"Please Go to Hell"
By John Richard Jackson, with his sister Pauline Roberta "Bubbles" Jackson Bates
John Richard Jackson and his sister, Pauline Roberta "Bubbles" Jackson Bates, once planned to write companion memoirs of growing up in Creede, Colorado — his half from a boy's perspective, hers from a girl's. John finished his half on his own manual typewriter; his sister's was never written. After John's death, his niece Shannon found the typescript among his papers. When she asked her mother about it, her mother exclaimed, "Oh, you found the lost manuscript!" It is transcribed here, in sections, exactly as John wrote it.
What follows is reproduced in John's own words, exactly as he wrote them — nothing edited, softened, or left out. He wrote in a broad, joking, tall-tale style typical of local-color memoir writing from his generation, playing up a folksy, small-town-goofball persona that was entirely a put-on: he was an articulate, well-read man, and the voice on the page is a deliberate comic choice, not a reflection of how he actually wrote or spoke. Where a spelling or typing slip appears in the text below, it's almost certainly a transcription error from retyping the original typescript into digital form, rather than an error of John's — he wasn't known to make them. He also did not write about Creede's mining-camp characters, or about race, gender, or the people around him, the way anyone would write about them today. Where a piece needs a specific content note beyond the general one above, it carries its own.
John signed his newspaper column and several self-published books with the pen name "Thundermug." Some of the poems reproduced here are signed and dated that way in the original.
Contents
John's own set-up for the whole manuscript — his full wind-up before diving into the stories below:
- Introduction
- Prologue to the Preface
- Preface to the Foreword
- Foreword
- Life's Puzzle
- Right the First Time
New sections are added as they're transcribed. Not every piece in the manuscript will necessarily appear here.
- Family and Brothers — three short pieces on growing up with Joel and Scooter and the uncles who taught them things school didn't, bracketed by two poems, "Childish" and "Yesterday."
- Digging for the Truth — the hardest story in the manuscript to get out of Bill Jackson: his own father's decline and commitment, and the childhood that shaped him.
- Mom Jo and Grandma Lane — on Alice Josephine Jackson's love of books, and her mother Anna Maud's decades as Creede's midwife.
- The Talking Picture Box — a night at Denver's first 3D movie, and the decade-long wait for television to reach Creede.
- When You Would Like to Live Forever — John and Inez's own wilderness fishing trips, and a Trinity Lake camping trip that brings back the family's August 1947 stay at Brewster Park.
- Reflections and Hindsight — John's poem contrasting the Creede he knew with the Creede he sees now, "Modern Creede," then he looks back on the mentor, the prospectors, and the one particular skunk he was most grateful for, and closes with two poems on growing old, "The Felony of Age" and "Priorities."
- Hellions and Moonshiners — a boyhood gang's pranks and a dumpground squirrel hunt, a poem and profiles of the Snowshoe Mountain moonshiners, a burro-hunting misadventure, and a cold-weather ice-cutting and hunting partnership with Allen "A.J." Hosselkus.
- Let's Dance and Slim Blackford — Creede's dance pavilions from waltzing couples through the Jitterbugging craze to the "Bucket of Blood," and the long working life and lasting nickname of Slim Blackford.
- Truth Stretchers and A Sailor Never to Be — a gallery of the finest liars John crossed paths with in the mines, closing on the true story of a wartime friendship with a German POW and a stowaway teenager, followed by the poem "A Sailor Never to Be," on John's own seasick 1946 troopship crossing.
- The Greenhorn — John's first shift underground as a green flunky, what a fifty-pound box of dynamite taught him that a pick never could, and the mine engineer and U.S. Geological Survey scientists who turned Creede's geology into a second education.
- Dedication and The Amethyst Crew "1947" — a roll-call poem imagining a bus ride down "Memory Lane" past old friends and mining pards, followed by John's roster of the crew he worked with at the Amethyst Mine in 1947.
- The Hog Killin' (1947) and Pass the Chicken, Zero — two connected stories starring Amethyst Mine miners James "Zero" Ott and George "Big Kentucky" Hatfield: a shaggy-dog tale of a disastrous double date to a brothel in Alamosa, followed by the two-week bender that cost them both their jobs.
- The Deserter — a Kentucky newcomer at the Amethyst Mine known only as "Sandy," who deserted the Army as a teenager, assumed his cousin's identity to re-enlist, and fought through Italy and Normandy — but spent his Creede years always one step ahead of the military police still hunting the deserter he'd once been.
- Black Pitch Wins Again — two accidents on the treacherous grade above West Willow Creek Canyon: a near-fatal runaway pickup wreck, and a comic, multi-act truck wreck John witnessed a decade later.
- Wormology — a short one: an earthworm trapped and fattened inside a rotted board over the grease trap, and John's own reaction to setting it free.
