Middle of the Staircase: A Hip Hop Story

By Dipsy Bulgard

This book is an autobiography that spans from childhood to the resent times. This is an emotional glance into the life of an early childhood spent in rural America and growing up in one of Americas largest cities is really like. This ambitious autobiography exemplifies that growing up in the often single family households of the inner and validates that it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of the inner city mentality to pursue dreams and ambitions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781665508889

Dipsy Bulgard

He graduated from the High Schools for the preforming and visual arts then earned a diploma in professional music from a prestigious music school. After publishing his first song and not finding satisfying employment He studied Data Processing and computer programming learning to code in several computer languages in the span of nearly two years. With this background he forged a career as an IT profession that spanned two decades all while using his talent for patients at NIH and performing in off broadway plays and sitting in on jazz sessional to hone is skills. He also worked in a non-profit as an executive under the tutelage of theologians and PhDs working on disaster recover and character development in public schools and various other companies. After becoming discontentment after getting a divorce he started his own music business in Artist Manage where he self taught himself electronic musical production. He is the offspring of a championship winning football coach and a college professor. During the span of his journey he experienced a lifestyle only reserved for the privileged. After experiencing homelessness of which he has recovered. He is a baby boomer born before his time.

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2020 Dipsy Bulgard. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  11/30/2020

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0887-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0888-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020923480

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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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.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Born in the City and raised in the Country

Chapter 2 Who let the chickens out

Chapter 3 Daddy Moe and Medea

Chapter 4 Homecoming II

School Days

Chapter 5 How they met

Chapter 6 The early years

Chapter 7 DC Days

Chapter 8 visiting OG

Chapter 9 The apprentice

Chapter 10 The Bachelor Party

Chapter 11 Spicy Relationships

Chapter 12 Making the band

Chapter 13 Losing it all

Chapter 14 Returning to my first Love

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CHAPTER 1

BORN IN THE CITY AND

RAISED IN THE COUNTRY

O ne hot summer day and my custodial grandmother shared with me about her friend my maternal grandmother. I interviewed her as she and I chatted on the front porch of her farmhouse. My brothers and I called her Medea, but her friends and associates referred to her as Miss Minnie. I recall as little boy the farmhouse was surrounded by crops of corn, string beans and greens. The front of the house was an awfully long and wide porch that spread the entire front of the farmhouse. There on the front porch was a wooden rocking chair setting next to the screened door that interred into the living room where a portrait of President John F. Kennedy hung melancholy on the wall. The front door remained opened during the hot parts of the year. A screened door kept the many flies from interring into the Home. At the entrance to the porch were two cement steps leading up to the porch. To the left was a huge field where my custodial grandfather used his mule to plow the field where green leafy green vegetables, peas and string beans were planted and grew. I do not know if they were mustard greens, collards green or turn up greens after all I was born in the city and raised in the country. The corn fields were in the rear of the farmhouse where the wooden steps were that led out to the back yard where also the chicken coops lay situated. These steps led to the spacious back yard which at one time there was a working well that Medea used before there was running water in the farmhouse. One of the steps was slanted slightly upward because it had been worn slightly more than the others due to use through the years. In the rear of the farmhouse back yard the chicken’s coops were situated to the left the hog pens to the far right behind a fenced in area. In the back of the hog pens were more corn fields and pear trees. On the right leading out of the farmhouse adjacent to the house was a utility room with a wash board where Medea hand washed clothes using a washboard and lye soap. On top of the wash tub was a ringer which I used to ring out the cloths before hanging them out to dry. In the back yard to the left next to the clothes lines was a tree stomp that Medea used to slaughter chickens for dinner. I used to sit on the back porch and watch in amusement as the headless chickens would run around the back yard frantic until they realized they had been slaughtered for dinner. In the back of the clothes lines was a hen house which had to be locked up at night so the wolves could not get into the hen house. There was a fence around the hog pin and hen houses which ended at the utility house. Next to the hog pen there was a huge shed that Daddy Moe stored the feed for the chickens. Just before you got to the corn fields was the outhouse that we used when visiting the country for summer and before my mother picked me up from Medea’s to go back to the big city. The outhouse was a permanent structure that was used to relieve yourself and store the waist from the buckets we used during the night. As a little boy I spent most summer vacations with my other brothers in the Country on the Farm with Medea and Daddy Moe. Initially as part of the divorce settlement my dad would take my brothers and I for the summer to his home with his new wife and children, but at some point, he would drop us off at the farmhouse. I guess in some way he wanted us to experience a part of his upbringing living on a farm with Medea and daddy Moe. As an infant until the time I started school Medea and Daddy Moe used to keep me in the country while my Mother and Father were going through their divorce. Daddy Moe was also a retired barber and Medea ran a country store from the farmhouse. Before Daddy Moe and Medea bought the Farm, they lived in a labor camp of the lumber yard. There was a significant German population in the state, and they owned and operated the sawmills where Medea and Daddy Moe lived and worked before, they bought the farm. The owners hired a lot of people of color to work and support the sawmills. Medea and Daddy Moe earned a living as did many other people of color working at the sawmills. As I imagined they lived on the property of the sawmill along with many other lumber jacks. Anytime they wanted a haircut they had a resident barber, Daddy Moe the barber for the sawmill. When eventually Medea and Daddy Moe saved up enough money to buy a Farm which property included an entire country block for that matter. Guess you would say they were was businesspeople and by the way daddy Moe had a propensity for having a good time.

