Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Read Online Free PDF

only one eye. My father did not complain and as a consequence, I did not know until I was twelve years old that he was technically half blind.

3
    GROWING UP, I WAS ALWAYS THE “BIG KID.” By the seventh grade, I was already six feet tall and 180 pounds. You’d think that might scare people off, but instead my size acted more like a trouble magnet. Seemed as if everybody who wanted to make a name for himself thought whipping the Big Kid was just the ticket. So I got in a lot more fights than I wanted and spent a good deal of time in the principal’s office. I never got whipped, but in the fifth grade, I did get some teeth knocked out in a school bus fight.
    One fight I got into had a silver lining.
    In seventh grade, I played on the school basketball team with this kid named Jimmy Ferebee. I didn’t know him very well. One day at practice, we collided under the basket a few too many times and our tempers began to heat up. We pushed and shoved a little, exchanged the required macho threats and insults. It came to a head in the locker room after practice.
    “Hey, Boykin!” Jimmy Ferebee said. “Wanna take this outside?”
    “I got no beef with you,” I said, picking up my gym bag. “I’m going home.”
    But when I turned to walk out of the locker room, Jimmy shoved me in the back. In one motion, I whirled, dropped my bag, and grabbed him around the neck. Then we fell to the ground and began flailing away. He was tough and held his own. I got the upper hand only because I was bigger.
    After a few minutes, though, I got tired of fighting. “If you’ve had enough, I’m going to let you up,” I said.
    Jimmy could’ve gone either way. “Okay,” he said simply. I was glad since Jimmy was strong and quick, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold him down.
    So I unfolded myself from the floor, picked up my bag, and walked out of the locker room. Don’t ask me to explain the mysteries of male bonding, but from that moment on, Jimmy and I were inseparable. We did
everything
together including our two great passions: sports and music. We both lettered in baseball, basketball, and football, but liked football best. I was pretty good at linebacker and loved to mow down anyone who had the bad taste to still be in possession of the ball behind the line of scrimmage. Because of my size, I also played fullback, blocking for—guess who?—Jimmy.
    Jimmy was outgoing and gregarious, and the older we got, the better looking he got. (I just got taller.) Besides being the school’s star running back, all the girls thought he looked like the teen heartthrob Bobby Darin, and he could sing like him, too. One day when we were sophomores, Jimmy said, “Let’s get us some ukuleles and learn to play.”
    So we did, then we moved up to guitars. After that, Jimmy bought a banjo, and a girl named Anita Johnson joined us to form a trio. It was the era of folk music: Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary. The three of us sang “Puff the Magic Dragon” at every country fair and talent contest in a tri-county area. (I wanted to sing country music, but Jimmy and Anita hated it and wouldn’t let me.) In 1965, our little group traveled all the way to New York City and sang at the World’s Fair. We sang together until we graduated. Jimmy went on to a twenty-year professional music career. Anita went on to become Miss North Carolina.
    By then, I’d fallen in love with Lynne Cameron, a beautiful blonde who’d transferred into our country school from New Haven, Connecticut. During my junior year, her father took over management of the Stanley Power Tools plant in New Berne. Lynne was a year behind me in school and thought I talked funny. But since she was from New Haven, everybody thought
she
talked funny. That was okay by me, because she was shy and sweet. I asked her out after the first football game of my senior year and after that, didn’t date anyone else.
    During my senior year, our high school integrated. But it was