So if you were here last week you know that I’m trying something new with the site. Previously, in the last several incarnations, it was a way to talk about the law. Sometimes we chose a fun topic like the enforceability of a BDSM contract and why you may still want one even if they weren’t. Other times it was boring shit for lawyers like what system to use to bill the Almighty Point Two that every large law firm worships. I always tried to make it amusing.
Now, though, we’re branching out into some other shit. So today, I want to start talking about community. More specifically, I want to talk about how a miserable fuck like me – and maybe you, who knows, we’re all allowed to be miserable fucks in this the year of our lord twenty twenty six – needed to find community and managed to do so by amusingly being a miserable fuck until I wasn’t. Do I mean I stopped being a miserable fuck or merely an amusing one? Well that, my little miserable-fucks-in-training, is really for you to decide.
I’m the Boozy Badger, and this is how I learned to stop worrying and love the bum (that is me).
I’m the bum in this scenario.
First, forgive me for making this sound like some strange autobiography. Remember how I said I was going to be attempting a few new things with this website? Well, this is one of those things – kind of a stream of consciousness sort of deal. And to do it, I’d like to talk about communities in general. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the types of communities I have found over my life in some effort to discuss, and to understand a bit better myself, how I ended up in the places I’m at these days. Not that these places are bad by any stretch of my limited imagination. But sometimes it’s probably healthy to sit down and understand how you got to where you’re at and look back at where you’ve been.
So to do that, let’s talk about some of the communities I have found myself in, by choice and default. We’ll go in a chronological order – it’s easier that way most of the time for me, and it’ll make it feel like I’m telling a story.
FAMILY: THE FIRST COMMUNITY
I was raised in a southern family just a generation removed from poor white trash, which is to say that I was raised in a family that was the real “circle the wagons, it’s us against the world” type. My grandparents – after the Depression Diaspora from the muddy hollers to the cities – had used the Second World War as a springboard to new lives, and in doing so turned families of roustabouts, layabouts, river town thugs, laborers, miners, junkyard owners, and dirt floor poor itinerant farmers into stanchions on the American lower middle class by the time my folks were born. Which, in the grand scheme of broke-ass country folk everywhere, meant that the first community you always relied on for anything was family.
Family, by the way, didn’t mean those folks who lived in the house with you plus an additional select few direct blood relations. It meant a wide-flung net of uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, third cousins and relations that would stretch across not just a neighborhood but in some cases entire counties. It also didn’t simply mean blood – I can’t count the number of uncles and aunts I had that were actually “Uncles” and “Aunts.” Trusted family friends my parents had grown up with or around and who were, in all but the strictly sanguineous sense, members of my family. That did not count the network of neighbors and parents of my own friends I would encounter growing up who adopted a principle of “Every kid is my kid” on the general understanding other parents would do the same.
In short, I grew up supported, loved, and with no lack of community around me that I could be a part of. That was important, because it shaped how I addressed and handled things and, in no small part, contributed to the fact that I was (and maybe still am behind a gruffer exterior) a sensitive kid who spent a lot of my fledgling emotional labor trying to understand the complexities of the older kids and adults around me. I was never spoken down to by the myriad of folks that formed our extended family in any way that was noticeable, which is not to say they treated me like an adult but rather that they treated me like what I was: an intelligent (modesty be damned), curious kid who had a desire to know what was happening in the world around him and a drive to try and understand why people do the things they do and if I could help in some way.
There’s a story that comes to mind that may be a good example of what I’m talking about. Uncle Larry was a mailman. He was a friend of my father’s and had been around since the time I was born with his wife and his own older kid. He wasn’t blood in any manner, but we referred to him as Uncle because he was, for all intents and purposes, an uncle. He was there for every birthday, every celebration, on Christmas evening for a group dinner and for each and every Kentucky Derby party. He knew bad magic tricks (though none compared to Uncle Tommy’s trick of lighting a cigarette and smoking it through the socket of the eye he lost in Vietnam, one that he had shown to me first in the smoking pit at a local mall on the same day he let a little me drive his painter’s van through an alley. I would like to apologize belatedly to the neighbors’ trash cans). He sang Elvis and played the guitar – both poorly but well enough to enamor a young Boozy sitting in a lawn chair around a campfire on a group camping trip.
