NOTE THIS IS PROBABLY THE MOST DRY THING I'VE EVER WRITTEN]
Let me tell you about Jim Hogue.
My grandma used to tell me Jim Croce's song, You Don't Mess Around With Jim wasn't about Jim Walker, it was about Jim Hogue. "You really don't mess around with your grandpa," she told me.
Grandpa was born in Indiana, in the middle of nowhere during the tail end of the Depression. My great grandpa served as an Army Airborne paramedic in the Pacific theater in my grandpa's youth. Once, his platoon got separated from a bunch of captured Americans on the other side of a river. That night he could hear the screams of his comrades as the Japanese gave them the thousand cut treatment. Great grandpa had to be restrained from trying to cross the river himself. The enemy had retreated the next day, and left behind still-breathing hamburger men. They begged for morphine. He had ran out the day before.
So grandpa grew up in the household of an alcoholic father, once bringing home my grandpa's "Uncle Roy" from the bar, who pissed on the hot stove and then left. He learned woodcarving, hunting, shooting, and general handyman skills from his dad and his uncle (real uncle this time) Oscar. Uncle Oscar is essentially where he got his humor from. In high school, grandpa was really good at two things: fucking and racing cars. He was the ricer of the yesteryear, teaching himself mechanics and installing mods on his Chevy. He never told me which model he raced. "That thing was a piece of shit. I don't want to think about it." He loved to read poetry and science fiction. He loved Phillip K. Dick and Harry Harrison, and Robert Frost was his favorite poet.
After graduating my grandpa went to Detroit for work. He was a roofer mainly, and during this time first met my grandmother. He would wind up picking up the roughneck trade and would travel back and forth between Detroit and Midland, Texas for work. One time roughneckin' three tornadoes formed and started heading toward the oil rig. Grandpa asked the team lead, "Shouldn't we get out of here?" The team lead responded in kind, "Shit, boy, where you gonna go?"
At this point my grandpa just kind of decided to marry my grandma. Like, just a snap decision. So he wrote the following letter to Detroit:
"Dear Ann,
I'm tired of washing my own clothes and making my own beans.
Do you want the job?"
The answer is apparent.
Now earlier I mentioned he got a lot of his humor from his uncle Oscar. Here's the first prank. They were just wed, and grandpa and grandma were driving down to Texas where grandpa was going to post up for work. Now keep in mind, my grandma had essentially just met my grandpa and then chose to marry him very quickly. So he starts casually mentioning how he had sold her to Mexicans. He would drop lines like, "I got a good price for you." My grandma got so scared she tried to jump out of the car. After pulling her back in he explained it was a joke.
Grandpa was a drinker, and at this point it was starting to get out of hand. He wound up getting into a bar fight and nearly killing the guy, and then he fought three cops until getting taken down by the fourth. They gave him an ultimatum:
Go to jail or join the Army, killer.
So he joins the service and decides to go Airborne, just like his dad. He served with the 82nd for two years, until one day on a jump he blew off course and hit a tree. He broke his leg so badly he got honorably discharged. This was around when Kennedy was starting to escalate in Vietnam so he always told me he was lucky, cause if he had re-enlisted and stayed he would've seen combat.
They lived in Texas for a while, but his dad started getting really sick from all the alcohol, so they left for Indiana, only for his dad to die a few weeks after they arrived. They moved back to Detroit, but this time with his brother Jerry, who was twelve at the time, in tow.
In order to support Jerry through school and put away a little extra cash, grandpa would come up with money schemes. First of all, if there was anything he thought would increase in value over time, he would buy it. Coins, stocks, we even have a bunch of vintage Ren & Stimpy merchandise because he thought they would have collector value at some point. Second, he would squirrel away cash in random hiding spots throughout their house, a practice he continued to do up until he died. He would win poker games against his coworkers constantly and then stash it away. One night he was very late home because a game ran on long and grandma was pissed, until he came through the door and tossed five hundred greenbacks in the air in front of her. Their dog ate a twenty, but that's still a haul. He also had this scheme where he would sneak onto this ritzy golf course at night, go into the water traps and feel around for golf balls. He'd bring them home, clean them, and then give them to my grandma who worked downtown as a secretary. She would sell the golf balls to passing businessmen for less than what they could get at the store. He literally made free money.
Eventually my uncle Jerry graduated high school, and this period of their lives is a little fuzzy. All I know is somehow grandpa had heard that there was a gold rush in Honduras and Ecuador, so he decides he's gonna go prospecting. He and my uncle Jerry go to Honduras, and I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but all I know is once my grandad mentioned to me the phrase, "Plato o ploma." That was one of the few things he taught me that I already knew. Silver or lead. Take the bribe or take the bullet. So whatever happened, it must've been some serious shit.
