#2 cruisn perididdle spade christmas gift
Summary
In this episode of Queernecks, hosts Ash and Beck explore their experiences growing up queer in rural environments. They discuss their early interactions with technology, the challenges of navigating queerness in school, and the impact of their upbringing on their understanding of sexuality. The conversation flows into their first crushes, the games they played as kids, and the social spaces they created to connect with others. They also share stories of run-ins with the law, their first jobs, and the creativity that emerged from their rural lives.
Key Takeaways:
The internet served as a reentry point for many.
Early experiences with technology shaped their youth.
Navigating queerness in school was challenging and often stigmatized.
Upbringing significantly impacts one's view of sexuality.
First crushes often came with fear and confusion.
Games and activities were essential for socializing in rural areas.
Cruising was a common social activity among youth.
Run-ins with the law were often humorous and formative.
Jobs provided financial independence and social experiences.
Creativity flourished in rural life due to limited resources.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to the Internet Journey
02:52 Navigating Queerness in a Digital Age
07:15 The Impact of Family on Sexual Identity
12:00 Exploring Queer Spaces and Community
15:55 Reflections on Growing Up Queer
24:17 Adventures and Misadventures: The High School Experience
33:17 Games and Creativity in Rural Life
37:20 Final Thoughts and Looking Ahead
37:58 New Chapter
tags: LGBTQ, queerness, upbringing, sexuality, youth games, social spaces, relationships, creativity, rural life, appalchia
Transcript
You wanna do welcome this time?
Beck (:If you want, let me pull up the thing.
Ash (:You don't have to go by the script. But you can if you want to. Yeah, yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, but it helped. Yeah.
Ash (:While you're doing that, actually let me.
with your audio.
Ash (:can't. Oh, because noise reduction is on.
Beck (:You go ahead and do it. It's a lot.
Ash (:Okay.
Ash (:What Oscar? Are you gonna be loud this whole time?
Ash (:Everybody's in here now, because they know I'm trying to do something.
Ash (:Okay, get it on well.
Ash (:What did I put for this intro?
Ash (:Yeah.
Beck (:Can you see that? My senior picture.
Beck (:And then this one, look at my bangs.
Ash (:You posted that on Facebook and every time I see it I die.
Beck (:The bangs are bangin'.
Ash (:The one from like second grade when you look like a realtor. I think I've actually seen that. I saw that and I was like, I've seen that before and didn't know it you.
Beck (:that one. I made the front cover of Awkward Family Photos with that one.
Beck (:I... Yeah.
When you look at it though, you can tell it's me.
I look exactly the same.
Ash (:We, okay, I think let's, for like the cold open, let's talk about like how long we've been on the internet and the ways like you can talk about like the times that you've gone viral and like just what it's like being old people who've been on the internet for a while.
Beck (:Okay.
Ash (:Okay, Mark.
Welcome back to Queernecks. You join us no longer on our first episode. We've made it past the beginning point. I am your host, Ash.
Beck (:and I am your other host, Beck.
Ash (:And we thought we would spend some time talking about, this is a reentry point to the internet for me, like learning how to podcast and stuff. It's the most like forward engaging thing I've done on the internet. But I have obviously lived on the internet for a long time. Did you have AIM? Yeah.
Beck (:I did, but I'm a little bit older than you. So when I was in high school, we got a brand new high school my freshman year and I took typing one and it was actual word processors. then, no, there was a different one, but same idea. Mrs. Mossbarger, she was strict. Anyway, then in my senior year, we were working on very early computers, learning WordPerfect.
Ash (:Yeah.
Ash (:Yeah, did you do Mavis Beacon?
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:So I was part of the very first generation, you know, after message boards and stuff like that. My first email address was at my high school and then I got one through the university. At Miami, people had laptops and stuff like that, but it was few and far between. Most people went to the computer labs that were on campus. And that's where I had AIM. And then when I moved into my own apartment, I had a computer and I had AIM.
Ash (:Same.
Beck (:when I was 19, 20, 21.
Ash (:Yeah, didn't, damn. I got the internet in my own name in my late, it might have been 30 actually. And so,
ave anything. They had like a: Beck (:Right.
Beck (:Yeah.
Ash (:their own version of the internet like you could Google yeah yeah so we had email addresses but we could only talk to each other and but there was like Google didn't exist yet but there was remember Alta Vista web crawler ask Jeeves
Beck (:and intranet.
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:Yep. Internetics, the early internet, Netscape Navigator. Yeah.
Ash (:Navigator, yeah, that's what it was. So yeah, and I would sit, like that was something I spent a lot of time on after school when one of my sports wasn't in, I would just sit in the computer lab looking at pictures of pretty girls.
Beck (:Yeah. Do you remember AOL, the disks that they would send in and how you get free internet time and all that and the keywords? Like you had to know the keyword for the thing to find it.
Ash (:Yeah, I remember that.
Ash (:I remember a roaring trade in keywords. You could buy them from people or trade them for things. We were talking about micro economies a little bit on the last episode. We traded for a lot of things when I was in college especially. I traded my first piercing. got somebody did for me in exchange for taking a test for them.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:wow.
Ash (:Yeah. I don't think they were even licensed. I mean, they had done several and it was fine. It turned out great. but yeah, that's, we would trade for everything and whatever you were good at, somebody would give you something for it. That's how I got most of my drugs too.
Beck (:Right?
Gotcha. There was there was a young man named Brian that lived in that honors dorm next door to us Because there were six of us that would smoke weed in the dorm together And we would buy five dollars worth of marijuana at a time Like we would we would pay in nickels and pennies and shit like that He'd take it he would take it every time and we'd take that five dollars worth of weed and all six of us would somehow get high I don't know how we managed it. We had a little wooden pipe
Ash (:You
You
Yeah.
