Steven Cornelius was born and raised in Northeast Mississippi and is married to a beautiful, auburn haired second generation Irish woman with deep roots in Galway and Sligo. His love of books began at a very early age. When night fell on the farm and chores for the day were complete, he and his family sat around the fire and read until bedtime. Many of his childhood adventures are featured in his writing. He attended the University of Mississippi, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while participating in Air Force ROTC. Steve completed more than thirty years Air Force service in the US and overseas. For the Distant Traveler Trilogy, he drew upon experiences and memories collected during assignments around the world. After retiring in 2015, Steve decided to get serious about a lifelong passion for writing. His most recent work has been published in Mississippi magazine (October 2022) and Louisiana Living (November 2022). He just finished a multicultural novel set in Cuba and Houston Texas featuring Hispanics as the main characters. Steve has written one hundred and five short stories collected in two volumes and posted stories on the Mississippi Folklore and True Appalachia webpages and has a following of more than 3,000 regular followers on each page.

I Just Want To Celebrate…

By Steven Cornelius

I met and became friends with Pete while working as a carhop at the Frosty Mug. For a time in the sixties, the Frosty Mug was the hopping place in Corinth, Mississippi. Located across Highway 72 from Magnolia Hospital, the Frosty Mug caught a lot of traffic headed to and from Memphis. Pete was “living the good life” about a mile south of the Mug in a tumbledown old shack of a house with six sibling’s and his mom and dad. Their old place had no indoor plumbing but was an easy walk down to the drive-in for Pete and more importantly, coming down to the Mug got him away from his trainwreck of a home life. Pete would walk up to the east side of the Frosty Mug and having no money, didn’t dare go inside the restaurant. Instead, he would duck into my little carhop booth. After two weeks of sitting with me shooting the breeze, he finally asked, “How can I get a job here? I want to do what you are doing and get paid for it.”

I was running my legs off waiting on a hundred cars a night and welcomed the help, so I introduced Pete to the owner and a week later, he showed up wearing a big grin and pitiful, too big for his skinny feet work boots. It took a day or so to get him trained, but then he started working Thursday through Sunday…hustling around his half of a two acre gravel parking lot, shuffling toward the sound of hungry and impatient customers honking their car horns, scribbling food and drink orders in our crude, shorthand and then rushing into our carhop shack to hang the small slip of green paper under a spiral spring holder for the cook. Pete and I worked together at the Mug for about fifteen months. During that time, we became good friends. Once in a great while, when I was too tired to ride my motorcycle fifteen miles through dark, cold and sometimes rainy nights to sleep in my own bed, I would spend the night with Pete. I only did this a couple of times because his house was bursting at the seams with sweaty kinfolk. With no bed space for us…we slept al fresco…on folded quilt pallets laid on a hard front or back porches with six or seven half-starved dogs, either slapping at mosquitos or shivering in the cold dampness.

Pete’s dad was an abusive alcoholic, and his momma wasn’t much better. Both parents screamed at him nonstop. Pete was the oldest son, so everything was his fault as he was constantly reminded. Pete was happiest away from there and when he wasn’t working at the Mug, he found shade somewhere and just sat under an oak tree and slept. Pete wasn’t dumb, but neither was he the sharpest knife in the drawer. He basically had no encouragement at home or anywhere else, so he devoted scant energy to academics. Somehow, someway Pete managed to get himself enrolled at my high school, almost twenty miles away from where he lived. Apparently, he figured out a way to stay with a family in our part of the county. Once I got over the surprise of seeing him, we enjoyed being classmates. Pete wasn’t cut out for academics. Even by rural high school standards…he barely squeaked by his freshman and sophomore years. About two months into our junior year, after an ugly confrontation with one of our asshole teachers, Pete quit school. The last time I saw him for several weeks was a chance encounter in the hallway. He glanced toward the principal’s office, where he’d just received a paddling with a long, skinny pine board, looked over at me and said, “Fuck it, I’m outta here.”

I didn’t try to talk him out of leaving school; it’s doubtful I could have in any case. During that time, Pete was constantly stressed out. His folks gave him hell and teachers at our school weren’t any better. He didn’t exactly give the teachers problems, mainly he just sat like a lump, refusing to talk to them or try in the least at any of his studies. By then, I had moved a little closer to home and was working as a short order cook at Sherer’s Drive-in. About a month after he walked out of the high school, Pete dropped by Sherer’s. Surprised to see him, we sat in a booth while he quickly devoured a basket of chicken and said goodbye; Pete had enlisted in the Army. It was September 1969 and Vietnam was still a raging dumpster fire. As Pete later told me, his first year or so in the Army went very well. During initial placement testing, the Army discovered that Pete had a knack for maintaining and operating heavy equipment. After completing Basic Combat Training (BCT), the Army sent him to Fort Knox to learn how to do just that. He completed Advanced Individual Training (AIT) and wound up in Germany for a year, eating brats, drinking good German bier and generally living the good life. Then his combat construction battalion was deployed forward to Viet Nam for six months to help build new or rebuild damaged firebases along the DMZ and up in the highlands around Pleiku.

