Probably the most exciting and adventurous thing I’ve done in life was to become a songwriter. I was back from Graphic Design School and unsuccessfully looking for work. I never felt very excited about being a page layout artist, which is what graphic design mostly entailed. I was following through on an idea someone else had for me to be a graphic artist. I also had no better ideas and felt I needed to do something…..anything before I was too much of a loser to ever move out of my Mom’s garage. While I was in school, I bought a twelve string guitar and taught myself to play. I’ve been interested in playing music since before I was born. I was making beats in the womb. Somehow, I never considered it as a career option and it was never presented as such.

1991, I went to see a music show in a little club called “Luna” in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Marshall Crenshaw was one of three, slightly obscure, songwriters doing the show. He was the only one I’d ever heard of. I had two of his cassettes that had no hit songs. I don’t know why I even knew who he was. Eventually he had a Hugely popular song called “Someday, Someway” and also appeared as Buddy Holly in “La Bamba”, the movie. During the “In their own words tour”, I was incredibly, amazingly, overly inspired. I was so excited that I felt that I must share my epiphany with Marshall Crenshaw! I was so shaken up by the idea of just making a living writing songs, that I was vibrating and profusely sweating as I informed the inspirational and highly accessible music artist all about it. Like I was the first person to ever figure that out. Except, of course for Marshall Crenshaw, who obviously previously figured that out. He actually was concerned about my nervousness and said in his cool voice,” Hey man, you all right? You gonna be okay?” It was then that I realized I was over zealous and was really freaking out Marshall Crenshaw. I strictfully informed him that I would move to Austin, Texas and become a songwriter like him. He calmly reassured me that Austin was a good town for music. So I moved to Austin very, very soon.

I started out dominating open mics all over town. I became a regular at the Saxon Pub on Thursday evenings . Owen Murrell was the host and introduced me in a serious and booming voice with pauses between my first…middle…..and last names. He introduced everyone that way. After the mostly mediocre open mic performers, Rusty Wier would headline the late show. He was a blast. He was a great performer and drank a lot of tequila shots. The bartenders loved the money he brought in with the crowd. I was broke, so I never left the bar after the open mic, so my girlfriend and I never paid a cover charge. For some reason, Rusty took a liking to me. Probably because I wore a signature hat like he did, and I reminded him of a younger, less talented himself. He often would insert my name into the song he was singing as I made my way through the crowded room. It was a great feeling. Rusty had written a song that was included on the “Urban Cowboy” soundtrack. “Don’t it make you wanna dance” sung by Bonnie Raitt. He was friends with another local songwriter, Jerry Jeff Walker who wrote the hit song, “Mr. Bojangles”, made famous by Sammy Davis Jr. Mr. Jerry Jeff Walker happened to be hanging out one afternoon following the open mic. I was also very much there. Owen Murrell was talking to Jerry Jeff when I interrupted and thanked Jerry Jeff for sending me advice on music. I actually had sent him a tape before I moved to Austin and I thought he sent it back with the kind advice to read a book called,”This business of music”. He enthusiastically told me that it was just the standard thing his wife, Susan, does with unsolicited tapes and he had nothing to do with it. I politely asked him to thank his wife for me then. He just grumbled at me. I was obviously bothering him but I loved his music so I really didn’t notice his despite for me. I honestly knew two of his albums by heart. Owen asked him if he wanted to play a few songs and he thought out loud and muttered, “I’m not sure what to play”. I immediately interjected with many, many random Jerry Jeff Walker song titles -like I was asked to help him out. About ten minutes later, I noticed Jerry Jeff standing alone, listening to Slaid Cleaves playing on the stage. He was the talented open mic headliner. I thought to myself, this would be a great chance to have a real moment with Jerry Jeff. I stood next to him and confidently told him to remember my name, Sidney…. Vance…..Stephens, because I was going to make it someday and he should remember my name, Sidney. …Vance….Stephens. I could feel the shiver of bone chilling blood, running down his spine. He didn’t even look at me. He couldn’t.