Ash (:Well, I mean, that did go further back in the day. could get a lid for like 50 bucks when I was an undergrad.
Beck (:Yeah.
Ash (:But yeah, so I don't know. The internet, I remember being, when I got caught being queer the first time at school in my high school, it was in a chat room and I was in typing class. Supposed to be on there doing my made of this beacon, you know, with that blind keypad cover they put on there so you can't cheat on your typing. And for some reason, holy shit, they weren't fucking around.
Beck (:huh, yep. Yep. We wore actual blindfolds. Yep.
Beck (:I told you she was crazy strict. Mrs. Mossbarger, I'll never forget her my whole life. But I can type in like 90 words a minute though, so it worked. Yeah.
Ash (:Well there was a- a-
Hell yeah, yeah, I can type. There was a strange lesbian scare my year because so many of the girls were gay. And so it was so bad that they called an assembly because people were transferring to county over accusations of being lesbian. And we had this president, or sorry, principal.
Beck (:hahahahah
Ash (:and he called an assembly and he was like, y'all have got to stop bullying people out of transferring schools. He was like, and he, he got himself fired over it. They fired him for trying to stop people from bullying queer kids. but weirdly it did actually, it did eventually end because then we're getting off topic from the internet because that's not where we found queer people back in the day. like, did you have any way to interact with queer culture when you were in?
The Hills.
Beck (:You know, my access to sexuality and everything related to it was kind of colored through the through the through the porn shop lens. And I sort of made myself asexual because I was afraid people think would think I was hypersexual because of the porn shop, right? Or think that I was a slut or something like that. So I was pretty asexual. I had like two boyfriends in high school and neither of them lasted more than a couple of weeks.
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:I just pretended that was not part of me. And then I came out when I went to college.
Ash (:You haven't really said what porn shop, so it just sounds like you spend a lot of time hanging out in a random porn shop. There it is!
Beck (:True, my parents owned a porn shop when I was growing up. It was an unusual childhood. Somehow I ended up working in women's studies afterwards. So draw your own conclusions from that. But yeah.
Ash (:you
Ash (:you
Ash (:So you were afraid of being too closely aligned with just hypersexuality in general.
Beck (:Yeah, and that has really affected me my whole life. When I was working as a photographer, people would ask me to do boudoir photos and I refused. It's too intimate for me. Like it's too much. I can't do things like that. I can't do super intimate situations. It overwhelms me too much.
Ash (:Yeah.
Ash (:Well, and I think, you know, your situation is unique, baggage about sexuality is fairly common for queer folks of our generation, I think, or those older than us. It's like complicated to navigate something so stigmatized.
And it's not like you don't have to come out for it to be brought to you. Like the first time I heard of lesbian was somebody telling me not to talk to a girl because she was a lesbian. So the first thing I learned about being queer was that it was bad and if I let it slip or somebody suspected that I was, then nobody would want to talk to me anymore.
Beck (:Right. I remember being single digits, maybe eight, nine, somewhere in there. and I was at my grandmother's and I was watching something like 20, 20 or 60 minutes or one of those news magazine shows and they covered, two women that were together and one of them put lipstick on and kissed the other. And she was like, there, you have lipstick now. And that has stayed with me. I, that was when I realized that girls were allowed to kiss girls. And that, yeah, that was a very formative moment for me. I, and I,
Ash (:That's kinda sweet.
Hmm.
Beck (:Like I said, it was just something random on TV that I watched, but I was big-eyed and sucked in, you know? When I came out to my parents, we were actually in the porn shop. And my mom told me to go get a lesbian porno and that that should satisfy my curiosity, is what she told me. Because we all know that lesbian porn is made for lesbians, right?
Ash (:You
Ash (:The target demographic for exploitative female. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah.
So, you know, when it comes to sexuality and stuff, I think that my parents really associated with sex because there is a separation between the two, definitely, but that was really blurred in my upbringing.
Ash (:Yeah, and I had a real opposite experience. My parents thought, yeah, well...
Beck (:Most people did.
Ash (:You'll see what I mean when I say this because I think my parents believed that simply not letting me, not teaching me about anything, about the outside world or how anything worked, like by never even acknowledging that sex was real or that it was something people did for pleasure, by not acknowledging substances, that they could will those things into never entering my...
experience. And so when I started to think about like who I was attracted to, it was the context of not understanding that attraction happened. And so trying to describe what was happening felt
Like it felt shameful from jump. And my parents weren't religious, but it was like, it was kind of an Amish existence we led. You know, like no TV, like TV rigidly controlled. Like the things that we were allowed to learn about. The people we were allowed to be around.
Beck (:See, we had the opposite. had HBO and Cinemax and we were allowed all the pop we wanted and we had... Mom was very lax because she had a very strict upbringing and decided not to do that. I remember being in like fourth grade and there was a soap opera at the time called Santa Barbara and it was going off the air and she let my sister and a couple of her friends and me all stay home from school and we ordered pizza and made a day of it. Yeah, that's the kind of shit mom would do.
Ash (:Dang.
Ash (:My mom told me a story that one of the reasons she decided to do that, and she had a tendency to pin huge decisions on minor things that happened. She said that when we were babies, she used to watch TV, and one day I called my brother a bastard.
because she had been watching General Hospital or some soap opera and I heard the word bastard and heard that it was used in a way that, you you were annoyed with somebody. And so she basically, that was when they just, she decided that we would have no mediated input on our development. it, mean, thinking back, there's so many reasons why I don't have any social skills.
