Heroes, Hellions & Hot Rods: Rocking the Boat At Piedmont High

By Ron Neff, Ph.D

Bud ordered and briefly wore to classes a T-shirt reading, “Piedmont High may not be the end of the earth. But you can see it from here.” Oddly, that would not be well received by the school’s administrators. No biggie there. Bud was always in trouble with those folks anyway. One positive side to being in such a rural setting was the plenitude of backroads; largely free of state troopers. Bud liked to hurl his old 1968 Mustang Fastback down those backroads. It might be old, but Bud and Deuce, his ace mechanic, had “The Blue Flame,” as they called her, hopped up and ready for anything. Trudy didn’t seem to care about Bud’s car. She just liked to climb into that vehicle – or any other place they could get together – and ask him to hold her. She seemed to need that. The Mustang driver was also interested in a mysterious blonde with huge blue eyes, who had introduced herself by claiming, “I’m your new girlfriend, Bud.” That girl would promptly disappear; then reappear at odd times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684713059

Ron Neff, Ph.D

Ron Neff (Ph.D University of Iowa) is a semi-retired professor and psychotherapist. In recent years he has published several self-help books: Goodbye, My Love: How To Mend A Broken Heart (2016), Loving Well: Keys to Lasting and Rewarding Relationships (2016), Your Inner Mammal: How To Meet Your Real Emotional Needs And Become Stronger - For Self And Others (2017), and Surviving Divorce & Winning in Family Court (2021). He has often been told he should write novels, probably love stories, since he has studied and worked with issues of the heart most of his life. Hence, The Color of the Moon (2017), Daisies in Hell (2019), One Heart Over the Line (2019), Heroes, Hellions and Hot Rods (2019), and now Sometimes They Came Back (2022). At other times, his novels have been more in the “action adventure” or “science fiction” genres, including Enough With Those Humans: Was It Time for a Higher Intelligence? (2020), The Trouble With Eve: Forbidden Fruit in a Big Sky Paradise (2020), Sidewinders & Sassy Skirts: Blame It on Texas (2020), Up to Alaska: The Rush Of 2032 (2021), and Post-Earth: Searching the Stars for New Life (2021).

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HEROES,

HELLIONS

& HOT RODS

ROCKING THE BOAT AT PIEDMONT HIGH

Ron Neff Ph.D

Copyright © 2019 Ron Neff Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-6847-1306-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-1305-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date:  11/27/2019

For

Amy Boylan,

A Many Splendored Pisces

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, the author must give credit to his multi-talented friend Jason Shepherd. In this story as the brazen but slick Rusty, he came up with that nickname himself. He also suggested several of the storylines in the book — including The Fireball Express, our tribute to Von Glandon, a local hero well known and widely loved in the author’s community, and recently passed away far too young.

Special thanks are also due to Kirk Hittner, another dear friend and the volume’s editor, who does his best to keep me passably within the bounds of correct grammar – not a small job, as he will readily attest.

That leaves Sally Peiffer (the mysterious blonde with the same first name in the story to follow). Suffice it to say that Sally remains just as baffling to the author as her mercurial and enigmatic character in this yarn.

CHAPTER 1

Lost In The Hinterlands

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Built on an old abandoned airstrip, a remnant of World War II, Piedmont High was located in the middle of no place. That was perhaps fitting, as Bud really thought this rural school – and his entire rural life — was at or nearly off the map. In fact, he had managed to order, receive and briefly wear to classes a T-shirt reading, Piedmont High may not be the end of the earth. But you can see it from here.

Oddly, that had not been well received by the school’s administrators. But, no biggie, Bud was always in trouble with those folks anyway. They didn’t like his attitude. Again, no biggie, no love lost there. He was not one bit fond of them either.

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Bud would often question some of the sacred truths he was being taught. They claimed, for example, that, In America, the people rule. It is one person, one vote. Of course, he had to hold up his hand and ask, If that’s true, why are my parents always being bombarded by politicians asking for money? It seems like the people who understand the system think it’s more a matter of one dollar, one vote. As my father puts it, ‘Money talks.’

