Jeff Duncan does not easily fit into the stereotypical English professor role.
For one thing, he does not shy away from the harsh language that accompanies a harsher life. Additionally, many English professors will tell their students stories about how they read and wrote constantly as children, but not Jeff Duncan.
In his latest book, “Low Crimes and Misdemeanors: Confessions of a Tulsa Boy,” Duncan takes the reader on a journey through the troublesome adventures of his youth with friends who were “kinda rowdy.”
Duncan grew up in Tulsa, Okla. in the 1940s and ‘50s, a time when kids could truly disappear for hours at a time without overbearing mothers calling in the National Guard to find them.
Duncan and his childhood friends could be found sneaking into movie theaters, stealing candy from concession stands, joyriding, underage drinking, throwing snowballs at passing cars and “car-hitching.” Essentially, they would sneakily grab the rear bumper of a stopped or slow-moving car, get on their haunches and slide over the ice behind the car while trying to avoid dry pavement and joust one another off. Nowadays children could get arrested for doing these things, or their parents would be fined for their children’s misbehavior.
Duncan began writing his autobiography at the behest of his children, to whom he had told many of the stories found within his book – but not all of them.
Over the years, he compiled his stories of misdeeds and put keystroke to screen. The problem, he relates, was his youngest son.
In a recent interview with The Echo he stated, “There was no way I was going to finish this up, put it in print, until he was well out of high school.”
Now that his son is 24, he feels confident his actions will not inspire his children to commit some of his more heinous acts. Still, Duncan is not out of the woods yet.
“I have a lot of nieces and nephews that are teenagers and I’m telling my family that this is not for them to read. I call it R-rated because I don’t hold back.”
Duncan strove to recapture the Tulsan dialect and speech patterns, and the book is littered with obscene jokes, crude language, racial discourse (this was the Midwest in the 1950s, after all) and even some sexual fumbling.
His slick yet simple prose makes his book a fantastically quick read and, regardless of the era and location, highly relatable. The first 50 or so pages read like short parables (without guaranteed morals to the stories) that draw the reader in. As Duncan grew up and his life and relationships grew more complex, so did the stories in his book.
Readers might find themselves forgetting that these fantastical stories are somebody’s real life. Duncan’s “characters” are, or were, actual people, and they got into a lot of trouble. Everything from venereal diseases to trouble with the law, those boys quite literally made the ladies blush.
In one story, humorously titled “Clap Clap Clap,” Duncan describes the humiliation he experienced after contracting a venereal disease. After experiencing extreme burning sensations when he urinated, he tried to get the pharmacist to prescribe penicillin. Unsuccessful, he was forced to confess everything to his mother in order for her to schedule an appointment with the family doctor. He was shocked to find that his mother already knew he had gonorrhea and that he had gotten it from the brothel. She knew everything.
Before making the necessary appointment, she simply asked if he had learned his lesson. He said he had, and his punishment was he had to pay for the treatment himself – and he couldn’t sleep with prostitutes anymore.
Most of his childhood friends have passed away, and many of them have suffered from severe alcoholism, but Duncan was fortunate enough to survive his recklessness.
Perhaps his misadventures will motivate his young nieces and nephews to behave, or perhaps his stories will encourage them to try to collect their own amusing anecdotes. Either way, Duncan has written a memorable and entertaining autobiography. His book, “Low Crimes and Misdemeanors: Confessions of a Tulsa Boy,” is available at the campus book store and on Amazon.com.
