The Things I Never Told My Children: Confessions of an Evil Twin

By Raleigh Sutton Deer Meadow South of Town

The reason for this mess

There was a specific reason for writing all this.

In 1979, I was in a horrible car accident resulting in a double concussion, permanent brain damage to my left frontal lobe, and the inability to walk well. Riding a bike and driving a car was far down the road. I lost a lot of language skills, including the loss of German and Puerto Rican--two languages I spoke well. My English suffered a lot too. The names of things were missing from recall, producing a lot of incomplete sentences. Getting lost often was another reward.

I had a doctorate in psychology, which helped the recovery process. At least that part of my memory was not lost, so I began rehabilitation.

Stress proved to be a killer. With too much stress, any gains were lost, and I had to start all over again. Learning to meditate helped take the edge off the damage.

I needed to recover my word use, starting with crossword puzzle books. I did thousands with increasing improvements. It was frustrating to say the least.

I started writing opinion letters to the newspaper, with many published. It helped with the continuity and writing. After five or six years, memories started to recover, and twenty years of psychiatry helped me organize the thinking process. There are some memories that I would have rather forgotten...but!

The brain is a funny organ. If you have a memory that seems incomplete, your brain helps by creating a logical fill-in. Many of my written memories may have two or more versions. It still makes a good story, so take your pick; there is no way I can choose!

I enjoyed the process of rehabilitation with everyday discoveries lurking around the corner.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684988273

Book preview

The Things I Never Told My Children

Confessions of an Evil Twin

Raleigh Sutton

Deer Meadow South of Town

Copyright © 2022 Raleigh Sutton Deer Meadow South of Town

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-68498-826-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-827-3 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

Black Bears and Blueberries

Can You Canoe a Canoe? Without Getting Wet?

Dirty Words by the Yard

Hydrogen Whistle

Marvin and Me and the Eight-Pagers

Not Seeing Africa on Zero Dollars a Day

The Beard Monster

The Little Red Scare

Wagon Ho!

I Hurt It on the Grapevine

Vegetable Soup Smells Like?

USAF

Boats and Wires

The Darned Trip from Heck

Air Police Wars

The Nineteenth Hole

Half a Hill

The Motorcycle Crash

A New Friend

Sand Sifting at the Seashore

Snake Trouble

Marble Mayhem

Sugar Beets vs. the Railroad

The Special Table

Fraternity Freak-Out

Getting Back with Kerouac

Funerals for a Dollar an Hour

Mrs. Yoho and the Devil’s Bus

Bowling for Fun

The Rumble at Big Boy

He Was a Chained Man

Going to Gitmo for Old Methuselah

The Inner Sanctum—Arrggh

Bulldozing the Marines

We Changed His Mind

Man Bites Dog

I See London, I See France

The Unchained Melody

Driver Braining

The Key’s the Thing

Bats in the Attic or Something

My Last Visit

F and G Streets

Fifth Time’s a Charm for Some

The Shop Teacher

The Fever

The Fist of Death

Yo-Yo Yahoos

Let’s Make a Deal

The Triangle Bar and Grill

Toxic Sock Syndrome

The Soaps

The Drive-In

Eight-Legged Trouble

Traffic Cone Carnage

Thanks, but No Thanks

The Reluctant Ballplayer

The Thing

The Miracle

War with the Turkeys

The Big Dam

Uncle Jack’s Cats

Worse Than Bashful Kidneys

The Swedish Clubs

He Was Dumb and Smelled Bad Too

The Lock Poppers

The Bird Curse

Lion Tamer

The N—— Shooter

Working for My Dad

The House That Dad Built

Dad’s God

A Free Driver’s License

A Beer with Vern

A Hot Time at Owens-Illinois

Cuss Words

The Woman with the Dirty Face

The Battle of the Bottle

What I Did to Dad

Mom’s Relatives

The Tooth? The Tooth? You Can’t Handle the Tooth!

