Cloverdale Elementary School held a carnival on Saturday evening before Halloween, 1972.   My friend Bill and I attended, along with lots of parents and elementary school kids. 

Ninth graders at Cloverdale Junior High at the time, we felt so much more mature and thereby superior than all the elementary schoolers.  We were not deceived for more than a few minutes by the spaghetti brains with grape eyeballs.

At one point, we were presented a mop handle with a clothespin dangling from the end with twine.  The clothespin was lowered over a bed sheet draped across a corner of the room.  Soon there was a little tug on the string and voila, a “fish” was caught in the clothes pin. 

Everyone received a brown paper bag of assorted treasures including pencils, erasers, and trinkets that, like Cinderella’s coach, reverted to trash at midnight.

Afterwards, we strolled to the Burger King for some cheap eats and a chance to examine our Halloween goodies.  We sat on stools lined up against the front wall of the restaurant, which was a floor-to-ceiling window. 

A policeman was standing outside a few feet away, looking properly stern, especially when he saw long-haired, adolescent trouble-makers pretending to be innocent, law-abiding fast-food patrons.

Bill took a cellophane-like Pizza Hut Pete hand puppet from his bag and stuck it on his right hand.  In a high, squeaky voice, he proceeded to entertain me with droll remarks such as the evergreen “Hey, who farted?” 

We were just shy of laughing so hard Coke shot from our noses when the cop stormed in. He ripped the plastic puppet from Bill’s hand like Velma unmasking a Scooby-Doo villain. 

Giving us the evil eye, he growled, “I’m gonna throw you both in jail if you don’t stop this shit right now!”

Bill and I were shocked.  Was it okay to say “shit” in Burger King?

The only thing we could possibly be doing wrong was having hair too long for this guy, whose idea of fashion-forward was a flat-top haircut you could land a PiperJet on.   

Did Santa neglect to give him a puppet as a child? 

Maybe he was sensitive to fart jokes due to uncontrollable flatulence?

After we left, we gradually recovered from our run-in with “the Man” with only minor psychological scarring.  For example, I still cannot poop for a fortnight after eating a Whopper.

Glancing through the McClellan High yearbook during the COVID-19 epidemic, I noticed a curious thing.  In a photo of the band, Bill is right at the end of a row.  He is holding his trombone in a special manner, one not taught in beginner band class, a manner that could, just possibly, be construed as flipping the bird.

When asked about it, Bill told me that in his days as a Rebel Without a Clue, he often surreptitiously flashed the finger.  With only cursory research, I found other yearbook photos showcasing his single digit salute.

While still sequestered from the infectious world, I also indulged some nostalgic purchases via eBay. Those included a risqué paperback about flight attendants called Coffee, Tea or Me?, a Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour menu from 1973, a pair of vintage 1970 “two tone disco groovy platform hippie shoes”, and a Pizza Hut hand puppet just like the one from the brown paper bag. 

It was maybe a year later when I awoke at 3:00 am, my brain bristling with a sudden and peculiar idea. 

I hurried downstairs to The Official Steve Hendricks Archives and yanked out the 1972 volume where I stored the hand puppet.  I verified my nocturnal suspicion. 

With this latest clue, could I finally solve a mystery from the days before Michael Jackson’s balls dropped?

Some months later, I stopped in to visit Bill and his delightful wife Lisa.  I told them about the Burger King Halloween Mystery. Their little gray cells figured it all out long before I revealed the solution, spoiling my shot at a Hercule Poirot moment.

That earlier night, when I had checked out the fevered idea that had awakened me, I learned that the Pizza Hut hand puppet had a clear plastic back…

The kind of transparent back that allowed Bill, unseen and unsuspected by me,  to “innocently” flip off the cop.  While we laughed like demented hyenas sniffing nitrous oxide!  

It had been a bad idea on his part, especially in Arkansas, doubly so in the early 1970s, when many police officers had their sense of humor surgically replaced with racial intolerance. 

