Madge and Mable - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/128/four-corners

On the corner of Madge and Mable.

I grew up on the corner of Madge and Mable in Las Vegas, and the more I look at the corner that I called home for my entire childhood explains a lot about me.

Street View

My house has since been painted a new color, lost a lot of it's original 'charm', but it's still the best house on that corner. All while growing up, I thought that I was the person who had the nice house. In my neighborhood, we were the ones that had a yard, and the grass even looked alive most of the time. If you were able to pull up street views from forever ago, my house was one of the only houses on the street that looked like someone cared enough to pay attention to it. All of the other houses that I was surounded by were "desert landscapes" which roughly translated out to the people living there not caring a bit about what their house looked like and just letting the desert decide what their yard looked like for them.

This meant that my entire life I thought that I was one of the better off kids. This was not the case. I was just one of the only people in my neighborhood that decided to turn their sprinklers on on a regular basis. As much as I want to imagine, my house was ghetto. I drive back on the street when I go home, and I can't see the world that I thought I was in when I was a kid. I thought that my street was a little weird, had some character, but normal. Now I go down the street with many of the houses still with the same people inside of them, and I see anything but normal. My street, my corner, wasn't in the world of normal, it was the weirdest thing that you could find in metropolitan Las Vegas.

On my corner of the world there were people that owned horses in their back yards, raised chickens, rabbits, peacocks, camels, roosters, and donkeys. Not only did that raise the crazy that was my neighborhood that I took for granted, but then a Las Vegas celebrity bought a house (mansion) that was a block away. Lance Burton being the back door neighbor to your friend's house down the street was just a normal day for me. Seeing him washing off his birds that he kept in cages in his garage while I rode my bike around the block was a totally normal thing.

My childhood corner was on the corner of weird, crazy, and Vegas, and it made me who I am. That weird corner of my home that had no side walk, no street lamps, and had enough divots and bumps in it that when it rained there would be giant puddles that were long and deep scattered throughout the street, was what sculpted me. I never saw myself as the crazy one, it was always everyone else. I was the perfectly normal one that had a neighbor who would occasionally light fire his cannon on the 4th of July . . . and whenever he wanted to celebrate a good time. I wasn't the weird one, the person that had no electricity to her home and was as much as a hermit as any person living in Las Vegas valley could allow, was the weird one. The fact that we shared a street was just chance.

I was never the weird one. Even when people would try to point out to me just how weird I was, and just how much my corner of the world had seeped into my life, I didn't believe them, because in my eyes, I wasn't the crazy one. I tried my best to push the crazy away from me, or to find other flavors of crazy around me, but now that I look back at it, I was not as crazy as the people around me, but by no stretch was I completely removed from the crazy.

I had a back yard and then a back, back yard.

My dad would occasionally sit out with his .22 and shoot at gofers in our back back yard.

We would go into our back back yard and try to smoke out the gofers by saving the smoke bombs from the 4th of July, lighting it and throwing it into one end of the tunnels they lived in, just so we could see the smoke rise from any other entrances that we missed. Ultimately we'd cover all of the entrances up which meant that we either buried them alive, or gas chambered them in their own tunnels.

For fun I would play in the wash, which was behind my house and when growing up neither paved or cleaned regularly. It was the first time I ever had a beer bottle thrown at my head. I was maybe 10 years old and we were throwing stuff at each other.

For the longest time behind my back, back yard was just acres of desert, which doubled as my playground. Kids in the neighborhood had different stacks of bushes that doubled as their hide outs. I never spent time to make one, but please believe that I played in them.

With the massive amount of animals in the area, and every house having at least one dog (seriously, every single house) by the time I was in 4th grade, I had picked up a semi-convincing bark just to play around with the dogs any time I'd travel by houses. If the dogs weren't barking when I biked by, I'd bark just to get their attention and keep driving past.

As much as I'd want to think that I grew up in a normal neighborhood doing normal things, I look back at my corner and the world that I came from and realize that a lot of who I am came from that weird, crazy, back country, metropolitan corner.