The Barackman Brothers

A Walk in the Country

Play It Again

Gay Bashing and Thrashing

All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth

The Bully in Training

Sticks and Stones

I Did What She Asked

A Window of Opportunity

Ghost Crab Grab

The Octopus

Dismal Swamp

Free Meals in College

The Boozers Meet the Nazi

The Mentor

A Good Christmas

Manpower Shortage

Wet Toes and a Dripping Nose

The Coldest Day

Playing in the Snow

The Track Star

The Ball Kicker

Childhood Hostility

The Transom

Going for Broke

Catching Frogs at Grandma’s House

Donna Rose Ruffalo

Christmas in Havana

Raviloa

The Sin Stoppers

Getting Our Ducks in a Row

The Boxing Match

None of Your Beeswax

Egg on Our Faces

Happy Birthday

The Great Wasp Crisis

Notes

Grandma’s Problems

Uncle Virgil

Lloyd LaVerne Reed

My Uncle Roger

The Summer Adventure

The Hysteric Wins One

The Four-Leaf Clover Clod

The Chess Chump

The Long and the Short of It

J. T. Price

War’s End

The Little People

The Little Snot

The Guard

Relationships

Finders Keepers, Finders Losers

Historical Destruction

Stealing the Souvenirs

School for Illiterates

Poetry Assignment

Teaching Using the College Method

Rich Man, Poor Man

The Latin Doughboy

Sizzlin’ Suzie

Taking Rides with Strangers

Movies under Duress

Playing War in the Woods

There Was No Warning Label

Ask Me No Questions

Time to Go Somewhere

The Clubhouse

Good Movies and Bad Customers

Junkyard Dogs

You Can Dress ’Em Up

The Class Drunk

We Were All Guilty

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

They Ate Like Birds

The Brute

Happy Birthday to Me

You Can’t Take Him Anywhere

Tough Sledding

Miracle of the Glasses

Walking Myself to Death

Theobabble

Great Balls of Fire

Galoshes by Goshes

Utopia

Peaceniks

Advocacy

Cats, Cats, and More Cats

She Didn’t Understand

Working for a Living

Worse Than Mayhem at BEPEX

The Turtle Lady

Bye-Bye to BEPEX

A Blizzard to Die For

A Trip into Strange

The Big Trial

It Was Just a Joke I Think

Silvertone Days

The Rubber Chicken

Standing in the Corner

The Man with the Shot Glass

White Death from the Snow

The Healer

My Children Walking

Sleeping Beauties

Don’s Collectibles

Painting Bottles

Wood Street Riots

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

The Appalachian Trail

Cottontown

The Road to Raywick

Love for Sale or Not

The Dream Business

A Hole in the Head

Doing the Crab Walk for Fun

Full-Time Terrors

Insult to Injury

A Small Escape from Reality

New Skills for the Old

An Afterthought

The Wooden Desk

A Return to Spirituality

The Guy Who Used to Be My Brother but Became a Jerk

White Pines State Park

Selma

A Little More Walk in the Country

The Lovebirds

The Bully

The Texan

How I Met Your Mother (Not the TV Show)

Favorite Places

Favorite Events

Favorite People

Favorite Books and Authors

Favorite Movies

Things I Learned from My Dad

Things I Learned from My Navy Stepfather

Summing Up

Introduction

I’ve written many stories for myself and my sons over the last few years. Most reflected the good times, pleasant days, and easy living.

But there was also a dark side. It is a side of abuse, both mental and physical, that I experienced at the hands of my cold-hearted mother and abusive stepfathers. They were terrifying and uncertain times where my mother moved so many times that I lived out of a cardboard box for much of my life. The situation affected me so strongly that I did everything I could to keep my own children safe from that lifestyle.

I found it difficult to write some of these as it was painful to come to terms with the facts. Many times, I have told mini versions of them so as to render them harmless. Getting them out was, at least, satisfying. I am not proud of much told here; I caused a lot of people pain and inconvenience. I was, in truth, a juvenile delinquent, a troublemaker, and too clever for my own good. I was lucky to outgrow it, and the longer I spent time with my dad rather than with my mother, the tide slowly changed.

My dad was my mother’s first husband. She always claimed that he beat her. No one had better reason to do so, but it wasn’t true. It was pretty obvious why Dad married her, she was a very beautiful woman, but he had to talk to her sometime, and she definitely had nothing to say.

In my whole life, my dad only spanked me once, and only a crack across the legs, so I find it impossible to believe her. When my dad merely touched his belt buckle, I knew I was just about to cross the line.

