The Golden Flake Clown Was Really SLOW Reaching Puberty

 

    So, where was I?

    Oh, yeah. 

    The Golden Flake Potato Chip Company.

    Maybe when I was 10, my father started advertising Golden Flake Potato Chips on a local television station's weekday "The Benny Carl Show". Each episode hosted local kids from different grammar schools (1st-8th grade), and church Sunday school classes, and sports teams.

    When I was 12, a Little League program was started in Mt. Brook, and I tried out. I threw left-handed and batted right-handed, and played first base and pitched.

    I was a good hitter, and I became a good pitcher after my father nailed a home plate and pitching rubber 44 feet apart into our gravel driveway. Several days a week, he came home after work, got down in a crouch with a catcher's mitt, and caught my pitches for about 30 minutes. 

    I got pretty accurate, and I threw pretty fast, and right-handed and left-handed batters had never faced a left-handed pitcher.

    My father attended the first game I pitched, and whenever I threw a bad pitch, I looked at him and he frowned. The other team got ahead, and I kept looking at my father. We lost. 

    My coach asked me, who was in the stands that I kept looking at? I said, my father. The coach said my father couldn't come to any more of our games.

    I reported that during family dinner at home. It was not a happy moment.

    I then won five games in a row. 

    I was fearless, pitching, hitting and fielding.

    Then, I seemed to lose a spark. I became afraid when I was pitching, of being hammered by line drives.

    I lost two very close games. 

    5-3 record.

    Late in the season, my team was invited to be on the Benny Carl Show. We each got to say our name and what position we played. 

    When I said I am Bash Bashinsky, Benny asked if was related to Sloan Bashinsky, at Golden Flake, one of his show's sponsors? 

    I said, yes. Benny made a big deal about it. 

    I was outed. My private life was over. 

    I was short and pudgy. 

    Some of the boys in my class at Crestline Heights Elementary School liked to bully me.

    I would not eat the food served in the school cafeteria, perhaps because I was spoiled on Cha's fabulous cooking. She fixed me a sack lunch each morning. I ate it with Golden Flake potato chips each day at lunch break.

    The boys wanted my sandwiches and potato chips. They wanted the fried chicken, or the roast beef sandwich, if that was in what Cha had prepared. 

    I never gave them anything. 

    They started calling me "greasy old potato chip". 

    Then, they started calling me "Tater,' which was slang for potato.

    Some of the girls in my class started calling me, "Tater".

    I hated being called "Tater".  

    I didn't have girlfriends. I was terrified of girls. I dreaded annual cotillions, when I had to invite a girl to be my date. That got some better after I attended a ballroom dancing school across the street from the grammar school. The dance school was run by a mother of one of the girl students.

    When I was 14, my father made me work at Golden Flake during summer vacation, while some of my rich- family buddies were playing golf and cards and swimming every day at the Birmingham Country Club.

    My father bought me a set of used irons, and he held back twenty of the forty dollars he paid me from his wallet each Friday, until I had repaid him for the irons.

    Golden Flake was located on Lomb Avenue, a really long way from Mountain Brook, and the only way I could get to work was to ride there with my father, and the only way I could get home was to ride home with him.

    Except sometimes he had other things to do, and then I had to catch a city bus into Birmingham, and wait a good while for a city bus going "over the mountain" into Crestline and right by our home on Montevallo Road. I was the only white person on the bus, which carried black servants and yard workers back and forth between Birmingham and Mountain Brook.

    If it was warm weather, I got off the bus in front of the country club, and went to my father's locker in the men's locker room and opened the combination lock and put on my golf shoes and got my golf bag out of the back of the pro shop and played 9 holes. Then, I put my golf bag and shoes back where they were kept, and walked across the golf course to our home.

    Many times my father told me that golf was really important, because all business deals are made on the golf course. In his teens and early 20s, he was a scratch golfer, meaning his handicap was zero. He could have been a professional golfer, but he chose to be a businessman instead. 

    What I did at Golden Flake when I was 14 was not very exciting. I sat beside a mechanical packaging machine, using my hands to put packaged roasted peanuts into small folding yellow boxes, which were put into larger brown cardboard boxes, which I stacked on top of each other onto a metal float on wheels. 

    When the float was full, it was pushed by one of the black warehouse workers into the quonset hut warehouse and the packed boxes were stacked on the floor for the route salesmen to pull orders and for loading onto over the road trucks, which transported Golden Flake products to route salesmen's warehouses in other Alabama cities, such as Montgomery, Huntsville, Decatur, Tuscaloosa, etc.

    Other days, I sat at the peanut blanching machine across from the peanut packaging machine, and picked out small rocks and rotten peanuts, and peanuts that still had the red skin on them. Sometimes I left the red skin peanuts alone, because Golden Flake made a redskin product, too. Redskin peanuts were smaller and tastier than regular peanuts.

    For eight hours, each week day, I did those incredibly boring jobs, and I did a lot of daydreaming. About what, I'll let you use your imagination, if you can't guess fishing, hunting, and girls. 

    Some days, I got to stack Nabisco crackers into the peanut butter and cheese cracker making and packaging machine. I really liked that job, because time passed really fast for some reason I never understood. Whereas, the peanut detail was like time stood still.

    Sometimes, I was put in the warehouse to strip adhesive labels off empty, flattened cardboard shipping boxes, which had been returned by route salesmen. We called those boxes, "knock downs". They were reused a dozen or more times, before being sold for scrap. A great deal of Golden Flake's profit margin was in how often the knockdowns were reused.