Beck (:Right? Well, we didn't have a lot of books. Something that really influenced me was my grandmother was, she was a nanny for the county coroner and a sociology professor. whenever I would go over there to visit, because the kids that she nannied were about my age, and they were all girls, and I would go over there sometimes. And I remember when you walked into their house, their kitchen had a room off to the side of it. They had a little couch in there.
and they had a wall of books, just a wall of books. And I was a voracious reader from the time that I could pick up a book. And I thought that's the kind of life that I wanna live. I wanna have a life where I have books in my kitchen, you know? And that was really a thing that pushed me. I would think about their kitchen when I would be playing school and things like that.
Ash (:Yeah. Yeah.
Ash (:Well, you know, thinking about like trying to find any way or any knowledge of queerness, it was the lesbian scare when I was in high school that really was like, fuck, I'm gonna be gay.
Beck (:When was your first crush?
Ash (:I mean...
Beck (:Mine was sixth grade.
Ash (:It was probably about then, it might have been a little bit younger, but it was on somebody on television. I was so scared. Well, in my, I was punished at the school I went to. Like I was hunted for sport. I like had to climb trees at recess the older I got. I aged into a where the other kids could tell I was doing gender wrong.
Beck (:Yeah, mine was a girl in my class.
Ash (:I just became prey. And so I didn't have any, I had one friend and I didn't have like, attraction feelings for her because I was just so invested in preserving her as a friend. She's one of the ones that since died. But yeah, that sucked. But, and again, freak accident. She was crossing the road and somebody ran her over. Just because they weren't crosswalks.
Beck (:Right?
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:I'm sorry.
Beck (:wow.
Ash (:but yeah, I was like not in a position to really experience attraction until high school, but I learned about the lesbian thing and met a gay kid who transferred in from somewhere else. And he told me about gay bars. And so then me and most of the junior and senior class of girls were sneaking out on weekends to drive down to Knoxville.
and sneak into the underground and the bars. At the time they were 18 and up, and of course we weren't 18, but they didn't care. We weren't going to drink. We were going to be around gay people.
Beck (:Yeah.
Ash (:And so this kid had an inn with them and they would put, they would just mark, he would steal the marker and come out and put it on our fingers so that we weren't going to drink. And then they would just let us in. And we did that weekend after weekend. Even my straight friends would come with me because they were just like, this is fun. These people are fun to be around.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah. My first gay bar was the Stonewall in Huntington, West Virginia. But that was so I started coming out. I went to my freshman year college and then my freshman summer between freshman and sophomore year. That's when I came out to myself. And that next year I spent coming out to my friends and stuff. I took it pretty slowly. But when I came out to my friend Jonas, who is also subsequently passed away.
Ash (:Wow.
Beck (:When I told Jonas I was gay, he was like, my God, me too. And he told me about gay bars and we went to the Stonewall like that weekend. We were both 18 at the time. I was maybe 19. But that place really changed my life because like you said, it was a place to be around queer people. And that just wasn't a thing anywhere else that I was existing. That's how I ended up moving to West Virginia was because there were so yeah, because there were so many queer people there. Yeah, yeah.
Ash (:Mm.
Ash (:And I just.
Ash (:really? It is queer, yeah, it's queer as hell. Well, now that we've already kind of covered some of these already, we've decided, listener, to create a process for helping us organize our thoughts, which is almost certainly not gonna work.
but I have made a wheel here with various slices and topics on them and I am gonna spin it and we promise we won't lie about what it lands on unless we just don't wanna talk about it then we will lie to you. Okay, I'm gonna click spin. I was gonna read all the, should I read all the topics or just let it be a surprise? Okay, you're right. Okay, spin. We're spinning the wheel now.
Beck (:Hehe.
Beck (:Let it be a surprise.
Ash (:And...
Ash (:It landed on games.
Beck (:That's fun.
Ash (:Yeah, so I mean, obviously super vague.
Beck (:Well, I was also your traditional queer dyke that played softball. I played from tee ball through high school. I was a catcher. I was always one of the biggest targets, so they put me back there.
Ash (:yeah, yeah.
You know... How you didn't know?
Beck (:How people didn't know I was gay, I have no idea. Yeah, how I didn't know. I literally wrote poems to my best friend, quote unquote, and they were love poems. Yeah, they were terrible.
Ash (:Yeah. You can't stop that shit from coming out. I mean, we're two prime examples of either you tried or my parents tried and it just doesn't work. All right, so you played softball.
Beck (:No.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:And I was in a bowling league. Yeah. My parents, my mom bowled on Wednesday afternoons and my parents bowled together on Sunday evenings. So they enrolled me on Saturday mornings. And so every Saturday morning that I wasn't playing softball, I was at the bowling alley. I was pretty good. I got my name in the paper like every week.
Ash (:my god. That's pretty hot actually.
Ash (:Dang, I didn't know that you could play bowling in an organized way in high school, but we did go all the time. There was a Cosmic bowling alley up in Corbin and we would go up there, you you pay your, it was $2 or something to come in and bowl from like nine to midnight. And they put on the blue lights and things. So I did play sports. I avoided softball with intentionality. And at the time I didn't really...
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Right.
Yeah.
Ash (:talked to myself about it, like I didn't try to explain it. I played basketball, I did track and field. Man, I was terrible at all of them.
Beck (:You know, looking back at some of my softball pictures, I'm the only out loud lesbian of any of them. And I find that wild. There were no other lesbians in that whole softball world. I haven't found any. Just me.
Ash (:Hmm. Yeah, you know, lot of the the the Dykes in my school, some of them played sports, but they were like, again, they did like cross country and basketball. Basketball was the Dykes sport, like baseball, softball. Like now I'm thinking about it, like, did we even have a softball team? It's it's so like I knew I can't place anybody that I like identify that sport with and I'm in my high school.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:big was your high school? Yeah. Yeah, my class was of 81 people.
