The Days of Babylon
An Autobiography By A Former Stoner
Timothy L. Nix, Author
Published by Timothy L. Nix at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Timothy L. Nix
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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My Dedications
I would like to give thanks to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit for returning the mental capacity to remember the events in my life.
I would like to thank my wife, Bambi, for sticking by my side through the good times and bad times.
I would like to thank my brother and sister-in-law for taking me in during what were some of the darkest times of my life.
And I would like to thank all the people that I have come in contact with during my life, both good and bad.
Contents
Chapter 1: Days of Innocence
Chapter 2: Days of Trouble
Chapter 3: Days of Confusion
Chapter 4: Days of Enlightenment
Chapter 5: Days of Responsibility
Chapter 6: Days of Marital Bliss
Chapter 7: Days of Discovery
Chapter 8: Days of God's Blessings
Chapter 1: Days of Innocence
I was born on December 23rd in 1955, in Birmingham Alabama. I was born Timothy Hunter to Winston and Sherry Hunter. I have a brother named Blane and a sister named Claire. At that time we lived in a small community called Rockdale. My dad ran moonshine with his friend Ernest and his uncle, Milton Blake, for years. My earliest memories were of our dog named Butch. He was part German Shepherd and part husky, One day my brother came outside and jumped up and down on top of a brush pile and a rabbit ran out. Our dog, Butch, gave chase, and every day after that when we let Butch out in the morning, then he would go straight to the top of the brush pile and jump up and down until the rabbit ran out and he would chase it. I guess one day he caught it, because he stopped jumping up and down on the brush pile not long after that. It is said that he would wait until I got to the edge of the yard and push me down with his nose to prevent me from going any further. The other memory I have at that time was sleeping with my mom and dad. We did not have air conditioning back in those days, so we would sleep with the windows open and you could hear the sounds of the great outdoors. You could hear the sounds of the tree frogs, crickets, cicadas, and katydids. One night I woke up and looked over my mom’s and dad’s headboard and seeing the woods on fire. I woke up my mom and dad. Then me and my dad and brother went out to the fire and I watched him and my brother put the fire out. It wasn't a very big fire.
The earliest memory of school was kindergarten, when I was playing with the kids watching romper room on TV (TV was black and white back then) and playing with my favorite toy, which was a train made out of boxes. I loved naptime, when we would get a carton of milk and cookies before we took a nap on these big blue plastic mats. I remember the only song I knew back then was a something like “and little lambs eat ivy.” That was my earliest recollections of life.
Even though my dad was born in 1928 before the Depression and after Prohibition, he still made and ran moonshine as long as he could evade the police. One time they heard that the revenue agents were going to hunt them down and they floated the still across the river to avoid getting caught. They said that they could see people with flashlights in the woods searching for their whiskey still. My grandpa and grandma, my mom's parents, lived about 3 miles away from us in a place called Bessemer. My grandpa was a house painter. My grandma was a homemaker and did house work. My mom had four brothers and one sister. It seemed like my whole family was racially prejudiced with the exception of my mom. Everybody in my mom's family called black people “niggers.” Whenever I would go to town with my grandpa and grandma, they would say, “Lock your door because we’re going through nigger quarters,” which were about a mile away at that and time. They used to tell stories about my dad beating black people with switches for not calling him Mr. Hunter.
Like I said before, my dad used to make and run moonshine. One time my dad was running moonshine and the cops caught him! They impounded his car full of whiskey, his shotgun and our family dog. Yes, they impounded our dog! And put Dad in jail. When he got caught, the judge gave him a choice to either leave town or go to jail for an extended time. So, he decided that we would move to Chicago, and when we moved, we left our newly liberated from jail dog, Butch, with some relatives. Chicago was about a 14 hour drive at that time, but I'm sure that my dad drove in 11 hours on that trip. I saw the man pee in a bottle to avoid stopping on that particular road trip. We moved across the street and down the alley from an amusement park named Riverview. Sometimes my brother Blane and his friends would take me to the amusement park. I remember one time when he took me, he bought a shrunken head and it looked so real. A cool attraction that my brother really liked was a statue of a gunslinger who would draw his gun, and if you were faster on the draw, you won. I remember one time were getting ready to leave the amusement park and my brother won me a goldfish on the midway by throwing a ping-pong ball into the gold fish bowl. They took the gold fish and put it in a plastic bag, but when I got home, it didn't last too long because I was too young to take care of it. It ended up going down the toilet, probably because I was too young to remember to feed it.
