I must've been younger than twelve. Twelve marked the advent of a major age in my life. That's when I became a boy scout. That's when I learned how to drink and smoke and learned that girls really didn't have cooties after all.
I'm thinking I was younger than twelve because I wasn't hanging out with Mike Lane yet. And I wasn't smoking.
I was getting around the neighborhood though. Admiral Boulevard was, back then, in the early sixties, an action place to be. From Sheridan on East to Memorial there were a lot of interesting places kids could walk to and hang out. There was Sheridan Village Shopping Center (Which no longer exists) at Admiral and Sheridan. Anchored at the Memorial end by EastGate Shopping Center. Back at Admiral and Sheridan there was the salvage yard, uh, Zeligson's. It actually had military trucks in it. We would climb under the fence and explore all day long.
There was the A & W Rootbeer stand, home of the famous rootbeer float and Frito-chili pie. There was also a drive-in. Maybe this drive-in was there before A & W and maybe not. I don't know. But it was one of those places where you could drive in and park and order food from your car. But you could also eat inside. You could sit in the booths and order songs from the juke-box which had a selection kiosk right there at your table. You would turn metal pages that listed all the hot songs of the day. Put in a quarter and play one. Then move on to the next. If enough kids were there, you would wait all day for your song.
Jubilee City was down the road, just before the Babtist church, which was a ways across the street from the entrance to Admiral Twin Drive in theater.
During these particular days I'm writing about right now, David Kinder was just finding out that he had to move so that 'They' could tear down his house and Guy Mckanelly's house and Billy Poulos' and lots of other houses in that neighborhood so that they could build the new Interstate highway that we would soon call the Crosstown Expressway.
At this time much of the place was just an empty expanse that kids liked to walk on and explore. It was also an obstacle on the way from my house to Admiral Boulevard and Jubilee City and the A & W.
One day I was alone walking across a vacant lot that hadn't been torn up for the highway just yet. I was going to the drive in because it was summer and I was bored and that was what we did back then. There were a bunch of new piles of dirt there and I was running up them and down them and looking for turtles and snakes and whatever I could find. I ran up one hill and stumbled a little and came down on a knee and looked there in the weeds and there it was. Staring at me. A HUMAN SKULL.
No, it was not fake.
It was a real bonafied actual real honest to God head bone of a dead and past human being.
MY GOD, what have I found.
I took it straight home.
I showed everybody I knew on the way.
I sat in my room and stared at this awesome (no wait - the word wasn't awesome back then). It was COOL. No, maybe it was even NEATO. Gawd it was super, though super wouldn't be useable as an adjective for another decade or more.
Whatever.
I had a human skull.
The top of the head was chopped clean off. Like someone took an axe and smacked it. But they must've hit it twice because in the front there was an area that looked like the axe hit it without going all the way through and then it was hit again, that time scalping the guy (or gal) really good. It was so small. I guess we all look a lot smaller when the hair and nose and skin and meat and stuff are gone.
It had a couple of teeth. No lower jaw.
The back of the skull was also gone. Chopped away just like the top.
The area where its brain once sat and thought was all smooth and lumpy, like cauliflour, only lumpy inward, like a braincase and not outward like cauliflour. The cheeks didn't look like cheeks at all because, as I learned that day, cheeks aren't made of much bone. The nose was just a large and unsetteling, gaping opening in its face.
My sisters hated it.
I was in love.
This was so much cooler than anyone or anything I had ever known.
I had a skull. And it wasn't a cow skull, like Jimmie Houston had. It wasn't a snake skull like Mr. Lindsay had. It was human. A real human skull
I showed Mom.
She freaked.
"Throw that thing away".
"Get it out of my house".
I ran outside clutching my new prize.
And hid it.
Then I got lost. Back then the kids weren't coddled up in the house all day. They were kicked out at dawn and told not to come home before dark. They roamed the neighborhood playing ball and riding bikes and walking to Jubilee City and going to the drive up restaurant. That's where I went. I was sitting inside there looking at the jukebox selection at the table with some friends when somebody came inside and said, "Bobby, there's a cop outside looking for you".
"Huh? A cop? Huh?"
I looked. Sure enough there was a cop car. Walking in the door of the restaurant was a real life policeman. He came over to me. Asked if I was Bobby. "Uh, yea".
He asked me to come sit in his car.
Dumfounded, that's just what I did.
He asked me if I had found a human skull that day.
"No sir".
"Look son. This is important. I've been told by your mother that you did find a skull. You need to tell me where it is before you get into a lot of trouble".
Ok.
He drove me to the house. Pretty cool. We drove out of that drive in restaurant with a bunch of my friends looking on with wide open mouths.
I got the skull and gave it to him.
There was a small article in the paper, which didn't mention my name, that told about a skull being discovered.
Months later they called and said we could come and get it and have it back. They said they couldn't figure out who it belonged to and they thought it must've been thrown away by a medical school or something.
Lots of years later I decided to become a hippie and entrusted a lot of my belongings to some 'friends' to keep for me while I hitched to adventure. I was pretty naive. That could have been when I lost it. Or it could have been when I went to the Navy. My mother says she 'thinks' that my sister finally did throw it away.
I'll never know I guess.
Though I did read in the news about a year or so ago that some drug users got arrested and a human skull was found in their home. And it makes me wonder.
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