Ash (:was very small. I graduated with 40 other people.
Ash (:Yeah, which is why I think the percentage is so skewed on people who have died, Like 20 people dying is, that wouldn't be a significant number at a larger school, but yeah, the county was like that. We were at the independent city school.
Beck (:Right, like Shanna graduated with almost a thousand.
Beck (:Yeah, she went to the second biggest high school in West Virginia. I can't imagine. Like, I just can't imagine not knowing everybody in your school, you know?
Ash (:Yeah, it would be strange. I kind of wonder like if that would have been nice or if I would have hated it. Like I don't have any context for a place that large.
Beck (:Right, me neither. Well, except going to Miami. Miami of Ohio, not Florida. That's where I did my undergrad work. It's a little bit bigger than BGSU, I would say. I'd say the campus is much bigger than BGSU. It's much more spread out. But none of the dorms are... Okay, yeah.
Ash (:Is that a big school?
Ash (:No.
Ash (:We're gonna cut this part out. Stop saying where you work.
Beck (:yeah, sorry.
Ash (:I can't bleep it though, so it's fine. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. It'll be funny, right? It's authentic.
Beck (:I'm new to this, it's a learning curve.
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:But when I went to, I could say Miami, because I don't work there. When I went to Miami, there were like 4,000 people in my freshman class. And I remember going to the, they had like the first year institute, the move in weekend where you do all the activities and try to bond with your class and all that. Yeah. And I remember we went down to the football field and they had us separate ourselves by birth month. It was just a way to make us all move and get away from our friends and do all that kind of stuff.
Ash (:you
Ash (:Yeah, welcome week.
Beck (:And there were so many people in my birth month that I was overwhelmed. There was just so many people in that field.
Ash (:What birth month do you have? See, I'm October and I know that your partner, yeah, in high school, the first week of October was birthday, like, central. It was just multiple, in a small high school, right, multiple birthdays every day for the first week in October. And that trend has continued since I've left school.
Beck (:September.
Yeah, you share a birthday with Shanna.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, know. Well, it's the most common birthday in the world because you were conceived around New Year's Eve. Yeah, I was conceived around Thanksgiving. My birthday is the first. My birthday is always Labor Day weekend because it's the first. So I think next year it's actually on Labor Day, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's on Sunday this year.
Ash (:New Year's Eve,
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ash (:Well, we've talked about, like, school sanction games. What kind of games did you and your friends come up with to play?
Beck (:One of the most fun things that we ever did was I drove a 1989 Gio Metro, which was about... Oh, there you go. Mine was a four-door though, so it was... Yeah, mine was a four-door hatchback. So it looked like a little loaf of bread is what it looked like. Little roller skate. And my friends and I, one time in October, we went pumpkin stealing in Portsmouth, where basically, just like it sounds, you jump out of the car.
Ash (:Mine was a 1990. no, mine was two door. Yeah.
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Ash (:Yeah.
Beck (:run up to somebody's porch, steal their pumpkin and run back to the car. And at some point somebody grabbed a pumpkin that had a worm on it. And my friend Amy freaked out and she was tiny. And somehow we fit four people in the front seat of that Geo Metro.
Ash (:you
Ash (:Hahaha
Did you ever play, was it Fire Alarm? Japanese Fire Alarm? Chinese Fire Alarm? Yeah, I don't know. don't remember. I know that somebody called it that somewhere, but we did not call it that. I learned it was called that later. But yeah, we would do that. There was a lot of driving games because one of the things we did for fun was just drive around. Yeah.
Beck (:Chinese fire, sorry, Chinese fire drill. Yeah, yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, that's all there was to do. Did you guys ever do cruising?
Ash (:Yes, they had to actually make a rule against it. Like there was some sort of rule where you could only drive past a certain strip four times in a period of time, right? And so if they caught you driving through more than four times, they'd pull you over and give you a stern talking to you.
Beck (:Yeah, they shut it down.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. They just cut it out completely because there was one strip called Chillicothe Street that was right down the middle of the downtown area of Fort Smith and that's where everybody would go. There would be hundreds of cars there at a time at its heyday, you know? It was huge when I was in high school but it no longer exists.
Ash (:Yeah.
Ash (:I don't think Gen Z does that kind of thing. They don't leave for their third space, know, theirs is online.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Right, because they can be there, they can be in their third space at home or, you know, yeah, where we had to go out to seek interaction with peers and things like that. There was no Tinder.
Ash (:They're home, yeah.
Ash (:Yeah. Yeah. When they, you know, the, yeah, when they, when they got wise to cruise in, we would, we would go out on county roads, and then just meet up places and you would go place to place. Like we didn't have a way to communicate who was where. And so you just go place to place until you met up with somebody who happened to be there and then more people would show up and then that's where the party was at night.
And we would, you you would get your Mountain Dew bottle, drink half of it, fill it the rest of the way up with Jim Beam, and then that was your drink for the rest of the night. So much alcoholism in my high school. I barely drank in high school, actually.
Beck (:Yeah.
Yeah, my friends weren't really the partying type. I remember one time we went to a bonfire. I had a friend that was... So there was two sides of the river you could live on where I grew up. And I lived on the northwest side and went to school on the valley side. The northwest side was even more rural than the valley side. There were a lot more big farms. There was a lot less development, that kind of thing.
