Just Wanted to Learn

by William Swafford

Chuck was tall as I was and he had a mullet hair cut. He liked to work out and listen to death metal music.

  He didn’t smoke weed. I had tried to talk him into it several times, because it might have calmed him down. I would drink beer, but I could only take it in small doses.

  I had started buying weed off of Bob who had played with my dad and Nick. He would let me go to his house by myself and get what I needed. He also had given me two guitar books from a heavy metal band.

  Chuck had a lot of anger built up inside of him for reasons that I had never found out. He always wanted to fight someone. There were days when we would be driving down a country road and I would have to stop.

  He would get out of the car and walk up to a tree or telephone pole. Then he would punch it as hard as he could. If he didn’t at least rip some skin off his knuckles, then he wasn’t happy.

  Chuck was never musically talented. He wanted me to teach him guitar, but I couldn’t. We didn’t have the same taste in music. He was into the hardcore death metal music and I was into classic rock.

  I did end up selling my black electric guitar to him. I believe that it was more that I just wanted it out of my room then actually wanting him to have it. He didn’t do anything with the guitar.

  There were a lot of nights spent like this. I still found time to play my guitar when I finally made it home at nights.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My dad did moved back in town. He was staying at a lady’s apartment. He said that they were only friends.

  I had started helping my dad out after school. I would go help clean up and get things that were needed. He had started putting vinyl siding on houses

  This is when I got to met Doug Fields. I have always heard of Doug, but had never met him. He was a drummer and he played for one of the local bar bands.

  Doug and my dad would always hangout after work. My dad was teaching Cecil how to get better on guitar. They were trying to form a two men show for the bars.

  My dad had taught him two songs to sing. They were the only songs that he could sing. I honestly never had known him to do anything else.

  This had made me jealous for a couple of reasons. I had always wanted my dad’s help with the guitar. He wouldn’t teach me how to play, but he would help someone else.

  This also put an idea in my head. I should have been the second part to my dad’s two men show, not Doug. I had already thought that I was a better guitar player than Doug.

  They played and worked together for a little while. They didn’t sound bad for just two men with old beat up guitars. They just had gone to places that would allow them to play.

  My dad did all the singing and most of the guitar work. Doug did sing his two songs. They were just going out and having fun.

  There was one thing that wasn’t good for the duo. They both liked to drink. They had drunk beer at home and mixed drinks at the bar while playing.

  The alcohol, the redneck attitudes, and the adrenaline that comes from playing don’t mix well. It can go on for a while, but something always turns up happening. They were no exception to this.

  My dad had always seemed to be moving around. He had kept siding houses and found another partner. My dad didn’t have a license anymore. He needed someone to be the driver.

  He had lost his license for DUI’s. He had gotten so many of them that there was no real hope of him getting them back. He still always talked like he was going to save up the money to get them back one day.

  His new partner’s nickname was Roaster. Roaster and his wife helped my dad. I got to help them a couple of times.

  Roaster was a tall skinny guy. His long grey hair seemed to be always sticking up. He had a grey beard to match.

  His wife was a rough looking old woman. She worked harder than the men did. She could drink more than must men.

  Roaster had also played guitar, but I didn’t get to hear a lot of it. He didn’t look like it, but he also liked drinking a lot of beer. He didn’t talk too much.

  This played an important role in music for me. It leads up to the first time I played with my dad in front of a crowd. It was different for me.

  Roaster and my dad were going to play for a friend at an outdoor wedding. I was able to sit in and play with them. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

  On the way there we had stopped at a store. My dad and I had stayed in the car. It took a couple of minutes.

  I had gotten a new CD and had let my dad borrow it. I had asked him if he had a chance to listen to it. He took his guitar and showed me how to play a few songs off the CD while he sat up in the front seat.

  We played a few songs before the wedding started. Then we played as the bride made her way to the groom. It was fun.

  I was more worried about watching and following my dad on guitar than what was going on around me. It was a new experience for me and I just wanted to do well. My dad didn’t say anything about how I did.

  Chapter Fourteen

  My home life didn’t get too much better. My mom did her best to stay working and just basically keep going on. My brother was heading down a bad path in life.

  Someone had introduced him to huffing paint. I had tried it and tried inhaling other things, but gave it up quickly, thankfully. My brother didn’t and he had a friend who had done it with him.

  I was a sophomore in high school and I had gone home sick one day. My mom was at work so I just sat on the couch and watched television.

  My brother, Josh, and a kid named Danny had skipped out of school after lunch. They had gone somewhere and had huffed spray paint. Then they came to the house.

  My brother was acting funny and I could tell that he had been doing something. He had started messing with me as soon as he walked in.

  “What the hell you doing here?” he asked.

  He had walked up to me while I was still sitting on the couch, so I stood up. He got up in my face.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  He pushed me back down on the couch. I stood up again and turned him around to make him sit down on the couch.

  This had gotten my brother upset. He wasn’t about to let me push him around in front of his friends and get away with it.

