When you write about real people, real events, events charged with emotion it is challenging to strike the proper balance between hard edged fact telling and one's personal experiences. Ten people observing the same event will see ten contrasting stories. The actual facts they observe will be different because where they stand relative to the event offers a distinctly different view.
Their personal histories, what they lived through, and what they believed also color their interpretation of the events they saw. What I offer below is not "the truth," but rather a sort of truth remembered decades after the events in question. No harm or offense is intended. If you were there and you remember it differently, I have no quarrel with your memories. Me, I wrote this a decade ago and I just decided enough time has passed that my memory of my truth could be shared now.
What follows is a work created from memory. The description of real-life events and real-life people will be skewed and warped by the time between now and then. No true statement, concept or even logical construct can be relied on with 100% accuracy in what follows. Except for the broad sense of truth imbued in living, which is the communal truth of human experience.
The tale is written more or less in the vein of magical realism. It is a tale where the fantastic meets the boring and hopefully meshes. Told in the first person with some variant of myself as the narrator the tale is of my life, but of my life as it was lived and experienced long ago.
This is an old story that I have posted only in a limited fashion because I have never felt comfortable with how I wrote it. One day as I lay on a park bench, I recalled what I experienced as a child growing up in New Jersey. Maybe it was the last dark doppelbock that I had consumed that sent me into this flight of reverie.
You do have to forgive me one thing in this tale. I open with a quote from Paul Bowles. I have put this at the start of several pieces that I have written. If you have read it before read it again. It is important. Life is short, way, way too short. Remember that. Make what you do matter. As I sit here recovering from cancer surgery that brevity of existence is very real to me.
My Old Man, His Gun and the Hot Summer of 1971
An Antecedent to this Tale in Prose
Because we do not know when we will die
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well
and yet everything happens only a certain number
of times and a very small number really.
How many times will you remember a certain
afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that
is so deeply a part of your life that you can't
even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps
four or five times more? Perhaps not even that.
How many times will you watch the full moon rise,
perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems so limitless.
~ From The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Paul Bowles piece is very important to me because the finite memories we hold inside each of us are so important. Personally, my memory is fading. But this story “is so deeply a part of my life” that I cannot let it pass easily into the darkness of unrecorded time. I don’t want to lose it, so I wrote it down. It isn’t a great story, but it is a snapshot of what made me what I am.
Summer in Nixon-era New Jersey was miserable. Temperatures stayed hot. The air was always humid. This ever-present moist air was filled with gritty particles of dirt kicked up by the frequent coming and goings of a thousand ramshackle produce trucks.
Grinding gears and belching diesel fumes the beat-up old stake trucks were always hauling peppers and cucumbers to the packinghouse. On those sweltering summer nights, you would feel every grain of that dust that was suspended in the 110% humidity. Those particles turned into small black spider web thin strands of dirt in the interior crook of your elbow. Living in the swamps you have ever-present perspiration. In rubbing your neck to remove this sweat, the mixture of moisture and dirt smears both your hand and your neck.
In the early 1970s there was no air conditioning in the old wood frame homes in the piss ant farm towns of South Jersey. At 11:30 p.m. even with the windows all open, and the constant drone of a window fan clearly audible, sleep if it ever came was damn uncomfortable. On nights like those sleep came only from pure exhaustion. Built on reclaimed swamp and still surrounded by swamp the place was stifling.
A barrage of harsh sounds was everywhere on those hot nights. The fans buzzed and rattled. There was the cacophony of crickets and frogs. These noises together with the whine of 18-wheelers working through the gears out on an old U.S. highway 130 two miles out of town all conspired with the heat to deny everyone in town a good night’s sleep. But another sound stood out. Living next to the produce packinghouse the mechanical buzz of 10 or so reefer units running all night was the high decibel white noise of those midnight black hours.
Produce trucks parked just below my window. Each idled for hours awaiting their turn to get a loading dock to load or unload those pungent vegetables and then move on. No part of this process was quiet. The engines of the rigs pulling in or leaving produced much engine chugging and grinding gear noise. Sleep was a precious commodity in August 1971 in small town New Jersey, for me, my family and pretty much everyone else around.
Sleep-deprived people won't take shit from anyone.
