by JN Lenz
I guess the closest you could ever say Clyde came to being philosophical, was any discussion around hunting and more precisely his natural talent at it.
“I guess you can’t be any kind of hunter if you’ve never been hunted yourself’
Clyde would proclaim this to me; it was really in reference to the countless times he had been hunted down by his father Skip, in a drunken rage. That’s really how the trailer came to reside in the back field, hidden within the thicket of scrub brush and rusting metal and behind that stand of cedars. The old leaking trailer, with its stripped interior and leaking roof became more of a home to Clyde than the one provided to him by Skip and Flo. By the age of twelve Clyde spent most his nights in the trailer, tired of the drama and crazy nights trying to escape the wrath of his drunken father. Most nights Clyde would detect the predictable drunken patterns of his father early, before he erupted in rage and lashing out at him. It would be at that point that Clyde would make his way to the hidden trailer. Skip’s violent outbursts came almost weekly, which day would be anyone’s guess.
Nor did Skip have a preference in the manner in which he lashed out at young Clyde. The cries of panic from Clyde made little bearing on whether Skip beat him with a belt, or with a stick. When Skip cut Clyde’s hand straight across the palm with his jack knife, there was no special warning or change in Skip’s anger. He simply came at Clyde with a knife in his hand instead of a stick; the violence was always the same, only the instruments of pain changed. For Skip it was like a disease, so intense and deep his mental and physical senses had been corrupted to the core.
Clyde had become the hunted at a young age; he in turn hunted the animals of the bush. They must feel the same panic and fear, the adrenaline rushing through their entire body, just as he felt in attempting to escape from his father. Clyde believed he had always been more humane than his father when he killed. For Clyde, a clean shot and one at that should be all that was required. Clyde’s pain was often camouflaged by the resulting shock from the attack. This followed by the relief that once Skip had beat, cut, or burnt him, it would be over. After which, his father would stagger away slurring profanities as he left.
One skill Clyde learned long before his superior talents as a hunter emerged, was the mastery of making himself scarce and undetectable. Often he would hide in the house within feet of a screaming and enraged Skip, going completely unnoticed. Soon this would lead to Clyde abandoning the house each night, to escape to the trailer once his parents drinking and drugs started.
The Drexler family homestead was in such disrepair and so surrounded by rubbish, Skip made no notice of that disappearing trailer. Clyde moved his mattress into the trailer; he would leave the box string in the house to mask the absence of the mattress. Not that either Skip or Flo would notice, only Skip ventured into the boys room, but only when he was drunk and in a rage.
Clyde worked away on that rusty old trailer, outside he stacked piles of garbage and scrap on the sections that the cedar’s and scrub brush did not conceal. The trailers two tiny windows would be hidden behind a stand of cedars. From inside the trailer, the windows provided a view to the back of the homestead. In addition to the storm windows we had fitted into the roof, on the inside, Clyde fashioned a half table with just two legs against one wall. A second smaller table that held an old black and white TV, the thing only ever got two fuzzy channels, he even had a cheap pocket radio for music.
He had spliced every wire that could be stripped off discarded appliances, or anything electrical in the yard, joining them all up to construct a hundred and ten foot extension cord. The cord was then buried just below the surface, which the weeds and rubbish concealed from view. The power to the trailer reduced from the various gauges of wire and from all the junctions, but Clyde had lights and power. A pair of mismatched chairs completed the interior of the trailer. Clyde had no closet or dresser; he only ever owned a couple pairs of pants and a few tee shirts at any given time, so there was really no need for either.
When he could no longer bear being penniless, Clyde lied about his age to the Bud Rinks, the owner of the abattoir on the south edge of town. I think Bud knew he was not fifteen, but Clyde was so convincing, Bud decided to give him a try.
“You know what? Sure kid come on out back, I’ve got just the job for you. Boys meet our new slaughter house hand. This ought to be good for a laugh” the fat Bud Rinks yelled out, causing his slaughter staff to join in the boss’s joke.
“So you need to be right here, so when Bill there slams the cow in the center of the head and kills him, you help rig him up so we can gut him, then once that’s in place you need to clean up the shit, cause they usually shit everything out when they gat slammed, got it kid?” Bud’s voice had turned suddenly gruff; he was looking for another laugh at Clyde’s expense.
“Sure thing, I’m ready. Right here, you want me here”
“Yaa kid, there is good. Go ahead Bill”
To all their amazement Clyde jumped on the still twitching steers neck to secure the meat hooks before running for the shit pail and shovel and cleaning the back of the killing stall. He was back around by the time the animal had been pulled up by its neck, waiting to be cut open.
“Want me to do that, I’ve skinned plenty a deer”
“You sure kid? That’s a bigger animal than a deer, with a lot more blood”
“I’m good, blood never bothered me; right here is that where I should enter? Clyde already had one of the knives used for this stag of the slaughter in his hand.
“Yes, actually that is exactly where you need to enter” replied Bill, looking at Bud in amazement.