Her second husband was Frank Curley Sol, a Merchant Marine during World War II. She married him for his allotment check, knowing that he wouldn’t be home much. He was torpedoed on the Murmansk run to Russia in the North Sea three times and was a little crazy from floating around waiting to be rescued or left to die a cold wet death. When he was home, he was brutal, beating both of us until he left. Curley’s mother was Mrs. Bemis, who loved me like her own child. She knew I liked mushrooms and would make a special bowl just for me.

Her third husband was Charles William C. W. Plybon, a career Navy man who ran the house like a ship. After the first year, we became adversaries more often than not. Once, he said to me, How would you like to take the garbage out? I was watching some TV show that had maybe a minute to go. I said, Just a minute. When I didn’t move fast enough, he ran over and swung at me. I saw him coming and dodged. He swung at me so hard that he threw his shoulder out of joint. I took off upstairs and got my samurai sword (the one Matt has now). As predicted, he came roaring up the stairs after me. I stood at the top of the stairs and told him, If you take one more step, I’ll split you down to the crotch. As he was almost a foot taller than I was and outweighed me by a hundred pounds, I felt justified. He backed off, and things were never the same after that. In a few weeks, I graduated from high school and joined the Air Force.

There was another time he hit me so hard that I bounced off the refrigerator, knocking it over into the hallway. Another time, I was apparently hanging around the house too much and I was told, right before I was thrown through the screen door, that they were tired of seeing my ugly face around the house. When I didn’t return for three days, they were all worried and said that they had missed me, etc., etc.

The rules were never certain or predictable; what was funny today was worth a beating tomorrow. The dinner episode was one of my mother’s classic moves. She yelled out, Come and get it or I’ll throw it in the garbage. We weren’t quick enough, so she grabbed all four corners of the tablecloth, scooped up the entire tabletop, and threw it out the door. No dinner that night for anyone.

When I was about five or six years old, I did something that made her mad, and she spanked me until her hand hurt. She then broke two ping-pong paddles on my rear. I still would not cry. Then she broke a plastic hairbrush on my butt. I still refused to cry. She ended up crying behind the chair, and I went out to play even though I could hardly stand up. That was the way it was until I left home at seventeen, which was one of the best days of my life.

My dad, on the other hand, was predictable and constant. I don’t believe he ever explained what the rules were. His main emphasis was that you should never bring shame on your name. He showed us by example, and we knew exactly what the rules were. Punishment was predictable and always the same, mostly a removal of privileges. There was no malice involved, but the worst thing you could do was disappoint him, which was like stabbing yourself in the heart.

There are some events in my life that I find hard to accept, even at this date. I have decided not to share them at this time.

I never had the time to raise my sons the way my dad raised me. It is the biggest regret of my life.

I dreamt, and in my dream were many things done and almost done, and I wept at the many ways not taken.

I apologize to my sons if I am boring them with these accounts, but if I had a special wish concerning this subject, I would have asked my father for more stories about himself as I haven’t near enough information about his early years. I still feel that gap since his death in 1971. All I can say is, read them if you would like or don’t read them as your heart desires.

Black Bears and Blueberries

A Story of Bravado and Dumbness

I had three good friends in high school: Duane Cox, with whom I shared a background of being a Navy Brat; Ken Thompson, who eventually became a Forest Ranger; and Eddie Harris, whose parents moved to Argentina at the end of the summer between our sophomore and junior year. When he returned in our senior year, he was just as skinny but twice as tall.

Our main pastime was hiking through the countryside, rain or shine, snow or unbearable heat. We stomped through private and public property, intent only on exploring, roundly ignoring property rights. Many times, we went armed with our .22 rifles. No one cared then.

One of our favorite spots was the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, surveyed by George Washington as a safe passage past the Great Falls on the Potomac River.

We all had been, at one time, Boy Scouts who had earned numerous merit badges, such as lanyard making, potholder construction, six-inch-long birch-bark canoes, and fire building with matches and lighter fluid. We could even set up an Army surplus pup tent in such a way that, if it rained, we would not be washed away. We could also cook and knew the value of dropping our food in the fire to get that special ashy taste.