1971, in addition to being a hot summer, was also a time of profound change in this country. Class divisions were growing. Racial tensions were rife. Just a few years before our cities burned and some empty ruins stood not that far from my home. A 13-mile drive would put you in the midst of burnt-out row home blocks. I haven’t forgotten. It was the era of the generation gap and street riots over Vietnam. Even among people of the same race the cultural gap between a teenager and a fifty-year-old man in 1971 was probably as pronounced as it ever was in America.
In my small town if you were under twenty your hair was long, or you wanted it long, or you fought every day with your parents because you wanted it long. In my little town in 1972 the drinking age had just legally dropped to 18 and in all practicality had dropped to 14. Beer was openly consumed in garages where motor heads twiddled wrenches on Chevys, and only Chevys. In 1972 LSD hit New Jersey's small towns like a lightning bolt. Joints were openly smoked.
In my little town the income level was high enough that as a kid you didn't work in the summer unless you had a specific goal, a car, a high school trip the next year, or a chance to go to the beach and rent a room in a boarding house while you looked for a job on the boardwalk. Didn’t someone say idle hands are the devil’s workshop? It was in this mélange that my stoned longhaired smart assed friends, my father's short southern temper and one shotgun came together.
Bear with me while I digress a bit. To understand what happens as this tale continues you need to understand my family’s relationship with guns. The sense of that relationship is found in a short excursion to South Jersey thickets and woodlots several years before the August 1971 events.
Each fall when various birding seasons come in my father and middle brother headed out into the fields to hunt. Along with the aforementioned family members would be the family dog, Soot, a jet-black cocker spaniel. Almost as an afterthought I would be there too.
After a short ride to some fairly dense woods my father owned, we tumbled out of the car, well at least the dog and I tumbled. It seemed I would no sooner struggle to my feet than Soot would get himself hopelessly tangled in the nearest briar patch. As his black coat grew more and more enmeshed in the briars there were some ear-piercing howls and whines. When this cacophony of misery arose, it fell to me to perform my only function on these trips. Yup I would crawl into the briar patch to retrieve the whining and simpering canine. In our family hierarchy there was my dad, my brother, the dog and then me. Oh, my ongoing psychological trauma.
Any way when we went on these hunting (in my case dog retrieving) excursions my brother would egg my father on to let me shoot one of the guns. My age the first time I did this was between 10 and 11 years old. I think the first gun I shot was the 16-gauge. What I remember as I pulled the trigger was feeling a ferocious kick from the stock. The next thing I remember is my sorry, scrawny, lower than the family dog assed self, lying flat on the ground. Har, har, hars all around. Well, at least it was funny for them.
While this peeved me to the point where using age-appropriate profanities, I may have called my brother “doggie dirt” it did teach me something about guns. Guns had a terrible mojo; they were both powerful and scary. Such fear is something that I will always remember. Despite shooting a .22 and a 410 in my early teens I always knew guns had terrifying power. That knowledge plays a critical part in the next part of this story.
Smackwater Jack he bought a shotgun
Cause he was in the mood of a little confrontation
He just let it all hang loose
He didn't think about the noose
He couldn't take no more abuse,
So he shot down the congregation
You can't talk to a man
With a shotgun in his hand
Smackwater Jack-Carole King
******
And I'm still sittin' with my next-door neighbor saying
Where'd you get the gun, John?
Raindance-Burton Cummings
My father was a southern born factory rat with engineering leanings. He attended engineering school in Brooklyn for a bit but never finished. After a number of career choices including being a chauffeur for Kate Smith and the immortal Rin Tin Tin, (although not at the same time) he went to work for DuPont. He worked making Freon for 30 years. Dad was a company man.
My dad worked at "the Plant" like many, a lot of dads in my little town. He worked shift work before I was born. He hustled, grunted and because of his engineering skills moved up in the hierarchy. As the years passed, he moved to day shift, first as a foreman, then as a supervisor. Despite the actual color of his shirt, he always remained a blue-collar boss. He had many people reporting to him. Some of them were process guys (i.e., the guys who made and maintained the system that made Freon) and some were truck drivers who delivered the stuff. My old man was straight; he was a tee totaling Baptist who served as church moderator for a spell.
