Spirits and Demons

Friends And Neighbors

                                                          Part Thirty Four

  The parties had gotten completely out of hand. Kids were coming from every junior and high school in the twin cities and even from some of the surrounding country towns such as Farmerville, Downsville, Eros, Chatham, and southern Arkansas. Word of mouth had gotten out the best weekend party to go to was on the outskirts of West Monroe. Having only intended the parties for a few friends, Jimmy Don and Mike moved the party to their grandmother's abandoned house near the A & W rootbeer stand. It took several months before all the kids quit coming around for what had become a regular thing. The deputy's had begun parking on the gravel road with their lights out and taking many of the kids to detention centers so to continue the parties with only a few close friends, no one else was told the parties had been moved to another residence across town. Mike noticed many kids at school were very angry the large parties had stopped all of a sudden and when they found out the deputys put a stop to it they kind of understood. Others began having their own parties though none came close to  the notoriety Jimmy Don and Mike's parties were labeled with. At their grandmother's house everything was much quieter since there would only be maybe six couples. The police were never called and things went on smoothly from there. Everyone cleaned up their own mess because no one wished to ruin a good thing.

  Next door to Carl's house lived a preacher and his wife in a very large house. They'd opened their home to orphans and had anywhere between twenty and thirty children living there with them. Robert, James, and Kenneth were three of the older boys at the foster home. When they weren't watching wrestling on cable television, they'd go to the local civic center and pay to watch wrestling. Kenneth was the crazy one, one of the wrestling matches held at the civic center a guy sitting in seats on a higher level threw popcorn down on Kenneth's head. At intermission Kenneth got the guy to meet him outside to fight and Kenneth got the poor guy on the ground and stomped on his head with steel toe boots. An ambulance was called as Kenneth slipped back into the civic center to watch the rest of the evening's wrestling. One Saturday Mike was outside and saw Kenneth jerking and trapped in barbed wire with his eyes rolled in the back of his head. While Mike was untangling Kenneth from the barbed wire, James and Robert came running out of their house with a large spoon. James crammed the spoon into Kenneth's mouth since he was swallowing his tingue from the epileptic attack he was having. Mike had no idea what was going on and stood back out of the way while Kenneth's life was being saved. A couple of weeks later Kenneth drowned while swimming in a nearby backwoods lake from his last epileptic seizure when no one was around to help him. Also in the neighborhood a lady named Mrs. Moffett had a tiny store in her kitchen where the neighborhood kids could purchase drinks and chips and such. Down the street were a few families though there were only about twenty homes in the entire neighborhood. There was plenty to do, ping pong at the Marklands or darts and horseshoes at the Barnett's. Billy and Randy Markland would set-up their ping pong table under one side of their carport and leave it there until winter. Bubba Barnett and his sisters, Deborah and Sue enjoyed the stiff competition playing darts and horseshoes. Cale and Randy McNair lived on the end of Jerry St. and they were both pretty crazy in their own right. Cale hung out with Jimmy Don since both of them were into drugs. Randy collected turtles from the surrounding woods and at one time he had over two hundred turtles penned in his backyard. Another family were the Berry's, Diane and June Berry were two of the most beautiful girls a guy could imagine. Every time their dad would catch his daughters talking with any of the neighborhood guys he'd run them off, telling them if they wanted to talk with his daughters that they had to come to his house so he and his wife could maintain their daughter's innocence. Next door to the Berry's lived Floyd Cockrell, a World War II veteran. He was a friendly neighbor even though he drank whiskey all of the time. Hit by shrapnel from a bomb, he was paralyzed on the left side of his body. Once a month he'd get Virginia to drive him to Shreveport where the nearest PX was located at Barksdale Airforce Base so he could buy cartons of cigarettes at half price. On those trips he'd also stop by the Veteran's Hospital for check-ups and to receive his medicine. It was the first time in Mike's life he could remember knowing and interacting with so many friendly neighbors that weren't violent alcoholics