And so a kid from the northwest side transferred into Valley and we had a big party out at his farm one time and so we had Bonfire farm or bonfire parties and things like that Beyond that the the drinking that I did was minor. I Did try pot when I was 16 before a school dance. Yeah
Ash (:Yeah. Well, I mean, I did too. I hated it. Why is it always a school dance? Yeah, I hated it. It made me throw up. I suspect it wasn't weed, but it may have been because I had similar thing happened the second, third and fourth time I tried it. I just was not good at it. But yeah, whenever we did get alcohol, it would be like a 40 ounce of malt liquor and I would drink on it like once every so often and I would feel so scared every time I did it.
Beck (:I don't know.
Beck (:We would drink Zima. Because it was the 90s.
Ash (:Zima, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there was like this Ocean Breeze malt liquor we could get down in Jellico for $2.
Beck (:When I came out to my very best friend, his name was Mike, he was two years younger than me, so he was still in high school. But when I came out to him, I picked him up and I had a bottle of liquor, Mad Dog 2020. And we went to Wendy's and got a big cup of ice and half filled with pink lemonade. And he filled up the other half with the Mad Dog and he drank that and got shit faced. And that's how I came out to him because I didn't know how he was going to react.
Ash (:So you thought, let's pour some kerosene on this fire.
Beck (:Yeah, his reaction was, my god, me too.
Ash (:Mad Dog 2020, I don't believe that's liquor.
Beck (:My dad, one of the reasons that I don't believe in religion is because my biological father, he took off the Mad Dog 2020 sticker off of his truck and put up a Praise the Lord sticker in its place. And that just really rubbed my chaps wrong. You know, I was like, that's not okay. That's... I have a lot of problems with religion and that it's so performative is one of them.
Ash (:Yeah. A lot of the games we played were to do with like...
Beck (:Yeah.
Ash (:challenges because we were bored. And so we would go to the Tri-County shopping mart after it was closed down, take all of the shopping carts out of the styles in the middle of the parking lot there and have basically a shopping cart derby. And so like it, we would invent rules for who won because it wasn't really a race. It was more like we were trying to turn the other person over. And so like, it was kind of like, what's that one? Is it chicken where somebody sits on your shoulders in the pool?
Beck (:I, I don't know. I think if chicken is where you both drive towards each other in the first one to verb.
Ash (:It's not chicken. It's not chicken. It's something, some kind of game people play in the pool. We didn't have, I still don't know how to But yeah, something like that. you were trying to turn the other person over and somebody was in the cart, of course. And so again, we should have been really badly injured and just kept living secret little charmed lives for the longest time until it eventually catches up with you.
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah. Once I got to high school and stuff, I can't remember a lot of game playing. We all lived so far apart that it would have been hard to meet up and not everybody had cars and things like that. There was really nothing to hang out and do in Lucasville, which is where I went to high school. Literally, there's no park. There's a park and ride.
Ash (:I tell you, we had a lot of actually like games we would play in or after school. So, Hearts and Spades was really big. We played cards a lot. We would just sit in floor at the high school. Like we just refused to go home and sit at the school. And we played hacky sack a lot. And just generally like.
Beck (:Add my second kiss there.
Beck (:We had nowhere to do that.
Beck (:Yeah.
Yeah.
Ash (:I'll tell you something we did though for fun was, you know, this high school in Kentucky I transferred to was rich. They had an AV studio. And so me and all my nerdy friends, my, my actually biggest sports, my competitions was I was captain of the academic team.
And we all hung out together outside of school. And so we would go to the AV lab and film short films together. Just like we would write a script really quick, something stupid. Like for a long time, you remember the do the do Mountain Dew commercials? Not sponsored, not sponsored. We would recreate those, but with like really lame stunts. Like, you know, parallel parking or something, and then jump out and throw them a can. So we would, we would find like whatever was available at the school and just use it.
Beck (:Yeah.
Ash (:and then hang out in my friend's basement a lot.
Beck (:Nice.
I wish we had a place like that, but like we either lived in trailers or our houses were too small or there was just no where, nobody's house that we could go to. I remember I threw a New Year's Eve party one time and people came over, but that wasn't my actual group of friends. It was like band people when I was in the band.
Ash (:Hmm.
Yeah, well, and of course we lived in a trailer too, but like there was woods behind us and we would just sleep outside. And so like my friends would come over. I remember my mom started to freak out about it. She was like, you've got boys coming over and staying the night. And I was like, I know. And she was like, people are gonna think you're a whore. And I was like, I don't think they are gonna think that. I was like, I am not dating any of those people, trust me.
Beck (:We had one friend, her dad was hard of hearing. He was older, like in his late seventies. She was a late in life child and he would go to bed at like eight o'clock and he couldn't hear shit. So we would throw parties in her front yard. Yeah, I did that twice at least. I got drunk at her house.
Ash (:Yeah.
Ash (:Yeah, yard parties were where it was at. Cause it was like, was no, I mean really just anywhere outdoors or anywhere, we kind of had to steal space. We would break into the high school to play with stuff. yeah, me and my brother, lived down the street. all of us, of course, me and my brother and sister, when we lived in the trailer park, this is before we moved to Kentucky, Angelico, the high school was...
Beck (:Yeah, yeah.
Beck (:Wow.
Ash (:just like down the street from our trailer park. And it was so old and busted up that the doors didn't lock. There was one that like, and we knew every, was always going to be like this. it was chained shut, but we could pry it open enough to get through. And it led straight to the gymnasium. And so we'd be in there playing basketball. We'd sneak into everything that was unlocked. And, and it was like, we weren't being hoodlum. I mean, I guess we were because, you know, we were, we were somewhere we weren't supposed to be unsupervised, but we weren't trying to.
Beck (:Gotcha.