The old man once told me he didn’t believe everything he heard in church. However, he felt being there was worthwhile for you so he attended. My dad was tough. From what I was told by people who worked with him he cursed so profanely that it would wither a seasoned truck driver. Surprisingly he never used foul language at home. Corporate management respected him. We had a number of dinners at our home with the guy who eventually became DuPont’s U.S. Freon operation’s vice president. Not bad for a guy who hadn't even graduated from high school.
Whatever the case may be, my old man worked hard for his money. He in 1972 got to "the Plant" at 8 a.m., left at 4:30 p.m., and took business calls until 10 at night. Unlike today working at home was not the norm in 1972. Back then he walked the extra mile. Thus, when he decided he wanted to go to bed it was critical for him to get some sleep.
My father had to sleep. If he didn’t sleep well, he wouldn't work effectively. If he didn’t perform well, he wasn’t happy. He believed in the order of things. He believed in working hard, coloring within the lines, and working forty hours. He had grown up in the depression and having a job was paramount. So, doing what it took to keep that job meant something.
That summer of 1972 was not his time for sleeping. Into that hot summer of that turbulent year came a mix of late teen and early twenties’ idleness, alcohol, pot and discontent with everything. This swirling maelstrom brought young emotions close to boiling point. Like Brando’s key line in the Wild Ones when you asked us what we were rebelling against the answer was, and as it should be and always will be, “What’d you got?”
All night we had somebody’s car’s ignition turned to alt and listened to the Doors, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper and Humble Pie. We played it loud enough to hear and sing along with. We played it loud enough so that even those who didn’t want to hear it had to listen.
Music carries a long distance on hot nights. There must be something in those heat-agitated molecules of the air that does it. Without invitation the pulsing beat and screaming guitar solos poured through the open windows into those small frame houses assaulting those poor working stiffs trying to catch 40 winks.
Across from my house was an old lunch counter that had folded. Each night after it became dark, local male youth would gather there. I should note that I use the royal we hear. On any given night I was more than likely there for a short while, but never for the duration. Most nights I had a 9 or 9:30 p.m. curfew. This was part of my parents' limit-setting strategy. The funny thing was that you could get really, really stoned by 9:30 p.m.
Most evenings when I came in, I ducked through the living room quickly and returned to my room to read a book or listen to music. This was without my totally (totaled and?) intoxicated self being noticed. I still don’t know if they knew I was stoned or not. The only time this became an issue was once when I was truly toasted. I bumped into the doorframe to the living room and apologized to it. They found that kind of thing hard to ignore. I digress.
Most summer nights we stood outside on the stoop of that old convenience store. We also stood outside on the steps of an old grocery store about a block away. We waived our arms and gesticulated in animated discussion. Funny how that happens when you are really, really intoxicated. We cut each other down. The main insults were sexual although some focused on bravery. We ranted and railed about wanting freedom and its clear and unquestionable corollary at the time, more (or even any) pussy. This was an all-male aggregation. Our grasps did not exceed our reach.
Our minds were small, and to me my friends' dreams seemed mundane. Their aspirations were average to the point of being hopeless and boring. Well, it seemed that way to me at the time. As the years have passed by, I have realized that their dreams were no less valid than mine. However, at the time the place looked small and their goals even smaller. To give you a sense of how limited life was in this small town I offer a short snippet from a recent e-mail exchange between myself and a female friend who grew up in the same town as me on what the chances were that you could get out unscathed. From her letter I quote:
“I try to forget whatever little memories I have of high school it was not my favorite time of my life. I think I was focused on how the hell I was going to get out of town and whether or not I was going to give it up (to use the infamous saying). I knew that if I ever decided to have sex with any of the guys from town that there would be no leaving then. I don't quite know why I thought that, maybe the pregnancy thing or maybe the fear that if my mother found out she would break my legs and I wouldn't be able to leave but somehow, I associated the two as being in direct conflict with each other. You either left or you stayed and had sex with one of the local boys and ended up marrying him.”