Uncle Larry had, at one point in my childhood when we lived in a small house not far from my grandmother’s, bought me a Fisher Price Little People farm playset. I recall it had the red barn and a couple of animals, but most importantly it had the Cowboy. The Cowboy was a Little People figure (if you aren’t familiar with what these looked like in the 1980’s they were essentially pegs with a little ball on top and a crude smiley face painted on them). The Cowboy was my favorite of all the figures with his blue peg body, his little red bandana, and a jaunty yellow Stetson on top of his perfectly round noggin. Not exactly an action figure, but I certainly had more than a few imaginary adventures with the Cowboy working him around that crude plastic farm and, eventually, the little Fisher Price Little People western town playset (he was, of course, the sheriff of the town. I believe the sheep from the farm was a train robber. The furry shit started early in retrospect).
The point is that I absolutely adored the Cowboy. He was my go-to toy and was never far from my sight. When I slept he was always on the nightstand beside the little night light left out for me in the room I shared with my brother, protecting me as I slept. I don’t have a lot of very strong memories from being younger than 6 years old, but I can say that the vast majority of the ones I do have from that time in my life feature the Cowboy in some way, either as a major player or as a background character.
One weekend Uncle Larry came over to visit and he was pretty visibly upset as he sat at the kitchen table with Mom and Dad talking about something. His wife, who had never had the title of “Aunt” with us kids, had told him something. I didn’t really grasp what that “something” was, but I knew he wasn’t happy about it and was, in fact, damn near crying. Mom and Dad assured us Uncle Larry would be fine, and Uncle Larry himself even managed to tell us the same thing, but even as a kid you could recognize someone that was upset about something probably wasn’t going to be fine. This is the point where, if I was gonna be cutesy, I’d be like “Oh maybe he lost his favorite toy” or some shit but that would just be pandering to the whole “I was a kid! I didn’t know what was happening in the big, scary grown up world!” deal and that’s not what this was. It was just that someone I cared about and who cared about me was upset, someone he cared about was the cause for it, and I didn’t know what it was really about. Otherwise he assured me he would be fine even though it was pretty obvious that he wouldn’t be.
(We all know by now that it was a divorce, right? Like I don’t have to explicitly say that shit? He was getting divorced. Years later I’d learn that his wife had come out to him – she was a lesbian, she couldn’t live a lie anymore, and she told him she wanted a divorce. I’d love to say that over time they became fast friends or some shit, but I don’t think they ever really did because being human means being messy at times and Hollywood endings happen primarily in Hollywood, not in a working class neighborhood in Shively, Kentucky. They had a kid together, though, and they co-parented well once things settled down and while I don’t think they ever really became friends they didn’t actively dislike each other and invited each other and their respective partners to things so I guess that’s about as much as you can ask for out here in the real world.)
Uncle Larry started coming over more, always without his wife but sometimes with his daughter. He’d hang out, talking with Dad and Mom, playing with us kids, getting a little dose of normalcy in a life that was turned upside down. I could tell that he was sad, because “sad” is a really easy emotion for a young kid to pick up on and understand, and that when he was hanging around our place he was a little less sad. I could tell his daughter was sad, but when she was playing with my sister and my cousins and the other kids in the familialesque friend group she was less sad. So of course, as a kid, you do what you can to make someone less sad, right?
My way of accomplishing that came when Uncle Larry, one weekend, came over and picked Dad, me, and my brother up early. He was moving somewhere new, and he needed Dad’s help moving the stuff and asked if we would come along as well. So we rode with them as they went to his house and picked up a few things – boxes of clothes, a small kitchen table and chairs from the garage, a twin bed out of a shed around back, and the smallest TV in the place – and drove them to a run down, second floor apartment not too far away from where we lived at the time. I remember looking around this sort of dingy one bedroom place and thinking “Oh, this is going to make him sadder.” I was astute in that sort of thing as a kid, though I think just about anyone of any age would have realized that a shoebox of that size with carpet that particular shade of “we have a warehouse full of this shit” institutional brown was not really conducive to good mental health.