Ash (:get into shit we were curious we wanted to see the the experiments that the kids got to do in the science lab and we wanted to play with like the good toys
Beck (:We had no option to do that because our high school was brand new and literally across the street from a state prison. Like a high security, it was where they did death row. So it was, I remember in English class, Mrs. Miller would be like, on the other side of that wall and basically tell us all we were going to prison if we weren't good, you know? Yeah.
Ash (:That's a nice view of your future.
Ash (:Damn. Yeah, I mean, we all know that that's the best, you know, authority figure approach to getting students to straighten up an act right to...
Beck (:But you know, none of my friends turned out to be junkies. None of them have gone to jail for anything, knock on wood. Couple of alcoholics, couple of alcoholics, but my friends, well Lord, what for?
Ash (:I've been to jail.
Ash (:I've been to jail twice. Getting into shit. Actually, one time I wasn't doing nothing wrong. I didn't know. It's a stupid story. tell it when we land on another topic that's more related. I will get us off topic. Let's put it on the wheel. Yeah, I am not like a hardened criminal. It was just one.
Beck (:No.
Beck (:Jail should be one of our topics. Yeah.
Ash (:one misunderstanding and one dumb mistake that'll never happen again.
Beck (:speaking of not a hardened criminal, I've had a run-in with the law exactly one time in my life. And it is so hilarious. So it was Halloween and I was living in the dorms. It was my last semester at Miami before I dropped out. I made it five semesters the first time I went before I dropped out. And I was living in a single room in a freshman dorm, but I was a junior, right? And so there was a few rooms like that scattered throughout the dorm.
and there was a girl that lived next door to me and she was also a junior, but she was friends with one of the RAs that lived upstairs and for Halloween she wanted to prank him. So we called a couple of pizza places and ordered pizzas to his rooms. Ha ha, very funny, right? So that happened and then the next day a cop knocks on my door of my dorm and basically we got charged with the fourth degree misdemeanor disorderly conduct.
Ash (:Holy shit.
Beck (:We had to pay back each one of the pizza places, which was fine, but then we also had to make a matching donation to the library and do 60 hours of community service and go to court over it.
Ash (:Yeah.
Beck (:Over a freakin' pizza!
Ash (:Uh, crank calling, now that's a game too. Like, we... before Call ID, we would get up to it when we were kids.
Beck (:Yeah, but when the, because the dorms didn't have that, so we never thought about it, but they could absolutely trace every call coming out of the dorms. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's how they caught us. You know what I mean? Because we were stupid. So stupid. My mom had a field day with that.
Ash (:to exact room, Yeah. Yeah. I think...
Well, a lot of the stuff that we did in any sort of organized fun way was made out of whatever was laying around. And so what do we have to hand? Okay, well, we're stuck here, it's raining, nobody's got a car, let's crank call people. We played...
We played literally fucking tag outside of the house in the dark. And so like this added like skill level of trying to hear where the person was.
Beck (:Yeah, no, we didn't have any spaces like that. Like we could sometimes go to Jonas's house, but his mom was a big pothead and didn't like people to be there for very long. Everybody else's house was too small. Mine was too far out of the way. I lived on the other side of the river from everybody. So it would take a lot longer to get over there. And one of us always had a car, so that worked out.
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Ash (:Yeah, driving around is, and we, had, so my parents had a minivan. And so I could load pretty much everybody into the van and we drive around, like we built a potato gun and this was another run in with the cops. We probably would have been in trouble if we had got caught. We accidentally, okay, so we were behind the bingo hall.
Beck (:Hahaha.
Ash (:And the lottery, I mean, it's the whole lottery place, but it was mostly bingo at the time. And we were not trying to shoot anybody. We intentionally put ourselves in the middle of a fucking field, really far away from everything. And we're shooting this paintball gun, or this potato gun, but we weren't loading it with potatoes.
We were making our own munitions basically out of, we would soak toilet paper in water and wad it up and wrap it in Saran wrap and then put that down in there. So it was a cannon basically, a giant like paper-wad shooter. And we didn't understand the ratio of accelerant or...
Beck (:Right?
Ash (:Yeah, accelerant to air and we just pumped it full of too much hairspray. So the first one, very first one we shot went probably 200 yards into it straight. went over the bingo hall into the parking lot where every cop in the county was sitting. And we were like.
Beck (:Wow.
Ash (:there was this moment if we were like, if we don't move, nobody will see us. Nobody will know we did it. And then we hear all the doors shut and the cop, the cars all start up and they knew which direction it had come from. And so we all pile into this fucking Ford Aero Star and start, I'm trying to like sneak out the back ways of this thing. And we, I get on the interstate and we make it to my house and we're just sitting there, my mom and dad's trailer trying to act cool. Like we didn't just run from the police.
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Ash (:They never did. and we didn't, I hope we didn't hurt anybody. Jesus Christ, I hope we didn't hurt anybody. But we didn't do it on purpose. It's just, again, redneck shit escalates. It gets out of hand because there's not a manual for any of the stuff we come up with to do with our time.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, there was really nothing to do. I'm trying to think of what we would go get Chinese food. We would go eat at McDonald's sometimes. Some of us had jobs here and there. That was another thing. I worked at Fasoli's. Have you ever been to a Fasoli's? Yeah.
Ash (:yeah, we didn't have one but I ate it a ton in college.
Beck (:Yeah, I was the best breadstick ballerina you ever met.
Ash (:I worked at Pizza Hut, actually me and all my friends worked together at Pizza Hut. So that was fun. And so we would be like on shift together and then just not go home after that.
Beck (:Nice. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, a couple of my friends worked at Fazzoli's. But we always had school and stuff. We were nerds about school. We were honor roll students and, you know, in band and mock trial and quiz bowl and basically every club that you could be in, we were in. I was the only athlete among my friends. I was the only one who played sports.
