Snippets of My Life

By C. C. Lee

What happens when you learn about sex at too young of an age, when your influenced by a wrong peer group, go into the Navy ending up doing even more drugs, when you marry a bi-sexual and it turns out to be bad? You clean up your life… just to end up going to prison.

This book has the mini stories about growing up, being a teenager, learning about sex, drugs, becoming a man, military, and marriage. Then the trials of what it's like to be in prison. There is a little bit of it all in "Snippets of my Life."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662410482

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Snippets of My Life

C. C. Lee

Copyright © 2020 C. C. Lee

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-1047-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-1048-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Into the World

Innocence Lost

Pop-Paw plus Mom-Maw

No More Across the Tracks

Elementary Hell

Junior High Escapades

Into the Sticks

Back Across the Tracks

Personifying Myself

Stitches and Death

Service, Here I Come

Returning Home to Chaos

Matrimonial Bliss

A Change in the Air

The Devil’s Den

After Hitting Bottom

Schoolboy Again

Finding Mormon

County and Crime

Watching My Back

Scuffling and Savagery

Working and Learning the Ropes

Finding Sparks in the Darkness

From Slums to Condos

Downgraded but Uplifted

Building a Solid Foundation

Rehab, Release, Relief

A Step Up from Prison

Health Mix-Up and Heavenly Aid

Ponderings and Reality Slaps

Part 1

Raised as a Dysfunctional Baptist

Chapter 1

Into the World

Where our journey begins and where it ends is a mystery to some but not to me. My life started in heaven, and where it ends is known to me also for I will return to my true home. But for now, I have these trials and tribulations to go through.

I was born into this world out of wedlock. My biological father, nicknamed Rocky, did not marry my mother, Peggy, after she got pregnant with me at the age of fifteen. Reason being is that we were from across the tracks, and his parents would not approve of it.

The charity hospital I was born in, near the Port of Beaumont, burned down shortly thereafter. My poor family was living around the Refineries and Plants in Port Neches, Texas. We literally lived on the other side of railroad tracks that divided us from the rest of the town.

My grandmother, I called Mom-Maw, ended up raising me in my younger years. My mother was fifteen years old and needed to still be a teenager. My real grandfather died a little while after I was born, and my mom-maw married Joe Martinez, whom I called pop-paw.

He was a janitor for the local Pipefitters Union Hall. Some mornings, he and Mom-Maw would bring me to work with them. One morning, he allowed me to operate the floor buffer. Picture a four-year-old boy trying to operate something that was twice his size and being pulled along while it’s bumping into walls and spinning around. I have never seen Pop-Paw laugh as hard as I did that morning, ever.

The woman I called grandma was really my great-grandmother. She lived next door in a shack with a tin roof. I remember when it rained, it was loud because of the roof. And when it thundered, Grandma would tell me, That’s God rolling watermelons under your bed, son.

She would lay down on her bed and have me pluck hairs out of her face. I didn’t mind because she always had chocolate fudge pops in the freezer. Even though she snorted snuff, she made the best corn cakes that I, still to this day, have never tasted anywhere else. She ended up dying from Alzheimer’s disease. I remember being young, seeing her, and not understanding why she was like the way she was.

Chapter 2

Innocence Lost

One of my youngest memories was around four or five years old. My stepfather, Nelson, whom was a Cajun with a bad temper, left his pocket knife on the dresser. Me being an inquisitive child, opened a bottom drawer, crawled up and proceeded to open the knife up. When I went to fold the blade shut, it sprang closed on my right thumb, cutting it open to the bone. I was so afraid of Nelson’s wrath I lied and said I slammed my thumb shutting the dresser drawer. I believe this was the very first lie I told. I didn’t know it as a lie. I knew it as to save my rear from a severe spanking. To this day, over fifty years later, I still have the scar on my thumb.

Around that age, for some reason I cannot remember, I tried to run away from home, and I told my mom goodbye. She told me to go ahead. I went outside and hid in some hedges, thinking she’ll come looking for me. She must have seen me hide for she didn’t come looking for me. As it got dark, I got scared and went back inside, and neither I or Mom saying anything to each other. Needless to say, I never tried to run away again.

My entrepreneurial skills started early in life. At the age of five, I took a bunch of marbles, coated them in glue, and rolled them in glitter. After they dried, I tried to sell them by the roadside. I will say here that I did not make any money. My first failure at self-employment.

My first sexual awakening was at age six. I had this older cousin, called Jojo, who was a teenager, took me and my cousin Beth, she was a year younger than me, into the backyard inside some high weeds. He told me and her to pull down our pants and underwear. He pointed to my privates and said, That goes there, and he pointed to Beth’s privates. Right then, I was fascinated because Beth didn’t have a wee-wee.

