The First One Is Free

Frankly, life as a Hoosier isn’t all that exciting; especially when residing in a little burg like Terre Haute, Indiana.  Well, it’s not exactly a burg anymore, with a total of maybe three shopping malls, two of which don’t even have a second floor.  With few buildings over four stories high in its ridiculously small downtown area, it will never be mistaken for the New York City skyline. According to the signs along I-70 it’s “The cross roads of America”, but us locals just call it Terrible Hut.

I have lived here in T.H. all my life, and I have no idea why.  I could go up to Indy I suppose, Indianapolis for you outsiders, that’s where all the good jobs are supposed to be.  But who wants to live in a crumpling big city that is really confused?  I mean, it’s big enough to be home to the NFL’s Colts and the NBA’s Pacers, but it’s really just another Hoosier hick town – just bigger.

I actually left old Terrible Hut one time on a dare from Billy Hickman, my best friend since second grade.  We had just graduated high school and he came up with a great idea. “Why don’t we join the Navy,” Billy said.  “We can see the world!”  I could tell Billy had been watching too many television commercials.

But since neither of us had ever actually seen an ocean up close and personal, we decided that maybe it would be nice to live somewhere – anywhere – but here.  So off we went to navy basic training up in Michigan.  Our first site of a large body of water (Lake Michigan) was completely overwhelming – almost a religious experience - that is until they dropped us out in the middle of the darn thing and said, “Swim for shore.”

It turns out Billy and me were not made for water.  They hauled out sorry butts out of the lake just as we were about to go down for the count.  We thought that they would leave us stateside after that experience, but no such luck.  We both wound up on the USS Theodore Roosevelt moving from one side of the world to the other, Billy, a machinist mate and me a corpsman.  A constant supply of Phenergan was all that saved us from puking up the remainder of our intestines. Fortunately, I had the key to that medicine cabinet.

Some old Navy seadogs told us we would get our “sea legs” eventually and we wouldn’t need the sea-sick medicine.  They lied.  We were sick from the time we boarded that ship until the day we docked back home at Norfolk.

We had seen the world, through motion-sick eyes, and decided from now on we would fly to those exotic locations, stay a week or so, and then head back home.  Wherever home would turn out to be.

Imagine our surprise when home turned out to be back in T.H.  The rest of the world just didn’t know what to do with us hillbilly Hoosiers, so we came back to the only place we really knew.  Just like my Granddad Dutch said we would.  How did the old guy know all that stuff?

Early in my life I thought I would grow up and marry Ellie Stomperheim, my third grade sweetheart, but she kicked the crap out of me in tenth grade when I told her I wasn’t going to take her to the sophomore prom because I was going to go fishing with Granddad Dutch. “You’re an absolute idiot,” she said as she left me lying face down on the gymnasium floor after a swift and really wicked roundhouse kick to my head.  I was a really bruised idiot at that.

She obviously did not understand the value of good bass fishing, and at that particular moment I was reconsidering its value as well.  But Granddad Dutch had always told me that when bass fishing gets in your blood, there’s nothing that can take its place.  Maybe that’s why he and Grandma Edna always slept in separate bedrooms.  Of course, the lingering odor of fish may have had something to do with it as well.

I hoped we were over the sophomore incident by our senior year when I asked Ellie to the senior prom. And I think I would have had a real chance with her if I hadn’t mentioned that Mary Jane Ashton had already turned me down.  That’s when she did a complete wheel-house karate kick and dropped me like a big loaf of bread.  I was pretty groggy, and I thought I might be dreaming when I heard, “You’re still an idiot, Johnny,” as she stomped off and left me on the same gymnasium floor where we had our first lover’s quarrel. I went bass fishing in my rented tuxedo, which to my surprise, never really caught on with the younger anglers. Go figure.

Billy and me left the Navy as soon as our hitch was up and briefly thought about relocating to Arizona where there was little chance of sea-sickness.  But then I got a call from Grandma Edna, Grams to me, and she said she was feeling a bit on the south side of a north-bound train – so I grabbed Billy and we headed for T.H.  I had already lost granddad and could not imagine the guilt I would feel if something happened to Grams with me two-thousand miles away enjoying the famous southwest picturesque climate. Besides, there was no real bass fishing in Arizona.