I responded to her post with my thoughts on the same subject:
“Much like you and I went back and forth on the giving it up thing during that last year of high school. One of things I wanted most in life then was to get out of that place. It was a desperate incredible urge to be gone. I remember standing around talking to the guys on the steps of Draybold’s store late one night and telling them I was going to college and I wasn't coming back. I wanted to go places, see things; I wanted to learn more stuff that you could get sitting around watching T.V. Nobody seemed to get it. They thought that going to work for uncle Dew Pew-our pet name for DuPont; drinking beer at Caan’s (sp?) and hustling the local action was just fine.
On the night of that particular speech my father was standing in the shadows of my house over on the Cherry Street side. He was puffing on another in the chain of L & Ms that would eventually bring on a heart attack, the heart attack that would kill him. Apparently, he listened to my whole soliloquy. He later asked me why I was so determined to leave. I asked him point blank what he saw for me in town if I stayed. He really didn’t answer me.
I think him overhearing that conversation really changed his attitude about whether I should apply to an out-of-state college. Until then, he had been resistant to me going anywhere except Rutgers. Money was a factor and Rutgers would have been in-state tuition. I think when he thought about what would happen to me if I stayed around, he was okay with me leaving.”
Clouds of smoke from Marlboro cigarettes and Columbian weed floated in that summer’s night's air. The smoke really didn’t move from the place we stood on those nights. There wasn’t much of a breeze to be had on any given evening.
If you don’t remember Columbian, it was an excellent weed. We had bloodshot slits for our eyes and were drooling idiots. We drank lots of 7 ½ ounce pony bottles of Rolling Rock to cure cotton mouth. A 7-½ ounce bottle fits roughly into your palm. It can easily slip into a crevice or one's pocket if the New Jersey Troopers pass by. Late at night on backcountry roads it was a great sport to hurl the dead soldiers at road signs and telephone poles. 24 of those little puppies were less than five bucks. And 7 ½ ounces is just the right quantity to purge that dry gummy taste from your mouth.
With the above as a prelude, we get to the night in question. It was about 8 o’clock in the evening and dusk was settling in. Being on the eastern most edge of the time zone, South Jersey was dark around nine in midsummer. It was hot and humid this August, and it was Sunday night.
I, in a blur, jammed a cassette tape into my mighty Symphonic tape deck. I mean it was really jammed in there. The cassette was stuck with the deck not turning and would not eject. I don’t know why, but I remember the tangled tape. Caught in the clutches of that cheap-assed tape player was Stephen Stills' eponymous debut album. I can still hear,” Love the One You’re With,” repeating over and over again. I played that thing to death that summer. Oh, how seventies.
Dad helped me, his mechanically inept sixteen-year-old son, remove the now mangled tape. My help was limited since I had that weed smell about me and my mind was elsewhere. With a thin screwdriver and pliers, he tried to coax the cover off the cassette player to extract the tape. This was tedious and delicate. Good thing he wasn’t stoned.
My father as he performed the delicate surgery on the music machine grumbled about the punks standing on the stoop across the street. Dad had grumbled about them for days. He had “talked” to the fellas several times in the past week. My father's talking usually involved a deep voice yelling out the window. The speech was usually “Don’t you boys have a home of your own to go to?” This would quiet them down for a while.
Most of this rag tag crew were the sons of people my father knew. The connections between my father and their parents were varied. A coworker at the plant, a fellow officer at the Baptist church, etc. Occasionally the implicit threat that the above statement carried, which is “keep it up and I am calling your father,” wouldn’t work. Tonight, as fate would have it was one of those nights where the threats wouldn’t be the stopping point.
On this particular Sunday evening in addition to the high school punks that were street corner talking there were some older twenty somethings in the mix. These were guys who had graduated, gotten factory jobs and still lived at home. Oh, they might have an apartment but they were in town so often it was difficult to view them as independent adults.
Additionally, a couple of them were never doing well and were destined for jobs like gas pump jockey or something like that. If I went back there today these guys might still be drinking those pony bottles. They might be sitting on the same corner gazing at me with their glazed eyes and would say, “Rufus, where have you been? I ain’t seen you in a while". It would almost be like four decades hadn’t passed.
My local tribal nickname was Rufus. It was from a Bob Denver character on "The Good Guys” a short-lived sitcom. One of my fellows had given me the name and it stuck. There were a variety of other nicknames, including Bear, Deacon, and Turk. Turk was short for Turkalurkus a bastardization of Tuberculosis. Perhaps, and I am just speculating here his nickname was derived from a disease because he was viewed as being so depraved as to qualify for categorization as his own pathogenic sickness.
