My Step-Grandpa

From the time when my mother married my stepfather when I was seven to when I was nine years old, the three of us lived in the company of my stepfather's dad. Not wanting to disrespect my "true" grandparents by implying that he was as influential in my life as they were, he and my parents told me to address him by his first name, Bob.

Aside #1: I don't know if this was actually their reason for this, but it was what I believed while growing up and what I will continue to assume unless told otherwise.

As most seven year-olds would be when thrown into living with a senior citizen they hadn't grown up around, I was incredibly apprehensive about the situation at first. After all, he didn't only live with us, he actually lived with us. I'd never seen anything like it before. He watched TV. He took showers. He ate dinner with us. He even lived in the bedroom next to mine. It was as if they had adopted another child, except this one swore a lot and didn't have regular bowel movements.

Aside #2: Because I can't find a way to coherently incorporate it into the above paragraph, I'll just mention it here: Bob lived with my stepfather before he married my mom. That is all.

But after a few weeks, I became accustomed to having him around. Usually, I'd arrive home from school to find him sitting on the couch watching the news or reading his Bible. Once I'd become completely comfortable around him, we'd go on walks together, where he would explain how the colorful Southwestern Bell telephone line-marker flags I was pulling up and collecting were actually placed there by a kid around my age who had gone on a walk alone and left a trail so he didn't get lost, and that he wouldn't be able to find his way home if I continued to take them.

Basically, he completely fabricated a story that was tailored to my adolescent mindset to give me an actual reason to stop taking the flags, rather than just telling me "don't do that" like a normal adult would have.

Aside #3: One of my favorite things I ever asked him on one of these walks was how cigarette filters tasted if you continued to smoke past the tobacco. His answer? "Burning paper. Don't try it if you ever smoke."

Because of his demonstrative way of passing down wisdom, Bob would teach me three of the most important things I've ever learned in my life over the course of the next two years; through things he did, not things he said.

Lesson #1 - The world around you is important, always keep up with current events.

There was a woman that lived across the street from us with her husband and three kids that Bob would talk to regularly, named Jane. She was notorious for getting her news updates through Bob, because she didn't read the newspaper or own a television.

Aside #4: It's sort of implied, but I'll say it anyways: This was in an age before the internet was most peoples' primary source for news.

One evening, Bob realized how dependent she was on him for this, and decided to play a prank on Jane, telling her that there was supposed to be a massive solar eclipse the following morning around 7 AM (when Jane would be waking up, and in her windowed kitchen making coffee). After explaining that the eclipse would make it pitch black outside around this time, he told her not to open her blinds during the few minutes the eclipse would last because she might unintentionally look into the sun and be blinded. Taking his word as truth, she believed him implicitly.

Late that night, long after Jane and the rest of her family had gone to sleep, Bob walked across the street with a handful of thick black trash bags and a roll of duct tape, affixing them over the few windows Jane would walk by on her way to the kitchen the next morning.

It worked perfectly. The way she told it, she woke up in her dark room and walked down a dark hallway into her dark kitchen, where no sunlight was shining through any window. She became suspicious and went outside, she explained, after the "eclipse" hadn't ended by the time her pot of coffee was done brewing.

Lesson #2 - Work can be entertaining, if you make it.

Sometime during the first six months of my mother and stepfather's marriage, they decided to paint the entire interior of our house peach. I don't know why, but it happened. Naturally, Bob and I were enlisted to help, with me taking on most non-painting duties (like watching!) as he worked on painting the living room.

Watching him work was infinitely more entertaining than watching either of my parents work. He would paint shapes and simple little drawings to entertain me as I valiantly tried to stop myself from dipping my Hot Wheels in the paint. He joked that he would paint a mural while I was at school one day, even though he only had the single color.

Lo and behold, he did. Sort of. You see, this story happens to take place the same week as Halloween, and Bob apparently realized that peach isn't so far from the fall season's head color, orange. So he painted a giant, smiling jack-'o-lantern on one of the walls in the hallway that lead to our kitchen. Upon my arrival home, I nearly shit myself with happiness when I saw that an adult had done something so cool. He had even left it out for me to see, meaning that it dried completely before he painted over it later that day.

That also means that every time I would walk by that wall, and look at it from a certain angle in the right light, I could see the faintest outline of a grinning pumpkin, years after it was painted.

Lesson #3 - Learn to make fun of yourself, before others do.

I don't know or remember what planted the seed of the idea that I was obsessed with the then-ridiculously popular Britney Spears into Bob's head, but after about a year of knowing me, he suddenly would not stop hassling me about it, teasing me every time she was on TV or in the newspaper.

