Candy from strangers
1969 was a very passionate and
confused year in America. It was the time of "do-your-own-thing" individualism
and the Viet Nam war draft. There other mind-boggling events like the moon
landing and riots taking place to keep your world stirred up. I was living in
south Florida and that place was beyond crazy on a good day. For teenagers,
life seemed uncertain at best.
A small group of enthusiastic teens formed
an organization that we called the "Davie Rodeo Club" which was not
affiliated with any school (like they are now.) I belonged to a close knit
group of bull riders, consisting of myself, Stan, Dubby, and Pollard (he had a
first name, but we never used it.)
The four of us were close and always
watched each other's back. If one had trouble, the others were there... if you
needed money, the others were digging in their pockets. In a time that stressed
individuality, we had unity. And we were glad of it.
There were other bull riders in the
club as well as bronc riders, bulldoggers, and ropers who hung around with us,
but had their own cliques too. The kid whose dad owned the property that we
built our arena on was a team roper, but he spent more time with us than the
other ropers. It was obvious that we were a team and that was attractive to others
who were used to being alone.
We did all the normal teenager
stuff; if you can call anything a teenager does "normal." There was
the usual dating, dances and school and we did have our own interests outside
of rodeo. Bull riding was the common bond between us and it was strong
brotherhood. To outsiders it was probably considered an insane passion, but to
us it was life.
Pollard was a year older than the
rest of us, but in the same grade. A little trouble (probably not so little
really) along the way had interrupted his school career and he repeated a year,
thus ending up with us. He was never rude or disruptive in class but he was
treated like a troublemaker by every teacher in classes that we had together.
We all thought that being underage
and drinking beer was OK, with the typical misconception that drinking beer
made us cool. The need to seem older and more sophisticated than our peers at
school made us do stupid things like that. Some members of our group had more
trouble than others with growing out of that bad choice.
Our teenage years are difficult at
best, and can be devastating at the worst. Successfully navigating those years
was often dictated by who you had around you. If you had someone to either look
up to for an example, or listen to for guidance, it made a world of difference.
Some of us figured out how we were being “extra stupid” on our own.
It wasn't really apparent to us at
first that Pollard had a drinking problem. We were after all still teenagers
and a year younger than him. The guy always had a beer on him when he was away
from school, but he never seemed to get drunk when we were around him. He
started skipping school and going to work instead, more and more all the time.
He said it was because he "needed" more money.
Pollard lived by himself in a small three
room cottage apartment in Davie. His father had run off when he was young, his
brother died in Viet Nam during the early years when we were just there as
"advisors," and his mother had problems with alcohol and other
substances of her own. His mother being a substance abuser was the one reason
why we didn't think that Pollard would get "that way." We were wrong.
If he couldn't get beer or hard
liquor, he would drink cough syrup or anything with alcohol in it. Stan caught
him straining Sterno through a cloth to drink because he was out of booze and
money and needed a fix just like a junkie. We decided right then and there that
we were going to put a stop to this before it killed him and/or us (he often
drove the car with us in it.)
Pollard wasn't left alone after the
Sterno incident, and we wouldn't allow him to take a drink of anything with
alcohol in it. It was pretty tense for a long time. There were several fights
and we didn't fight fair, we'd gang up on him. We were determined to save our
amigo and beat the booze.
After a few weeks it appeared that Pollard
was over his craving for alcohol. We were elated, sure that we had won the
battle. He told us that he was OK and didn’t feel the need for alcohol any
more. It seemed like everything had worked according to our plans.
He had switched addictions and was
chewing Redman and dipping Copenhagen or Skoal a lot more, but we figured that
was a good trade off. No one thought about cancer much back then... well, the
rest didn't. I had lost my grandfather and an aunt to cancer in the previous
ten years and the idea of getting cancer bothered me. We thought we had it all
fixed, but we were wrong.
Somehow Pollard had hidden a bottle
of vodka where we couldn’t find it and was "spiking" his tobacco
products with it to get his fix. He repeatedly said that he really wanted to
quit and knew that we loved him like a brother and only wanted to help him. He
felt the same about us and wouldn't intentionally do anything to hurt us. But alcohol
was still ruling his life, in spite of what he wanted... until we found out
about the vodka in his tobacco.
That discovery caused a blowout of
huge proportions. As always we were “plotting against him," (as he saw it)
so he told us all “where to go and how to get there.” We had finally had enough
of spending all of our time on him and angrily stormed out of his place and
went to Stan's house to discuss what to do next. It was decided to do nothing;
the next move was Pollard's.
