JAMES SECRETS

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Flack
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JAMES SECRETS

Post by Flack »

I was ten-years-old the day I thought the world was about to end.

The creek behind my house was ten-foot deep and twenty-foot across. It wasn't man made with steep, concrete walls, but rather a natural run off, filled with weeds and mud and snakes and crawdads and crushed beer cans. The creek started just west of my backyard underneath The Bridge, and supposedly ran three miles east all the way down to the lake, although none of us ever made it that far.

We tried to find out, one winter. The standing water in the creek had frozen, making it easier to navigate. Four of us wrapped ourselves in layers of flannel and met down in the creek. We were half a mile away from my house and playing "kick the can" on the ice when, thinned by the afternoon sun, cracked as loud as thunder. The water at that part of the creek was two or three feet deep and freezing cold. Within seconds, we were waist-deep in it. We scrambled out quickly, but the cold water had already done its job, filling every crevice we had. Back on our feet we shuffled as quickly as we could on the ice back home. My thighs froze and burned at the same time. My toes were so numb I was afraid I had lost them.

By the time I got home I had cried so much my face was covered in frozen tears and snot. My mother helped me out of my wet clothes, wrapped me in a warm blanket, and placed me in front of the fireplace before beating me.

The coldest winter I can remember was followed by the hottest summer -- the kind where you slept with the windows open, a box fan on and your shirt off. It was the kind of heat that sent folks out to check on their elderly neighbors, and kids in search of water hoses and shade.

That August, Judy (a high school friend my mother hadn't seen in years) came to visit and brought her son, James. It doesn't take long for kids to bond over nothing, and while our moms began to reminisce over glasses of sun tea, James and I bolted for the creek.

We had already slid down Red Nose Hill and were almost to The Bridge when James looked back over his shoulder and pointed up at the sky, which had turned blood red. The sun, previously big and yellow, was gone. Whatever was floating in the air had blocked it out.

"Probably a nuke," said James, rubbing his smooth chin. "We're already dead."

By the age of ten I knew all about nuclear weapons. It was the 1980s, after all. All kids knew about the Cold War and Reagan and Gorbachev. We didn't understand everything they said on the news, but we heard enough each night to wonder if if tomorrow would be "the day."

"My dad says if there's a nuclear war, the air force base is a primary target and we'll be vaporized instantly," I said. For some reason, being vaporized immediately felt better than suffering from radiation sickness for a few weeks before dying.

"Not instantly," James countered. "They wouldn't hit Oklahoma with a huge bomb. They'd use something smaller, just big enough to destroy the planes and cause a big radiation cloud to rain down on the midwest."

"I wonder what that would look like," I said.

Again, James pointed up to the sky.

The two of us made our way down under the bridge and sat with our knees up against our chests, as if that would protect us. I wondered how long it would take to die from radiation poisoning. Would we suffer in pain for weeks, or would it be quick? Would it only affect people like me and James who were outside at the time, or would the deadly dust settle inside homes and make everybody sick?

"I don't wanna die," I said, and began to cry.

James took a deep breath and stared into the muddy water. "I'm ready."

I wasn't. I didn't want to die -- not then and not there, under some rickety old bridge next to a kid I had just met. If I was going to die from radiation poisoning I decided wanted to do it at home, next to my parents and my dog and my toys.

When we emerged from underneath The Bridge the air was already starting to clear. The sky hadn't been filled with nuclear fallout but rather red dirt, blown up by a freakishly large dirt devil. The tail wind that followed had already begun to blow the dust away. The shade on the ground was gone and the sun reappeared. We had survived the attack.

I ran all the way home with James in tow, bursting through the front door and excitedly telling my mom what we had just experienced. She nodded calmly, as mothers do, before returning to her conversation with Judy. James and I, safe from the swirling red death, decided to stay inside and play in my room. No sense in risking our lives twice in one day.

in 1983 my room looked like a cross between a toy store and an electronics department, with walls covered in movie posters. The family Atari 2600 had been moved to my room for the summer and sat connected to a small black and white television. As I played Video Pinball, James roamed around my room, examining things that piqued his interest. After a few minutes of window shopping he picked up my small cassette recorder, hit record, and began to whisper into its silver microphone. His voice was so faint that I could barely tell he was talking, and couldn't make out any of the words.

"What are you recording?"

"Secrets," he said.

I continued to play Atari while James sat on the other side of the room, whispering secrets into my cassette recorder. Only in the silence between the beeps and bloops of electronic pinball bumpers could I hear his whispers. When he reached the end of the tape, the recorder stopped with a definitive click. As though the noise were a signal, my bedroom door opened and Judy stuck her head in.

"Time to go, James."

Judy's station wagon hadn't even left our driveway before I had rewound that tape. With the volume knob turned all the way up and my sweaty ear pressed hard against the speaker, I tried to discover James' secrets. His voice had been so quiet that all the built-in microphone had picked up were this hisses and pops of his whispers, his words drowned out by the background bonks of Atari pinball.

A few weeks later on the first day of school, my mom told me James had killed himself. If she told me how, I don't remember.

As a kid blank cassette tapes were gold, handed out as birthday gifts and rewards for good grades. Mine got recycled frequently with the latest radio hits and impromptu comedy skits, but that tape, James's tape, got pulled out of rotation. Using a blue ink pen I carefully printed "JAMES SECRETS" on the cassette's orange label and stuck it in a shoe box full of tapes.

Last week, more than 30 years later, I found it.

With years of technology on my side, I set out to finally learn James's secrets. The cassette, which had spent the past several decades in a cardboard box moving between attics and garages, has not aged well. A foreground hiss is now by far the loudest noise on the tape, with the background sounds of Atari a distant second and the buried whispers of a troubled boy barely perceivable.

Whatever secrets James left on that cassette, he took with him.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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Jizaboz
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Post by Jizaboz »

Wow, wild story. Following creeks to see where they lead was a fun activity for me too as a kid growing up in the mountains. Most of them were so small we would just trot through them in "creek shoes" and get nervous every time we spotted a snake hole.

Perhaps if you rip that cassette to a high-grade .wav file you or I could run it through Audacity and filter out some of the noise.

Kregor

Post by Kregor »

What kind of scores did you put up in Video Pinball?

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Flack
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Post by Flack »

I challenged James to many a rematch. Always a no show.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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AArdvark
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Post by AArdvark »

That's freaky. I wish I'd saved more of my youthful stuff from teh tape recording days. Nothing mind bending like Jame's whispering but just stuff that was embarrassing then but would be funny now.


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MAGNETIC PAST
AARDVARK

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

This was a great read. Good work, Flack.
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!

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pinback
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Post by pinback »

He thought it was a nuclear attack, but nobody had seen or heard a bomb? Was he some kind of moron? ROBB, get him on the show immediately! Hmm?

Ah.
I don't have to say anything. I'm a doctor, too.

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Well done.

I know that you didn't want The Don Rogers Show to be a farce-filled radio show, but if we were doing it every week then one episode would have to be nothing but you talking over the tape that Flack recovered.
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!

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