Aside #5: He even left a Britney Spears poster for me to find in my room one day, suspiciously signed "To Tyler, Love Britney S. XOXO" in Bob's all-caps handwriting. That's how bad it got.

Being a hotheaded child that hated being made fun of even a little bit (like I still am), I chose not to ignore him and was subsequently driven mad by his constant success in pissing me off.

Like one earthquake triggering another, my anger turned into nonchalance over time, and soon I was reacting to her appearances in media faster than he was, with mock excitement. I don't he was ever as proud of me as he was the few times I did that.

But unfortunately, as I mentioned above, my time spent with Bob didn't last more than two years. He moved out to live with his brother and other family members in Rochester, New York, on an alpaca farm. From there, he would send us letters and photos every month or two, either of the crazy weather they were having or members of his family in the crazy weather they were having. They had a photo printer and loved to use it.

Aside #6: Seriously, if you went through my photo collection, you would wonder why half of it is comprised of unidentifiable blurry people in snow gear waving at the camera from off in the middle-distance.

One of my favorites was not of either of these things, though. It was of Bob and a young alpaca named Don Diego, standing outside of a veterinary office where the animal was to get some shots that day (as explained on the back of the photo). Along the bottom, a caption reads "This won't hurt?" which was for me at the time, the pinnacle of all things humorous. I put it up on my wall immediately.

A few weeks after sending this last picture, in apropos of nothing, Bob had a stroke in his sleep and passed away. From the moment I found out until the moment I saw him lying in his casket after flying out to Rochester with my parents for the funeral, I didn't believe it was possible for him to be gone. But he was.

It rained on the day of his funeral, which is always fitting. I was in shock for most of the evening afterwards, not really talking to anyone or getting to know these family members I'd never met before. Seeing this, Bob's brother and his wife offered to take me out to the stable to meet a few alpacas, an offer I gloomily accepted.

After meeting the half-dozen they owned and posing for a few obligatory pictures with each one, we returned to the house to print said pictures out to take home with us.

Immediately after plugging the camera in and turning the printer on, a sheet started running through it without having the order to do so. Curious, everyone in the room watched as the printer spit out a sheet of four identical pictures of Bob standing next to Don Diego, caption and all. No one said a word. Then Bob's brother started laughing, followed by everyone else.

It was then that I realized that he'd once again inadvertently taught me a life lesson, one that I value most of all: always keep 'em laughing.

My Near-Miss

I've mentioned this before in a few posts in the past, but let's go through it again:
The summer in-between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, my parents uprooted me from my birth state, Texas, and moved me to the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.

Shortly after moving all of our possessions and selves to the Grand Canyon State, we were told that we would have to endure the plight of having to live in an apartment for a month while our house was being completed.

Since we'd moved during summer vacation, this left me with no convenient outlet for trying to find friends, leaving me to desperately prowl around the complex looking for people my age.

To make a long story short, the only person I ended up meeting during this adventure was a twentysomething pot dealer named Garth, who had an affinity for The Doors and a bong made out of a real human skull. Essentially, Garth was not exactly the type of friend I was looking to make at this point in time.

Aside #1: Though he does sound a lot like a few people I know. My, how times change.

Not long after this failed friend-finding mission, I began hanging out across the street from a high school a block away from the apartment we were staying in (not my future high school, by the way) in hopes to maybe hang out with a small group of teenagers that I'd noticed leaving the school one day in the early afternoon; looking like they were part of some sort of school club.

And part of some club they were. As I would later find out, this half-dozen strong collection of my peers turned out to be the school's Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game club, meeting up before the school year had began to plan out meetings and the like while sharing an enjoyable game of Yu-Gi-Oh between friends.

Aside #2: This blog post is brought to you by Yu-Gi-Oh: "The Funnest Trading Card Game Out There!"

But like I said, I was completely unaware of this fact as they walked up to me and started questioning me relentlessly. During this questioning, I couldn't help but stare at the sole female member of this microposse, named Jessi, who returned my advances by staring and smiling at me flirtatiously. So in order to get closer to her through her friends, I walked around the area with them over the next hour, pretending to get to know all of them, but only truly being interested in her the entire time.

Luckily, my "hard work" paid off, and everyone else with a penis left Jessi and I alone, talking to one another like it wasn't a huge deal (which it totally was, for me). Eventually our conversation winded down, and we exchanged numbers and made plans to do something the following day.

Thrilled, I returned home to tell my mother, who didn't share my excitement. Crushing my hopes of having Jessi over to our apartment the next day, she told me that she and my stepdad would be visiting our new house all day the next day, and that I was not to have any visitors while they were gone.