  He had gone out to the kitchen and grabbed two knifes. He had come back out to the living room saying that he was going to hurt me.

  He threw one of the knives towards the kitchen. It missed Josh’s head by two inches. Then he had come after me.

  Danny had stepped between my brother and I, but that didn’t stop my brother. He went over Danny’s shoulder and then I felt something hit me in the shoulder.

  I pushed Danny to the side and went after my brother. I got him to the ground and made him drop the knife. Danny pulled me up and then I went after my brother again.

  I was on top of my brother. Danny was hitting me in the side, but I couldn’t feel it. My brother had found a way to get up.

  He took off out the front door and I followed. He got into Danny’s car and had locked the door.

  I walked back up the house and that’s when Josh stopped me.

  “Hey me,” he said. “You’re bleeding. I think he actually stabbed you.”

  I seen the blood running down my arm, but I didn’t look at where he had gotten me. I walked into the house and seen the blood stain on the floor. Then I started freaking out.

  I knew my mom was going to freak out about the blood on the floor. I couldn’t get it cleaned up.

  My brother and Danny had done taken off. Josh had stayed with me to help clean up, but it did no good. I was going to have to tell my mom what happened.

  My mom didn’t freak out, but I didn’t have to go to the doctor’s office. The knife had made its way through the skin and barely missed the muscle.

  I about passed out when I watched the doctor spread the skin and touched the muscle. I got six shots and five stitches on top then one underneath the skin. Then I had to go to
the police station.

  My mom had taken them the knife. I had to get my fingerprints done. Then the cops went looking for my brother and Danny.

  They were eventually stopped on the outside of the city limits. They were both still high.

  They had gone to court and were put on probation. I had to go to school the next day and be embarrassed.

  We had made the front page. Teen boy stabs his own brother. Everyone in school had known who it was.

  I sat in speech class and watched them pass around the paper. They all looked at me while they read the paper.

  Danny and my brother tried to take off. They had even tried staying at my dad’s. They were caught again.

  My brother was taken to court. My dad had to go because they had hid at his place for a little bit. My mom and I were sitting outside of the courtroom when my dad showed up.

  He had started in on me. He was telling my mom who I was buying my weed off of. There was only one person who could have told him and that was the other guy I was buying weed off of, Bob.

  I was getting in trouble not for buying weed or buying it off of Bob, but for buying it off of someone else.

  Chapter Fifteen

  School was getting ready to let out for the summer. My dad had met some lady and was staying at the motel with her and her kids. Lee was graduating from high school.

  My brother’s graduation party had gotten us into some trouble. The party had started in the afternoon. It started at a guy’s house that we weren’t even supposed to be around.

  He was some guy that my brother had met. He was over twenty-one and a bad influence. His name was Scott, but he has some weird nickname.

  There were two cases of beer and a bottle of Tequila. We also had a bag of weed. We all got too drunk.

  We had gotten into the car and ended up in another town. I had started blacking out. I had never had that much to drink before. This is the first time that I remember blacking out.

  One minute I was in the car and then playing basketball. Then we were back in the car and then we were parked on the side of the road. I don’t remember the ride there.

  It was a road beside of the gravel pit. There were other people there too. It was a place where people used to go and sit to party.

  I was standing talking to some guy. I didn’t even hear anything going on. The next thing I know I’m being pushed into the car.

  I was sitting in the back seat next to Chuck. There was blood coming out of his nose. He had gotten into a fight.

  He was fighting one guy. Someone said that Chuck was actually winning. Then another guy had jumped in and kicked Chuck in the nose.

  We dropped Chuck off at his brother’s and he took him to the hospital. Chuck had a broken nose. Chuck’s brother was upset.

  We had gone back to the other town. I had gotten into a fight with my brother and his friend. They dropped me off in the country. It took me almost an hour to walk home.

  I had gotten out of that town before Chuck’s older brother and friend had gotten there. They had gone looking for the guy with a shotgun. I had found out about this later.

  The more time that I spent hanging out with Chuck the more trouble I got into. I was drinking more when I was hanging out with him. I was starting to be pissed off at the world just like him.

  Chuck always found out how to get a little bit of beer. We would either drive around or walk if we didn’t have gas money. We both just wanted a way out of our houses.

  Chuck and I had been out drinking one night. We didn’t want to go home. We both were drunk.

  We ended up at Mike’s house that I had known for a long time. I also hung out with when I was friends with Lori. I had gone with him when he got his guitar. I had thought we were friends. There was also another guy there that I had known.

  The two treated me like crap. They wouldn’t smoke with me. I wasn’t even aloud to touch his guitar.

  Two girls had shown up with the guy’s brother. One was his brother’s girlfriend.

  One of the women I knew of but didn’t know personally. She was twenty-five and overweight. The other woman was nineteen. She wasn’t pretty but had a descent body.

  Chuck kept messing with the other guy. He was told to stop, but he wouldn’t. We got kicked out of the house.