I’m highly ashamed of that moment, but he kind of had it coming. He could’ve been a little nicer to me. I only admit to this horrible behavior because I wonder if it became relevant many years later.

I moved to Nashville for many years but eventually returned to Austin. I saw Rusty Wier again, but so much time, and tequila, had passed that he did not remember me. I was a little hurt but I understood. If you don’t stay active in the music world, you’re forgotten easily.

A few more years passed by and I sadly heard that Rusty was not doing so well. He had pancreatic cancer. He made an appearance at a local bar where he was showered with an abundance of love. He was crippled and very weak as everyone surrounded him as he made his way through the crowd. I spoke to him and told him how good it made me feel when he sang my name all those years ago at the Saxon Pub. He didn’t remember me at all, but was smiling. That’s the last time the public saw Rusty.

He passed away a few weeks later with his good friend Jerry Jeff Walker by his bedside.

And if this story is relative, I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, the moment before Rusty Wier took his last breath, he suddenly looked up and remembered me, and said my name aloud, and Jerry Jeff Walker turned his head in confusion and heard a distant booming voice…..

SIDNEY……….

VANCE……….

STEPHENS!!

And Jerry Jeff would have remembered my name.

I once impaled my own eardrum with a Q-tip. I was multitasking by letting the cotton swab soak up the excess moisture in my ear after a refreshing shower and brushing my hair simultaneously. My arm raised up and my bicep jammed the resting implement right through my ear canal. It was very loud and jolting due to the incredibly close proximity. Then it continuously made the disturbing sound of a ripping plastic swimming pool inside my cranium. Luckily, it was during the late afternoon and I could get to a doctors office instead of an emergency room. Unluckily, my only mode of transportation was a motorcycle. I learned that day how much physical balance is reliant on the equilibrium created by the complex workings of the inner human ear. Physical balance is also a key component in the operation of a motorcycle. I very unsafely rode twenty-five miles to see the doctor. There was much weaving and wobbling on my journey. The treatment for a broken eardrum is to break it even more. It’s called scarification and it’s just as sadistic as the name implies. It’s not incredibly painful, but it leaves the subject in a state of dismal confusion. Even better for a challenging after dusk motorcycle ride back home.  At one point, I had both feet skiing on the pavement for balance at fifty-five miles per hour.  Sadly, that was not the only time I had done that, but that’s another story involving a facial chemical burn, a heat enhancing safety helmet facing the sun, and a much higher speed of travel.

The moral of this tale is that there is a legitimate reason the Q-Tip people tell us NOT to use their product in the only way we can conceive of how to use it.

I just google searched a person who made me sad and angry in 1985. Jerry Tillespie. It’s about time. 31 years. And yeah, he seems to be doing fine.

He was one of those kids that exuded confidence. His hair naturally fell perfect on his slightly larger than average cranium. He was built like an athlete and was , of course, taller than the average eleventh grader. He played football and went to church. He was the teacher’s favorite and not just because his Father helped to financially support the Agriculture department. He was handsome and had his future waiting on him.

I was a sophomore in High School. I was in class, sitting at the end of a long, slightly oval, simulated wood laminated table. The Ag teacher, Mr. Werner, was sitting directly across at the other end, quizzing the entire classroom of students sitting at the over-sized table about the information we were all supposed to have read the day before. I actually read it all but retained none of it. That seemed to be quite common with my learning skills. It was an abundance of information about cotton farming. I remember thinking it was incredibly boring and not what I had been studying the previous semester at my last school. For some reason, I was glorifying the study of artificially inseminating cows. I’m not a weirdo, that’s what we were doing in my previous Ag class. It was easy to belittle cotton farming in comparison. Ranchers are way more cool than farmers. Everyone knows that.