Naturally, I completely ignored this, and invited her over anyways, reasoning to myself that they'd be gone all day, and that if I had her over right after they left and had her leave a short time later, all would be well.

Surprisingly, all was well. They awoke the next morning, got dressed, and left without suspecting a thing. As planned, Jessi came over shortly after they'd left, and we walked around the complex for a few minutes, talking, before heading to the apartment to "hang out."

Aside #3: I used quotes to point out the euphemism I'm trying to convey here. I hope I've now drawn enough attention to it.

Before I continue, I'd like to take a second to break down Jessi's appearance during this meeting, from head-to-toe. I've intentionally not said anything about it until now. You'll see why.

Head:
-Short brown hair with multicolored streaks in it.
-Big eyes, with tons of eyeliner. Wore a small jewel on her upper cheek.
-Small, diamond lip stud.

Torso:
-Huge breasts barely contained by a band shirt she'd taken scissors to.
-Tons and tons of bracelets. So. Many. Bracelets.

Legs:
-Short jean miniskirt.
-Leopard-print tights.

Feet:
-Semi-tall socks. Yes, over her tights. Yes, in the summer.
-Converse she'd drawn all over, rebelliously.

What I'm getting at, is that besides for her ridiculously proportioned boobs (which totally wasn't why I liked her), she was just like 80% of the girls that were at that age when I was. Except sluttier (which was totally why I liked her).

Basically, she was not the type of girl you want your mom catching you with. But lo and behold, fifteen minutes after I'd taken her back to "my place," laid her out on my parents' bed (after closing and locking the door, of course), and taken her shirt off, my mother opened the front door and stepped into our living room.

Hearing this and panicking, I handed Jessi her shirt and ushered her into the adjoining bathroom, telling her to step into the shower/bath and close the curtain, just in case. Closing the door to the bathroom and opening the one that lead from the bedroom to the living room, I stepped across the threshold and faced my mother.

"Hey, what are you doing?" she asked suspiciously.

"Nothing. I was just going to the bathroom in there," I said, completely innocently.

"Oh really?" she asked, stepping past me and into the bedroom.

Aside #4: Growing up, my parents always assumed I was up to no good, or lying to them. This lead to me usually being up to no good and lying to them about it.

Scoping out the room, she lingered at the threshold for ten seconds before deciding not to go further; her mannerisms not unlike a velociraptor from Jurassic Park.

Aside #5: I'd almost have rather her been one, come to think of it. In fact, I can safely say that I'd rather be put in a cage match with one of these prehistoric killing machines than my own mother. Freud would love me.

"Well, we just went out to eat down the street before going to the house. I forgot my sunglasses, so we had to come back," she explained, after turning around and walking towards the front door.

"...oh, alright," I offered, following her to the door while consciously trying to make my rapid heartbeat stop showing through the front of my shirt.

With that, she left. After watching my parent's car pull out from the parking lot and waiting a few seconds to make sure she didn't come back for some illegitimate reason, I walked through the living room and bedroom, opening the door to the bathroom, finally pulling back the shower curtain to find Jessi standing there, still shirtless and shaking slightly.

"Why didn't you put your shirt back on?" I asked.

"I didn't want to make noise!" she exclaimed. "I didn't know if she would walk in or not!"

Completely ignoring her ridiculous reasoning and grinning, I said, "I thought for sure she was going to find you."

"Me too," she said, stepping out from the tub. "What happened?"

As she put her shirt back on, I explained the events of the past few minutes.

"Wow, I can't believe we came that close to getting caught. I should probably leave in case she comes back," she said, once I'd finished speaking.

"But...no! She won't be back for a few hours," I pleaded. "Please don't leave."

Aside #6: The first, but not the last time I'd say those last two sentences together.

"I don't feel comfortable here anymore. I'm gonna go," she said, sadly.

Less than five minutes after my mother had, Jessi departed from the apartment, promising to call me sometime in the next few days so we could meet up again. She never did.

But looking back, I'm very glad she didn't. Any girl that thinks, even for a split-second while under loads of stress, that putting on a t-shirt is loud enough to be heard by someone in a different room, through a closed door, is no girl for me. I don't care how slutty she is, or how big her boobs are.

The Camp Story

In the middle fifth grade year, I was given a chance to attend a four-day camp alongside approximately 80% of my classmates. We took a fleet of buses to the middle of nowhere (Oklahoma), and the 100 or so of us stayed in cabins with volunteer parents or teachers that had come on the trip with us.