Somehow, we had gotten the idea that we were capable of going into the Great Smokey Mountains or the Appalachians and living off the land. So we packed up our camping stuff and hitchhiked to the mountains. We came well prepared. A tent was too heavy, so we left it behind. Food supplies consisted of two cans of Spam each and a box of saline crackers; our other supplies included some fishing line and some hooks, large Marine surplus survival knives, and a kerosene lantern filled with fuel. We planned on staying for three weeks, augmenting our Spam and crackers with all the game we would catch by setting traps we had never learned to make. It was early summer, and we could imagine the abundance in the woods as we set off on our adventure by hitchhiking to the end of the first trail we saw that went up into the mountains.

After marching into the mountains by way of game trails, we settled on a little mountain lake with an island in the middle. The water was warm, so we made a small raft and ferried out stuff and clothes to the island. It was covered with deer poop. We promptly christened the island Deer Berry Island, swept most of the poop down to one end, and set up camp.

The first evening was spent eating our dinner of Spam and crackers by light of our kerosene lantern. We did manage to bring blankets and spent a warm night with a gentle breeze under the stars. The entire sky was filled with stars. Without the lights of civilization to drown them out, they shone in all their glory. We felt a great kinship with our pioneer ancestors and long-vanished Native Americans.

The next day was all business. We got out our fishing equipment and fished for lunch. The fish could have been vacationing on the moon for all the luck we had; not a nibble all day or the next. Our Spam supply was dwindling fast, and the kerosene lantern had leaked into some of our crackers. Kerosene crackers would be looking pretty good in a few days.

In a week we had run out of food, even the kerosene crackers were gone, so it was time to forage along the shores of the lake. Our stomachs were getting a bit rowdy and rumbled so much we were sure the noise would scare away everything that had legs.

I found some blackberries, and Duane found a good crop of blueberries. We were saved at least from immediate starvation. We knew that there were bears around, so we posted a lookout while the rest of us picked blueberries and blackberries. We were pretty intent on filling up our hats, so when Eddie sounded the alarm, we were slow to take notice.

At the top of the hill there sat a black bear. Black bears don’t get all that big, but it looked big enough for us. We were trespassing and eating its berries, it seemed. He ran down the hill straight at us, and when he had covered about half the distance, he rolled up in a ball and rolled the rest of the way.

We didn’t need a building to fall on us to take a hint. Hats flying, we ran into the lake. We knew that a bear could climb trees better, run faster, swim better, and bite better than us, and to make matters worse, he kept running into the lake and back out again. Bears could also swim better!

I never could swim, but that day I learned. Not only that, I learned to pee my pants at the same time. With my imagination, all I could see was mangled arms and legs flying in all directions.

After a half hour of this, I guess the bear figured he had made his point and left after tearing up our hats as a final lesson in bear manners. We changed our plans and had one guy picking and everyone else watching, and we stayed pretty close to the lake too.

It wasn’t long before we had exhausted our berry supply, so we tried fishing again, this time with better luck. We caught a half dozen sunfish equal to about two bites each, but it was better than no bites each!

We restarted our simmering fire that we kept burning only on embers as we had used up our matches. We could have started a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Have you ever tried it? Oh, for a frying pan, we didn’t bring any, naturally, as they were too heavy. But a green stick through the mouth was good enough! We each had two fish and ate them, tiny chewable bones and all. We set out our lines again using dry sticks as bobbers while we went foraging. A harlequin snake made the mistake of wandering into our camp. They are harmless but similar in color to a coral snake, as if it would have made a difference in our current state. It didn’t occur to us that coral snakes lived in Florida and not Virginia. All I could think of was the old poem about how to tell a coral snake from a harlequin snake. The banded colors of black, red, and yellow are the same except for the sequence.

Red and black, friend of Jack;

Red and yellow, kill a fellow.

The unfortunate friend was soon skinned, chopped up, toasted on our green sticks, and devoured. If you are interested, snake doesn’t taste like chicken; it tastes like snake!

At the end of the second week, we were pretty well pioneered out and decided to make our way back home. As the smallest of the bunch, I fared much better as I didn’t have to feed a huge bulk of body tissue. I had managed, over the years, to get myself up to 105 pounds, but I had now lost 6 pounds. When I graduated from high school, I only weighed 118, so it took two years for me to gain 19 pounds.

