The House On Dale Street

Chapter 8

Jason and I became good friends. A few weeks after helping him unload lumber from the back of his truck, I'd seen him again outside the old Music Hall and he asked me if I wanted to play a game of tennis. I was always up for any sport so I said sure and he told me to get in his car and he would drive to the tennis courts which were up on a hill behind the park. He drove a brand new IROC Z. He also had the old beat up truck, but that was just for work. For everything else he tooled around in the IROC. Where I was from we made fun of guys who drove IROC Z's but Jason was a cool guy and the car didn't seem quite so corny with him behind the wheel.

Once we made it to the tennis courts we played a game and I won six to four. We played another and Jason won the second time. He probably would have beat me the first time because he was a better player than I, but I did have a quicker serve. He said he was glad to have someone who could play as well as he could and after playing we drank water from the water fountain and then sat beneath a tree and talked for a while. Jason talked about his ex wife and his kids. He'd only recently been divorced and it seemed to upset him quite a bit. He got pretty emotional when he talked about them so I tried to steer the conversation in another direction and talked a bit about his mom and how she and Hazel had become sort of close. Hazel would sometimes walk down to the gift shop and have a cup of coffee or tea with Charlotte. After the lady from the Anzara had gone back to New York, Hazel had one day not long after met Charlotte at the gift shop and they instantly hit it off. There was a quilt in Charlotte's shop that Hazel had gone crazy for- I didn't know many seventeen year old girls who were crazy for quilts, but Hazel loved this particular one, and she'd been saving her tip money to buy it.

"Yeah," Jason said, "my mom is pretty special." I told him Hazel certainly thought so. After awhile I suggested we go get a bite to eat. We went to the walk up restaurant and got hamburgers and fries and sat out at one of the benches that were outside in the grass. They had three or four benches where you could sit and eat and we sat and talked some more. Jason told me his life story from front to back and then back to front but I liked him and I didn't mind. He talked a lot about his ex wife. Her leaving him had really pierced him to the core. He had kids with her; a boy and a girl. They weren't allowed to see him, he said, because he drank and his ex wife said he couldn't see them until he'd sobered up. He said that was why he drank. I liked Jason but I felt that was an excuse. I'd been through a lot in my life as well and I didn't understand people that had to drink or take drugs to cope. But, I guess people are different and what can break one person down may not break someone else.

When we'd finished eating we walked down to the pool hall and shot pool. Then we came back to where Jason had left his IROC-Z by the walk-up restaurant and he took me home and sped off.

After that, for weeks Jason would come by to pick me up. I think he mostly wanted someone to talk to. He was an emotional guy. I didn't mind it so much at the time. When he drank he would start to cry. Red Boiling was a dry county- there was no liquor at all sold in the county so Jason would swing by and pick me up and drive thirty or forty-five minutes away to a bar on the outskirts of the county. They had the most awful names- The Do Drop Inn, Whiskey Dicks and the most horrifying, my all time favorite- The Hairy Hole. At the Hairy Hole (named after a guy named Harry), just as an interesting aside, there was always this band that played. They were called, Dixie Wrecked. Now say that five times and see what you get.

Jason liked to take me because, you only had to be eighteen to get in the bars (which I was) and he needed a sober driver. Jason would drink so much that he would pass out cold. As a rule, I hated alcoholics- absolutely had zero tolerance for them- having grown up with an alcoholic mother and a revolving door of drunks in our home- but I felt bad for Jason and didn't feel towards him the way I felt about most alcoholics. I guess because he came across so wounded. I mean, goddamn, it sucks to see someone who's wounded. It's the worst. And he was certainly wounded. So, we would go to these bars and sit and talk while he drank and I sipped on a Coca-Cola or something and he would tell me his life story (which I knew by heart after the first few times of hearing it) and as he talked I would just watch the hot girls sauntering around in their blue jean short shorts and, if we were at The Hairy Hole, I would watch the girls take turns dancing on the one pole they had in the center of the dance floor while Jason proceeded to get shit-faced and Dixie Wrecked played in the background.