- Pards — a sketch of two boyhood friends and later mining partners: Floyd Dooley, one of three children raised by their widowed mother, and Harry Bucher, a poor, thin, deep-voiced kid Floyd looked out for and let play the hero in their games.
- Pat, Shorty and Dunk — a tribute to two cheerful, hardworking miners, and to Shorty's son Paul, still known as "Dunk," whose common sense as a novice tunneler bested a DuPont engineer's own blasting instructions.
- Slim Anderson — a lifelong friend of John's, a natural horseman and a menace on a bulldozer, in three episodes: a near miss with John's chainsaw, a funeral-limousine ribbing, and a bar-room dispute over exactly how he was caught on Millie Kistler's porch.
- Quirks of the Trade — four short character sketches of mannerisms and tells: a moustache that signaled trouble, a cap and headlamp that would never point straight, a new hire's eyeball-endangering war against sneezing, and an underground scowl that vanished in daylight.
- Bill Gydesen — a profile of a Gunnison-area friend and consulting client with, John swears, the proverbial nine lives of a cat: a broken ankle worked through, a burst aortic aneurysm, and years of other close calls that never slowed him down.
- Lawrence Cruthers – Vocalist — a Cedaredge neighbor whose morning ritual of bellowing back and forth with John across the yard traced back to a conveyor-belt accident in the coal mines that nearly killed him.
- High Jinks — a retired Texas game warden catches a group of high-school-age kids drinking in a park, and makes the one with the beer bottle stashed in his shorts pay for it, one jumping jack at a time.
- Sit Down, Senator — on Mom Jo's gift for listening and John's own shorter fuse for it, closing on a 1977 Nevada mining hearing where a coworker, Slim Meutze, ran out of patience for a long-winded senator.
- Etiquette and Reverse Etiquette — a Denver machinery salesman's two loud belches turn out to be the highest compliment his faith offers, and a mine promoter's pitch about the millions in a new mill gets cut short by Inez and a scoop shovel.
- Bullseye Creede — a runaway 1964 Pershing missile test out of Fort Bliss nearly struck Creede, and it took a two-week Army search and, that spring, a lucky find by a geology graduate student staking claims near where John himself was prospecting to turn up the wreckage.
- The Price of Glory — twenty-three years and several moves removed from Creede, John reflects on the fame the town actually remembers him for: wrapping a fifty-five-gallon oil barrel around his truck's front axle and pushing it seven drunken blocks in view of his sister's schoolhouse.
- The Coldest Day and The Hottest Day — three more poems, "A Harmless Loon," the paired "Where Danger Lurks" and "Needle Teeth," and "Fare," bookending two personal stories John frames as matched temperature extremes: breaking ice for cattle on Cebolla Creek in January 1994, and a blistering August 1981 afternoon prospecting between Spearfish and Lead, South Dakota.
From the manuscript
Go to Hell
Introduction
We hope you will not be offended by the title "Please Go to Hell." It is neither a directive or invitation but, rather, a forewarning that if you read it, in entirety, it is very likely your ticket to hell has been punched and you will join us as soon as the vacancy committee finds a place for you and your particular talents. Hell is a pretty exclusive club, we have learned, and we were turned away several times until we returned with the proper credentials and references.
Thundermug Jackson had been told to go to hell by the dregs of humanity to, and including, the most influential people he had met in his journeys. Some even put special emphasis on the command by adding "go straight to hell." There is no straight path to hell. It is a circuitous trail, not clearly marked, and forks to dead ends that test one's endurance. Those persons with the proper attitude, qualified and deserving, will have few problems.
Let us tell you, it doesn't get any better than this. We laugh at ourselves, we laugh at our neighbors and we don't sue McDonald's because their coffee is too hot or because their high calorie food makes us fat. In fact, we don't sue anybody. Lawyers who found their way to us liked our lifestyle so much they begged to stay and have either become bartenders or janitors.
Hell is a separate and sovereign colony not dependent on any governing body because everyone here is equal. We haven't determined equal to what, but that is the least of our worries. We should add that Hell is like any spirited community and you will find a certain faction that believes it is more equal than the rest of us, but since we have no specific entity or object to be equal to there is really no social difference.
We don't know where the hell we're going or why, but we intend to raise hell and put a chunk under it.
Prologue to the Preface
"Hey there, don't skip this page. If you want to go hell, you must read all of the publication regardless of its contents or how boring it may seem."