The walk back to a road seemed to take forever, and we ate what berries we found along the way, keeping a sharp eye out for our friendly bear or his pals. We were in no shape to run very far, but we would probably eat anything dumb enough to attack us.

It took us three days to get home as it was hard to get a ride looking like unkempt wild men. When we finally arrived in Rockville, the first place we stopped at was a place that sold hamburgers. We did bring money even though there was no place to spend it in the mountains. Duane ate his too fast; his stomach rebelled against such hardy stuff, and it came up just as fast as it went down.

That was the end of the most ill-planned expedition of all time by three of the cockiest and stupidest teenagers of the time. What we did learn was character and how to survive under extreme hardship, even of our own making. Despite the bear and near starvation, we came out on top, an example of blind determination. At worst it was a draw.

Next time, we would be more prepared if we ever decided to do it again. It was a resounding no by acclimation.

Can You Canoe a Canoe? Without Getting Wet?

I and my friends Duane Cox, Ken Thompson, and Ed Harris decided one Saturday to go canoeing on the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that ran alongside the Potomac River. Although most of the canal was in disrepair, some of it was still operational.

There was a place allowed to rent canoes for use on the canal. By the time we got there, most of the good canoes were taken so we had to do the best we could with a leaky one that came with a free bucket to bail out the water.

After waiting for Ed to get around to getting into the canoe, we finally got started with the sole available paddle. The paddle was so bad it was held together with what seemed like five or six pounds of duct tape.

About a mile up the canal, we met some girls we knew who had finished and were on their way home. We got in close to the shore to say hello. One, Judy Hudson, asked us if we would like their potato chips. Sure, we all blurted out at once.

Judy tossed the bag toward us, but it fell about two feet short, and naturally we all reached for it at the same time. Over we went into the canal, except for me. I was the quickest by far and ran up and over Duane’s back on to the shore high and dry! But not for long. In the middle of a big belly laugh, I was picked up and thrown in headfirst. They wouldn’t even help me out.

After about an hour of drying out in the sun, we pulled the waterlogged canoe onto shore, cleaned it out, paddled back, and ate our potato chips on the dock.

Dirty Words by the Yard

In addition to delivering five hundred papers before school, I had a part-time job at a hardware store after school. It only paid fifty cents an hour, but that was all that was to be had. If I quit, there would be twenty other boys just like me lining up for it. In the mid-1950s, fifty cents an hour was the standard rate, no matter what you did to earn it. My job was to assemble lawn mowers or anything else that needed to be put together for display. These days you have to put everything together yourself. During the winter, the loading dock got a bit cold. That was my area for assembling things.

During the day, I attended Richard Montgomery High School, where I was usually indulging some sort of mischief if not putting others up to it.

One day while jogging around the football field during Physical Education, I got an idea that would be the best/worst one of my criminal career.

That afternoon after school, I borrowed an old beat-up fertilizer spreader from the hardware store. It was an old model that never sold and did nothing but take up space in the back room.

After work, I took the spreader and a bag of fertilizer (I paid for the fertilizer) back to school and wrote f—— you on the football field through three inches of snow, returned the spreader, and went home.

When spring arrived and things got growing, all the words blossomed with the prettiest green anyone could have hoped for. It was a perfect contrast with the brownish bare surface that was usually there. The high school staff went ballistic. The F-word wasn’t part of everyone’s vocabulary as it is now, so the desired shock value was more than I believed possible.

Within hours, a local farmer was contacted, and the entire football field was plowed up, smoothed out, and seeded. Then came the big investigation. No one saw me put the fertilizer on, and I wasn’t around when things started growing, so they couldn’t pin a thing on me. As it turned out, I wasn’t even a suspect: better yet.

Hydrogen Whistle

I didn’t learn very much in high school, graduating eighty-fifth in a class of 128. You could say I was in the upper two-thirds of my class or the bottom third of my class. Either way, my standing wasn’t good. Few teachers and even most subjects managed to motivate me. To put it simply, I was bored out of my skull.

Dr. Arthur B. Fauley managed to overcome my disillusionment. Dr. Fauley once was a coal miner in Harlan County, Kentucky. He had six children and "owed his