A week went by and we hadn't seen or
heard from Pollard and we were getting worried; the “what if” scenarios kept
playing out in our minds. Then on Saturday morning about 11:00 a.m. Stan got a
call from Broward General Hospital. He in turn called Dubby and I and we sped
to town.
Pollard had gone fishing on the sea
wall by the jetties near Dania Beach. When he went to stand up he reached back
over his head to grab the handrail that went all along the wall, missed, and
fell over backwards. The drop was about ten feet.
He landed on his head on some great
big rocks that were jumbled up all along the dry side of the sea wall. The
one-point landing split his head open and knocked him completely out. The
witnesses said that he didn’t move after he hit.
Fortunately for him there were
several other people out there that day and one of them ran to a phone to call
for an ambulance. The response was very quick as there was a beach substation
less than two miles away. The crew had to climb down into the rocks to get to
him and check him over.
Keep in mind that this was 1969 and
procedures were not anything like what you see today when a Paramedic or EMT arrives.
They picked Pollard up, sat him upright, and put a bandage against his head
wound to stop the bleeding. While checking his vital signs they noticed that he
had a kind of green pallor about his face.
He just didn't look right to them so
they hauled him up the seawall bodily and manually carried him to the parking
lot. There they strapped him onto a gurney, loaded him into the ambulance and
hit the lights and siren. They didn’t have a clue why he would be green, but they
were sure that it wasn’t right and that they had to get him to the ER, ASAP!
What they didn't know (and Pollard was
a little too unconscious to tell them) was that he had about half a pack of Redman
Chewing tobacco (non-alcoholic version) in his mouth when he fell. He swallowed
it all, and I promise you, that will give you a green color!
The call Stan got was from Pollard
himself, wanting more chew (or at least some snuff to dip) and he sounded clear
and alert. We met at Stan's and then got into Dubby's Oldsmobile and went to
the hospital. They indeed did have him registered there, but no, we couldn't
see him until after 5:00 p.m. They were running tests on him and would be all
day.
So, we went over to Leroy's Coffee
shop and drank coffee until we thought the tide had come in and we were about
to drown. Then we took a road trip to Boca Raton to see the new Horse Track and
finally, we thought we had burned up enough time and drove back to Broward
General.
It was only 4:30 p.m. and that grumpy
Charge Nurse would rip our heads off if we bugged her again asking to get in
early. So, we sat in the car and listened to Dubby's tapes. He was called
"Dubby" because he had a speech impediment and could not say the
letter "W" correctly. It always came out sounding like "Dubby"
and that was a bummer since his first, middle, and last names all started with
"W.”
We waited out our time and it seemed
like forever because Dubby only had country music tapes in his car. He always
claimed that it was because nobody would steal them like they did rock music. I
would have gladly given them away to anyone who wanted them, especially when
Dubby decided to sing along. The guy was tone deaf and didn’t care what he
sounded like.
While we waited we had been watching
two little boys, around six and eight years old, playing in their car while the
adults went inside. They were obviously brothers and had been fighting most of
the time. All of the windows were rolled all the way down in a failed attempt
to keep them cool.
The boys had been repeatedly jumping
from the front to the back seat and back again. They played with everything in
the car; especially anything that they weren't supposed to touch. The cigarette
lighter, the ashtrays, the horn, everything was fair game to them.
Before too long they were even bored
of fighting with each other. The young boys were just kind of lying across the
backs of the seats with that," been there, done that, too bored to
bother" look on their kissers. The only thing that they didn’t even
consider was getting out of the car; that would have brought the wrath of mom
down on them.
Dubby said that it was time to go in
and Stan and I gave a cheer. It was less because we now got to go see Pollard,
and mostly because it meant that Dubby would quit that infernal noise. He said,
"What? Don't you like my singing?" I told him the sounds he made
would give a Barn Owl hot flashes and he chased me around some cars. That boy
just couldn't take a little friendly critique.
While we were running around cars, Stan
had been talking with the two little boys that we had been watching. They
wanted to know if we were real cowboys, and Stan said, "Yep," which
was cowboy talk for, “Uh huh.” Then they asked him what that was that he was
putting in his mouth.
I failed to mention that Stan had a
broad mischievous streak. He said, "Candy, do you want some?" The
little brother of course said, "Yeah" (which was little kid talk for “Yep.”)
Stan gave him a big wad of Redman chewing tobacco, which he quickly jammed into
his mouth so his brother couldn't have any of it. I had been the target of his
practical jokes in the past myself, so I felt sorry for the kid.