Flash forward to July 1972; imagine my surprise when Pete dropped by Sherer’s. He was thinner but still had that same old, aw shucks, country boy demeanor. He was lucky to catch me, because thirty days later, I quit the restaurant business and started full-time studies at Ole Miss. He sat enjoying his favorite meal…a chicken basket while we caught each other up and reconnected. As he stood to leave, Pete gave me a crumpled slip of paper with his current address. The next Monday afternoon, I drove down to see him, surprised to see his family renting a big old house in Biggersville, unsurprisingly paid for by his VA disability pension. Sitting on the front porch of that old farm house, with curious siblings swarming around us, Pete told me that Viet Nam really screwed him up. Within weeks of arrival in Saigon and then assignment up near Danang, Pete discovered heroin and became completely hooked on that deadly stuff. About a month after arriving in country, by his own admission, Pete floated through each day higher than a Georgia Pine. One insufferably hot afternoon sixty miles north of Danang, he was sitting atop a clanking, stinking olive drab bulldozer scraping away at a ten acre patch of scrub brush and red Vietnamese dirt.

He didn’t see or hear the Viet Cong sapper team that got him. The only thing he recalled was that one minute he was sitting atop a dull green Caterpillar D-8 working the controls and the next he was flat of his back on the same dirt he had just pushed into a pile, bleeding out…torso and right leg blown apart, having taken three AK-47 rounds. Thanks to quick and competent care by a field medic and arrival of a “dust off” UH-1 Huey five minutes later, he survived. Pete spent almost three months in an Army hospital in Saigon and endured a half-dozen surgeries there before being air evac’d to Walter Reid Army Hospital by way of Ramstein Air Base for even more surgical work and rehab. The one positive of all his hospital time was that he was forced to get clean. It was a lot harder to score smack in the hospital than on the streets of Danang or Saigon.

As we sat on the front porch of their rambling old house…his mother and three of his siblings swirling around us, Pete pulled up his t-shirt and showed me the collection of ugly, livid scars crisscrossing his torso, which looked like deep pink lightning bolts running in every direction. It was hard to look at and I told him so. Pete’s face screwed up like a toddler about to cry and nodded. He glanced over at his noisy family and then quietly told me about a girl he’d gotten friendly with in Germany on the journey from Saigon to Walter Reed. She had been curious about his injuries and when he finally relented and opened his gown, she screamed and ran from his hospital room. Pete stared intently at his feet as he quietly offered, “When I get horny or need to get away, I ride a greyhound bus to Memphis and pay for a hooker that’ll stay overnight with me or just get a room and drink.

As we sat on that creaky old front porch, I noticed Pete admiring my small Austin Healy Sprite. I glanced around at his family who seemed to crowd around us at every turn and asked, “Hey, want to go for a ride?” Pete grinned, “Sure…anything to get away from here.” As we stood, Pete turned and glanced down at the little black car, “Does your convertible have an eight track player?” I chuckled, “Yep. The stereo is the best part of the little thing.” Pete ducked inside and a few seconds later emerged holding a single cartridge. We hopped in and as I pulled out of the driveway, Pete shoved the tape into my eight track player and offered, “It’s the only one I have.” It was Rare Earth’s One World album. The song “I Just Want To Celebrate” was the first to come on. Pete looked for the volume knob and turned the sound up until it was really blaring. I drove slowly so that we could enjoy the song. Pete leaned his head back and listened, eyes half closed…looking up at a blue summer sky…really getting into the lyrics, “I just want to celebrate another day of living…I just want to celebrate another day of life…Yeah ah…Put my faith in the people and the People let me down…”

We drove around for almost an hour listening to One World. Pete would repeatedly fast forward the tape until “I Just Want To Celebrate” came on again. I finally turned into the uphill gravel driveway and dropped Pete off in front of his house. As he unfolded himself from the Sprite, Pete grabbed his eight track tape and reached over and slapped me on the shoulder giving me a shy grin, “Thanks…that was fun. I’ll see you around.” The glimpse of him walking deep into the shade of a massive oak tree was the last I’d ever have of Pete. Life got busy and it was five or six weeks before I made it back down to Biggersville to check on my friend. I was shocked and surprised to see a vacant house. All traces of Pete and his family had vanished.

It took several weeks before I pieced together what had happened. As I finally learned, the next evening after our short car ride in the country, Pete caught a greyhound bus to Memphis. Instead of looking for female companionship, Pete walked around the seedy section of the Bluff City until he found a pusher and scored a dime bag of heroin. It was more than enough to overdose; I don’t know if he shot up in a back alley on the southside of Memphis or brought the smack back to Corinth and did the deed closer to home. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, it was enough to kill him, and dead is dead. Once the VA disability checks stopped coming, his family had to move along. A deadly and destructive habit picked up while serving in Vietnam claimed him; Pete joined the other fifty-eight thousand names engraved on the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, DC, each with a sad story about life cut short and unfulfilled ambitions.