After not hearing from my grandpa for a while, my grandma one day receives a postcard that read, "I miss your cooking and your fat ass." Soon after that him and Jerry came home, somewhat empty handed but apparently had made enough money to have made the trip worth it.
He went to Ecuador a few years later, but again, some serious shit must've went down because he had to escape to Cuba. Now this was the 60s, so he gets to Cuba and is almost immediately approached by spooks and told he has to get out. So he bums about Key Largo for a while, shooting at light bulbs he would throw in the sea for target practice, then went back to Detroit.
Things are going smoothly, my mom and my aunt are born, but there comes a problem. Black people.
See, Detroit used to be called the Paris of the Midwest. Cathedral-like opera houses, art museums, statues, infrastructure, all backed by the unstoppable force of car manufacturing. Motor City, baby. But then it became Oil Shortage City, and crime began spilling into nicer neighborhoods. My grandpa personally watched Deerborn become what it is today, and if you ever ate at Big Boy's and drank a Vernor's you know how bad that shit is. So he took his family and moved to Bandon, Oregon, where my uncle Jerry was living. He got a job as a logger and kept a small farm. He started hunting for agates and arrowheads, and started studying anthropology in order to identify them. Arrowheads became another huge source of income, buying, trading and selling them and other Indian artifacts. One time grandpa and the family were eating at a diner in town, and to make himself laugh he stood up suddenly and shouted, "THAT'S THE LAST TIME I PICK UP A BROAD WITH KIDS," and walked out of the restaurant. My grandma was pissed and grandpa was laughing in the car.
He told me that being a logger was the best job he ever got, because one day a tree fell on the same leg he broke in the Army and it had to be amputated on the spot by a helicopter team. High on morphine and losing a lot of blood, my grandad yelled at the helicopter pilot to "Hurry the fuck up and get to the hospital." Loggers in those days were insured out the ass for injuries, and insured for the rest of their lives if they couldn't work because of one. After getting out of the hospital (a sixty thousand dollar receipt which he didn't pay a dime for), grandad now had until the end of his days to do whatever the hell he wanted. So after my mom and my aunt moved out of the house they packed up, moved to Chehalis, Washington, bought five acres, and just kind of chilled. Grandpa kept on with his arrowheads, which now grew to a substantial collection. We still don't know how much it's actually worth. He got so good at his arrowhead game he was getting letters from anthropology departments from state universities asking him for help identifying stuff. A hillbilly from Indiana who never went to college outsmarting entire departments of dedicated researchers.
Eventually we came along, my brothers and I. My parents divorced early on and we lived with my grandparents for a while. Grandpa loved sharing things with me, usually schemes. He wanted me to get into modern art because he understood as a laundering scheme, the quality of the art didn't matter, so with a little smooth talking I could get rich with little to no effort. He loved teaching me things about history. He would record snippets of Nova documentaries, stories of war in East Asia, samurai movies, Godzilla, Space Ghost, history docs, nature docs, Sealab 2021, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Samurai Jack, basically just whatever he liked to watch he would compile onto VHS's for me to watch with him. I called them Grandpa Tapes, and one day I'm going to rip them all to digital. Notice the Godzilla, samurai, and East Asian war stories. Grandpa was a fucking huge weeb. He had lots of books on Japanese history, and through reading learned a cursory amount about kendo, and in response to this he carved my brothers and I bokken and told us to go fight in the yard. Once he told me to give him my sword, and when I did he whacked me in the side and said "Never give someone your weapon." I got the classic kung-fu movie training sequenced by a one legged man who watches cartoons. He taught me a lot about yard work, he taught me how to shovel, how to caulk windows. He imparted random folksy wisdoms and told me about how he heard every song in the O, Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack when he was a kid. He told me to be very careful in California because the people there were perverts, and holy shit was he right. Without a dad at home, he was about the best surrogate I could ask for.
When your parents tell you to spend as much time as you can with grandma and grandpa, they're right. And we as children never listen. My grandparents lived an hour away from me. I could see them anytime when I got a car. I didn't. Jim Hogue died in July of 2017 of pneumonia. Fittingly, he was too stubborn to go to the doctor when the symptoms started showing. My brother and I were going to write down his life story. We plan on doing it still, but it has to be a tangential story. Words by my uncle and my grandma and my mom outlining his figure sitting on the couch watching the Red Wings. I'll always regret the time I chose not to spend with him.
Moral of the story, if you think your old man has pneumonia, drag them to medical care.