So when we went back to our house for Dad and Uncle Larry to grab the worn out couch from our basement for him to use in the Shoebox of Sadness I ran up to my bedroom. Then it was back in the truck and off again to drop the couch off. A few other visits were made that day, mostly to pick up Mom and my sister and everyone off to a thrift shop to get essentials like secondhand lamps and used plates and cups, and the day ended back at his new home at that tiny table eating carryout pizza with my parents chatting with Uncle Larry while my brother, sister, and I watched original Star Trek on one of the local stations his tiny TV tuned in. As we were leaving Larry gave us all hugs, and that’s when I handed him the Cowboy.
“So you aren’t lonely,” I told him.
That was predictable, right? I spent all the time talking about the Cowboy and the Fisher Price toy and I set that whole thing up, right? Disney bullshit! Except I assure you, all of that stuff is true. Some of it may be a little mis-remembered like was it Pizza Hut? Was it a brown carpet? Did we really spend a whole day furnishing his apartment or in my memory have I combined several visits into one? I dunno, that’s the way I remember it. But the bones are true – a family friend close enough to be considered an uncle was distraught about his divorce and came to us for support, my parents helped him by listening and helping him move, and a very young Boozy gave him his favorite Fisher Price Little People figure to be his friend because young Boozy thought the apartment looked so damn lonely and Uncle Larry was obviously so damn sad and it was the smallest Big Gesture he could think of to make sure he wasn’t lonely and sad.
Meaningless, really, just a little kid doing what little kids do and thinking they can solve big problems with small things.
Years later I graduated high school and of course Uncle Larry came to my graduation party. In the kitchen of my childhood home – different than the little house in the working class neighborhood, larger, nicer as my parents improved their positions over the years – he handed me an envelope and a gift wrapped box and hugged me and told me how proud he was of me. The envelope, he said, was mine to open right then but the box had to wait until the first day of college when I moved into my dorm.
So it did. My parents took me to college on my first day and helped me set up my little dorm room. A tiny room with one window looking out at the wall of another building and institutional blue “we have a warehouse full of this shit” carpet. A small TV, and a tiny desk with a secondhand lamp we picked up on the way in. We had all gone out for pizza at a restaurant in town that the college’s former basketball coach had an ownership interest in. Then they dropped me off and we said our tearful goodbyes (they were tearful, I was ready to be on my own) and I went into that small room and turned on the TV and started unpacking my clothes to find the small box, still wrapped.
To be honest I find it very unlikely I remembered that box. I find it much more likely my mother had remembered it – or more accurately secreted away after the graduation party – to make sure it was in my clothes. Either way, though, after I finished putting things away I sat down and opened it to find two items: a folded note and a Fisher Price Little People cowboy with a jaunty yellow Stetson and a red bandana, worn with age and faded from time in a shitty apartment window. It wasn’t the first time I had seen it since we moved Uncle Larry into his first post-divorce home, it had always sat in the window of that apartment every time we visited, but it was the first time I had thought about the Cowboy in a long, long time.
The note was simple:
He did a great job keeping me company, so now he can keep you company.
Love you,
Uncle Larry
Family was the first community I found, and I guess it is the default community for many of us. My parents were the ones to cultivate the relationship with my “Aunts” and “Uncles” when I was a child, and the ones who formed the community of family members that met the description in every meaning of the word except blood relation. Like any community a family can be bad, or it can be good. It can be a strange mixture of both. But I don’t think there’s any denying that it is, for better or worse, the community that shapes so much of who we are at the outset and determines to no small extent the communities we will find ourselves in throughout life and how we interact with the same.
I was just lucky to be born into a cultivated community of good people. I would also spend the majority of my life to date trying to seek out communities like that. As we’ll get into next time, sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, and sometimes it’s complicated.
Until the next time, I’ll just be sitting here being
-Boozy