Before you turn another page, however, be advised that the authors are not writers, per se. We are mentally unstable due to many and varied factors and grossly uninhibited in our advanced years. Pauline Roberta Jackson Bates, known affectionately as "Bubbles," has a degree from a prestigious college that qualifies her as a learned person and capable of writing real novels. Her ambitions along that line were rudely interrupted when she was kidnapped by aliens from a distant galaxy just after graduation. She was returned with a vast knowledge of the universe and interstellar travel but her brain was wiped clean of prior academic learning. My credentials are far less noteworthy, though I have exposed my instability and incompetence in other publications that were well received in Latvia, where a friend on missionary work shared them with students in his classes. They couldn't read them, but they liked the illustrations.
In our immediate family, Bubbles and I have outlasted the other players and share a common bond in spite of our disparate mental abilities. Our goal, in this publication, is to jog memories of oldsters and acquaint others with short stories of a variety of people who influenced us, one way or another, and gave the mining town of Creede the aura and flavor that pervades to this day and draws the curious into its fold. The hell raisers are gone and "good riddance" to us. It is time for a new and invigorating culture to polish Creede's image and attract artisans who will preserve the past but take the town to a new and higher level.
I, personally, am well acquainted with the landlord in Hell and rest assured I will provide references for each and every one of you who wish a change of scenery and atmosphere after reading our stories. We will inject a few previously unpublished poems and a few previously unpublished thoughts that probably should have remained unpublished.
Preface to the Foreword
Why are sisters smarter than brothers?
And their combined intellect less than Mothers?
My brothers and I weren't prepared for a sister. Especially a sister with a brain that absorbed as much in her first six years as our brains absorbed in twelve years or more. We sprang from the same loins, nurtured in the same womb and nursed from the same breast but somewhere along the genetic trail, between our births and hers, the DNA spiral was altered with smarter genes.
Girls are smarter than boys. Boys are smarter than their fathers until they partially mature at twenty years of age to find their old dads, in a surprising surge of aptitude, surpassed them in scholarly capabilities and common sense. Through it all the mothers sit back and let us all make fools of ourselves, then rescue us from total failure with both superior intellect and love.
Mothers are a national treasure and we darned well better appreciate them and make their lives a little easier.
Foreword
Okays, we got a little carried away with a prologue, a preface and now a foreword, which are basically the same in meaning but we felt if we could confuse you enough at the start we could fake the rest of it and you wouldn't be too critical of the conflaberration we dreamed up to gain a little fame or grease the skids for a faster ride to hell than the leisurely pace reserved for the elderly. The word "conflaberration" is not in the dictionary. It combines a few words or parts of words that, if assembled correctly, would amount to a confession for misleading you.
Some people write books for a living, they are creative and put a story together that can be sold for a profit. Some people write books because they feel they have knowledge to pass on to those less learned. We write to embarrass family members in hopes the most prominent and well-heeled will offer to buy the manuscript before it reaches a publisher. Unfortunately, we have no prominent or well-heeled family members and the only offer we have received to date is not suitable for printing and contains threats of bodily harm if the manuscript is not destroyed.
We do not take kindly to threats and we shall not be deterred. Family secrets should be aired before the skeletons in the closet gather cobwebs and dust. Our advice to family members is to brace yourselves as firmly as possible and deny any relationship.
I always write with fear and trepidation. I don't know what trepidation means but it sounds scholarly and, above all, I want to sound scholarly conflaberrating with my sister since she has a college degree and has traveled in space with a superior, alien race. With her background, she has no fear of anything on Earth.
The main purpose of our conspiracy is to let you know that Creede was and is a very special place. The road to everywhere starts right in Creede, Colorado. If you are so inclined, the stories may serve as a guideline for the journey to hell and you are encouraged to read on. If you are not so inclined, the stories and poetry may offer you a guideline to avoid the journey, but "nothing ventured, nothing gained" Please read on.
Life's Puzzle
Enigmas in life are many and varied
Arising to haunt us from species long buried
With images captured in pictograph caves
That tell us the world was a far different place
Before the advent of our own human race
In the scheme of the cosmos just what is our goal?
as we coddle ourselves and try to control
all matter of nature that fashioned the earth
and provided essentials for a new creature's birth
that walked on two legs with the power to think
but fails to acknowledge there must be a link
to all previous life that comprises Earth's history
and why we are here remains still a mystery.
Thundermug 2003
Right the First Time
When a lost soul reaches a fork in the road
so tired of carrying his earthly load
his breathing labored, his spirit bowed
Where does he go from here?
With memories fading in watery eyes
that no longer see rebirth in the skies
yet seeking forgiveness before he dies
Where does he go from here?
Bearing lack of faith in theology
that fails to show an analogy
with a record of facts in geology
Where does he go from here?
The path that led him from there to here
with loved ones lining the route to cheer
and helping him conquer both doubt and fear
Lies quiet, unused, unmarked from here.
No thrill in the chase or the strength to fight
he looks in vain for a guiding light
pleading, "where in hell do I go from here..." HE'S RIGHT,
That's where he goes from here.
Thundermug 2002