The Crazy Stuff

Thinking back on my life as a kid, I am amazed that I lived past the age of ten. Daily life sometimes seemed to be a series of near-fatal mishaps. Seriously. The shit little dumbass boys do. How the hell do male children survive? If mothers knew the totally insane and dangerous shit their male offspring do when their parents aren't around, they'd probably all have heart attacks.

One time when I was nine or ten I climbed up this giant granite road cut (in Decatur GA--same granite formation that created Stone Mountain). The engineers had routed a road so that the construction crews had to blast and slice through a granite outcrop and there was then about a 30-foot high cliff beside the road. One of my pals said that we should scale it. Like mountain climbers going to the top of an ice-capped summit.

I liked that idea. Of climbing a mountain and reaching high above treeline where the snow never melted. It didn't matter that I lived just outside Atlanta and it was summer with no hint of temperatures under 88 degrees. To an adult mind the fantasy of snow and glaciers was silly. But I was a kid. Hell, yes, I figured. That seemed like a perfect idea. Let's climb that sumbitchin' cliff!

So, up we went. First there was a grassy embankment that probably sloped up to something akin to a pitch of about 40 degrees. But there was plenty of green blades of grass to hold to keep from sliding or falling down. Enough of a purchase to get us up to the granite where we could find handholds and ledges to put our feet. Just at the edge of the rock I was having doubts (I had looked down--big mistake). But somehow I made it up until I was at the granite and about ten feet above the road.

I looked down again. My pal--a kid named Paul I knew from school--was back at the road on safe, level ground.

"What the heck, man?!"

"It's too steep," he yelled up to me.

"You didn't even make it to the rock!" I wanted to tell him that he was a fucking asshole, but I didn't.

He shrugged.

Hell with it, I figured. I was already committed. So up I went.

At first it was easy. The road crews had left wide ledges from their blasting and jackhammers. You could almost stand on them. Not quite, but almost. I kept climbing. After about ten more vertical feet I got to a point where the places to hold on were getting sketchy, and my tennis shoes were on little outcrops that extended only deep enough for my toes--maybe an inch more. And then I did the stupid thing again.

I looked down.

Paul wasn't only not climbing anymore, he was gone. And I saw that the drop was not like the grassy slope at a disturbing but survivable 40-degree inclination--it was straight the fuck down. Like Wile E. Coyote down. Puff of dust and broken bones down. I could then see myself falling, but not getting up. I felt the fist of mortality squeezing my guts and a voice inside my fragile cranium telling me that I had fucked the goddamned fuck up.

Holy shit.

I couldn't hug the face of the artificial cliff, but I did as near an approximation of that as I could. I pushed up as close to the surface of that warm Georgia granite as possible, trying to meld with it, squinting my eyes and wondering how in the name of Steve Ditko I was going to get down.

The next thing I did was also stupid. I looked up. Holy Jesus. I was only halfway to the top. And the handholds were just as crappy. I squinted my eyes and wanted to scream. Cars below me were whizzing by, oblivious to the dumbass kid clinging to the rock face above them. Or maybe not oblivious, but just terribly amused.

What the hell was I going to do? How was I going to get down?

And here's the thing.

I have zero recollection of how I did get down.

None. Zilch.

All I can tell you is that I did get down, or maybe up. It's possible that I climbed the rest of the way up and bellied myself over the edge of the cliff to the pine forest above. Or maybe I edged to my left, closer to that crazy-steep grassy incline and came down that way. I seriously have no freaking idea how I got down. I seem to have blotted it from my mind.

Sometimes, when I'm half-awake and recalling that moment of extreme but also somehow average moment of male-child stupidity, my thoughts veer off into a dark world created by Philip K Dick and I'll muse that I didn't get down. I'll start to think that somewhere between climbing the rest of the way up, or edging my way to the grass and scooting down that embankment of green chlorophyll vegetation...well...that I fell to my death and that the rest of my life is just a way Death gave me to soften the blow. What if that kid Paul saw it happen and went screaming for someone to scrape his dumbass pal's bloody corpse off of the side of the road? What if that is the way it went down and the Grim Reaper just gave me a confusing dream to make it all a little less cruel?

And so here I am waiting to hit the pavement at some point.

What my spider sense really told me was that I had just totally fucked up.