The midway was cool - that's where all the games were and all the sideshow freaks. There was a lady behind a cage and when you would look at her, she would turn into a gorilla. She would break out of the cage and run into the audience, and of course, everybody would clear out of the tent. They also had the pincushion man and the sword swallower and the bearded lady, and what looked like a baby in a jar of water with webbed hands and feet. Supposedly it was a frogman. My favorite ride at the amusement park was a parachute ride. It would take you way up in the air, and when it reached the top, it would pause a moment and then drop. I also like the bullet, a ride was two bullet shaped compartments that would spin on a shaft that also turned on its axis at the same time. And how could we forget The Round Up, a big round ride that you would walk into and lay against the wall. It would start spinning until the bottom dropped out, leaving you hanging on the wall. And last but not least was the house of mirrors. I'm sure that everybody has been in one of those at some time in their life.
I first learned to ride a bike when I was only six or seven years old. It was a full-size girls bike, and I would have to get up on the second step on our steps to get on the bicycle, And if I fell, I would have to go all way back to the steps before I could get on the bike again.
My sister Claire would have her girlfriends over at our house and they treated me like a little doll. They gave me hugs and kisses, and I just ate it up.
Across the alley from the house we lived in was Henry’s Hamburgers. They sold hamburgers for 25 cents apiece. But the hamburgers I really liked were White Castle. They were little hamburgers and sold for about 12 cents apiece. Some people might know them as Krystals in the south, but up north they are called White Castle because the building is in the shape of a castle. At night in the yard where we lived, we could hear the music from the amusement park and could smell a conglomeration of hamburgers, popcorn, and cotton candy. It wasn't long until we moved from that house. We never stayed in one place for a long period of time. Eventually they turned the amusement park into an industrial park.
We moved up the street a little ways, probably about a mile, to an apartment building. My mom’s brother lived with us. He had been married four or five times and was recently divorced again. One time him and his friend took me to the Shriner’s Circus. My uncle and his friend must have been Shriner's because I remember there were these red hats with tassels. It was the first and last time I ever went to a circus.
I remember my Grandpa John Hunter and Grandma Marlene Hunter used to live in a building across the street from the Biograph move theater, where John Dillinger was shot and killed. My dad had six brothers and three sisters. My Grandpa drunk whiskey and my Grandma dipped Top Snuff, a type of tobacco. When my Grandpa was younger, and my dad and uncles were just children, some of his brothers worked in the coal mines along with my Grandpa and his brother-in-law. They told me stories about how my dad and his brother and sisters had to go get water from the well, and chop and gather firewood. The coal mines were in a place called Genry’s Gap, a coal mining camp in Alabama in what now an upscale part of Birmingham known as Hoover. And they couldn't just go out to the store and buy food. Instead, they had to have tickets, because the coal mining company made them buy things from the company stores. It was the same way with the gasoline. Then on payday, the company would take the money from the tickets and subtract it from their paychecks. That way, most the time there was more money going out than there was coming in, which in turn would keep people in debt to the mines and stop them from picking up stakes and getting jobs elsewhere. Well, that was then and this is now.
Back to the streets of Chicago, and I remember spending the night at my Grandpa and Grandma's apartment and trying to go to sleep. Outside of their window was a big red neon sign that would flash off and on every so often, keeping me awake at night. There was another movie theater down the street named the Parthenon. That is where me and my cousins, Raymond, Abraham Junior, and Larry would go to see movies on Saturday. Sometimes they would have Monster Marathons on Saturday and show about five or six movies in one day. I remember that was the first time I saw The Mummy with Boris Karloff. It was in black and white, which made is seem creepier. There was also Frankenstein and The Wolf Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Fly. But the first movie I ever remember seeing was with my brother and sister. It was called Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte. Sometimes me and my cousins would go in the alley behind a restaurant, and I had a little condiment containers that had lids and we would catch flies in them. Sometimes we would play hide and go seek in the building. There was a lady that lived in the house right off the alley, and in her backyard was a little pond. She had goldfish in that pond, and we would try to catch those goldfish. She would come out and yell at us and shake her fist at us as we ran down the alley. Other times when apples were in season, we would steal apples from her apple tree. I remember another thing from about that time. We would go to the grocery store down the block and they had bottles that were returned for deposit. We would take the bottles that had already been returned for deposit, bring them back in the store and get the money for them, and we would ride the rocket ship or rocking horse outside in front of the store. We had to put a dime in the meter, then it would rock back and forth until the time ran out. Other times we would use the deposit money to buy candy. Sometimes me and my cousins would go around to the alley and get sheets of cardboard to ride the cardboard down the steps in the building, and sometimes we would just ride down banisters, which if you didn't know is another name for the railings that ran down the middle of a stairway.
Sometimes we would listen to my brother and two other of my older cousins playing the guitar, or sometimes we would watch them play penny toss in the gangway. Penny toss, if you didn't know, is where each player tosses a penny against a wall and the one that gets closest to the wall won all the other pennies. Sometimes they would take us to Lincoln Park. That way we could run all of our energy out chasing squirrels.