  The two girls said that they would take us home. Somehow we had ended up out in the country, and then back at one of the girl’s house.

  He ended up on the floor with one of the girls and I was on the bed with the other. He was having problems, so the other girl got on the bed too.

  My first time having sex was with two girls. I couldn’t get enough.

  I had gone home the next day. I had forgotten my hat and hadn’t even realized it.

  While I was out the following day, the girls had shown up at my house. The heavy set woman was wearing my hat. I had told them that I would hang out with them, but had changed my mind.

  My mom knew that the girl was actually twenty-five. The woman also had a bad reputation. She wasn’t happy by the time I had got home.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The day before my seventeenth birthday I had gotten into it with my mom. She had sent me to go live with my dad. That lasted for one night.

  I only wanted one thing for my seventeenth birthday. I wanted a new guitar amp. My mom had told me she would get me one, but I didn’t think that she would after everything that had happened.

  My stepdad and my mom had taken me to a big music store. They had let me pick out a guitar amp. It had cost them three-hundred-and-seventy-five dollars.

  I wanted to be happy and excited about it, but I couldn’t be. My mom was in a bad mood. She really didn’t want to buy it for me.

  I can’t even remember having a birthday cake. I was thankful for the amp though.

  I started hanging out with Chuck and drinking more. We had even tried acid.

  I was going down a bad path in my life. I did have Chuck to hang out with, but I felt like I was all alone. Chuck had his own issues.

  I hated my life. I didn’t even try to see a future for myself.

  Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday is when I had messed up my life. Chuck and I had gone over the edge.

  I had lied to my mom and had told her that I was staying at Chuck’s house. Chuck wasn’t staying at his house because his dad was in the hospital. He was staying at his brother’s. He told his brother that he was staying at my house.

  We both had drunk all afternoon and into the night. We had started down at the park with a fifth of whiskey. Then we ended up at someone’s house. They had beer.

  We were told that we could stay there for the night. As the night went on, Chuck got drunk. When Chuck gets drunk, well he wants to fight.

  He had gotten us kicked out of there. A guy named John said that we could sleep on his porch.

  John was my height and a little over weight. He had been to jail several times. I didn’t like him, because I knew that he wasn’t someone that could be trusted. It didn’t matter how I felt about him, because we needed a place to stay.

  Once we got to the alley, I had released that I had dropped my cigarettes. I had went back and found what I could. When we got back to the alley, John was gone.

  We didn’t know where he lived or where he had gone. We just walked around town. We stopped at the school’s playground to rest.

  Chuck was getting upset. He wanted to go back and fight everyone in the house that we had just got kicked out of. Then he wanted to go find John and kick his ass.

  We started walking again and he kept talking. There was talk about the world being messed up and about suicide. He had talked about one us shooting the other and then shooting ourselves.

  We had decided to go to his dad’s house. He wanted to get his gun. I just listen to him talk.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want him to turn on me. Chuck had never tried to fight m
e, but I was scared of him.

  When we go to his dad’s house, we just couldn’t walk in. Chuck had his key taken away before his dad left for surgery. We had to figure out a way to get unnoticed by the neighbors.

  We were drunk but not stupid enough to try breaking in the front door, so we had to go to the back door. There was a privacy fence standing between us and the door. The fence wasn’t what had bothered us, it was what could be only the other side that did.

  Chuck’s dad breeds German Shepherds. Sometimes his dad would leave them out in the backyard. I thought we would have heard them barking, but Chuck said that they didn’t bark a lot.

  “They’re your dogs,” I said. “You got to go first.”

  “They don’t like me,” he replied.

  “I’m not going over first,” I said.

  We couldn’t just stand there. We had to do something or keep walking. He ripped off a panel of the fence.

  We looked in the back yard and no dogs. They were put up in the kennel. Chuck started over the fence.

  The board that he had ripped off allowed for footing on the cross board. It made it easy to go over the fence.

  Once over the fence, we went to the back door. The back patio door was unlock, but the main house door wasn’t. We couldn’t pick a lock, so we had to bust out a window. This is where I had to step up.

  Chuck had taken his shirt off and folded it up. He placed it on the window and held it with both hands.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Punch it.”

  I was afraid of doing this for two reasons. First reason was that I knew that it would make a lot of noise. The second reason was having the glass fall on my arm. I pulled back and punched the shirt.

  I was thankful that I had pulled my hand back quickly. The double glass window went straight to the floor. I was amazed by the way it sounded when it hit the floor. Chuck had reached in and unlocked the door.

  “We got to be quick,” he said.

  We made sure not to turn on the lights except for the refrigerator. We finished off his dad’s beer and wine coolers.

  We went to his dad’s room first. He kept saying that his dad had a gun too. We couldn’t get into his dad’s room because it was locked. He was scared of his dad. He wasn’t going to break into his bedroom.

  We gave up on his dad’s room and then went to Chuck’s room. He had his windows covered good so we could turn on his bedroom light.