Ash (:Yeah, all my friends played something other. I didn't have any girlfriends. was mostly, I pretty much only hung out with guys. And so we all played various things, but we were all like in them together. Like we were all on academic team together. We were all in choir together. And the like away matches for academic team, the back of the bus, that's where I learned about like other people's lives, right? Like we'll just sit around and talk about everything at the back of the bus.
Beck (:Right?
Right.
Ash (:And we'd be going into the hollers of Eastern Kentucky to play against other people in our division. So it was like six hour bus rides.
Beck (:Right?
Ash (:And we didn't really do drugs, but at the time you could buy trucker meth like anybody could buy it. There was a lot of truck stops where we lived because it was a major throwaway. And so you could get like yellow jackets and mini thins and stuff like that. I they didn't cart or anything back then. We could get our checkers cigarettes for 75 cents a pack.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:We all did smoke, that's something that you can get cigarettes anywhere, nobody cared if you were 18 or not back then. They were like $2.75 a pack, do you remember that?
Ash (:Yeah, no, we were, was buying them myself at 15.
Yeah, remember, I mean Marlboro's, like the top shelf stuff was under $3. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah. I only ever smoked Marlboro's and Camel's.
I marble lights and camel lights. I like the.
Ash (:I smoked Waves because they were $1.50. And disgusting.
Beck (:Gotcha.
That's what I actually had a lot of money when I was in high school because my mom, when they were running the shop, they had some money, like they didn't have to worry about it. And my father, after I was adopted, started paying back the arrears of child support that he owed. So mom got a check for like 400 bucks every month and she would just give it to me. So I got like 400, yeah. But she didn't want his money, she said, right? And I was like, I'll take it, shit. So I would get like 400 bucks a month to do whatever I wanted.
Ash (:Hmm.
Ash (:day.
Ash (:Well, it's for you.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Beck (:A gas was like a dollar a gallon back then.
Ash (:I remember the summer it was 76 cents. It was like, I think that was 97. And I made, I was a really good server. I made good tips at Pizza Hut. And it was the Pizza Hut, was on, I lived on I-75. And that's one of the like most, like the busiest, most touristy interstates in the US. Cause it goes all the way up to New York, down to Key West.
Beck (:Yeah.
Ash (:down to Miami. so like people be coming through there with money. And so I'm like laying it on thick, you know, I could spot them. I'm like, how y'all doing? You know, anything else you're doing good? I mean, I was a fucking killer server. And so I say, would save my money up just from tips, put everything else to like gas or something like, cause we, when you're a server, you make back then it was, made two 13 an hour.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, my first job was as a server at a little dairy bar. I was terrible at it.
Ash (:Yeah. man, no. I mean, my first day was pretty overwhelming, but after that I was like, this is just, I've been doing this my whole life, right? Pretending I'm somebody else.
Beck (:The the I worked in one of those places where there was always a table full of old Ben drinking coffee and they would leave you a nickel as a tip and they'd want 400 refills on their coffee. And even at 16, I was like, fuck these old men. I don't want anything to do with them. You know what I mean? Get out of here.
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Ash (:Yeah.
Ash (:Yeah, no, I don't think I would have made, I certainly would not have been able to pull down what I did in that, know, I just, I, and we had big musicians, celebrities would come through there. They would stop in small towns instead of big ones. My mom, the Goo Goo Dolls was in there one day and my mom didn't know who they were. She worked there too. And the, she went over and she said,
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, not mine. That's the...
Ash (:That little man, that little, what'd she say, young man over there, he plays the guitar too. And I was like, what do you mean? And she said, well, you had a little guitar pin or something, like a badge that she saw, and I'm sure she was over there. My daughter plays the guitar. And I looked and it was the fucking goo goo dolls. Leanne Rimes stole gas from me once when I worked at the Speedway hand corp. Because she got spotted and ran off.
Beck (:Hahaha!
Beck (:The first concert that my mom let me go to on my own was the Goo Goo Dolls, No Doubt and Bush. Yeah. It was a great show. Yeah, it was a great show. It was my senior year. So that would have been either late 95 or early 96.
Ash (:Dang, that's pretty good. It's peak 90s.
Ash (:My first one was in 96 as well as my junior year of high school and we went down to Atlanta to see Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos on a co-doubleheader. So that was pretty fucking incredible.
Beck (:What year did you graduate high school? Gotcha. Okay, you and Shanna, but is your birthday 1982?
Ash (:2000
And I was one of the ones, I was about to say I was one of the ones that was already 18 when we graduated. It's 81.
Beck (:I was gonna say, because Shanna is also the class of 2000, and her birthday is also October 5th, and it would have been weird if it would have been the same year.
Ash (:Yeah. She, my brother was 2001, but he's born in 82.
Beck (:Yeah, but not October 5th.
Ash (:No, one month later. Because my mom was on a fucking schedule. She had a schedule to keep.
Beck (:Yeah, we were all three years apart. My sister was six years older than me and then my brother was three years older than me and then I was the baby.
Ash (:mom was pregnant every damn year. The only reason there's a gap between David and Vanessa is because the baby was stillborn. Because she finally was like, she my dad, she's like, you are getting a vasectomy. And he did, he was like, yes ma'am, I don't want no more either.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mom and my dad both said they wanted kids after me, but for whatever reason they weren't able to have them. Mom had had her tubes tied and Jan, my stepmother had had a hysterectomy. So, you know, there's nothing that you could do there. But I told them both they finished with perfection. So why worry about it? Yeah, well you have me. Exactly.
Ash (:It's hard to reverse that.
Ash (:Yeah.
Right, why keep going? It's all downhill from here.
