Journey Out of Knoxville

I'm going to have to put the Joyce Saga on hold. In the meantime, let me regale you with some fun facts about my life that you probably do not know. I'm inspired by a friend's FaceBook post.

1) I worked at the same car wash in East Knoxville two different times. Huber's, owned by the Huber brothers, Jimmy and Louie, on Magnolia. The woman who ran the cash register was nicknamed Butch. She chain smoked and pretended to keep an eye on things. Working there was very much as the the movie "Carwash" portrayed. We partied on site as well as off. During the slow times, Lil and I would sit in her car and drink Canadian Mist mixed with Sprite. Sometimes we would slip around the side of the building and smoke a joint. I played my guitar and wrote in my journal and drew. When things were really slow, Jimmy and Louie would send us all home. Then a group of us would buy some beer and head out to one of the many rock quarries in the area and hang out there. I never swam. The car chassis and tires in the water were a deterrent.

2) I did not want to go to college. This is how I ended up working at the car wash the first time for pretty much the entire year after graduation. Mom, however, was very afraid I would turn out like Mac so at her insistence, I finally enrolled in some kind of engineering program at State Technical Institute at Knoxville (S.T.I.K.), now known as Pellissippi. I have no idea how I chose the program. I had no known interest or aptitude in the field. I did briefly enjoy the course(s) in which we got to draw circuit boards. However, by the end of the first week of the second quarter, I was out of there. Somehow my ex-boyfriend and I had ended up in the same class. My recollection is that after class that first week, I told him I was quitting, left, and never went back. This is how I ended up working at the car wash the second time.

3) Two years after graduation, I met a woman at the local gay bar, the Huddle (just off Gay Street, by the way). She got me to join the lesbian softball team, the Animals. That's a whole other story but the point in this context is that she and another woman I met on the team were college graduates. And through them, I met another college graduate. It was because of them, college-educated lesbian Feminists, that I finally felt inspired to go to college. I finally realized that college would be nothing like high school. (S.T.I.K. felt exactly like high school.) So in the fall of 1980, I enrolled at U.T. I declared no major. I took classes that interested me: music history and theory, philosophy of film, life drawing, class piano. And I started living in Ft. Sanders. I loved it all. That was a really good period of my life.

4) However, never one to let moss collect on me, over Thanksgiving of that year, Debbie and I drove up to NY/NJ, she to visit her mom and step-dad, me to visit my friend, Emily, at Sarah Lawrence College. It was a fateful trip. Several of Emily's friends had stayed on campus for the break and we all ended up hanging out together, eating, partying, and going into the city. They all welcomed me with open arms and recruited me. "Hey, you should come to Sarah Lawrence!" they said at the end of our four days together. "OK," I said. So when I got back to Knoxville, I proceeded to apply as a transfer student. I guess the combination of being from the South and my essay on women's music and Meg Christian won the admissions people over. I started in the fall of 1981.

5) The summer of 1982 was the last time I lived in Knoxville for a long time. I came back and lived with Kari and Flash again on Freemason. At least, I think that's where I lived. Anyway, it was that summer that I got a job working at the World's Fair souvenir warehouse. We were responsible for pricing souvenirs. I got real good at slapping price tags on with the pricing gun. We also had to assemble that year's craze, the dealy bobbers (a plastic headband with objects sticking up like ears on springs), as well as foam alligators that were at the end of a wire; people "walked' them around the fairgrounds. The iconic structure for the fair was the Sunsphere (the fair's theme was energy) so there were a million different Sunsphere souvenirs. One was a small metal replica, about five inches high. I clearly remember pricing it at the beginning of the fair for about $25 and laughing at the absurdity. I laughed even more when by the end of the fair it had been reduced to about $5. Even though I worked at the fair, for some reason I thought it was a ridiculous event so I only actually went on the fairgrounds one time and even then I really didn't do anything but walk around. I admit that I regret this now.