Bud hired Clyde on the spot, he wanted him week days after school for a couple of hours and every Saturday from 8-4.Clyde was so proficient at his position that Bill moved from the kill spot, moving into trimming loins instead. Bill much preferred working at cutting of the loins, the band sawing of the steaks and the grinding of the hamburger. There was no argument from him in forsaking the killing and gutting of the livestock, Clyde loved his new job.
The work did not bother Clyde in the least; he used it to become a master in the use of sharp knives, his knowledge of bovine and swine anatomy was amazing. Had he ever wanted to make some cow pig Frankenstein, I’m sure he could have done it. Clyde sliced away the heart, lungs, liver and stomachs with the precision of a surgical master. To him the job was not brutal and grotesque, he looked at it was a natural extension of his life to that point, like it was fate he should work there. He worked at the Bud Rinks abattoir until the day we left the town of Parsons for good.
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Chapter 2
Clyde had always been the proficient card player between the two of us. I would attend the poker games we would take part in every Friday night, basically end up throwing some money away. Rarely would I win a hand, I could take or leave gambling, not caring enough about it to get proficient I guess. Initially, we had played with a handful of school mates in what would be our last year of school, grade twelve. After High School had ended, we began to play against a handful of the towns more chronic gamblers. I would sit out most of the hands, but Clyde continued to play every game he was invited to attend, for sure he was there every Friday.
To Clyde the game of Poker was like the forest, carefully observing the animals, before he killed them. The card game also required a skillful eye on his prey, observing his opponents tendencies and characteristics, intensely and carefully. He was good at watching and listening, detecting those subtle changes in his opponents. Although they were doing it completely subconsciously, Clyde aligned these involuntary actions, to the quality of the hand they were holding. The tiniest of twitches or hesitation provided answers to Clyde, just as knew how a change in the weather would affect the actions of a Buck in the bush.
Either that or the fucker was just lucky as hell. I’m sure his observation skills must have helped at the Poker table; whatever it was he usually won more than he lost, whic
h was more than I could ever say when it came to gambling.
The Friday night game had evolved over the years, what started out many years ago as the weekly night out for a handful of men in Parsons turned into a decades old tradition. The location never changed, meeting in the backroom of a local five and dime store, on the town’s Main Street. The game had gone back several generations, but because of the small population of Parsons and surrounding area, they were always interested in new players and new blood.
There would be a minimum of six players at the table at all times. Joe a buddy of ours would come with the two of us on that first night, attending the town’s infamous Friday Poker. Joe was married straight out of high school, not sure what that was about, he was desperate for an excuse to escape from home for a night out with the boys. Thru the years, virtually every man in Parsons over the age of eighteen had attended a Friday Poker game at some point in their lives.
The oldest regular player at the game was Rocky, or that’s what all the old boys called him. A group of them would show up every Friday, just to have a few beers and watch everyone play. The old prick never got married, most likely because Rocky was one ugly looking mother fucker. But he was big as a brick shit house, so no one called him ugly to his face. Plus there was the matter of him being a bit of a stinky slob, so I guess I could understand why no woman would want him. Funny thing was, Rocky did very well financially from the heavy equipment road construction business he owned, willed to him by his late father who started the business with one small little single axle dump truck back in the sixties. I’m sure if some of those gold diggers out there would have realized what the slob was worth, they would have stocked up on Fabreeze.
Three years later there would just be Rocky and Clyde remaining from the original six stalwarts who had played at the table on our very first Friday night match. To go the distance every Friday, you either required deep pockets like Rocky, or your share of winning hands like Clyde.
Our choice of business directions meant there would be no girl friends for either of us, no one to stop us from playing poker every Friday night. There was no way in hell we could risk the business we had built up, on a relationship gone bad. One nosey number could be all it would take to end up in jail, and neither of us had any intention of ever spending a day in jail.
“Keep it brief” was our motto back then, I guess it still is for Clyde to this day.
Over the years the Poker game had garnered somewhat of a reputation around the town and surrounding areas as a high stakes affair, or as high stakes as the rural red necks of the area could afford at any rate. Clyde and Rocky would be there at the table, hand after hand, playing the rotation of players, visions once they had squandered their bounty to the gambling gods.
There was no way my abilities would not match Clyde’s prowess at the table, my attendance had more to do with the social gathering than actual act of gambling. After the first couple of months, my contribution consisted of a handful of hands, never gambling more than a few hundred dollars on any given Friday night. As time passed the Friday night game had evolved into a well coveted and desired match, for those willing to risk the losses from the ever higher pots and hand minimums. There had been weeks when there had been tens of thousands of dollars being wagered.
Nights like that I preferred to sit out; I had no interest in loosing thousands of dollars, and being sick from the thought for a life time. There was little chance I would have the skill to win it back. On the nights when the table produced the wheels, I stayed on the sidelines and watched Clyde. He was wagering both our monies after all.
Clyde was inspired by the fresh meat, the new guns; in particular he relished wins over those he deemed to be of the well-heeled variety. I soon understood in the business of gambling, Clyde by far stood the greatest odds of a return on our wagers. Worth the investment of a bit of crop money, sometimes you gotta play the long shot.
