Oh, The Memories

This post is just a random memory I thought of this morning. I'm not sure what triggered it, but I did chuckle a bit when I did remember it.

Sit back, pour yourself a cup of something, and read on. Or not.

Back in the old days, when I was 15 years old, my family moved from one small town in one state to another small town in a different state. Of course, I was pissed. Being uprooted and all, having to leave my friends and move to a strange town with strangers living in it, but that's the thing about small towns. You acclimate quickly. I soon met new friends, and life began again.

I also met new enemies.

In this town lived the Brunsons. The parents, two sons, and two daughters. They lived on a small ranch where they raised horses and whatever else, more as a hobby than a livelihood. The dad had a job to support the family and supplement the ranch.

The sons were a year or two older than me, one of the daughters my age, and one daughter a couple years younger. And before you ask, the daughter my age was okay looking with a knockout shape, cheerleader, friendly, peppy, all those requirements for the cheerleader sort. The only exception to the rule is that she was also a brain.
The younger daughter was - well, she was a hottie. Veeeerrrrrry cute and shapely. In fact, I dated her a couple times. But she wasn't really my type. Just didn't click. So I found someone else.
As for the sons looks, dunno. Don't care. I ain't into guys or what they look like. All I know is that they were assholes. They were pretty much our neighborhood bullies. Since it was a small town, the whole town was basically a neighborhood.

So anyway, like I said, they were bullies. The only people who liked them were their own damn selves and maybe their parents. I learned to dislike them in a hurry. They rubbed me the wrong way as soon as I 'met' them, and soon learned just what pricks they were. I'll define 'met' momentarily.

The main reason my family moved to that town was because of a job opportunity for my parents. My dad had lost his job, my mother never really worked, and an old acquaintance of my dad's asked him if he wanted to move to a new town and manage a convenience store he had just purchased. So the short story is that I ended up working at the convenience store, with my parents as the managers. I was cashier, stock boy, assistant manager, whatever else, on nights after school and on weekends, with a regular shift during the summer.

The Brunson boys would drive some old knocked out piece of shit pick-up (their dad's truck actually, until they finally bought their own car) around town. They would come to the store - which is where I met them - on a regular basis and buy goodies and sodas, always trying to get me to sell them smokes and beer. They were underage for both, and would get all bent when I wouldn't sell them their vices. So leave in a huff they did, only to return yet another day and try again.
Maybe what pissed them off the most was that I would sell contraband to underage kids I liked and trusted to not report me. After all, the underage people I sold the shit to were the same age as I was. I figgered I was old enough so they were too. :) Maybe that's why the law won't let minors sell booze and smokes to other minors?

Anyway, the Brunsons didn't like it when I turned them down. So I was soon on their shit list.
Now in a small town, being on a shit list is different than in a big town. You can avoid people in big towns. In small towns, you see the same people - or their associates - pretty much on a daily basis. There is only one school, one church, one post office, one everything.

Of course, by virtue of me being on their shit list, they were immediately on my shit list. I had friends too. These friends liked the Brunsons no more than I did and were willing to assist me in any way possible of ridding the town of the scourge that was the Brunsons. Since the Brunsons were much bigger and ornerier than we, we opted for the passive-aggressive approach to equalization.
If they were in a hurry to wash their car before a a date, sorry. The car wash (we also ran the only car wash in town) needed attention. It couldn't be used right now. Move along.
They wanted to buy something in particular from the store? Nope. We were out. Or it was time to count out the cash register at the end of the shift.

Now the convenience store we ran also had a small apartment attached to it where we lived. We would literally walk out of the kitchen, through the stockroom and into the store. Made it handy for taking lunch breaks and so on, but it was also unhandy, in that there were always cars coming and going.
The street out in front of the store sloped somewhat and the lot needed to be leveled, so the store and apartment had been built upon a fair amount of fill. This left about a four foot drop-off on one side of our parking lot, 15 feet or so from the front door of the apartment. No fence or anything, but a bit of a slope that could be driven down if you had decent clearance under your vehicle. Cars were too low, but trucks and motorcycles could ease off the edge and on to the other businesses if they wanted.
Some liked to drive through the gravel lot and off that drop-off, through what basically amounted to a sort of back alley. It wasn't really an alley but more of a dirt road running behind the businesses next to ours. But like I said, the front door of the apartment faced the hill and at times it was rather obnoxious having cars go back and forth there.

The Brunsons however, wouldn't ease off the edge. They like to take it about 25 or so, bouncing off the hill, kicking up dust and making a rather large racket whooping and hollering in a blaze of automotive glory. This really interrupted our quiet time in the apartment, and was quite annoying.
So my friends and I got this brilliant idea. We thought that if we rolled a few large rocks just over the edge of the hill, people going slow would see them and avoid them. People bounding over the edge wouldn't. Well, that worked like a charm. The first time the Brunsons went charging over the edge, oblivious to the rocks, there was all sorts of banging and clanging as their truck was beat to shit bouncing on rocks. Thereafter, the hill was taken at a slower speed or avoided altogether.

Of course, I denied any involvement, but I still got the evil eye every time they came in the store.

Anyway, the daughter I dated ended up marrying someone and moving out of town. The other daughter married someone local and ended up with seven (count 'em SEVEN) kids.
Don't know whatever happened to the Brunson boys though. They're probably dead or in jail somewhere.



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