#frazier road

For reasons I can't fathom, or for no reason at all--and really, what's the difference?--I left my house the other day at around 8 AM, having barely slept, and drove to my old stomping grounds: Sarepta, Louisiana, where I lived for most of my high school years. It was quite a trip; I haven't been in that area since Charley died, back in November, and before that day, I hadn't been back in some time. Or at least in the way I went back this time, which was deep into it. 

Plain Dealing is the first town you go through, and then Sarepta. Driving the normal speed limit, it takes about fifteen minutes to travel between the two towns. I remembered, as I drove, how when I was just out of high school and stupider and more dangerous behind the wheel than I've ever been, I used to see how fast I could get from one to the other. I think I did it once in six or seven minutes, blasting through the night behind the wheel of a 1997 Mercury Mystique, a car that was honestly not designed to be driven 110 miles an hour, especially not on bad tires, on bad Louisiana roads, at night, when any manner of creature can kamikaze itself out of the darkness and directly into your path, and especially not with a driver as stupid and inexperienced as I was. It's nothing short of a miracle I managed to not kill myself or someone else on those nights. 

Sarepta isn't much different: they knocked down the old high school years ago, and consolidated with a bunch of neighboring schools, so instead of being the Sarepta Hornets they're now the North Webster Knights or something, but I'm sure the name is all that's changed. Friday nights in the fall will still find a line of screaming dads along the fence, guys who have some dim memory of past glories that weren't actually all that glorious, memories of their own Friday nights out there on the gridiron, their own dads lined up along the fence screaming at them, reliving their own glories, and so on, back into the beginning of time or at least of high school football. 

Onward into the towns of Cullen and Springhill, which has added a handful of new business--a Taco Bell, a CVS--but on the whole seems more decrepit and rundown than I remember, but I suspect that it's just the shock of seeing the place after so long away. The one place anyone worked that provided even sort of a good job was the paper mill, but it's been shut down now for years. There's a tiny industrial park that, when I was in high school, had two or three businesses--a plastics plant, an place that manufactured air conditioners or air conditioner parts or something, and  third, forgotten place--but all are gone but for the plastics plant, and it doesn't look to be operating at any sort of peak capacity. I can't imagine what people who live here do for a living: work in the oil fields, I guess, and at the fast food places? There are a surprising number of weird little businesses downtown, little boutiques and florists and things like that, but there's just as many that are empty and shuttered. The only places that look to be making any money are the liquor stores and funeral parlors. I made a loop through the Piggy Wiggly parking lot, haunted by the ghosts of god knows how many Smashing Pumpkins songs, where kids with nothing to do used to hang out on Friday and Saturday nights, driving around and around the town in endless circles. 

I cruised around a bit more, past the trailer park where I lived for a year or so: I never lived in an actual trailer there, but rather in one of three tiny apartments in the middle of the lot. It was not a particularly happy time for me, and thank Christ I managed to escape, something I thought was almost impossible at the time. I went back through Sarepta, past the church where my mother taught Sunday school, and then down Frazier Road, where we lived for about seven years. My stepfather had a lot of family, and a lot of them lived on this same stretch of road: first there was Robert and Bessie, his aunt's parents; then Buck, his father, and his half-siblings Jamie and Rayanne; next door to Buck were Ruby and Dwight and their daughter Amanda; then down the road were Donnie and Marie (seriously), Ruby's sister and brother-in-law; then finally us, in a red cedar house with two peeling sycamores in the front yard. In the fall they would fill the yard with huge yellow leaves, and in the summer you'd be forced to get up at daybreak and mow the huge lawn with nothing but a pushmower. At some point after we'd moved out, my stepfather's half-brother Jamie and his family moved in, but the house is gone now. I don't know how or why, but there's nothing there now but a grassy lot. I passed a snake on the roadside coiled up beside a Sprite bottle, then turned around and made my way out of town. 

Heading back now, through Plain Dealing and then beyond that to Hosston and Gillam, and then Belcher and Blanchard and finally back to Shreveport via North Market, I found myself thinking about all those people I'd known back then, and where they are or aren't now. When I'd first turned down Frazier Road, I was shocked--shocked--to see Robert Charles out in front of his house: he was/is the stepfather of my stepfather's aunt (I know that's a little confusing, but bear with me), and was, the last time I'd seen him, surely at least 70 years old, and that was nearly 20 years ago. But there he was, in the same little house, selling watermelons out front. Good for him.

Others, though. My mother had a younger brother. She was about twelve years older than him, I'd guess. Something like that. When she was a teenager, she was in a car accident with him--an eighteen wheeler t-boned her at an intersection and Shannon, her brother, who was five or six, and in the passenger seat, was thrown past her, through the driver-side window and out of the vehicle: he survived, but suffered brain damage, and was never quite "normal" after that. He could function and take care of himself, but he was in many ways very childlike and had trouble understanding things. It's my mother's greatest regret, his injury, and I know she still blames herself for it, and probably always will. He died, shortly after we'd moved to Louisiana, just before school started in August. It's strange to think of him now, because, honestly, I rarely do think of him, which seems terrible. If not for the awful toll it took on my mother and grandparents, I think I could almost forget about him entirely. He was 21 years old. 

My stepfather, too, had a similar tragedy. He had a lot of siblings. I'm not even entirely sure how many: at least four, I guess, and they were all half-siblings, so those siblings had their own siblings, and so his family tree was this multi-forked and annotated thing that is beyond my powers to fully detail for you. The two youngest ones, Jamie and Rayanne, were still living with his father when we first moved into that little red house on Frazier Road: Jamie was just out of school and had been something of a BMOC. Rayanne was maybe fourteen or fifteen, and was a sweet girl, though, again, I don't remember her very well. I remember my brother and I spent an entire day at their house for some reason, being looked after by Rayanne, though frankly I was old enough to be left alone. I remember it being the hot summer--a lot of my memories of Sarepta seem to take place in the summer, for whatever reason--and we just sat around in the house under the protection of the air conditioner. I remember country music videos on CMT. Alan Jackson. 

She died, too, in her sleep. As best as I can recall, she had some sort of heart condition that no one knew about, and she was also taking that cheap trucker speed they used to sell at gas stations, and these were two very bad things to combine. I remember walking in the door right after school and my mother telling me that Rayanne had died. She was only sixteen. They played Guns N Roses at her funeral. 

I could go on and on with this. Charley is dead, of course, six or seven months gone, and his stepfather, William, died one week earlier. William's brother Rick, who lived with them, died maybe eighteen months previously. Ruby, my stepfather's aunt, is also dead. I don't remember when. It was long after I'd moved away. My mother told me about it, and I was sad in that kind of remote way you are when you hear about someone you've long ago lost touch with dying. She was a nice lady, easily my favorite of my stepfather's mostly awful family. She and her husband Dwight were always kind to us, and I have a lot of nice memories of hanging out late at night at their house when we were young. I don't know anything about Dwight or whether he's still around, or Donnie or Marie, or any number of those people that were there, in the old days.