I had recently moved from a small town, that had no cotton farms, in a different state, that had a lot of ranches. I had good friends and was at a school I actually enjoyed attending with good teachers. I tried to stay at that school, in that town, on my own. My single Mother household broke apart halfway through my Sophomore year. She moved to a different town one weekend after promising me she would not uproot me again until I graduated High School. She broke her promise and I was angry. So I stayed. At fifteen, I was bouncing around surrogate homes with my friends. I made it four months, living with three different friends and their families. I ran away from the first family when I discovered that my Mom was secretly coming to get me after my friend’s parents had grown weary of the situation. I hid my back-pack, full of my belongings under a tree the night before, so my friend’s parents wouldn’t see I was leaving. I was highly dedicated to not living with my Mom in her new town.

So I had a few troubles in my life and was just trying to survive. Eventually, I wound up living with my severely alcoholic Dad, in my Aunt’s house, in a different new town, in a new state, with no cows in sight.

It was Jerry Tillespie who welcomed me by making me sad. If I could go back in time, I would have, perhaps, made him more aware and sensitive to my situation.

I would do the same for Mr. Werner. I’m not sure why he treated me the way he did. My instinct tells me that he was just an insensitive asshole. Once every two weeks, the class would load up into an old, ratty, school bus and visit the Ag Farm, five-point two miles away. The more physical students would gather up and highly enthusiastically push-start the bus. It had a perpetually dead battery. I suppose that created an instant nostalgia for the upper middle class white kids. The same more popular kids would practice welding in the shop while the less popular kids would put on supplied rubber boots and clean the livestock pens. There were only two pair of slip over, protective rubber boots. Apparently, Mr. Werner did not expect a third loser kid at the farm and was not so prepared as to get a third pair of protective boots. He had me clean the pig pens while wearing my own cowboy boots or get a zero grade for the class. Pig feces has a very particular and potent aroma.  We returned to the school after I massively failed the attempt to hose off my nasty boots. The science class, that was extremely vocally unaware of the source of the powerful stench, was highly relieved when I finally walked out of class, never to return. The overbearing stink rose from the floor under my desk, slowly upward and spread across the classroom like a deathly flatulent ghost. I tried to ignore it as long as possible, knowing that if I left, everyone would know it was me. And there is no explanation for that much putrid stink. I couldn’t say to strangers, “Oh, that smell? It’s pig crap! I’m covered in it!” I just couldn’t go back to school after that. I would start out headed to school, but turn around and walk back home in the mornings. It wasn’t long before I dropped out of school.

In the short time I was at that school, I truly came to understand why kids snap and commit horrific violence. I was bullied by jocks. I was ignored and put down by teachers and made an example of. I was getting very poor grades and didn’t understand why. Not much had changed based on the grade percentage numbers on my papers. I eventually discovered that no one bothered to inform me that the State’s grading system was entirely different than my previous school. No one took any time with me at all, and no one cared that I quit.

A few days before the pig poo incident, I was called on by Mr. Werner in class. I was probably daydreaming, slumped behind a thick textbook, or possibly drawing my “Super Goober” cartoons in my notebook that was hidden inside the textbook. I wasn’t really listening to what he was talking about and was shocked that he expected me to know anything at all. I’d transferred halfway through the school year and been there less than a week. I was dorky, shy, and awkward. I was lost in this new world of strangers and lacking knowledge. I was socially inept. I dressed like I was poverty stricken and with an astonishing lack of style. I had no friends and no confidence. I had a unsophisticated walk like Charlie Chaplin impersonating a penguin. The last thing I needed was to be publicly called upon, exposing all of my frailties at once, in a room full of unkind strangers. But, after a few minutes went by, the teacher called on me again. He was testing me, which would be OK, but he also knew what the outcome would be, which made him a bully. This time, I knew exactly what he was talking about but didn’t tell him the answer out of defiance. I felt like I should have received a little credit for acknowledging the question at the very least, but no. I felt like I should get a little praise for having minimal eye contact and trying to engage at all. but no. The room was increasingly cold and judgmental. I started to feel the pressure and began to withdraw into my metaphorical insecurity shell. The third time I was blatantly called upon to answer a question I obviously knew nothing about, I simply replied, “I don’t know” the moment he finished asking. The person sitting next to the teacher was unprovoked when he stated, “Whut DO you know?- is whut I’D like to know!” The whole class chuckled at Jerry Tillespie’s snappy dim wit, including the teacher. Then it became quiet as everyone stared at me and I slipped deep into my shell of shame and discontent, never to expose myself again. I somehow missed the hilarity of his comment.

