and salty.It either worked for you or it didn't.
I remember living on the Rankin highway in
Midland Texas.This highway came east from
Main St. downtown. My family lived in a silver
metal thirty two foot by eight mobile home.
This was an oil boom town and the trailer park was
oil field workin folks.
One of my pastimes would send me standing along side the
Rankin highway watching people in solid metal bodied cars
and trucks roaring down that road going all these places
my mind could only entertain. I had been out of town my
family moved around from rig to rig location so I had a
small notion that there was other places. One thing I knew,
when I grow up I'm moving away from this.I didn't like
the way Midland smelled and I thought it was dirty.
Sulfur carried in the air like incense in a Hindu Ashram and
sulfur is not so inviting.
The oil culture is a rough and ready crowd.Oil stained overalls,
silver metal hard hats wearing steel toed boots was the uniform
my dad and his tribe wear.The most important thing my father
wanted you to know that he was by-god tough and he could whup
your ass. There was a more then fair chance that he could.
Tough was important in the oil field.
My mother's name was Leda. A dark haired beauty that was the female
embodiment of" Popeye". She was ironic and eccentric and born in
the year of the rooster. Mother worked at the downtown theater
and I could get in free.Now this made mother the gatekeeper of
dreamland and nobody could stop me from going to the movies.
If the movies were too scary I would have to get down and look
through the space between the seats in front of me.
Otherwise, as I laid back in those nice theater sets and watched the
hero kick the villains butt with one punch ,get the girl and all his
buddies gathering around pattin his back in "atta a boy's".
The fifties movies were the lineage of superman sent through Greek arts.
Years pass by with this manhood idea of physical dominance.
In my late twenties I found world of foreign dreamland,
European films, the french flix. The hero was everyman and he got
a pat on the back and occasionally the hot chick too. A punch seldom
thrown. What a revelation this was to me. How thrilling to just be
a guy ,ordinary as can be and this is acceptable and respected
where ever he chose to go. Wow,I can just be me and get the girl too.
Could this be true? I know it was. It seemed so reasonable. So this
was my therapy sessions. Going to the Edison theater every time
a new foreign film hit the Ed. My sessions were three dollars an hour.
I was never late.
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