We were almost to the front door
when we heard the sound of the involuntary expulsion of foreign matter. The
little guy was being dangled out the window held by the ankles by his big
brother. He lost his wad of chew and probably his lunch too. I could hear the
older one saying, "Don't you get any of that on Momma's car, I ain't
getting a beating for you."
We slapped Stan in the back of the
head and called him bad names for doing that to that little guy. He said that
he just wanted to teach them the lesson not to take things from strangers. I
told him that he just convinced those two that all that bad things being said
about cowboys were true.
Pollard was wearing one of those
silly open-down-the-back hospital gowns and every time he got out of bed his
entire butt would hang out. The nurse thought it was cute, which really worried
him. She looked like a Marine drill sergeant, and she told him that she was
going to give him a sponge bath later. He wanted out of there!
We had smuggled in his chew (which
he wasn’t supposed to have) and he promptly loaded up his jaw and eventually
had to spit. He looked around for anything convenient to spit in, (that the
nurse wouldn't see right away anyway) and settled on the bedpan. It was
stainless steel and held quite a bit.
Even though he was able to get up
and go to the bathroom just fine, they still put the bedpan next to his bed. It
freaked him out that the nurse asked him if he needed help using it every time
that she came in to check on him. We of course, picked up on his aversion to
her attention and teased him every way that we could think of about their
“romance.”
We asked our amigo how he was
feeling, really. What we wanted to know more than anything was if alcohol was
involved in his accident, but none of us would ask. Pollard said that he was fine,
just a cut on his head and they had sewed that up and he was as good as new. He
stressed over and over that he couldn't wait to get released... before “Nursey”
came calling again.
In a moment of rising bravado I
finally asked about his drinking and was he having any trouble needing a drink
in there? He told us that after we left him on the day of the big argument, he
sat down and took stock of his situation. That day he had come to the
conclusion that he had to either quit drinking or die. Pollard said that he
thought long and hard about which one he wanted.
He reached the decision that life
was worth living and it was up to him to make it work. No one else should have
to be responsible for his actions, and he hadn't touched a drop since. He was
afraid that he would backslide and was embarrassed about how he had acted. So
he wanted to wait until he had a week of sobriety under his belt and knew for
himself that he could do it.
According to him he had gone out to
the jetties to fish and think about what to say to us, and then fell off the
wall. There was a long silence where we thought about what he said and stared
at this guy that we cared about, wanting to believe him. It was fair to say
that there was a lot of doubt in that room.
Dubby said, "Pretty speech, but
if you don't mean it, we're all through with you." Stan and I stared him
in the eyes and nodded our agreement.... he got the message.
It was past visiting hours by then,
so we were about to leave when Dubby said that he had to go dump the bedpan
somewhere, so Pollard wouldn't get caught. The little monster took it to the
Godzilla nurse and told her that Pollard had a bowel movement and it didn't
look right to him.
When the nurse looked in that bedpan
and saw the chew spit and chunks of tobacco leaf all chewed and mashed (it did
look awful) she nearly screamed. Dubby had said, "Get out of here quick"
but didn’t say why. From the panicked look on his face we knew better than to
delay.
She was heading for his room when we
took off down the hall, at a very fast, I-wish-I-could-run-now speed. Pollard
got to stay an additional night while they analyzed his "sample." He
not only got the sponge bath, Nursey gave him an enema as well to "clean
him out."
The next day, Sunday, he got
"out" all right... when the sample turned out to be chewing tobacco
spit they practically threw him out the front door. We were there waiting to
pick him up, and give him more chewing tobacco. We knew it was a filthy habit,
but still indulged in it anyway.
The good news was that Pollard got
off the alcohol completely and the rest of us didn't want much to do with it
either. We had seen enough with his struggle to convince us to not let anything
get grip on our lives like that. There was a funny (to us) side effect from
Pollard’s hospital experience; he said that whenever he took a chew after that it
gave him the weirdest feeling, like he had to go to the bathroom.
My family and I moved to Georgia the
next year and I lost track of my friends. It is true that all of us have to go
our separate ways in life. I like to think that we learned enough from those
hard lessons to make better decisions.
I am sure that those other guys are
still out there somewhere having fun; and probably at each other's expense if I
know them.
Epilogue:
Pollard and Stan are gone now, but
Dubby is a wealthy business owner with a stack of kids and grandkids. I would
bet that he is still playing that crappy music and singing along with it while
he plays tricks on his friends.
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