I would berate them all if I could go back. I would rise up against the confident and secure. I would hand Mr. Werner his ass in a swine crap covered boot. I would state the obvious. That a kid like me needs patience, compassion, empathy, and understanding. A guiding hand. A simple conversation to assess my unique and troubled situation, then a plan to help me respond with confidence. But there’s no going back. I can only write and complain about it thirty-one years later. I credit myself highly for not blowing up the entire school. Instead, I dropped out and remained uneducated and lost for most of my life.

I also understand that this is only my personal recollection of these events, and they are biased. I think it’s allowed to have a skewed memory based on the fact that I felt like I was treated horribly. I feel like I was failed by the people society entrusted to educate and empower me. I feel angry and resentful for their uncaring attitude. And I cannot forgive the embarrassment and anguish it caused me. It didn’t have to be that way.

I could have failed just fine without their help.

We were traveling back from our family vacation. Shortly after getting on the road, Cody mentioned he had to go to the bathroom. It is always alarming to hear these words from a child, as you can never truly know the severity of urgency. I took the first exit off of the interstate that seemed safe and clean enough for Cody. He’s quite particular when it comes to public restrooms, and absolutely everything else. Not unlike all other 8 year old boys with or without A.D.H.D.

We hurriedly entered the truck-stop and found the restroom. Of course, it was requested that I clean off the toilet, so like a tentative and caring father, I did. I explained the importance of wiping down the front of the throne, where your pants touch, because usually, it has been dribbled with someone else’s urine. I think my actual words were,”Don’t forget to clean this part”, while smiling, to ease the harshness of the lesson. If I had mentioned urine, he would have completely lost his mind.

So I patiently waited outside the stall, noticing things like a lone, dirty, toilet scrubber on the floor, halfway under the sink. An odd place for that to be. There’s a story we will never know about that scrubber. And there were framed posters for sale at the entrance to the restrooms, where the foyer splits the genders using hieroglyphic stick figures as the common language of our people. A triangle at the waist specifies the female of our species, whereas, no triangle is the male. The posters on the female portal side, are of manly, shirtless men, holding manly tools, and pouting. To the left, images of curvy women, in highly precarious poses wearing non-sensible high heels, and also pouting. One poster had the 50’s model, Bettie Page covered in tasteless tattoo’s, poorly photo-shopped, giving the appearance of lick-and-stick temporary tattoos from a quarter machine in a dimly lit and carpet stained corner of a deeply urban grocery store. And of course, there was the poster that unites all humankind with commonality. Any image of Marilyn Monroe. Everybody likes Marilyn Monroe.
As I paced through the florescent light reflections in the water droplets on the bleached white tile floor, I heard the toilet flushing repeatedly and saw his moving shadow through the crack in the door, I asked Cody, “is everything all right in there?” He hesitated while he organized his explanation, as he usually does, and started to answer- just as I interrupted,”If you wiggle around on the seat, the light sensor thinks you’ve left, and the toilet automatically flushes. You gotta stay still on there, you can’t move around”. He got really quiet, which is way better than arguing with me, or getting his feelings hurt. I felt a glowing sense of pride that I actually explained something, he listened, he understood, and he calmly remedied the problem. It is far more likely that his lack of response was due to being momentarily paralyzed by the enormous turd escaping his tiny body.

