Eerie, Indiana was a show that reminded me of my little home town. It struck me as funny in my eleven year old mind that nope one else could see the similarities between that Twilight Zone-esque TV show and our bizarre little town of Brushton, NY.

Brushton was, Like Eerie, a seemingly normal place but at a closer level you could pick out the weirdness. Aliens popped in here and there, Bigfoot, lake monsters, killers and other crazy people, crazy animals, that sort of thing. Small country towns near international borders sometimes have a lot more going on inside of them than just smuggling.

These are my weird stories from home.

Unbelievable things were capable of happening in that place. The pretend isolation of the town was a sort of hilarity that I only recently realized. As I grew up and moved away the town became marked as increasingly bizarre in my mind as I tried to explain seemingly normal or even normally interesting events to other people, who would refuse to believe my tales.

You see, Brushton is situated next to the Canadian border (okay, more like a town or two away). From across the hills, if you a house overlooking a clear enough field, you could see the Adirondack Mountains in the distance on one side, then turn around and witness the Canadian border on the other, complete with a view of the St. Lawrence Seaway as well, shimmering in the far distance. At night you could see the thick dotted line of the city and of ships passing through the canals. Some serious stuff was happening at the border, some of it even legitimate.

But nothing was happening in Brushton, so went the standard thought. To a lot of local people, raised to be wary of the authorities, crossing the border can be the biggest hassle in the world. So activities near those shimmering lights to the north were generally out of the picture, except for special nights (like weekends after you turned eighteen). Time would be instead spent on finding your fun wherever and however you could, and damn the legalities of it all! At any rate people in the town generally thought of the place as being in the boonies, which it really, in all actuality, it wasn’t at all.

For myself and the dozens of other bored country kids we shared tje the clandestine thrill of the moonlit summer night; wandering around in secret with gangs of friends at two or three in the morning, running around and smashing fireflies over each others backs, riding bikes in the woods, all while drinking stolen Molsons out of a friends backback. This was the standard as a rite of passage in Brushton and really, all across the North Country. If you didn’t have at least one story of fleeing the police in a late night chase from a drunken and stoned party in the dirt roads or gravel pits you weren’t really livin’! I have to admit a late start to that sort of thing, as at the time I was playing stupidly overpriced game systems at my friends houses, probably high as all hell on soda and elf brand cookies.

One summer all of those beloved forbidden treats all started to come together, just wonderfully. Fourteen I was, and I had saved and saved and finally bought an Atari Jaguar. In retrospect, the joke was sort of on me, really, but there were some great games on that system. Ten or so, eventuallly… One in particular, and perhaps the greatest, was called Tempest 2000. It was a magnificent fusion of drug induced visuals and geometry class with a soundtrack so pumping you wanted to dance while playing the damned game. It was so damned good I actually cared about who programmed that mad game (who happened to be a wonderful and mad Brit by the name of Jeff Minter)!

One night I stumbled home from a random late night sneak out, and having met friends who smoked me up, I had wandered back completely stoned. I was ambitious and excitable when stoned as a young kid, and so I switched on Tempest 2000. That is when my life changed forever, or so it seemed at the smoky time. I was trapped playing the game for hours before passing out in teenage stoner gamer ecstasy, the visuals of the game composed of smoothly and swiftly moving geometric, 3-d shapes shot at your eyes and sent dazzling fireworks and blurred words or encouragement or dissing, accompanied by rampaging techno music of a quality you have never even thought possible, and coming from a goddamn masterpiece of a game, no less!

Three warp tokens hastily gathered, however, then

a sudden stop and chill moment upon warping to a special relaxation bonus zone, made up of of chilling and relaxing music and coasting along a semi-invisible path to gather points and spare lives before jumping back into the geometric fray.

Yes, it was the best game experience of my life up to that point. While I was in my early years of pseudo-stealthily hell raising and playing games, however, my brother was also apparently working his way into a becoming the sort of true hellraiser one fears yet admires, right at the same time as me- yet with a three year handicap! My first sign of his stunning pogress was when I asked him in the presence of a friend if he knew of where to find any weed. My brother told me that he did in fact know where to score some. and to wait one second. He came back- from his room- with a tiny bag and pipe and said to have fun. He had hidden his stash inside of a toy tractor trailer-his beloved Hess truck.

As my friend and I wandered into the stream in the woods behind the house to smoke and enjoy our good luck we laughed at how he had weed, how my little bro had pot. It was funny then and still is, really. I mean, he was in seventh grade! But it wasn’t a good sign. I mean, dude, he was in seventh grade. This should have been especially troubling because I had asked him for that which even I did not easily have, suspecting he did. I mean, he could get me beer through some process, somehow, then, too.

Around the same time I found my brother, deathly sick in the bathroom, puking away, and for the most part in the toilet. I remember the thick smell of cheap alcohol in the room, and I asked him if he had drank. He insisted he hadn’t and he just got food poisoning…even though the room stank of cheap Canadian whiskey.

I found out years later that he had a drank a jug of whiskey at once and puked it right up…silly kid hadn’t learned to drink “properly”. I’m glad I had found him, though. He wasn’t doing too well that night.

Ah, family memories…

, , , , , ,