I Become a Man

A humorous look at how a four year old boy is introduced to his heritage.

I Become a Man

A long, looong time ago, .. back when we were still a great country, .. it was the waning of what had been 1989. I was a new first grader, and so a real and full-fledged man. Well, not yet, but pretty close. Just one thing remained. Initiation. My initiation was instigated by my father and partially by my step-grandfather Lou. Long ago, before 1989, Lou had bought up, built on, and settled on a large stretch of West Pennsylvanian forested countryside outside of Brookville. At the edge of this land, beyond Lou's enormous and elegant, state-of-the-art, multi-story log cabin was a small patch of clearing upon which sat a small A-frame house slowly falling into ever increasing decrepitude year by year as time rolled by. It was here every year that a small group of the manliest, wiliest, unhealthiest, oldest, and possibly the most degenerate bunch of geezers ever assembled before and never assembled since would gather for the coming hunting season to hunt up my step grandfather's land. They called themselves the Ohio Boys, but I'm not sure that practically any of them actually came from Ohio. They were quite a mixture of ex-Hell's Angels, alcoholics, semi-reformed criminals, jacks of all trades, university graduates, doctors, lawyers, gamblers, cusses, snuff chewing hillbillies, and general all-around riffraff who somehow, whether legally or illegally, managed to get hunting tags for Western Pennsylvania regular firearms deer season. They had all just barely avoided prison, heart attacks, lung cancer treatments, court summonses, fraudulent elopements, funerals, doctors' appointments, and vengeful ex-wives long enough to make it back to the Ohio Boys' Camp for another year .. to spend a week or two in heavenly bliss: watching football, eating poorly, drinking heavily, spitting tobacco, scratching, cussing, telling lies, gambling at cards, and chain smoking everything smokeable, while hunting the Pennsylvania White-tailed Deer during the regular firearms season, ... and most importantly, this year at least, they had gathered together to also initiate me into a real man.

I'm not sure to this day how my Dad both: 1. managed to become involved with this group of rascals and 2. How he had managed to hoodwink my mother in letting him bring me to enjoy the company of this group of rascals, but .. it had come to pass. I remember being smuggled by my Dad and step-grandfather Lou to the A-frame one late afternoon before Thanksgiving. The top floor of the A-frame was rather uninteresting as it was mostly devoted to sleeping space. Early 70's era dark red carpeting covered the top floor, now greatly faded to an almost deep and dark pink, and the doorways to all the bedrooms or rooms that had been turned into such, is all I remember of this floor, along with the steep inclined ceiling that made up the roof of the A-frame. The steps led down to a bare brick walled basement space with a rusty old kitchen, filthy and cobwebbed covered toilet in a stall, and next to that was a television manufactured back in the late 50's with an antenna perpetually tuned to whatever college football game happened to be in reception .. and nothing else. Every time a commercial came on, static took over and then when the game resumed, a wave of static would descend down across the screen to reveal the snap of the second play. You always missed the first down after a commercial of static. I remember being mortally afraid of the toilet, that it would crumble to dust underneath me or that a flood of man-eating spiders would swarm up from the cobwebs around it and consume me. Neither ever happened.

One of the gang, a big guy, who smoked a pipe was the main member I recall most vividly. There were others around, but of them, he seemed the most interested in me and interacted with me the most while the others just watched, listened, and laughed, like adults who have very little experience with children often did. Pipe Guy also seemed to be one of the cooks. First I got to sit on a high stool for the first part of my initiation. I wasn't sitting in a "high seat" for little kids or relegated to a little kids chair as would have been common at that time. I sat on a bar stool at the table with the rest of them. They snapped open cans of beer and poured them into tall glass mugs with handles. A can of 7 Up was poured into my glass beer mug. It was heavy, but I managed to prove I was a real man like them and lift it up to my face once for a sip. We sat and ate Planter's cocktail peanuts from the can and my Dad and I watched them gamble at cards while they dissed their ex-wives and swapped yarns about "jobs" they had done and bragged about all that they would kill the next few days. Planter's peanuts proved to be an acquired taste .. that I acquired right then and there.

Then they served me West Pennsylvania Chicken noodle soup, which is canned chicken noodle soup with ketchup poured into it. Delicious, and also the most memorable part of the meal. Ketchup, I figured out, was what made little kid chicken noodle soup into a man's meal. I have never eaten chicken noodle soup with ketchup in it since that day, but that's not important, nor does it indicate any thoughts I may or may not have harbored about it since then either. After the soup course, these extremely unhealthy men would tuck into large plates of ribeye and T-bone steaks with baked potatoes loaded with gobs of salted butter and sour cream. I'm not too sure if I partook of all the same repast as they, but might have been given some chop steak and my potato was probably cut up, or some such. There was also heavily dressed salad of course. Provided no one had a heart attack afterward the group sort of broke up. Some went upstairs to clean their guns, some gathered around the television to watch static laden football in black and white with occasional color and to eat the rest of the open peanuts and open beer, and some stayed at the table to smoke and keep playing cards and drink more open beer. I was sort of free to wander around and observe some of each attraction of these festivities, but I was too afraid to go upstairs by myself. Eventually I returned to the table and listened to "Pipe Guy" laugh and talk with my step-grandfather and father. Finally, late at night, we piled in to Lou's big touring van to drive back to the log cabin. To this day I can remember being in the very middle of the far back seat of Lou's van slowly crawling up the gravel road, and looking past his turned face through the windshield. It was dark, very dark, darker than I can ever remember. The light of the headlights hits the heavy snow falling to softly patter on the windshield and the wipers audibly scrape across the windshield to wipe them away. It is very quiet, only the low mutter of conversation from the captain's chairs at the front of the van. I remember being sleepy but happy. I'm now a full-fledged man, accepted into manhood by the manliest bunch of done-it-all seen-it-all know-it-all men I'd ever know.

A few days later, I would return to the Ohio Boys Camp in the early afternoon light after a disdained kiddie kid lunch fed to me by my mother and grandmother. They would never understand that I was real man now. The snow was melting off the roof into a steady dripping and the covered trees under what had turned out to be a gradually brightening day after a night and early morning of windy snow. Around the back of the A-frame, hanging in a row from the back porch rafters from meat hooks, were the freshly slain and field dressed deer of the opening day. I would see this sight in other years until I was old and big enough to go myself. Sometimes then, over the years, even my Dad would have a deer of his own hanging from those rafters. Sadly, in the years that followed, most of the Ohio Boys would die off by the time I was ten or eleven. The years took their toll, and their lives of smoking, drinking, carousing, robbing banks and engaging in shoot outs or whatever they must have been doing would take their full toll and they would pass away, one by one. But the honor of the initiation they gave me into the ranks as a fellow man, a real man, a man's man, would never be forgotten.