Luckily for us, we were young and so white we were practically translucent.

After taking 50 years to solve this perplexing puzzle, I await an answer from Scotland Yard regarding my offer to look into the Jack the Ripper murder spree. 

I’m sure I can prove that a puppet had a hand in it.

1971 10 30, 54 years ago

At age 13, I first saw 2001, A Space Odyssey at the United Artists Heights theater in Little Rock, Arkansas. Televised science fiction, such as Star Trek, Lost in Space, and It’s About Time, where aliens, robots, and cavemen all spoke English better than I did, had not prepared me for Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.

When the film ended, I was somewhat bewildered even as I pondered the beautiful and awesome things I had just experienced.  Years later, I felt similar sensations after The Rocky Horror Picture Show thanks to Susan Sarandon’s breasts.

In pursuit of understanding, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of the script, as well as the book he wrote about the movie, The Lost Worlds of 2001.  Tim and I endlessly discussed the significance of individual shots and themes of the film and book.  What an intellectual excursion it proved to be.  I was enthralled.  

A couple of times a year, the UA Cinema 150 theater would present midnight screenings of 2001.  The theater had a 70-foot-wide screen that curved 120 degrees.   If you sat close, the picture would wrap past your field of vision on both sides.  The feeling of immersion was fantastically intense.

My friend Tim and I scurried to be first in line for the midnight shows, running to get front row seats before the drug fans could beat us.

Why the front row? To experience the wrap-around light show in the final minutes of the film while high! Drug fans high, not Tim and me high.  The closest we ever got to that was mainlining quarts of Dr. Pepper.

Our senior year of high school, Science Fiction was offered as an English class. Honestly! Science Fiction! In Arkansas! Someone in the school board must have had a momentary lapse of judgement. Bless him, that subversive tool of Satan.  I hope they let him live.

Our teacher, Miss Nancy Crary, informed Tim and me that we knew considerably more about SF than she, and asked if we would help. We would teach Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, while she would teach our beloved 2001.

We begged her to swap, but she declined, stating that she had to be very careful how she taught 2001. Possible immolation upon a pile of Isaac Asimov novels by angry Southern Baptists held no appeal for her.  Not at her salary, at least.

Tim and I resigned ourselves.  There was no way we could avoid the idea at the heart of the story; evolution.  Also, aliens.  The conceit was that aliens were shaping human evolution, even if they were represented by a 9-foot black slab showing no real interest in anal probes.

I’m not sure which was more offensive to the Arkansan religious authorities of the time, aliens or evolution.  Mentioning either could get you into serious trouble, and combing them was especially perilous.  Of course, had Charles Darwin teamed with H. G. Wells to do so, The Origin of Species movie rights would have been exorbitant!

Years later, I shared this story with Ray Bradbury.  Amused, he was also relieved that I survived high school intellectual witch hunts with minimal trauma.  Indeed, I was lucky to have done so, but it was not without help and guidance. 

Thanks again, Miss Crary, for saving Tim and me from our nerd selves.  Had we burned at the stake then, we totally would have missed Susan Sarandon’s amazing acting skills.

In 1975, as now, Friday Nights were sacred times, when hormone-charged high school football teams took to fields across America.

The McClellan High School football team entourage, aside from the coaches, cheerleaders, and the perky Pep Squad, included the Mighty McClellan Marching Band and Door-to-door Candy Sales Associates.

Our football adversaries that evening were the Mills Comets.  Mills High School, considered out-in-the-boonies to us worldly and refined Little Rock suburbanites, was named after Wilbur D. Mills.  Wilbur was an Arkansas congressman who served from 1939 until scandals with stripper Fanne Fox, treatment for alcoholism, and an unfortunate resemblance to The Three Stooge’s Shemp Howard forced him to change vocation.

After traveling via yellow school bus the few miles to Mills, we climbed into wooden bleachers apparently constructed from old moonshine shacks.  We sat down carefully, avoiding splinters large enough to pound through Dracula’s heart.

