When I returned home that evening, the whipping I received was just an inconvenience, something that didn’t get the results the Cowboy wanted. As I grew older, I started becoming more and more detached from the normal kids in my class; they being concerned with rodeos and country music. It was difficult for me to even begin finding my place, and it would stunt my growth as a man quite a bit.
“City Slickers” was a term of derision in that cowboy culture, heaped with scorn from dusty cowpokes and spat out from grizzled mouths like bitter chaw at any passing weirdo. Being accused of City Slicker tendencies was a favorite admonishment of the Cowboy’s whenever we discussed the finer points of right and wrong with a strap out by the woodshed. Life was good overall, those innocent days of my childhood.
Until one day after school my mother packed us all up in a rush and hid all of us in a cramped and dirty motel room, while she planned our escape from the Cowboy’s dominance games, and her bruises. We spent a few days in that motel room, cut off from everything and everyone lest the Cowboy discover my mother’s treachery.
Her destination, which we only found out about when we got on that boring bus, was the home of her sister in Minneapolis. I was going to a big city. A Big City! A magical world of cement and steel, neon lights and rock and roll which I had only occasionally glimpsed from the neighbor’s television set —and from the hippie commune in the mountains. And I was going to one!