The cabins were large, rustic-looking buildings with four sets of bunk beds in them, meant to house one parent and seven kids. Our "parent" was the father of one of those seven, Kyle, and was a nice man that let us stay up past our allowed bedtimes and play card games with each other.

Aside #1: I specifically remember thinking it was really, really cool that he let us play "Bullshit," even though we had to shorten it to "BS." Even saying the abbreviation made all feel awesome.

I was lucky enough to be one of the kids given a top bunk, for reasons I can't remember (I'm sure we had to draw straws or something), a treat that was sought after in the mindset of my grade.

Anyways, the day after our first night of settling in, the real fun began. Over the next two days, we would play with snakes, practice archery, look at constellations in the sky, and did plenty of other camp-related activities that seemed incredibly exciting at the time.

Aside #2: I'd probably still get excited over archery and snakes, I won't lie to you.

Then, on the third day, we went on our first nature hike. The teachers, camp counselors and parents told us that they were combining our cabins into three large groups, and that we would each be cycling through the three trails the camp had to offer.

So our groups headed off in different directions, counselors leading the pack and telling the first two-thirds of the kids that could hear them all about how neat the wilderness was. I couldn't hear anything, because I was the last person in the massive line, but I enjoyed the walk all the same.

That was, until I felt the all-too familiar sensation of needing to urinate. Badly. Waddling towards the middle of the line where a teacher was stationed, I pulled her aside and explained my issue. She told me to follow the trail that we were on back to the cabins, go to the bathroom, and wait there to join up with them.

Following a trail backwards is simple enough, right? Apparently not. It didn't take five minutes before a combination of my overt curiosity with nature and direction-less being found me lost in the middle of the woods with no one around and nowhere to pee.

I started freaking out, which is exactly what you don't want to do when you have to urinate so bad your stomach hurts. Then I began running aimlessly towards what I thought was the camp, which is the absolute worst thing you can do in the same case.

My panicking plus the jarring motions of running equaled one thing: emptying my entire bladder into my pants with no control over the situation at all.

Aside #3: You might ask why I didn't just zip my fly down and pee out. Well, I was in the fifth grade. I'd just got over my fear of peeing while standing up next to a toilet, I wasn't about to do it in the middle of the woods where someone might see my teeny-tiny junk.

I had no idea what to do with myself. So I kept walking (not running) in the direction I thought camp was in, hoping to get back and change before my hiking group had returned.

A few minutes later, I arrived. The grounds were completely deserted, so I made my way to our cabin and walked in. Stripping my urine-soaked pants, underwear and socks off, I stepped into the bathroom and washed my legs off as much as I could using the sink.

Aside #4: Our cabins only had a sink and toilet, the showers were elsewhere.

Once I felt I had done well enough, I put clean clothes on and looked at my pile of soaked clothes that sat in front of me. Rather than wash them in the sink like a normal person would, I instead opted to hang them all from the rafters above my bed, hoping that they would dry out before we'd return that night.

I stepped outside just as the three groups were arriving at the central campgrounds to swap trails. Re-joining my group, I continued throughout the day as if nothing had happened, with thoughts of my pee-soaked pants lingering in the back of my mind.

When my cabin-mates, our "parent" and I all arrived at the cabin that night, everyone stepped into the room only to have their nostrils assaulted with the smell of putrid, stale urine. Immediately, Kyle's dad called a camp counselor and discreetly told him that "one of the kids must have wet the bed last night" and that the cabin smelled absolutely vile. I didn't tell him what had really happened.

The counselor then told us all to pack up our things, and said that we'd be moving to a different cabin since this one was clearly uninhabitable. As I packed, I thought quickly and stuffed the offensive-smelling clothes into the very bottom of my bag, where the smell no longer affected the air outside of it.

Soon after, rumors started circulating around the camp about who in our cabin had committed the heinous act of peeing the bed, and one of the seven that wasn't me was eventually singled out as the offender. He was alienated for the rest of the trip, and made fun of relentlessly for something he didn't do. Again, I never said a word suggesting that I had anything to do with it.

So I write this as an admission. An admission that I, Tyler Walters, pissed my pants at camp in the fifth grade and let another boy take the fall for it. I'm sorry, boy whose name I forgot, for all of the pain I may have caused you. It wasn't my intention, and I sure hope you didn't end up shooting a bunch of people years later because of it.

The Green Crayon Story

As a person born after the 18th century, I grew up using crayons as an outlet to control my budding artistic "ability." Being a person growing up in the 1990's, I had a crayon set that had dozens of colors, ranging from gold and silver to lime green and burnt umber.

Aside #1: I've never seen "umber" used as a color outside crayon-speak.