    Many times, my father got a sad look in his eyes, and with a lamenting tone and look, told me, "Son, I built this business for you!" 

    I felt horrible each time he said that.

    Like, what was I supposed to do with it? I didn't like working there? (Understatement).

    Yet, I worked there the next summer, when I was fifteen, doing the same things I had done the year before.

    The summer I was sixteen, I was able to drive, and I was put with a route salesman, who in his youth had played for the New York Yankees. I really liked him.

    His route was in Mountain Brook. I learned it, and when he went on vacation, I ran it that week and checked about $17 short, which was considered almost scandalous.

    That was the first summer my money was held back from my paycheck, for taxes. I was enraged.  

    I told my mother that I didn't want to work at Golden Flake any more that summer, and, with her ok, I announced I was quitting. My father was not happy.

    I played a lot of golf at the country club. My handicap got down to about 2. I was shooting in the low 70s, for 18 holes. I won the annual junior golf tournament, which really pleased my father. 

    For three years, I had languished at Ramsay High School, in Birmingham. My parents had sent me there, because the classes at Shade Valley High School next to Mt. Brook Village had 40 or more students. Ramsay's classes were less than 30 students. Some of the Ramsay teachers had taught my parents.

    I did not reach puberty when I was 11, or 12, or 13, or 14, or 15. When women line and office workers at Golden Flake asked me if I had a girlfriend?, I said, no, and I didn't want one. They laughed, and said I would get over that! I said it wasn't going to happen.

    I was pretty good at football, great at basketball, and really good at baseball. But when I reached Ramsay, no way was I going out for sports and undressing in a boys's locker room.

    I became a TV couch potato, when I wasn't in school, fishing, hunting or playing golf. I was not studying well. I felt like a freak. I was in a silent, living hell. I told no one.

    Who knows. Perhaps I was late reaching puberty, because I didn't see a world I wanted to step into waiting for me?

    Perhaps it was just back luck?

    Or perhaps it was related to the truly terrifying. parts of the healing, which angels did inside of me in 1998, after I was a few months out of the black night of the soul? 

    My mother molesting me in my crib? And potty training me before I was one year old? And beating me up when my father was off at war?

    Whatever, my junior year at Ramsay, my father got me accepted at The McCallie School in Chattanooga, where he and his brother Leo had attended. 

    Shortly after that, I entered puberty, and everything changed. 

    I got a girlfriend and we were doing lots of kissing. 

    I won the junior golf tournament at the country club. My girlfriend walked the last round with me.

    I was coming into my own.

    Then, I was at McCallie, in Chattanooga. Repeating my junior year, because I was not ready to do senior high school work at McCallie.

    I was a spoiled brat. I made a fool out of myself many times. I got into a fight and got my ass kicked and my head beat on.

    My Birmingham girlfriend took up with another boy. I was really fucked up about that.

    It needed to happen. I needed to grow up, fast.

    Alas, I had been away from football, basketball and baseball for three years. I had lost much of my skills in those sports. All I had for a school sport was golf.

    Yet, I didn't even have that. Something had happened to my swing. I never knew what was going to happen when the club struck the ball. 

    I had nothing.

    So, I studied a lot harder than I had at Ramsay and made pretty good grades. 

    I got along pretty well with the other students.

    I got used to being at McCallie, away from Birmingham, away from my family and Golden Flake.

    Although my golf swing remained on the outs with me, I did pretty well my senior year at McCallie and was accepted at Vanderbilt, with the help of one of the sons of the McCallie co-founder.

    I didn't get along very well with the religious part of McCallie. 

    Today, I wrote this below on Facebook.

The other day, I accepted a Facebook friend request from someone, because his FB bio showed he and I had attended the same high school and college: The McCallie School, in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. Then, something he defended Tucker Carlson on Facebook, and I couldn't resist wading in. 

 

When I attended McCallie, it was run by hard-core Presbyterians: one of the founders and his two sons. We were required to attend chapel service every week day morning before class and every evening before dinner, and every Sunday evening. We had to attend a church service in Chattanooga on Sunday morning. We got Saturday off. We had to wear pretend military attire and march every week day carrying empty M1 garands, which we had learned to field strip and reassemble. 

 

Old Testament and New Testament were required courses. The founder taught the New Testament Course. He said he believed the Soviet Union leader, Nikita Kruschev, was the Anti-Christ, and we might be called to pick up our M1s, for which we had no ammunition, and defend America. He said he believed he was one of The Elect. He said that he and his wife of 60 years had sex three times. Twice to have children, and once for pleasure, and he had regretted the third time ever since. His poor wife. 

 

Vanderbilt was a liberal arts university with excellent engineering and medical schools, a divinity school, a lousy football team and a good basketball team. I mostly majored in my fraternity, socializing, drinking beer, playing intramural sports, and meeting and falling in love with my first wife, Dianne. I had no fucking clue what lay ahead. Had I known, I might have drank a whole lot more beer. 

Instead, I enrolled in the University of Alabama School of Law, in Tuscaloosa, where I would watch some very good Crimson Tide football teams led by Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, whose Sunday afternoon TV replay show was sponsored by Coca Cola and my father's Golden Flake Potato Chip Company. "Great pair, says the Bear."  

Little did I know what lay ahead. Had I known, I would have drunk a lot more beer and smoked a lot of marijuana.