Pimento bushes only produce in odd numbered years so it was a hard life with a lot of time for reflection. When a crop was harvested we would snicker, cudgel and filet them, bale them up and send them by raft to the big pimento cheese refineries in Baytown and Texas City. When I was only eleven my Papa sent me alone down the Fresca River on a raft with over 11,000 bales of pimento filets to deliver to the huge Halliburton Tomato Soup-Mayonnaise-Fracking Fluid-Pimento Cheese Production Complex in Texas City (you probably know of it as the place where Cheez-Whiz was first developed). It was on that trip I met my first two former wives, but that's a story for another time.
The house we lived in didn’t have electricity — it was powered with compressed air. My Papa had been a machinist mate on a nuclear submarine in WW2 and during that time he developed a deep passion for compressed air.
While he was building our house with materials from an airplane that had almost crashed on the property, my Papa won 6200’ of 3/8” copper tubing in a poetry competition. I remember him explaining compressed air to Mama and telling her that it was the flow that mattered — not what was flowing. Whether it's air or electricity really isn't important. She believed him at the time.
Papa ran 3/8” tubes into every room in the house. instead of electrical outlets we had little valves on the wall. The compressor was the cleverest part : Papa constructed a fake pothole in the state highway that ran in front of our ranch. At the bottom was a bellows that was squeezed every time a car wheel dropped into the hole. There was the Harmony Baptist church about a mile down the highway from us with Fresca River Lutheran right across the road and Big Otto’s honky tonk about a mile further on. Between Saturday night and Sunday morning we usually compressed enough air to last all week. Papa used worn out basketballs that the YMCA gave him as storage tanks. They were interconnected and placed in racks in a building we called the ball barn. My Papa would have been the smartest man in town if we had lived in a town.
Because we lacked electricity we didn't have “regular” TV; instead, Papa built a sort of flip book in a box which used compressed air to turn the pages. The shows were drawn by my older sister Acetylena. They were short, but there were no commercials. We got our news by telegrams from Dr. Scorpio, who ran the prophecy service Papa subscribed to.
Light was always a scarcity around the pimento ranch. Compressed air doesn't glow very much. In the odd numbered years, when we worked the pimento fields from daylight ‘till dark, we were usually too tired to stay awake after sundown — we would eat our cottonseed stew, have some bugs and sorghum, and go straight to our pallets. For Christmas and holidays we got possum.
It was the even numbered years that were the worst. While the pimento bushes were dormant we had a lot of time on our hands. Often at night Acetylena, my younger sister Shelium, and myself would just sit in the dark and try to see who could sigh the longest; Shelium usually won. Eventually Papa sold the lyrics of the song “My Way” to Frank Sinatra for $750. He bought us kids harmonicas and some glow-in-the-dark stickers shaped like stars, planets, and flying saucers - after that things were better. We started to get possum for no reason at all.
Our lives on the ranch were good for while until the vacuum cleaner man showed up one day and enticed my mother with pretty lies about what un-compressed air could do. Mama and Shelium were alone in the house; Shelium was sorting O rings while Mama knitted some socks from teflon tape, when he came driving up in his shiny new Hupmobile. I had begun my professional career blowing up balloons with a circus, and Papa was out trying to find investors for his air powered radio.
Sheila, as she now insists on being called, said that the man carried a stange machine and something he called a battery into the parlor with Mama and closed the door. Sheila said she heard a funny whirring noise and Mama laughing. When the vacuum cleaner man left that afternoon in his shiny Hupmobile, Mama was in it with him. All she told Sheila was to tell Papa that she couldn't stand the pressure anymore.
Things never were the same after that; Papa lost interest in developing the air radio and, after the deregulation of the pimento industry in the 70’s, he lost the ranch due to competition from the global pimento cartel. For a while he tried to sell bicycle pumps door to door but ‘bikepumps.com’ ended that. He lives in a religious commune now where he maintains their pipe organ and plays it at their services. He's studying to become a cult leader.
Acetylena married the young man who went on to invent Fix-a-Flat; they got obscenely rich and retired to converted missle silo where they raise feral parrots.
Sheila became a commercial mixed gas diver and works in the pirate treasure recovery industry. She’s stayed single but sometimes dates married men.
As for me - I stayed with the circus. In the off season I make balloon animals at birthday parties. I try not think about the past, but a few days ago the hostess at at a birthday party offered me a sandwich - it was pimento cheese — and tears came to my eyes as I told the lady 'no thanks’; when she asked why, I said ,
“I know where pimentos come from — do you?"
More recolections of my youth are available here
(By the way, I’m practicing to become a political speechwriter)