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CHAPTER 2

WHO LET THE CHICKENS OUT

A fter my maternal grandmother became pregnant with my father, she had no place to turn to but, her best friend. Grandmother got her own place eventually near the sawmill. After I discovered Medea was not my real grandmother whom I never had the privilege of knowing naturally I wanted to know more about her.

As my own mother shared with me a family secret on my paternal side of the family as I drove her back to the campus where she served as professor of hotel and restaurant management before, she passed away in 2006. Parallels to the story my custodial grandmother told me as I previously interviewed her as a young man while on Spring break from College studies proved credible not that I had any reason not to believe mom. I never shared this interview with my mother because my custodial grandmother did not want to give me back when mom came to pick me up from the country. As my mother and I drove down a long stretch of highway mother felt compelled to let me know the family history as best she knew. Now that I was an adult perhaps, she thought I could handle the truth. Your father was birthed in this small country town, she said as I looked up and saw the sign in my peripheral vision. My father probably did not know real mother very well, who was ostracized by her family after she became pregnant by this Caucasian man with whom she was supposedly married. Interracial marriages were something unheard of at that time besides in most states it was illegal. This alleged marriage is estimated must have taken place in the 1930’s when to the best of my knowledge Interracial marriages were illegal at that time which explains why there are no public record of a marriage between my Anna Rose and any other for that matter. Besides my Christian custodial Grandmother, a Baptist who founded the church she and I attended as a little boy could not have prevaricated such a story in which her best friend was involved. As mother expounded additional detail apparently when my paternal grandmother went to stay with her sister in Oklahoma her sister had a boyfriend at the time. Assuming he was like a lot of men are, they take notice of pretty women with light skin and long black hair the personification of a mulatto woman. He started to become attracted to her as well, wanting his cake and eat it too. Little did he know that his girlfriend had a twin sister. They apparently got there looks from my 3rd great grandmother Lucy Conner who was married to my third great Grandfather Henry of Alabama who was bludgeoned to death over alcohol as recorded in the Alabama news review. Lucy was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian -as recorded in the US., Native American Citizens and Freedmen of Five Civilized Tribes – she was among the 2000 plus Native Americans that voluntarily moved to Oklahoma where she later died a widow in 1906.

This mysterious Caucasian man then marries our Grandmother Annie Rose. Obviously unwilling get over her coyness like General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna could not get over the Yellow rose of Texas. No pun intended. So, when she became pregnant from this would be German man as my story goes, she was disenfranchised by her twin sister and put of the house. Needing a place to stay and have her baby because she could no longer consider Oklahoma home. Afterwards, she and her partner of German descent were married according to my custodial grandmother’s side of the story as confirmed by my mother. Nonetheless her best friend, Miss Minnie being a Christian lady accepted her and her Caucasian husband. My father was given birth in a place I often passed by many times on my way to visiting my Mom and Aunt at the college where they both were professors.

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CHAPTER 3

DADDY MOE AND MEDEA

I n those days the lumber jacks didn’t have many places to get their hair cut I would imagine besides who knew how to cut hair like Daddy Moe in the middle of Cold Springs for a Saturday night on the town or should I say in the woods? Before Daddy Moe and Medea retired, they had saved up enough capital to buy farmland which spanned the entire country block. Some of the land they rented out to tenants was not part of the farm they built. They also sold some of the property to their close friends who built their own ho uses.