After I overheard Cody do the toilet paper clean up work and flush, I heard a sigh of frustration and another flush. And another. He opened the stall door and briefly looked at me with a mix of confusion, frustration, and shyness. He looked at the floor and tried to explain, “It won’t go into the hole. It’s across and won’t go down the hole.” In my years of traveling, even as a truck driver, I have seen strange and horrible things in public bathrooms, but I have never seen this before. His giant poo was laying across the bottom of the toilet bowl, like it was standing up, at one point, and someone pushed it over in front of them. It was a single, 9 1/2 inch, solid limb that was lodged in a way that could not physically be flushed down the toilet. Like a log over a creek.  A terrible physics experiment, an unsightly sight to behold, an anomaly of nature. It was shocking, then hilarious. I couldn’t help but smile, and say, “That is impressive, Cody. You may have a gift”. Cody was slowly finding humor in the situation as his genuine concern, confusion, and overall stress faded. He smiled and coyly said,”I don’t know why it’s so funny – because it’s disgusting, but it is”. I replied, in that glorious moment, “Welcome to boyhood, son. It only gets better from here”.

We stood there for a moment as I tried to devise a plan that would sink the colossal fecal obstruction. I considered using the dirty toilet scrubber on the floor to prod it into submission, but decided that it would be too gross. Then someone entered the restroom and unknowingly added chaos to our situation. I did not want to explain to a stranger why my son and I were just hanging out in a bathroom discussing the physical properties of poop, so I chose to calmly walk away instead. I probably missed an opportunity for a fatherly lesson in cleaning up after yourself and not being a disgusting and rude person, but in the awe and confusion of this situation, I felt it best to leave it to the professionals. The truck-stop janitorial staff.

There is a possibility that it may have been discovered by a tired and ragged truck driver that had an extremely uneventful day, and this might’ve lifted his spirits and enabled a renewed zest for life. It might’ve been photographed and cataloged and gone viral on the internet. It could’ve raised this particular truck-stop from financial turmoil as a tourist designated “New wonder of the world”. Or the stool may have just surrendered to the the will of gravity and eventually fell in. You never know what might have happened.

His poop was left in the hands of fate.

It was the summer of eighty-five. My friends seemed to always be looking for something when they went out at night, trouble. They usually found it and I was usually along for the ride, like an oblivious journalist following a rock band.

They had heard of someone throwing a party, like every other Friday night, but this one was different. This time, one of my friends, Timmy, was having a rivalry with some other kids at the party. I was absolutely clueless to what was going on. I was riding in the back seat of a two door car and could not hear their maniacal plan through the howling wind and six by nine inch, oval speakers blasting Van Halen’s, Jamie’s Cryin’,  in my ears. We arrived at a house in a newly constructed neighborhood and parked in the dimly moonlit yard next to a Suzuki Samurai. Timmy and Mick yelled into the now completely quiet back seat telling me to stay there as they went into the two story, upper middle class home full of smoke, music, whiskey, and beer fumes. Their command was the first moment I sensed the malcontent behavior of this particular evening. Within minutes they were coming back from the house in a hurry. Our car started and Mick  jumped in as Timmy opened the door on the Suzuki Samurai that was parked next to us. He unzipped his pants and proceeded to urinate all over the interior of the vehicle as Mick was yelling for us to escape, “Let’s Go! Let’s Go!!” And we went! I’ll never know what took place inside the house. The Suzuki Samurai loaded with three angry kids soon caught up to us as we raced down main street. There were a lot of flying finger gestures and taunting verbal insults as I decided to join in and engage my own hidden talent from the back seat, not acknowledging any danger or repercussions for my actions.

This specific one of my unique hidden talents originated years before with a tickling accident and a pickle jar involving my brother. I think that is self explanatory, but if you need more explanation, I’ll suffice. I was being violently tickled by my brother on the kitchen floor when he opened the refrigerator door, grabbed a jar of pickles, and pretended to drop it on my face. Only he forgot to pretend to drop it, resulting in a chipped front tooth that left an eight millimeter gap like Alfred E. Neuman for many years after. It bestowed upon me the talent of being able to spit a stream of liquid about 12 feet through the space between my teeth.

I filled my mouth with beer, leaned up from the back seat, and squeezed out the passenger side window. I was brilliantly streaming a line of beer spit at the Suzuki Samurai. They scientifically deduced that since I was orally projecting a liquid with so much vigor, that I was the culprit that covered their interior with a piss-like substance. They also unanimously decided they wanted to murder me.

