| Memories The Royal Panthers After being given permission for my brother Stan to use our small outside shed as a clubhouse, we decided to fix it up inside and make it look like a clubhouse. We covered the wooden walls with newspapers soaked in a paste made with a mixture of flour and water. Then we painted the walls with some paint leftovers we found in the garage. We hung some pictures on the wall and furnished the room with some furniture we had scavenged from the local dumpground. Spaced around the room was a small bed, an old dresser, shelves on the walls for our gadgets and a few chairs. My brother made a ladder that reached the roof, cut out a trapdoor and secured it with hinges. We would then be able to lie on the roof at night and explore the moon and stars. We decided on a name for the club. It would be called 'The Royal Panthers'. We fashioned a flagpole out of an old broomstick and displayed a black flag with white letters bearing the clubs name. My brother and I had been selling subscriptions to Grit magazine, delivering newspapers and picking up pop bottles for our clubhouse cash. We decided to use some of this cash to buy sew on patches which we found advertised in the Grit magazine. We mail ordered a couple of these patches and about 3 weeks later they came packaged up in a big brown envelope. We carefully sewed them onto our sleeveless jackets we had formally prepared in anticipation of their arrival. We painted white letters on the jackets with stencils which made it officially 'The Royal Panthers' club. The club existed of only the two of us for a few years before we eventually admitted a few of our closest freinds. It was a place were we could explore our dreams and make plans for the future. We would talk of the universe, the stars, the moon, UFO's and lifes mysteries. We spent many days and nights in the clubhouse and all of our secrets and dreams of our childhood were to remain inside those walls. The unity of the Royal Panthers started to fade into memories once my brother began getting interested in girls. When he would bring a girlfriend to the clubhouse, no one else would be allowed in. His experimenting with a newly developed interest seemed to seperate the boyhood fantasies from the teenage realities. My father had rented a small part of our backyard to a truck driver freind, Lucky, who would be out on the road most of the time. He helped Lucky move his small trailer house into the back corner of our yard and ran a water and sewer line as well as electricity to the trailer. The mans live in girlfreind, Joyce, was a busy body. She would always be watching our moves and tattle on us to our parents for any mischievous deeds we did while our parents were at work. She was a woman in her early twenties and had little else to do while her boyfreind was out on the road. Joyce didn't have a phone in her trailer and would have to use our phone when she would need to call someone. Sometimes to call our parents about things we had did that she didn't approve of. One summer day my brother brought his girlfreind over to the clubhouse. He locked all of us out as usual. Among the giggling and laughter eminating from inside we noticed when Stan popped out of the trapdoor laughing, he hoisted something up the flagpole which looked exactly like a girls white bra. Joyce from the trailer saw the bra and went ballistic. She screamed out that she was calling my father and ran to our house to make a call. She called him at work and had him all worked up with some ungodly tale of what Stan had been doing. My father came home mad as a hornet, luckily the girl had taken her bra and left. My brother received a whipping as Joyce looked on shouting obscenities at Stan. Stan was grounded for a week and our clubhouse was locked up. No one was allowed in the clubhouse. It didn't keep us out as expected, we simply used a latter to access the trap door from the top. The memories of the clubhouse faded from existance not long after that and new interests took its place. There would be nothing like 'The Royal Panthers' clubhouse again. |