The fun for me was in sitting back with the regulars, they were there every week, regardless of whether they would play one or any hands. On nights that Clyde would lose, we laughed it off as a couple plants, grown in vain. But when he won, those were the nights I would never forget, what a pile of fun the both of us would have.
Having maintained our low wage jobs after completing high school, we had the smarts to spend very little on any expensive material items. There was no way we wanted to draw the attention from the town locals, curious to how we could afford such expensive items. There was no bling back then, no expensive cars, sick rags or bitchin pads, no us. We lived the life of a typical pair of low income local hicks.
By the year nineteen eighty six, the harvests and the poker winnings, it all added up close to one hundred and sixty six thousand dollars. Every dollar of it, we had stashed away in the forests around the town of Parson’s, mostly government land. The whole lot of it in cash. Clyde’s proficiency at poker, our green thumbs, it was all starting to add up. We could afford for Clyde to ante up to the twenty large it would take some Friday nights for him to sit among the first six.
He had to be in the first six.
Always had been, since the first time the pair of us made our appearance at the Friday night game. There was never to be a Friday night Parsons poker match in which Clyde Drexler was in attendance, that he was not among the original six for the first hand of the evening.
Word had made it across several counties, and beyond. Players would appear for a month then disappear, never to be seen again, often after losing thousands of dollars in the process. The stream of losers amused me, loosing at a sport is humiliating, losing money as a sport is retardation.
But there some schmuck was, week after week, a replacement idiot, ready to throw thousands of dollars away.
“Playing at the big table”
“Rolling with the sharks”
“The High Rolla”
“Spinning with the wheels”
“Cracking the Lid”
Fuck, if I heard one more one liner, from one of those losers, all giddy and ready to lose their hard earned cash, I was gonna blurt out in hysterics.
Have fun losing your money boys.
After a while, even I could smell the losers, and I suck at gambling. The difference between me and them is I know I suck at gambling.
Clyde started one night with over forty thousand dollars, he ended the night with nothing; it would be our biggest loss of money, ever.
To be fair to him, he had made well over forty thousand in winnings over the year prior to the loss, so net, net, he was back at zero. After that loss, we both agreed on a twenty three thousand limit for Friday night’s.
In the three years of playing Friday night, Clyde had not only won and lost thousands of dollars, but had also won a forty acre piece of property. The place was mostly swamp, but ten of the acres were dry land. We would sell the property years later for over forty six thousand dollars, all for a three hundred dollar call.
Friday night got us our aluminum boats and our outboards, a canoe, a rifle, the best was an old Ford 150 pickup truck, hell we both love that truck. Clyde still has the damm thing in one of those barns of his; it replaced that complete piece of shit, death trap Beetle we had been driving since the last year of High School.
The floors of the Beetle consisted of planks of wood and the brakes were made of Swiss cheese, we drove that damm piece of shit for the past four years which was ten years beyond its shelf life. Not that the Ford 150 was any luxury liner, it was a nineteen seventy six, basement model truck, with a three speed on the floor and a straight six under the hood. What a change from the bug, laughing as whoever was driving the truck, had their hands swaying back and forth on the steering wheel trying to keep that damm thing going straight down the road. That old 150 rarely let us down, she started every time and never left us stranded. Neither one of us could never bear to sell that stupid truck.
Just weeks after Clyde’s forty thousand dollar loss, it would be on the day of our twentieth birthday, Frida
y, June 6, 1986. Our birthday would be celebrated by a life altering poker hand. With the regular Friday night poker game falling on June the sixth, we both had to play a minimum of a few hands. We had not missed a Friday night in almost three years, so of course we had to go.
Clyde insisted he only planned to stay at the game until around eleven, and then we would head down to the Queens. It was the local watering hole, where we planned to drink away our first night of not being a teenager with some buddies. The bar was just a block off the Main Street, and only a couple blocks from the Five and Dime’s back door.
Clyde would be anxious to play that night, I remember him telling me on the way across town in the old Ford one fifty that he was feeling lucky that night. On the way over, he held out his hand with its small piece of aluminum foil. Inside the foil where four tiny purple squares, he offered me two of them.
“I was thinking about dropping the acid before I play tonight but now I’m thinking I will hold off, I’ll end up just loosing cash if I’m that blasted thinking I can see through the fucking cards or some shit” Clyde laughed while he talked holding out his hand as I pushed the long steel gear lever of the old Ford into third gear.
“No that’s not the crowd to be doing acid around, let’s both drop it a half hour before we plan to leave for the bar.”
“Beautiful, it’s a plan” would be his reply to me, as he wrapped the foil back over the small hits of acid and placed them back in his front left pants pocket.
“Let’s just get in there then, I’m feeling lucky tonight”
“Good, just remember the limit”
“I’m not going over the limit, I won’t need to. You’ll see.” Clyde proclaimed just prior to reaching the back door to the Five and Dime.