Life with Elmer

I woke up on Easter morning in 1976 in the little town of Escalon, CA, to the sound of my mother’s voice outside my bedroom door, demanding I be ready to leave for church in fifteen minutes. I went back to sleep. Fifteen minutes later she returned and opened the door, poking her still very pretty, albeit very angry, face into my trash heap.
Get yourself out that bed right now, young man.
Alright, alright.
I’m not messin’ around. I mean now. You’re already gonna miss Sunday school. You know good and well that your— that Ray’s preaching this morning. And you’d better be sitting up front, with your hair combed, when he steps up to the pulpit. Do you understand me?
I’m getting out of bed. I’m putting on my soc—
Don’t get smart with me, young man.
Sorry.
DO NOT be late! And clean up this pig pen this afternoon.
Yes’m.
She slammed the door, in her gentle way, and a few minutes later I could hear the reassuring sound of car wheels rolling out the gravel driveway. Half an hour later I stood on the front porch, stuffing out my second Winston of the morning to the sound of church bells. Ray, my stepfather, was preaching—so to speak, though droning would be more accurate—and the sociopolitical implications of his own stepson being late, or worse yet, altogether absent for his sermon were embarrassing for both he and my mother. But, alas, late would have to suffice. Why? Why do pigs grunt? Why do priests bugger little boys? Might just as well ask why you can’t see dark matter. It’s just the way things are. Because I was me. And it was the first blue sky day in this dreary little town of Escalon—with its Hitchcockian windblown streets and skeletal trees—in what seemed like an eternity. Escalon, I was told by a certain pipe smoking history teacher at Escalon High School, was Latin for Nasty, Brutish & Ugly, only half-jokingly. Such a beautiful morning, I soon began to understand (once the nicotine level in my bloodstream had been optimized), was proof that God really had no intention of forcing me to suffer the self-imposed torture of sitting through another sermon at the Escalon Assembly of God church. Seriously, it was just too much to even contemplate.
Suddenly even the concept of church was so abhorrent, when viewed against the Montana-blue sky and the uncharacteristically warm breeze that April morning, that I was forced to abandon the effort altogether. Of course, decisions have consequences, which require further decisions, which obviously result in yet more consequences: arguments, fights, threats, restrictions, cold wars, hot wars, thermonuclear slaps in the face, etc. So, after calculating most likely of the various possible outcomes of what would ultimately be judged as a blatant challenge to the heavenly-ordained chain of authority in our little household, I came to a startling conclusion: I had to leave home.
Immediately.
Technically, I guess, it was a classic case of running away from home, but since I was half way to 17 I thought of it more as just leaving. Without telling anyone.
It’s not like they’d be missing me a whole heckuva lot, I reasoned, as I stuffed a couple of T-shirts and socks and an extra pair of jeans a big yellow backpack. I changed from my Sunday duds into cowboy boots, Wranglers, a slightly weathered yet comfortable pearl buttoned western work shirt. My mom loved me, I knew, as I stuffed my head into a humungous black bullrider hat and looked into the mirror. The young man staring back at me seemed already a changed person. And, as I and set off for the edge of town, I knew that deep down even Ray didn’t really hate me; that he just had no idea how unbelievably and maddeningly shitheaded one otherwise not-all-that-terrible of a kid could be—given the wrong circumstances.
And our circumstance was, sad to say, as wrong as it gets: a) he was an anal retentive, bordering-on-miserly, 31-year old, thrust into a relationship with a careless, shiftless 16 year-old with a genetic proclivity to see the cup as half-empty, even when it was brimming over. Not that he didn’t have his own, shall we say, quirks? But, more on that later.
I stepped out the front door of the little green and white house and sucked in a lungful of air, said goodbye to the giant pine tree on the front lawn, absolutely no idea of where I was going, savoring every moment of it. Nor was there even an inkling of what I might actually do once there, wherever there happened to end up being. I had seven dollars and forty-five cents, two packs of Winston reds, and a couple days worth of clothes. Yet, that morning as I scuffed along the shoulder of Hwy 2, pointing my thumb at the sky, I believe that I may have been happier, right at that moment, than at any other time in my life up to that point (with the possible exception of when Cheryll Monson had a panic attack on church youth group field trip to the Palm Springs aerial tramway, squeezing the bejesus out of me and nearly crushing me with her 13 year-old breasts, which she had conveniently left unbound. But that’s another story which has no place in this narrative).
I felt like George Orwell marching off to war in Spain—a babe in the woods, mortally naïve, and just happy to be finally getting it over with on this my own rite of passage, such as it was. I could have no idea that it would be six months before I would see my mother and stepfather, and that little cluster of neanderthal huts known as Escalon.