Other students would sometimes snicker or even gasp after such comments by the bad boy. The teachers, on the other hand, would just glare at him.

More or less.

Bud also liked to use synonyms for bull crap, including bilgewater and birdseed. But, after all, even bull crap was a polite substitute, was it not? He would smile when he pointed this out to some of the schools wardens, as he thought of them. Yet they didn’t seem to appreciate his kind efforts in that regard.

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About the only thing about Piedmont High that Bud found not unbearably boring was its being the Home of The Ravens. At least that school mascot was a bit out of the ordinary – almost interesting — as such things went. Rather than bright colors, The Ravens simply sported stark black and white on their athletic uniforms, on their pennants, and the rest.

Of course, there were often references to Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal poem, The Raven, loathing, if you read it closely, the loss of one named Lenore. Yes, the poet had a broken heart. Unfortunately, that point was not apparent to the average member of Piedmont High. Alas, the poet had been a little over their heads.

Piedmont, Piedmont, never vanquished, always best. Take your leave with all the rest. To challenge us Nevermore.

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It was even worse than that.

Just for the record: Piedmont High, full name Piedmont Community High School, was a consolidated school, as they often called them in rural America. That meant that many smaller schools once located in actual towns had been replaced by one larger school located out in the middle of nowhere. Part of the logic behind that was: this nowhere real estate was dirt cheap. It also overcame the problem of fierce fighting that might have ensued should the powers that be have attempted to locate this new, larger school in one of the small towns now forced to bus their children to the new outpost. With every town involved equally usurped of their old school and its pride, there was less room for resentment. They were all in the same boat.

Bud knew all of that – and he thought it was all stupid; stupid with a capital S. Why should everybody be bussed to nowhere? Some liar types, he thought, were snowing people – selling everyone down the river for money that went into their already fat pockets.

Of course, trying to tell anyone that – well anyone except Mrs. Oliver — was only a ticket to more disdain. The last time Bud had said anything like that, he’d been sentenced to sit on the stage at the front of the room that doubled as the cafeteria and the amphitheater – every lunch period for a month.

That was supposed to humiliate him into submission, he gathered. No such luck on that. In Bud’s mind, that only branded him as exactly what he was: a non-buyer of the bullshit (or of the received wisdom, if you like).

Mrs. Oliver was the English teacher, Bud’s silent ally at the school. And yes, he’d learned the phrase selling people down the river from a book she had loaned him.

But that is getting ahead of the story. Right now, we should begin at the beginning. More or less.

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Bud’s actual first name was Eugene, but so was his father’s. Bud was not fond of that actual name in any case, and Bud, he thought, was better than Junior. Thank the gods for small favors.

The gods? Yes, Bud was not into conventional religion. He was into the Ancient Greeks and their multiple gods, whom he found quite a colorful lot. Of course, this bent of his was about as popular with the school authorities as his attitude.

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It wasn’t just the administrators. Bud didn’t think much of his teachers either, except for Mrs. O, as he liked to call her. Yes, Mrs. Oliver, the English teacher, was in Bud’s zone.

Because of her, the school’s impudent young Turk had developed a taste for literature – from the Ancient Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, to Shakespeare to moderns like Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. Of course, the more audaciously sarcastic they were, the better he liked them.

His favorite was Hunter S. Thompson, the self-proclaimed gonzo journalist, who broke nearly every grammatical rule — and often capitalized whole words in the middle of a sentence. But Aristophanes was equally audacious more than 2,000 years earlier. The women in his play Lysistrata undertook to end the three-decade Peloponnesian War between Greek city states by denying the men of the land any sex. That, thought Bud, served the damned fools right!

In Lysistrata, Aristophanes soon had those overly-militant men, now sex starved, walking around with telling — and increasingly painful — protrusions poking from the front-sides of their togas. And you thought pornography was a modern development?