Richard Manson, Clark Isaacs and I all played tenor saxophone, so we sat together for the game.  My girlfriend Elaine, who played French horn, was made an honorary sax player so she could sit beside me.

We all stood for the National Anthem played by the Mills Band, and were asked to remain standing for the invocation. Since we were not playing Catholic High, it would consist of a simple prayer without candles, incense and holy snacks.

“Oh, Lord,” it began.  While Christians disagree over the middle names of their deities, Jesus H. Christ and Lord R. God, that never prevented them from being on a first-name basis. 

After a few moments, the preacher continued,  “Please bless these boys tonight.  Hold them in the palm of Your Holy Hand and shelter them from the evils that young men fall prey to in these sad and terrible times.”

So far, so good.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Easy to ignore.

He hiccupped.  Or maybe it was a belch.  The minister then cleared his throat like a cat with a persistent hairball.

“Oh, Holy Father,” he said, “please bless these boys tonight…”  Then he took a long pause. Clark and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised like Spock finding a tribble in his underwear drawer. 

The holy man began slurring his words.  Was it an inconveniently timed stroke? Had he sacrificed too much sacrificial wine on his way to the stadium?

Before long, Clark and I were overtly cackling.  Richard kept his eyes closed, vainly tried to stay in the spirit of the thing, tears running discreetly down his face with the effort of not laughing.  Elaine squeezed my hand, scandalized by behavior unbecoming a Good, God-Fearing Southern Baptist Boy, as I supposedly was.

It just got funnier and more outrageous as the fellow droned on.

I have no idea how the game went.  The band never paid much attention to happenings on the field other than to estimate how long until our half-time performance or cast a leering glance at the cheerleaders.

Riding home afterwards, between bouts of low-grade hanky-panky at the back of the bus, I pondered the events of the day.  The prayer stand-up act and my unpunctured buttocks could only be viewed as gracious gifts from a normally-uncaring universe. 

All in all, it was a pretty damned good seventeenth birthday.

One perk of being in band at McClellan High School was spending free time in the band room.  As well as before and after school, band kids would lunch there and hang out through the following homeroom period. 

School lockers were located along the outdoor hallways.  Between classes, nicotine addicts in need of a hit stampeded through there like elephants summoned by Tarzan.  Many band kids only visited their hallway lockers the first and last days of school.  We also had lockers in the band room, ostensibly to store instruments and band paraphernalia.  I kept my books and lunch there. 

Every day of my 3 years at McClellan High, I dined from a paper bag.  Mom packed me a sandwich (Oscar Meyer ham on Wonder Bread with French’s mustard), a small bag of chips (Lay’s), a can of Coca-Cola (there was only one kind back then), and a piece of fruit (a so-called “Red Delicious” apple).  In those days, the Red Delicious apple, mealy and nearly tasteless, was about the only variety commonly available.

I had grown tired of the apples, and they started piling up in my locker.  One day, there were about a dozen of them, more than I could ever eat unless coerced at gunpoint.  I “generously” passed them out to other kids in the band room.

The trombone section was well represented that day, with Carra Bussa, Mark Cook, Andy McGee, and most especially Buddy Presley.  Buddy was one year older than me, with a mild-but-constant tang of mischief about him. 

As I bit into my apple, Buddy contemplated his, lightly tossing it in the air.  He grinned his lopsided smile, wound up as if on the mound at the World Series, and launched the fruit across the room at Andy McGee. 

Andy jumped like a startled gazelle, which is almost nothing like a trombone player.  The scarlet projectile missed, careening wildly off the carpeted floor.  In the cinemascape of my memory, it was a slow motion ballet as apple bits pinwheeled gracefully into the air.

Soon, other apple recipients joined the fray, and there was fruit arcing gracefully across the band room.  Say what you will about the Red Delicious, it does make for a glorious food fight.