When I was eight years old, there was this girl named Sandy who lived across the street from me. She was about thirteen years old. She made up this game where I would chase her, and if I caught her, I could stick my hands down her pants. For some reason, I always caught her. Little did I know, my mother was watching us. She sent Sandy home and told her to never come back, which she didn’t. Me, I got punished by kneeling on uncooked rice with my nose in a corner. The trick is that once you kneel down on top of that uncooked rice, stay still. If you move around, the rice digs in, and you get more pain.

By the age of ten, I was taught by some cousins how to perform oral sex on them. At twelve, we were having intercourse. Needless to say, I had an active sex life at a very early age, which shouldn’t have been.

Chapter 3

Pop-Paw plus Mom-Maw

My mom-maw worked for the Port Neches Independent School District as a custodian, but how she met Pop-Paw, I don’t know. I do know that she quit or retired and married Joseph Martinez, nicknamed Blackie. They bought an acre of land with a little house on it in a small country town of Deweyville, Texas. They had two pecan trees, six pear trees, a plum tree, and a bunch of cockleburs. I couldn’t go far barefoot in their yard without getting my feet full of them.

Pop-Paw was the first to teach me how to fish. He taught me about hard work, for I would help him mow, rake, clean the fence line, and burn trash. He would make and jar some stuff called chow-chow. You put it over a lot of dishes, and boy, was it hot. This is where I learned to love hot and spicy food.

He had this little Chevy love truck that I had to use as an escape route once. Mom-Maw and Pop-Paw inherited a really mean white spitz dog that didn’t like me at all. I would have to watch my back anytime I was out helping Pop-Paw with the yard. The rake in my hand saved me a few times from being bit by the Terror. One day, he trapped me in the back bed of the truck, and then when he hopped into the bed, I jumped up on the roof calling out to Pop-Paw for help. I did not like that dog.

Then one day, as I was opening the gate for Pop-Paw to pull his truck out, I heard the Terrors footfalls in the gravel coming at me. I grabbed the middle rod of the gate anchor, pulled it up and out while swinging it around. It met the Terrors head as it leaped for me. He stopped, shook his head, walked off, and never messed with me again. Boy, was I happy!

For some reason, which I could never understand in my preteen years, Pop-Paw loved to listen to the Houston Astros on the radio. He would go into his small bedroom, sit on his bed, and tune in the game on his small transistor radio. Mom-Maw and I would watch TV while he did this. Till this day, I wished he would have lived long enough where I could have brought him to a live Astros game.

Mom-Maw had this Chihuahua called Chequita who had to have her morning coffee with Mom-Maw. Chequita was house trained, but her bathroom was the bathtub. Every time I had to take a bath (for a young boy, it wasn’t often), I had to clean the tub of soiled newspapers and droppings; afterward, I replaced the newspapers back in the tub.

I remembered going to the Church of Christ with Mom-Maw when I was real young and seeing a baby get baptized by sprinkling water while the baby was crying. I was thinking how wrong and strange it was. While Mom-Maw was a member of the Church of Christ, Pop-Paw was a Catholic. The few times I went with him to church, I didn’t understand what was going on there. All the foreign languages, communion, kneeling, standing, kneeling again, incense smoking, and repeated prayers turned me away from that belief.

Mom-Maw had this Singer sewing machine that she put to good use. At the beginning of each school year, Mom would bring us over there to get fitted in our new school clothes. Mom-Maw would measure us and start pumping her foot, making that Singer sing, and boy, did she know how to cook! She could make a roast that the meat would fall off the bone. All of us would get together on a Sunday and eat lunch. We kids would line up around the kitchen floor, sitting and eating on top of the newspapers while the grown-ups sat around her small kitchen table with six chairs to sit in. All of us would say prayers together then dig in. Memories that I never want to forget.

Chapter 4

No More Across the Tracks

My mother married a Campbell, a Turner, and then a Boudreaux. I have two half sisters and a half brother. Nelson Boudreaux, my stepfather, was a teamster driver for the local union. We moved into a three-bedroom home on the other side of Port Neches, Texas, away from the tracks. Little did we know that this home was haunted, more on that later.

Growing up in Port Neches in the seventies was almost as good as it gets. Me and my brother Michael would wake up, eat cereal, and take off on our bicycles if we didn’t have school. No helicopter parenting then. We would stay out running the town until dark if we wanted to. Two things would bring us home before then: lunch (if we were hungry) and our black-and-white TV for Ultraman, Gillian’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and My Favorite Martian. These were our favorites.

