Here’s sludgo’s Mile Markers: Mile 201
It was my twelfth August. 1973. Late on a Friday evening following another wretchedly hot and humid day in sludgoville. The sludgos didn’t have air conditioning—only rich people had that—so I was trying to beat the heat by soaking in our bathtub, which was filled up to my shoulders with cold water and every ice cube I could find in the freezer. I was listening to KSLG-AM on my trusty Panasonic transistor enjoying the scratchy-staticky country sounds of Donna Fargo and Mel Tillis and Charley Pride when the top-of-the-hour hit and the news came on. The tersely-toned broadcaster introduced himself—‘Doug Dickerson,’ or something like that—then dove in to his report, eagerly noting there was plenty happening in the world that night. Said that the war in Vietnam might actually be over for good. That something was up between President Nixon and a hotel in DC with a funky name. That one of the astronauts on Skylab 3 had doubled the world-record for length of a space walk. That Willie Mays—the Say Hey Kid—had hit his six-hundred-sixtieth home run. And so on and so on and so on, but as I laid there in the tub with the ice cubes melting and my fingers and toes getting pruny I couldn’t have cared less about any of that junk. I had only one thing on my mind—the dead body in Old Man Granger’s garage.