One day while I was at my Grandma and Grandpa’s, me and my three cousins and more of our friends were playing on the porch in the apartment building, and in the back of apartment building were stairs that went up and down the hill in back of the building. On each flat, there were guard rails. At the corner of the guard rail on one of the flats were electric wires coming into the building. I can't remember who it was that dared me to grab ahold of the wires, which I unwisely did. The thing that I didn't know was that I was about to get electrocuted. So I was bent over the railing, grabbing the wires, and luckily a man that was going to work grabbed a hold of me and pulled me free. I ended up with third-degree burns on my hands, and I would spend the next four years licking the palms of my hands because they stayed dry. I did that for years. It really was an embarrassing problem, but better than being dead from electrocution.
I remember going and seeing some of my other cousins. My dad's brother, Brian, was married to Tracy, and they had four kids. My oldest cousin was Darlene, then there was my cousin Scott, and Beverly, and the baby Mindy. Baby Mindy was cross eyed and had to have a big operation to fix here eyes a couple of years later. I was playing at their house one day, and while we were playing the Oscar Meyer Wiener truck came by and gave us whistles in the shape of the Oscar Mayer wiener truck. We would go play in the schoolyard playground, whenever I came over to visit. We would go to the school name Oscar Meyer Elementary.
The last memory I have of living in Chicago was my sister getting in a fight with another girl in the building. The girl snuck up on her and scared her, and my sister – out of reflexes – slapped her in the face. It wasn't long after that before we started looking for a new place to live. We looked a couple of weeks before we rented a place in a town called Whiting, Indiana. That's where I got my first boy’s bike. It had a banana seat and high-rise handlebars. I remember that day when my dad bought it for me. We got in the car and he didn't tell me where we was going. We went to this great big shopping center called Shoppers World in Highland, Indiana. The bike was silver and turquoise, and when I got it home, my dad had to put it together. He was good at things like that. Sometimes me and my new friend Jimmy would take baseball cards and put them through the spokes and clip a cloths pin to the forks and our bikes would sound like motorcycles. Later on, we learned how to put the balloons in the spokes of our tires which even sounded louder and cooler. Jimmy and his younger brother, Mike, lived one block over. Jimmy was my first best friend outside of the family.
We lived in the back of a house, and in the front of that house was an empty storefront. Outside the house was a big gap in between the next house, and there was nothing but sandy dirt. Not much sunlight got through there, so not very much vegetation grew. Next to the house next door was a big garage where the Mr. Freeze truck stayed. Sometimes it would come down our street and we would buy soft serve ice cream, either chocolate or vanilla or chocolate-vanilla swirl. At the other side of the yard was a sidewalk that ran past the wall of the building next door. We would take a tennis ball and throw it against the sidewalk that would bounce off the wall and we'd catch it. The pitcher would throw it against the wall and the other person would try to catch it. If he caught the ball, you were out, and if you missed the ball, you were safe. Or sometimes we would throw a baseball on top of my roof and wait until it came back down and catch it in a baseball mitt.
We had a small backyard that ended in the alleyway. Across the alley and to the left was the Smith’s yard. It was in the middle of the alley and went all the way around in the middle of the block, which was the only place in the whole neighborhood that you could fly a kite. We would get about six or eight balls of kite string, and my mom would give us some old clothes, and we would make a kite tail out of them. Then we got all six or eight balls of string tied together and tied onto the kite. It looked like a little speck on the horizon. It was a humongous yard where two of the three brothers, Johnny, Lonny, and Tommy lived. They were the older kids, and I played baseball with Lonny and Tommy a few times.
One day, I was playing with the two girls next door, Nancy and Crystal, in their backyard. They had a garage right off the alley, and I went outside the garage to pee. I said, “Now don’t you girls look at me.”
I came back out and said, “You girls were looking at me.”
So I told them, “You guys looked at me and you saw mine, so now I get to see yours.”
I took them a couple of buildings down the street to Erickson’s Bicycle Shop. Here's the thing: A couple of nights before, I had a nightmare and woke up, and then went into my mom and dad's bedroom while they were doing grown-up stuff. That's when I got the idea. What happened was that I took them to the back of the bicycle shop, where there were stairs going down to the basement. I took the girls and a box down the steps, where I placed the box to lie on. I got was the oldest girl’s panties down, but before I could do anything, Lonny and Jimmy came along. Lonny came downstairs and scared us. Yeah, that's right, I got caught with my pants down! We all went home, told all the kids around the neighborhood, and from that day on, the bicycle shop would be called “Erickson’s Screws” by the older kids. That was the last time I tried to do anything with the next-door neighbor kids.