BILL CADY Word Count: 149,227 - At My Friend's Place

Bill Cady, The Early Years … by Bill Cady 46
street, in a house about eleventy-six times bigger than our dinky little hovel. Our house
later became such a source of deep embarrassment, I wanted to die.
No kid wants to admit being poor to anyone, especially another kid. It moves you
down a rung, maybe more. Well, my family was poor. Damned poor. The most money
my old man ever made was $12,000 in 1977. I convinced him the next year to retire.
Mom went on full disability shortly after that. Believe it or not, they made more money
that way than when they were both working. Mom had as many as three jobs at a time
for a while, but this was still a lot better for them.
Only one time, in my entire life, did my parents go away so I had the house to
myself. I was in my late teens when they went to Florida on vacation for a month. I had
a few guys over to drink beer one night. Maybe six, plus me. It was very, very crowded.
One of the guys, Dave Chouinard, was hilarious. His brother Bob, telling me Dave died a
few years ago, very correctly described Dave as “The funniest guy to ever shit between
two cowboy boots”. That was Dave, alright. A good man, and I miss him.
I didn‟t miss him when I had my “party”. Dave looked around as he sat on a chair
drinking beer and said, “This house is so fucking small, you‟d have to go out on the front
porch to change your mind.”
Anyway, these neighbors I mentioned were the Cann family. Their oldest child
was a daughter named Cary, a year older than me. She was cute, I guess, but chubby and
not “popular”. For reasons I never understood, to be “cool”, you had to be “popular”.
Yet, the only ones who could be “popular” were the kids who were “cool”. I wanted so
bad to be either one, but I didn‟t have a clue as to how I‟d ever pull it off.
Maybe it was the luck of the draw. I never figured it out, but years later I‟d meet
Leviticus, Limited 33-0505963