As any kid that has ever owned a single crayon will tell you, when one of these wax sticks was worn down to a useless nub, it was a sad day for all involved. Even worse, when one broke into two equally useless pieces, the resulting anger unleashed from the single affected child could be dangerous.

Or, if you were like me, you'd simply throw away the pieces and get on with your life. Such was the case, one afternoon during the second grade. I'd snapped my "basic" green crayon in half while coloring something with the sort of feverish back-and-forth motion that is usually reserved for the most violent of those among us males who masturbate regularly. Not wanting to walk all the way to the trash can in the kitchen from my boy-cave located in the far back of our house at the time, I opted to throw the bits away in the bin located in the bathroom next to my room instead.

Aside #2: When I was a kid, I begged my parents to let me have a trash can in my bedroom, something they didn't give me until I was well into my teens.

I should have never seen that crayon again. But I did, the next day after I'd come home from school. Both pieces were sitting on the dining room table in front of my mother, who was sitting in her usual dinner-time seat, waiting for me. Immediately, she launched into what I now assume was a rehearsed speech about how she had been cleaning the bathroom earlier and had found the crayon pieces in the trash. Upon further inspection, she said, it appeared that the crayon had been bitten by a pair of human teeth, assumedly mine.

Now, I feel like I need to mention my age again at this point. I was in the second grade, around the age of eight or nine. I started reading when I was three or four. At the risk of sounding slightly egotistical, I was by no means a dumb kid. Sure, I'd done dumb things just like any other child, but I was way, way beyond the point of eating crayons. Wax, to me, just didn't seem appetizing.

Which is precisely why I was baffled when faced with this accusation. Not knowing how to handle being falsely accused at such a young age, I immediately started bawling and trying to string together a sentence to form a defense without sobbing in-between words. Taking my crying as a sign of admittance, my mother demanded that I go to my room and told me that we would discuss my punishment when my stepdad came home from work a few hours later. I don't know what happened inside of my head at that exact moment, but tears stopped flowing and the gears in my head started turning. I knew that once the both of them had rallied against me, all hope was lost, and that I would be labeled a "crayon eater" forever. So I summoned every bit of courage I had at the time, and outright denied having nibbled on that crayon or any other crayon before, and that the one in question had just broken in two.

Naturally, my mother was having none of this. Having been given the entire day to form this batshit crazy scenario in her head, she was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had in fact taken a bite, her argument driven home by the fact that the crayons' edges didn't match up as if from a break.

Aside #3: I don't know if I colored with one of the broken halves before throwing it away, or if she'd tampered with them, but they really didn't match up. I'm still not sure why.

Then she brought something up that must have seemed like a trump card in her mind. A few days previous, I'd gone to the restroom and stood up to see that my feces was a dark green. Freaking out, just as any paranoid child would, I immediately ran to tell my mother about this revelation, dragging her by the arm into the bathroom to show her what had just come out of me. Being assured that "sometimes it happens," I thought nothing more of it.

Aside #4: Over a dozen websites tell me that this is a side-effect of either eating too much green food or an iron overdose. Being a kid that survived off of artificially colored crap and chicken nuggets, it very well could have been either.

But she did. Seeing my green poop as the final piece of the puzzle in her case against me, she would hear none of my arguments in defense of my maturity level. Logic didn't even sway her, refusing to admit that it was odd that I'd tell her about my bowel movements when I should have known the cause outright.

This was the stalemate we were in until my stepdad arrived. Taking her side just as any good husband would, all hope seemed lost. But some small part of me knew that an injustice had happened, and continued to refuse to admit that I'd done anything that they were accusing me of. Seeing this as insubordination and an outright lie, I was told that I would have to sit on the couch in our family room, doing absolutely nothing, until I admitted that I was lying and that I had in fact eaten the crayon.

I sat there for three weeks. Every day after I came home from school I'd make a beeline straight towards the couch and sit there until it was time to eat dinner, after which I'd go straight from the table to bed. There was no way I was ever going to own up to something I hadn't done.

And I never did. Eventually, my couch-sitting sentence was reduced to a few hours a day, followed by an hour, followed by nothing at all. My parents had given up on trying to get their version of the truth out of me, and we didn't really speak about it much afterwards. They never admitted their folly, and I never again tried to correct them. It became an anecdote lost in the sands of time.

Years later, after all of the wounds from this event had healed, the three of us were out to eat with my younger brother at a generic chain restaurant that gives children a packet of crayons to every child that walks in the door. Of course, my brother received one, along with whatever coloring placemat they were offering that month. Opening the crayons, my stepdad removed the green one and offered it to me.

"Appetizer?" he asked, grinning smugly.