Fields of Gold: The Yellow Terror

Just an intro for you, Fields of gold is a series I'll do to recap the horrors and terrors that laid in wait for my brother and I at our grandmother's house on weekend visits. Each will detail a different thing, or event that made up my childhood, and may give you all insight as to why I'm so fucked up.

--------------

Looking back on my young life, dear reader (readers?) I would have to say that some of my fondest memories stemmed from my time (Mostly weekends due to custody bullshit) at my Grandma and Grandpa (God bless his soul)'s house somewhere in the country (Sorry, not Mapquesting it for you. Its best you don't know.). Every Friday either or Grandparent would pick us up after school in the '82 Oldsmobile my Grandfather won in the lottery some years before (maybe it was, oh, I don't know.. 1982?), and take us to their humble abode, which I will will detail in further entries. While on the way we would regularly stop at a fringe game rental shoppe and rent the coolest newest NES games, like Jaws... and..... Jaws 2....

Our grandpa used to work for Frito Lay as a truck driver, and Grand ma as a bus driver, transporting RabbleRousers to and from learning establishments and it was with this job she somehow acquired a broken down bus which served as storage and generalized unaesthetics as it sat motionless at the side of the house.What this meant for the young impressionable Fortune children was that we had a place to hang, to play, to just be. And on certain harebrained occasions, a place to climb on top of and jump 20 feet off of onto the rocky and broken glass covered ground (seriously.). Stupid? Yes. Crazy, Fun? Also yes. But, suicidal jumps aside, the bus was the focal point of numerous play adventures, some of which involved playing "SPEED". I was Keanu Reeves!!!! Among the articles stored inside this bus was an old desk from the depression and a ham radio, presumably from WW2 (my grandfather was a veteran!) and assorted junk (COMING SOON: THE STORY OF THE JUNK!). One article I'll never forget. We stumbled upon a bottle of motor oil within the Yellow Terror (That's what we called it, or, what I'm calling it now.) We shook the bottle and heard there was something inside. Curious youths that we were, we opened the bottle. What we found inside was a quarter of unused motor oil, and a mouse. Yes, a fucking mouse. A dead one. (Of course, right? Mice cant live in sealed motor oil bottles... Right? RIGHT?!). Its still very unclear after all these years how it got into the bottle in the first place, as attempts to remove him proved unsuccessful. He was too big to get out, so how'd he manage entry, then close the bottle behind him? How long was he in there? As far as I knew, no one else entered the bus, and I doubt anyone there would put a mouse in a bottle of motor oil and close it. If he was there for a long time, why didn't he decompose at all?

We diced to do the right thing and send the mouse off in one of our many bonfires. The mystery remains to this day unsolved. Now, the glory of the Yellow Terror was not without its problems and tragedies. (That is of course, to say that jumping off it isn't a problem.) Being in a countrylike setting meant mother nature could pretty much have her way with whatever the fuck she wanted and the cops would turn a blind eye because she was paying them all off, which meant my nemesis species, the Vespid Wasp, otherwise known as the YellowJacket thought the Yellow Terror to be his home. This made co-existing difficult, and at times when we didn't have RAID, impossible.

The good (?) times eventually were cut short by what can be chalked up to an act of money-needing. the bus had to be sold for scrap! The local Towboy hitched that mutha up and proceeded to haul her away, when she suddenly awoke and realized what was happening. Acting on impulse, she forced one of her own wheels off in a last ditch effort to remain beside the house. It failed, and what remained after she was gone was a giant gash from the axle in both the driveway, and the dirt road leading up to it.

One last fuck you from the Yellow Terror.