I watched with amusement, chewing my Malus domestica, with my back to the band room door.   An unwitting arms dealer, I contemplated how the best of intentions can go awry.

A stentorian “WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?” from behind me brought a halt to the mayhem.  It got so quiet you could hear the cymbals ringing faintly.  Mr. Franklin Washburn, our illustrious band director, had covertly stepped into the room.  Impaling me with a sharp look, he demanded, “Hendricks, who started this?”

I froze under his baleful eye.  I could not speak.  I endeavored to look as innocent as possible; it was difficult with evidence of complicity so obvious, crimson there in my palm.  I felt like Adam caught picnicking under the tree of knowledge.

Buddy, surrounded by apples in various stages of disintegration, spoke up.  “Mr. Washburn, I don’t know who started it, but I’ll clean it up.”   You could almost see a halo glowing above his disheveled head.

After we cleaned up the mess, we were summarily banished forevermore from our lunch time Garden of Eden in the band room.

It was not so much a Fall from Paradise as it was a jaunty day trip, as we all sneaked back the following lunchtime. To our relief, Mr. Washburn graciously never said another word about the whole affair. 

The Honors English required reading my first semester at the University of Arkansas was a long list filled with even longer books. 

I’m talking lengthy, humorless tomes – the kind you only read on assignment or if you’ve a librarian to impress;  “The amorality in Zola’s ‘Nana’ reflects condemnation of heredity and environment as shapers of overall circumstance in Parisian life circa 1870.  So, howz about a quick snog in the stacks?”

As a conscientious reader, I was confident I would make short work of each novel.  After all, I had finished every assignment since “The House of the Seven Gables” in seventh grade, when I only made it through 3 pages before I regretted not dying over summer vacation.

That fall, I was in marching band for 10-15 hours a week, and I shouldered the extra burden of switching from saxophone to Sousaphone because the band needed more low brass.  This particular weekend we had also traveled out of town for a football game.  On the cacophonous band bus, I attempted to read my assignment, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”   It was like being swarmed by happy chinchillas – unproductive but not altogether unpleasant.

It is perhaps understandable that I got behind on “War and Peace.”  I was to have finished over the weekend, but on Sunday afternoon I had what felt like 5000 pages left to go.   Shades of Evelyn Wood, was it too late to cram a quick Speed Reading course?

By sheerest coincidence, the film “War and Peace,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, was being shown on TV that very afternoon.  A wave of gratitude washed over me.  Thank you, uncaring universe, for throwing me a bone!  And extra thanks for Audrey Hepburn, as long as we’re at it.

What a large bone this was, all euphemisms aside, in those olden days before streaming services or even video tapes!  It could be months or years before a particular film popped up on TV.  

For example, I had once waited years to see “Godzilla” on the TV late show.  I fell asleep 5 minutes into the film, although I awoke for the last 5 minutes.  Consequently, I long regarded “Godzilla” as the epitome of the tightly edited movie.

Viewing the film of “War and Peace,” 3 hours and 28 minutes long (and even longer with commercials), sounded considerably easier than reading hundreds of pages before class on Monday.  Not as easy as one might think, though; the 12 inch screen viewed from 10 feet away made it difficult to discern Henry Fonda from shrubbery.  Fortunately, his acting sometimes helped.

Now, my dorm room was about a dozen rooms down from the communal toilet, which was often inconvenient.  In those days, I drank Dr. Pepper with mucho gusto and frequency, sipping it from a Brandy snifter while commenting on its “good legs and fruity bouquet hinting of prune undertones.”

After several hours of watching the film, the climax approached, with Fonda’s character moments away from to assassinating Napolean as he rode through Moscow.  My attention was divided, however, because my bladder was bulging with processed Dr. Pepper.  During a commercial break, I sprinted down the hall to the restroom for some overdue relief.

Earlier that afternoon, it had started snowing, falling lightly and dusting the courtyard below my window.  My friend Carra, who lived next dorm room over, had glimpsed the snow and stepped into my room while I was away.