One of the country gentlemen that rented the shotgun style house from Daddy Moe and Medea on the land next door to the farm was named Luke. Luke enjoyed reading western novels while sitting in front of his Bunsen burner. He must have had at least a hundred western novels, everywhere there was a western novel on top of the tables in the shelves above the kitchen sink. My brothers oldest and middle brothers and I used to play cards with Luke in his shotgun styled house while he discussed the western stories he was reading. We called him cool hand Lukas. He used to occasionally ask me to pluck the ingrown hairs from his beard with a pair of tweezers. He would pay me for my troubles. A dime back then was enough money to satisfy any sweet tooth without having to see a dentist preferably. I would take my pennies from heaven that I had earned from cool hand Lukas to buy candy from the candy lady who lived nearby, around the country block. Now the candy lady lived in an old house with a wood gate and a barbed wire fence surrounded by woods in the middle of the country block. There were no signs to indicate a candy store existed in the middle of the woods but only the town’s people seemed to know anything about it. I would have to open the gate to get to the door and knock. Usually it would take a while before the candy lady came to the door because she was elderly. It was kind of spooky standing there in the middle of a country block surrounded by thick woods with no other houses in sight even in the middle of the day waiting for what seemed to have been an eternity for the candy lady to come to the door. Once inside the fear would dissipate and I acted I was like a kid in a candy store, there were shelves and shelves of candy everywhere. I would tell her I want a dime worth of candy. She would tell me my options and there always seemed to be lots of choices. Give me a couple of NowNLater’s a Chico stick and some bubble gum with the rest please. By the time I left I would not have a penny to my name. I spent it all living it up in the candy store! As a little boy I had a lot to learn about money.

Medea and Daddy Moe gave me chores around the farm when I was just a little boy. One of my chores was to chop wood for the Bunsen burners they used around the farmhouse. I chopped so much wood that cool hand Lukas nick named me axe man. With a lot of practice chopping wood, I got rather good with the axe. As a little boy I could split the wood right down the middle with a single blow on the chopping block. Medea and Daddy Moe slept in the same bedroom but in separate beds. I never thought anything strange about it because Medea was a real nice Christian lady who took me to church with her every Sunday and taught me how to say the Lord’s Prayer for memory. As a little boy I slept with her in her full-sized bed. When she bought new clothes for my Sunday’s best Daddy Moe used to tell her you are going to spoil that boy buying him new church clothes every week. Before they installed plumbing and running water in the bathroom in the new addition homes in Huntsville, we had to use an outhouse and slop bucket at night to relieve ourselves.

Meanwhile back on the farm in those days the ice man used to deliver ice to Medea and Daddy Moe for the Ice box because it did not use electricity. The ice box was a facsimile of a refrigerator because you could not actually plug it into an electrical outlet for refrigeration. The only thing that kept it cool was the huge block of ice inside it. Sometimes I would go with Daddy Moe to town to pick up the ice from the Icehouse in downtown Huntsville. All this did not seem to be much of an inconvenience for me as a boy being from the Big city as the people from rural towns referred to big city. After I got older the summer vacations were over, I went back to living in the Houston with my older brothers. I enjoyed spending summers at my grandparents, I adjusted to country living easily enough. My countenance seems to have an innate ability to live the simple life of the country even though city life in Houston was the deference between night and day nearly.

Daddy Moe used to be the taxi for the towns people in Huntsville because he seemed to be the only one available, had a truck for carrying things and along with a keen since of community that country folks seemed have that was rare in the Big H. Daddy Moe’s truck was an old two toned light blue and white Ford with the gearshift on the steering column. It always seemed to have a few beer cans in the bed of the truck which he had me clean up before he went to town. He also let me sip a bit of his cold beer as a boy where I experienced my first drink. Now there was an elderly lady who lived down the road that would call Medea on the phone and tell her to have me to come pick up my cake. To a young boy even a woman slightly older than your mother was a senior citizen.

She always baked goodies for me. Often, she would tell me before I left do not forget to tell Moe that I need a ride into town tomorrow at 9 am. Yes, Mam thank you for the cake I will be sure to tell him. Her gingerbread cake was off the chain, quite palatable you might say in other words. I liked going to the country because it was so peaceful there. Everywhere I went people seemed to be nice. If you were outside playing with their children and it became supper time, they would always invite you to have supper with them. In the country supper was the meal you had after lunch. In the metropolitan area we called it dinner in the big H.

As a matter of fact, I kissed my first girl in the country too. Her name was Tamela Smallwood. She was tall with honey brown skin and long black hair. We used to walk away while my brothers were playing with her cousins into the woods where we could be alone. I believe my brothers found her also. I learned at an early ag, whether from the