We would ride to the park to swing and play on the playground. Those days there were things that could and would hurt you to play on. Nowadays, half the things are not allowed anymore, especially the barrel roll. I knew of at least two kids who broke their wrist on it. Also, at the park, we had a public swimming pool, for $0.50, we could swim all day; it’s not there anymore. Now it’s a water park with a few kiddie sprays to run through; honestly, it’s just not the same.

Behind our house was a great big cement drainage ditch. It emptied into the Neches River, and we would use it as our own Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Frogs, minnows, snakes, sandpiper crabs, even neutral rats roamed our sanctuary. At the very end, we would fish in the river. One time, I caught this big turtle using bacon as bait. It had swallowed my hook, so I was carrying it back home with me when a neighbor stopped me and gave me $2 for the turtle—that’s a lot of 10¢ fudge sickles and a kite to fly.

The kites I’ve flown would just keep on going. We would add roll after roll of string to make it go higher. When it was time to go home, we would tie it off and keep it flying. A few times, we would wake up to find it not there. So our adventure would begin. We would follow the path of the downed string while collecting it. Miles of string, some of it had been broken by vehicles, some in yards we wouldn’t collect, but in the long run with patience and perseverance me and Mike would usually find the kite to fly another day.

There was this gravel company who had piles and piles of gravel to climb up on, but in the middle of the piles was our secret utopia. There was a hole dug about the size of six SUVs. In it was a big piece of solid melted plastic the size of a VW bug. The hole was half filled with clear water; in it, colorful fish swam around. There was a natural overhead ledge with vines and flora hanging down. We would float, play, swim, and hang out there all the time. After about five years, the company that owned the land filled it in, but at least I have memories to flashback to of better days.

Chapter 5

Elementary Hell

My school years started out with a bang! Literally. The second week of first grade, during class, the teacher was writing a simple math problem on the chalkboard. With her back turned, writing, she said for nobody to say the answer out loud. Someone did though, the teacher turned around, looked at me, and started to scold me. I denied it, and she sent me out to stand in the hallway. Ten minutes later, the principal came by and took me to his office. He kept telling me to own up to it and to stop lying. I wouldn’t. I was telling the truth. So he pulled out a paddle and told me he was going to give me three licks (swats) with it if I didn’t tell the truth. While crying and denying it, he grabbed me and turned me around and bent me over his desk. When he swung the paddle, I moved, and he hit his desk with it, and it cracked the glass that was covering the top of it. Now he was mad! He held me down while swinging that paddle three times to swat a seven-year-old’s bottom. Talk about corporal punishment, I found out early what telling the truth got me. I started failing second grade for reasons nobody understood. It took an English teacher to move me to the front of the class to find out. I needed glasses!

Once she told my mother I had vision problems, and when I got glasses, my world opened up. I could see things that I could not of before, plus my grades improved. Third and fourth grades were the ones in which I explored the town and grew. My first girlfriend, Naiomi, only lasted two weeks, but it felt good to hold hands with the opposite sex and steal a kiss when saying hi and bye. I was a secret admirer to a junior high girl named Lisa. I would leave her notes and poems at her door for her to find after school. She soon moved out of town and out of my life.

Fifth and sixth grade were where the real unfun began. There was this boy named Terry who was in the same grade as me. He talked me into skipping school one day and breaking into someone’s home. He started grabbing stuff, putting it into bags, handing them to me, and saying, Come on. I was more interested in what was in the refrigerator, in which he stopped, grabbed some cans, and put them in the bags. Once we left the home, we stopped in some overgrown bamboo shoots. He took out the cans and asked me if I ever drank beer. I said no, so he pulled the tab off and handed it to me. I took one drink and didn’t like the taste of it, so I handed it back to him. He had stolen a Playboy Magazine and was showing it to me. I was fascinated with it for I had never seen an older woman naked before. When we got back to my house, Terry started hiding all the stuff he stole all around my house, in closets, in drawers, and under the beds. He even had stolen a shotgun, which he put inside some bushes before reaching my house. Good thing no one was home at the time.

The next morning, a detective from the police department came to my house. A butler next door to the house we broke into saw some young kids. So the detective called the school and found out that we weren’t in school the day before. He put two and two together. He told my mother because of my age, if we returned the property, no charges will be filed. So I proceeded to look for stuff Terry hid all over my house. I even went into the backyard and got the gun he hid. I was severely punished, whipped with a belt, and made to kneel on raw rice. A few years later, Terry fell out of a tree and broke his neck. They didn’t find him until the next day. Still, as months went by, we would find a necklace here or a ring there that he had hid in my home.

While in sixth grade, Mark V. came into my life and scarred it badly. He was about sixteen and a predator. He