When I returned, hurrying so as to not miss any of the crucial final events of the film, I was horrified to find the TV turned to the weather station.  Carra was chomping on a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies and studying the screen as if he anticipated a pop quiz on precipitation.

“Why do you have it on the weather?” I yelled.  “It is pretty obvious that it is cold and snowing!  You can look out the window and see the snow!”  I always was a believer in first-person, empirical evidence.

I stepped up to the TV, grumbling, “Now what station was that on?”  I flipped the knob until a scene of Napoleon in his tent popped up.  Satisfied that I had not missed the climax, I sat, and we continued watching.  Would Fonda get a shot at Napoleon?  Would Napoleon get a shot at Fonda?  Would anyone get a shot at Audrey Hepburn?

The film’s focus had strangely shifted to Napoleon, without even a glimpse of our former protagonists.  It was even stranger that the French conqueror was played as a bit of a buffoon.  Earlier, he had been exactly as funny as hemorrhoids on a first date.

After 20 minutes, I gave voice to my growing suspicions. “Hey!  What’s up with Napoleon?  I don’t think this is the right movie!”   

I used few curse words at that point in my life, and most were mild by modern standards.  Nowadays, I would say, “Fuck!  What the fuck happened to fucking Napoleon?  I don’t fucking think this is the right fucking movie…  Tits!” 

I furiously rotated the dial, passing goofy Napoleon at least three times in my desperate search for any hint of Fonda or Hepburn.

What kind of universe shows two Napoleon movies simultaneously when one was sufficient?   Just how many movies with Napoleon in them were there?  What were the odds?  Was the universe dicking around?  Here, Steve, I’m gifting you with a movie, so you don’t have to read your ass off all night.  Ha, ha!  Just kidding, sucker!

Contemplating Carra, the agent of my aggravation, I calculated whether I should kill him humanely or stretch it out.  At 6’7”, he needed no stretching out, so perhaps quick was the better way to go.

I figured I could make it appear that Carra choked on Chips Ahoy easily enough.  Nobody would ever suspect foul play!

Carra was lucky that snowy afternoon;  he only survived because it would have been such a mess to clean up, what with crumbs everywhere.

I went to class the next morning without finishing the book.

And here it is, many years later, and I still don’t know how “War and Peace” ends.  Except that Fonda didn’t kill Napoleon.  Duh.  It’s not fucking “Titanic,” you know.

It was April 1976.  Since sunrise on July 5, 1975, the country had been gripped by Bicentennial Madness, a fever so contagious and pervasive I nowadays think of it as COVID-1976.

Everywhere you looked, things were plastered with the faces of dead white guys like George “I’m on the quarter AND the dollar bill” Washington and Ben “FATHER of Our Country if you know what I mean” Franklin. 

The most pervasive image was the US flag, Old Glory, the most complicated flag on Earth.   Betsy Ross, who sewed one star on the original for each of the 13 American colonies, would have thrown in the towel when faced with 50 of the buggers.

Nevertheless, Americans proudly wore the flag on hats, jackets, socks, and jeans; we were star-spangled right down to our tighty-red-whitey-and-blues. 

McClellan High School was not immune to the mania.

It was decided to put on a show for the student body to take place one afternoon at school.  It was to feature great American songs from “Yankee Doodle” to the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (proof that geography was not high on the Arkansas educative curriculum). 

For some reason, “Afternoon Delight,” a then-popular anthem about impromptu sessions of sexual congress, was not included.

I was tasked with providing a piece for the jazz band to play.  Since there was nothing I loved more than the 1940s era music of Glenn Miller (well, nothing that did not involve girls and/or pizza), I chose Miller’s incredible “In the Mood.”

We did not have time to perfect the whole piece, so I created a shorter version with no saxophone solos and no cowbell, which I have always regretted, since, you know, COWBELL!

