 portrait of the balloon as a young man. Thursday, March 29, 2007 early spring, friday evening around 6:10 p.m. 1974. it could have been just about any friday night around that time, really. i'm only trying to set the stage for was one of those repeated non-events still lodged somewhere in the grey matter of my head. gourd head. go ahead. i get it. so we drove up second street, left on clayton avenue, stopped at the four-way at hamilton, i glanced to the right at garth elementary to see if anyone was shooting hoops at the playground. doug gilvin and a handful of regulars, i'm sure. doug is dead now, died a few years back of a brain tumor, he had moved to lexington and became a cop. really good guy...even for a cop. we proceeded to the stop light at broadway and waited only a moment before we made the left up broadway, right past the cemetery, we hung a right at the...burger queen. yeah, you might not have ever had a burger queen, the chain was alive if not well, from the late 60s through the early 80s. home office louisville, kentucky. i have no idea how far they stretched across the country, or even if they did. but georgetown, had one. no mcdonalds, no burger king...just the queen. my mamaw, she liked the royal burger. a big sloppy-assed dual pattied thing ran through the garden with some sort of almost-slaw dressing substance as condiment. i never tried it. i was a cheeseburger, mustard, ketchup, pickle kid--but never that at burger queen. my papaw and i always got the same order. a fish on rye. i don't think it had a stupid name that had anything to do with monarchy or anything. not sure why but i distinctly remember ordering '2 fish on ryes please.' i always did the ordering. mamaw stayed at home. papaw drove me. gave me the dough. i got out of the mercury comet and went in while he watched through the giant plate glass front windows. for a long time i thought he wanted me to go in because he was tired from his 9 hour shift at the carbide cutting tool factory and it was uncomfortable for him to stand on his wooden leg and not move after doing that all day at work. yeah, he had an 'artificial leg' as everyone referred to it. i won't bore you with tons of details, but sometime when my mom was a kid, the whole family was in the car when it died on a rural road. my papaw got out to push the car to the side of the road when a drunk driver came over the hill and hit him pinning him between the bumpers. the guy never spent even an minute behind bars. no one thought too much about drunk driving i guess in the 50s. my papaw lost one leg completely, amputated. the other one had left an open wound on the shin most of his life. it was injured to the bone but they let him keep it. he got about $13,000 from insurance. my mamaw never drove after that, and hated even riding in a car with anyone. details, sorry, digression so yeah, i figured he just didn't feel like standing in line. so i always did it. this particular night they had someone dressed up as queenie, the burger queen mascot. a fat and sassy bumblebee, er, the queen bee. she was shaking kid's hands and handing out balloons. i made my way over, sidestep, as to not loose my place in line at the counter. i got my balloon, grinned at the bee and sidled back. i tied my balloon in a loop sort of around my wrist. i remember looking down and seeing a wadded up $10 bill on the floor. stealthly, i surveyed the area, no one was claiming it, i put my foot on it thinking...'wow, that is 5 model cars right there on the ground.' i had a prepubescent obsession with building model cars and every spare penny i could scrounge went towards my modeling. opportunity came, i placed my order, 'i want a royal burger, 2 fish on rye, blah, blah, blah...' the cashier totaled the whole mess and i reached in my pocket to get the dough. front left, front right, back left, back right...a nervous glance out the plate glass to papaw...when i realized the $10 bill i was sneakingly standing on--was mine. i carried the two bags to the car, dejected about my loss. i saw it that way, i had it, the extra $10 and now it was gone. my balloon was still attached to my arm, i managed it into the comet and back down broadway we went. now there were two sensations going on with me that have little to do with any of this pointless story. the car was filled with the odor of gum. wrigley's in that yellow pack to be exact but mixed with it was a pungently sweet, almost wooden smell. later i would learn that smell was ancient age whiskey. in my panic to dig out the cash for the food, i had glanced at papaw and caught the final moment of something leaving his mouth. i didn't really fixate on it. i never did really anytime i caught him taking a nip from a bottle. we drove in silence back to second street. papaw put the gum on the backside of his sunvisor in the car, when he died there must have been 100 pieces of old gum there. he took a bag, i took a bag. when i closed my door, my balloon snagged the top of the window frame and detached itself from my wrist and before i could grab it, it was making its way towards the sky. we both stood and watched it until it was nothing but a speck the size of a pinhead in the late evening sky. a one-legged man, a balloon, fish on rye, whiskey. those are a few of my best memories. hard for me to believe that i haven't had him in my life for the majority of it really. he died when i was only about 15. he was the man in my life. i guess he still is. even if he is but a speck the size of a pinhead in the late evening sky. balloon study frame #1. 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