As we sped through town, Timmy and Mick , who were much more proficient street fighters than I was, chose to stop at a dimly lit, obscure, city park, in a quiet sub-division to engage in battle. As soon as the car came to a stop, Timmy and Mick  were out, and posed, and ready as the Suzuki Samurai sideways skidded into the parking lot behind us. The angry kids were also quite prepared as they bounded from their vehicle. As they all started beating the crap out of each other, my vision became very narrow and dark. I was holding on to the door of the car as some angry kid was trying to pull me away. He was intently saying something about it being my fault and I should fight. I was not prepared to fight, in fact, I had given up fighting in the fifth grade when a tiny Mexican kid almost choked me to death in a fight that I started. I was being accused by the other angry kids as well. I could hear their voices through the scuffling and punching noises. I needed time to think. Luckily, a scientific hypothesis of space and time relativity kicked in. I have found that Time usually slows down for me in these intense situations. As my arms were being strenuously tugged and stretched, I calmly thought to myself, “I should just explain this whole situation. If I could get everyone to take a little break, I could explain it rationally. Oh, but then I would have to reveal what the liquid actually is, and I honestly don’t hate these guys enough to tell them they’ve been riding around in human piddle. I don’t even know these dudes. It also could potentially cause some disapproval with Timmy if I tell on him”. I concluded that when the angry kid eventually pulled me off the car door, I would just take my beating like a wimp rather than try to explain anything or actually fight back.

As Time began to re-clock itself and become normal again, the blur was lifted and I could see again. Timmy was centered fifty feet in the distance under the romantically lit city park lights, trading punches with angry kid number three. Mick  was twenty feet away to the left, exchanging blows with angry kid two. Angry kid one was standing in front of me with limp arms at his side, staring at me like I was a spilled bag of the last buttered popcorn on Earth. He was very disappointed in me for not engaging in the overall brutality.

In an instant, it was over with the sound of distant sirens and bouncing shadows of red and blue lights. Everyone scattered back to their peed on, or non-peed on cars, and whisked away into the night. Recess was over.

I remember being courageously vengeful in my thoughts and dreams for months after the incident. I envisioned sneaking up to their house at night, and draining the oil out of all their vehicles as revenge. I hope no one ever really did that. I absolutely hated kids who had stuff, and things, and decent families. I never knew who the angry kids were, or why we conflicted with them.  It felt imaginary at the time and still does. It seemed like it was already a memory when it happened. There are more of those nights. So many more.

I recently got pulled over. I was going about 5 miles over the speed limit. The young cop seemed overly cautious as he approached my driver side window. Probably because my truck has a smashed up rear bumper and a few random dents. Hey, it’s a work truck. It’s also a four door with dark tinted rear windows. I would be cautious too. Also, this was in a high financial residence part of the city and it is quite obvious that I am not in the high finance club. I was polite and he was brief and to the point. He took my license and walked back to his patrol car to check me out and possibly write out a ticket. I suddenly remembered something very important and yelled out to him, “Hey, I need to tell you something!” He came back up and I explained that the last time I got a ticket, the officer was not aware that I am not able to take defensive driving because I have a CDL. (Commercial Drivers License) And if he decides to give me a ticket, it will stay on my permanent record with no way to get the punishment reduced. The cop just turned and walked back to his car with no emotion.

A few moments later he returned with a written warning and handed my license back and said, “You know, just because you have a CDL, it doesn’t mean you can go around speeding.”

I politely thanked him and left, feeling weird. I was thinking that was an odd thing to say to me. I wish I could have replied differently.

– “Well officer, I disagree. You see, I paid a lot of money to obtain my special drivers license and I think I should be able to drive as fast as I damn well please. After all, I’ve been extensively trained in how to observe the roadway at a professional level and feel that even though other people may feel endangered, they should somehow know that I am in complete control of my vehicle.”