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Also because of Mrs. Oliver, the otherwise reluctant student had developed a taste for poetry. Well, some poetry – and Mrs. O as he called her fondly, often with a suggestive wink and an Oh, my heart, as he clasped his chest in fun, encouraged Bud to write a few verses of his own. Those verses would be outlandish, of course. But more on that later.

For now it’s enough to note that Mrs. O didn’t appear to be troubled one whit by Bud’s suggestive winks and clasps of his heart.

Maybe — even if properly married — lonely and spirited English teachers didn’t thrive by propriety alone. Maybe they needed a little mischief once in a while.

Enough said. A gentleman does not disclose any intimacies with a lady, older or otherwise. That much Bud had learned from Mrs. Oliver.

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Well, Bud actually liked one other teacher, too. Not that the man was a knowledgeable teacher. He sometimes taught biology; rather poorly. But mostly he was the school’s track and cross-country running coach. Bud was a star long-distance runner, and he and Coach Ball got along well. Never mind that the coach’s own mother had shared with Bud that her son had barely made it through college, making mostly Ds, but being passed by his professors largely at the behest of his coaches to keep him sports eligible.

One positive side to being in such a rural setting was the plentitude of secondary backroads; many with long, sweeping turns, gravel surfaced only, which provided alternatives to the main highways – more entertaining routes, and usually free of state troopers.

Bud liked to hurl his old 1968 Mustang Fastback (same model that starred in Steve McQueen’s movie Bullitt) down those back roads. It might be old, but Bud and Deuce, his overgrown thirtyish teenager friend and top-notch hot rod mechanic, had The Blue Flame, as they called her, hopped up and ready for anything.

For whatever reason, Coach Ball sometimes liked to hitch rides home with Bud after track or cross-county practices. Best of all, the coach didn’t seem to mind a bit that Bud would always put that Mustang through its paces, complete with 4-wheel drifts through those long, sweeping turns.

Usually, there would be one or more other students in that car, and they, too, were surprised that the coach never complained about the star runner’s exuberant driving. If asked about it, Coach Ball would only comment, That boy was not meant to go slow.

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Apparently, over the years Coach Ball would become a better teacher, perhaps just from practice, and he was later quite popular with the students at Piedmont High. Why? Because he told good stories to keep his students’ attention. This Bud would later hear from his nieces and nephews, who also shared that the coach still liked to talk about their Uncle Bud, who could really make that Mustang show her stuff.

Yes, the coach would always add, Now don’t you kids try that kind of thing. Times have changed, and you’ll get a ticket and lose your license for sure.

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Probably because he was regarded by the staff as pretty much a delinquent, Bud was largely shunned by the popular girls at Piedmont High. Even the rest of the girls there did not want to be his date at school dances or other affairs. But some of them encouraged him to show up in their driveways at home, where they would often climb into his car and make out – either right there or down the road at a secluded spot.

Better yet, Bud was quite popular with the girls at other high schools, mostly competing schools in their conference. Further, many of them were happy to show up with him at dances and the like. In reality, of course, that was as much about his car as any personal attractiveness he might have possessed. Everyone knew that car nearly always won any drag race – or any bet placed on who could get to the next town first.

One of those girls from another school was different. Trudy didn’t seem to care about Bud’s car. She just liked to climb into that vehicle – or any other place they could get together – and ask him to hold her. Unlike some of the other girls, Trudy didn’t try to impress him with any sexual antics. She just wanted to be held – and held some more. She seemed to need that.

Bud and Trudy didn’t talk about anything like love or marriage, but that hot rod driver really cared about her. He cared – and she knew that.

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Unlike most of his teachers, Bud did respect his Dad. He was not alone. Although possessing only an eighth-grade education, his father was regarded as one of wisest men in the state. He was a farmer, and he knew things other farmers only wished they did. Eugene subscribed to a wide variety of magazines and newsletters – including technical agricultural journals covering the latest research findings on modern agricultural practices. He also appeared to be a speed reader.

It could be argued that Eugene was something of an amateur philosopher. He said things that made you think — things like, You can be working too hard to make money.

Sometimes he would also say, Most people don’t like a smart man, because he makes them think.