On Thursday afternoon, April 15, the entire student body gathered in the gym to sit on unyielding wooden bleachers with no air conditioning or refreshments.  It was a recipe for Bicentennial fervor, make no mistake!

The lineup included such crowd-pleasers as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”  If the students had been octogenarians, I’m sure they would have gobbled it up like lukewarm Cream of Wheat.

The program might have gone down better if folks had tried just a little harder.  Keith, the fellow who sang “Clementine,” repeated only the refrain and the first verse five times!  Fortunately for him, he was the handsome object of every straight girl’s teenage desire.  Otherwise, he might have been hooted from the stage faster than you can recite the preamble to the constitution, which you memorized the day after your eighth grade American History teacher said she would give you an A- if you could recite the damned thing, but you couldn’t and got a B+ instead. 

As the assembly continued, the energy in the gym dwindled.  It was getting muggy in there with over a thousand students in attendance.  Many kids were jonesing for a nap, a nip, or a nicotine hit.  They just weren’t feeling the “Afternoon Delight.”

Performances were running longer than expected, and it looked like we would not be finishing up in time.  I was drowsing with the jazz band, awaiting our turn, when told to skip ahead and go straight to our piece.

I jumped up, counting off “In the Mood” with a lusty “A-Wun Two Three GO!”  The saxophones energetically launched into the swinging arpeggio that starts the piece.  Everyone in the crowd hopped up, yelling and clapping as if they had been offered the rest of the day off! 

Our band director Mr. Washburn later told me he heard the astonishingly loud noise in his somewhat-distant office, wondering if there had been an accident.  You know, such as one owing to a jet liner hitting the cafeteria, or the over-abundance of beans served that day. 

Even though I am probably the only one who remembers that glorious moment, it was a highlight of my time at McClellan High.  Amazing really, since it involved neither girls nor pizza.

January 5, 1973

It was the start of Junior Band Clinic at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.  The previous weekend, hundreds of young musicians had auditioned (“tried out” in band parlance) to earn a place in the two bands representing the best of Pulaski County junior high music programs.

I made First band, second chair tenor saxophone, indicating the judges believed me to be the second best tenor sax player who had tried out.  However, I was a bit annoyed that I was second chair. I felt I was a better player than the boy who made first chair, whom I recall uncharitably as the nerdy kid from The Far Side cartoons.

I had been playing saxophone for only 12 months, so it was cool that I made the first band at all. The only reason I did was because my friends Clark Isaacs and Richard Manson, both far superior musicians in every way, tried out for Senior Clinic instead of Junior Clinic, so there were more openings for tenor sax players of modest ability.

One of the pieces we played was “Cherish,” a saccharine love song with possibly the dullest melody ever written (the first 11 notes are the same!). Music historians remain puzzled about two events from that era; how “Cherish” became a hit, and why anyone thought “The Funky Penguin” was a good idea for a dance song.

The saxophones played the insipid melody at one point in the “Cherish” arrangement. The band director instructed the tenor saxophones to play louder, but not too loud, because when saxophones play too loud, they “honk like ducks.”

As autocorrect would say, this forever ducked me up for playing loudly.

It was an unforgivable thing to say to students seeking instruction and encouragement, especially naturally timid ones like me.  As far as I was concerned, the guy earned eternal torment in Band Director Hell, conducting first day beginner band students sight-reading “I Love You, You Love Me.”

During lunch, I went exploring with a fellow Cloverdale bandie. Throwing caution to the woodwind, we crossed heavily trafficked Asher Avenue to the old Asher Drive-In Theater.  There I found a large, red plastic letter “R” that had fallen off the marquee. Although it was a treasure beyond imagining, it did put a stutter in my strut when stuffed into my bell bottoms.

I planned to display my scarlet letter when I received an “R” rating from the Motion Picture Association (for Sexual Themes, naturally). Sadly, the best I could score was PG-13 for mild profanity and rude humor regarding where someone could stick his baton.