Ash (:Well, I can't think of anything. What else is there about games? Really, to sum up games for Rednecks in general, but for queer Rednecks, like wherever there was third space, wherever things were happening, you then had to go and find your version of it that also included you, that also had people that were gonna let you in and be safe to be around. And so, I was lucky to find the two to three people.
Beck (:Right?
Ash (:that, I mean, I feel fucking just like anointed by God that I found people to actually spend time with in high school. Certainly wasn't the best years of my life, but they were, they was more tolerable than every, than the best minute at the school, at Jellicoe, right? That was misery. So I just feel for people who,
I know that there is people out there, if anybody listens to this, who didn't get to have that.
Beck (:Sorry for the noise.
Ash (:person.
Beck (:my email dinged. forgot that I had that window open.
and we also played things like Perdital and, you know that one when you only have one headlight and slug bug and things like that. I think those are pretty universal.
Ash (:Yeah. Slug vogue.
Beck (:There's Christmas gift. growing up in the holler, there wasn't a lot of money going around so that you like Christmas time came around, you couldn't buy for all the cousins and stuff like that. So they invented this game called Christmas gift and Christmas Eve gift. So the goal is to be the first person to see the other person. So say it was midnight and I snuck into your house, I would jump out and yell Christmas Eve gift.
and you would have to give me a piece of candy or a dollar or something very low value, right? But I would win and the prestige is in the winning. Just being the first person to see the other one. So like one time I had a girlfriend and we didn't spend Christmas together because we weren't living together or anything. And after midnight, she drove from West Virginia to Ohio, burst in my front door, yelled Christmas Eve gift to everybody and won. Like.
Ash (:How do you win again? You surprise them?
Ash (:That's awesome.
Beck (:Yeah, so like we play that game for every like it'll be birthday gift or New Year's Eve gift or Easter gift or whatever we we play that in every version of holiday that there is But it has a long long history back in the holler Being where people didn't have money to give to each other So they played this, know hide-and-seek kind of game my papal would tell me stories about them hiding under houses and
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:You know, doing all kinds of crazy things to be the ones to win. But yeah, that's a fun game that my family plays. Christmas gift. Yeah. Yeah.
Ash (:Yeah, very social too. Interesting. It's like a person scavenger, huh? Yeah, well, I believe just like everything else, we could talk for days about it, but do you have any final thoughts on how and or how games are made and played where you're from?
Beck (:Yeah. Yep.
Beck (:I think that...
they really have to be organized for them to occur because where I'm from, there's just not, like you call it, not a lot of third spaces, right? So we'd have to make those in the car or at the Walmart Craft Center. We would have to make our own spaces to do things.
Ash (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:I know, I think that's one of the challenges of being from the country is that there is nothing to do most of the time and that have to make your own fun and games.
Ash (:And sometimes the game is making the fun. Like a lot of the best part of challenges, we would give ourselves challenges like we would, that was a challenge to get kicked out of Walmart. But we couldn't touch anything, we couldn't break anything, we couldn't do anything wrong, right? We just had to be weird enough that they asked us to leave.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Beck (:Right.
Did you ever corn a car? Yeah. No, be on the side of the road when they pass, throw corn at it and damage the paint. I only, I did that once.
Ash (:corn a car, like fill it with corn.
Ash (:No, we did corn. See, that's the starch, I guess, but we did bologna, so I mean, it's no better. We did eggs and bologna. But yeah, I think...
Beck (:Yeah, I egged my course teacher's house one time. That bitch deserved it. I say that this day, 30 years later, I'm still mad about it. Yeah, that's her name actually. Yeah!
Ash (:Fuck it, Janet. Is it? You're fucking shitting me. Shit, we gotta call this. I gotta go play lottery real quick. Damn.
Beck (:Facebook keeps recommending her as a friend to me and I keep clicking remove.
Ash (:They're like, what did you say? Bring her here?
Beck (:Yeah, I hated that bitch. My sister keyed her car one time. She got me thrown out of National Honor Society for throwing up in Disneyland or Disney World, the one in Florida. She was just evil. She was just hateful. But it turns out she had liked my uncle when they were in high school together and she had wanted to go out on a date with him and he said no. And then she found out he was my uncle and it went downhill from there. So small towns, you gotta love them.
Ash (:Hmm.
Ash (:You there's no... You're always paying for the shit that people came for you did.
Beck (:Yeah, that was one of the best things about changing my name was that I no longer had to be associated with my brother.
Ash (:Yeah, I think there's a lot of creativity that is, I wouldn't, I'm not gonna say imbued, and I don't think it's innate. is hard fought and won by people in the hills who are simply forced to be creative for their own sanity, for their own, I mean, the whole thing about Gen X and millennials being literally locked out of the house all day.
Beck (:All right.
Ash (:Well, yes, that, and nowhere to go and nothing to do. No park. There's no city park. There's not even a city, you know? No internet? No, well, yeah, that's true, I think. But, I mean, no, like...
Beck (:Yeah, no internet.
Beck (:That's just so hard to fathom for kids these days. They can't imagine what life would have been like without the internet.
Ash (:like right, how did we communicate with one another outside of school? And it's like, we never left contact with one another. Well, we're gonna choose a different topic every time. so hopefully, we're just gonna do this spur of the moment while we're on the mics. So we'll be as surprised as you. Yeah, so we don't know what next week's topic is gonna be, but I'm sure it'll be not what we wind up talking
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Come back and be surprised with us.
Ash (:Yeah, exactly. We'll just weather this storm together. Join us next week on Queernecks I have been your host, Ash.
Beck (:and I have been your host, Beck.
Ash (:We'll see you next time. Say hi to your mom and them.
Beck (:Bye.
