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Court Street Christmas

The Source

I’ve been blessed with some wild experiences in my life….stranded in the middle of Spain with 30 hungry teenagers, riding an Italian airlines when the cockpit window blew out, and I’ve taken hay rack rides in Pike County, but nothing…nothing compared with my single semester on Court Street. The house is no longer there. In fact, it was barely there when it was there. Our little trio of college boys had rented the third floor apartment for an exorbitant rent of $150 a month. We had to walk through the living room of the first floor apartment to reach the second and third floors, and since we were essentially being housed in the attic, the roof slanted toward the east and west, allowing only a narrow aisle down the middle where we could actually stand up to our full height. Three of us: Me, my friend Parks, and a guy who never gave his real name. Parks would pick up stray friends, bring them home, and he’d be asked to pay his third of the rent. I found that guys without names seldom pay their rent. It was a cozy little arrangement, complete with three cots and a hotplate. Every night Parks would make garlic-infused tomato soup. He would buy dill pickles, throw the pickles away and drink the juice. In fact, I’ve seen him order dill pickle juice in restaurants. (Only one place in town saved it for him.) I tell you all this to say that we were not normal. But we were white bread, unobjectionable, upstanding Presbyterians compared to the McCoys who lived next door. We never knew their last names. Oh, we were aware of all their first names because they’d yell them to each other all night long. How do I describe the McCoys? There had to be inbreeding involved. All three boys were identical and they were not twins. The mother was not married to the father and there were hoards of uncles who seemed to be related to no one. If the McCoys had an occupation, I suppose they’d be called mechanics. Every night, sometime after 10 p.m., they’d start working on their cars. I assume that’s what they were doing. The cars had plenty of throttle but no mufflers. It was much like the Indianapolis 500, but instead of a solemn playing of “My Indiana Home,” Mrs. McCoy would be begin the festivities with a string of profanities aimed at either her husband, one of the uncles, the three strange boys, or the lamppost, then the gentlemen would start their engines. Aside from Parks’ addiction to garlic and dill pickle juice, we were normal college students and at least in those days we had studies to do. The trick was to tackle all subjects that required intense concentration before Mrs. McCoy would explode at 10 o’clock and the pistons would start screaming. But they did more than rev their engines. I remember walking out the door for my eight o’clock class and seeing Mr. McCoy sleeping in a tree. He was in the tree, sound asleep! How do you do that? Heck, I admired the guy’s balance! Holidays were occasion for mega celebrations at the McCoy mansion, as they’d invite hoards of people who looked eerily like the McCoys, to an orgy of six packs and Jack Daniels. These guests also brought their own cars with circumcised mufflers. The saving grace is that the three inhabitants of our third-story apartment went home for most of the holiday. I’m not sure we’d have survived otherwise. But the strangest part of all this had little to do with the McCoy madness. It was Parks. My buddy had the ability to study through anything. No amount of commotion could get his attention away from Chaucer or chemistry. I’d look out the window and say, “I’m going crazy with all that noise!” and Parks would look up from his book and say, “Huh?” He hadn’t noticed a thing. (He also had the strange habit of going to sleep with his head resting on the textbook for whatever test he had the next morning. Parks believed in intellectual osmosis.) I often think of Parks as Christmas season approaches. There will be times that many of us will return from shopping areas so disgusted with the bastardization of Christmas that we’ll feel like chucking the whole thing and celebrating in mid-July when it’s quiet. My advice is that we all be like Parks … simply concentrate on the task, the celebration, the joy that lies before us and not get terribly upset about the melee taking place in the McCoys’ front yard. May we all enjoy this season in the simplicity of the original event. A baby, a mother, a father, and barn…even if the donkey needs a muffler.