The junior factory rats with some solid cash bought toys with their money, including a Dodge Challenger for example. They also bought most of the beer and Columbian. A factory job paid well and they had lots and lots of beer and Columbian. To emphasize that they were somebody they would power brake their new muscle cars burning a ¼ inch hole into the macadam road surface. This was done with all the attendant stench, noise and smoke.
Did I mention that it was a small rural town on a very hot and humid August evening? Did I mention the music was blasting? If it had been a city these guys would have been hanging out at the nudie bars. But alas, there was no such diversion in this town. Additionally, it was Sunday (which I may have said before), so beer access was limited. My home town was always dry, and the entire county was dry except for takeout beer from one sole bar on Sundays. That bar was fifteen miles away and everyone was too stoned to drive that far.
Of the 20 or so people that had congregated on the defunct Draybold's store’s stoop that night, most had been made fearless by the weed. And it was a good Columbian that was in town at the time. This was similar to the stuff I smoked the night my body dissolved and my mind floated into space.
Never, and I repeat never, sit down with a ¼ pound of Columbian and just two other people to try to see how much of it you could toke up in one sitting. Yup, that was the night I had to stay awake all night staring out my bedroom window watching the street light. This was so my body's atoms would not dissolve and float away in a vapor. Damn I am digressing again. My focus and memory just haven't been that clear since high school.
So, there we were. It was hot. My dad was busy getting the tape out of my cassette deck. I twisted my head at an odd angle so I would appear to watch him. Paying attention was required in these situations when fatherly help was given, but I was leaning at an angle so he couldn’t smell the reefer on my breath. While in this position I heard a pop. It was not my neck breaking from my contortions, and it was also not a loud noise. It was just a pop followed by a cracking noise sort of like crinkling old cellophane. Shortly after the noise my mother came rushing into the room very upset. She in a tremolo voice said, “Jack (yup she called my old man Jack even though his name was John) they broke the front window.”
What had happened as best I could piece it together later was one of the oldest guys out front had taken a penny and thrown it at our front door. Apparently, the aggregation for whatever reason had worked themselves into being pissed off at my Dad without him even having “talked” to them that night. As I gathered from the after the fact conversation, the guys had figured out they would have to move on soon because Mr. Todd was about to be heading to bed and they were pissed because they really didn’t have any place else to be. The bars were closed and a couple of standard sites, abandoned fields and the like were off limits. This is because they had been chased out recently.
One of the crowd vented his frustration with a penny. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Pretty amazing shot too when you think about it. Mr. Lincoln’s copper visage hit one of the glass panes in the top of the old wood frame door at probably a 15-degree angle. The cent struck with just enough force to break a penny-sized slot in the glass. Spider cracks stretched out throughout the pane but the glass did not fall out. That guy must have had a helluva arm.
Now Dad had already had a bad week with these “gentlemen”. There were a couple of nights when there were disruptions and outbursts at eleven thirty. He called the New Jersey State Troopers about it once, but they didn’t show up for 45minutes. By the time the jackbooted cops arrived on the scene the punks had already left. When there is no one there, there isn't a whole lot that can be done. The old man had also shouted through the window at my friends aa day after the police were called. Dad was generally tired of their shit, already agitated and tomorrow was a workday.
Upon hearing my mother’s comment my Dad’s face flushed red. All he said was “I’m getting my gun.” He sprinted up the stairs to his second-floor bedroom and the closet where he kept his guns. I ran after him. To this day I have no idea why. I mean I tend not to mess with my father when he was mad. Could have been the number of times I met his belt in my younger years.
Most likely I followed him up the stairs was because I loved my father and didn’t want to grow up without him. Visiting days in prison sucked. Maybe it was because of my memories of what a gun’s power was. Whatever the reason, I got to his room just as he tossed a couple of shells into the gun. I can’t swear to it now but I believe the ammo was birdshot, not usually lethal to humans, but significantly more damaging than rock salt.
Standing in the doorway to his room I yelled, “Dad put the gun down.” And in my stoned (but rapidly clearing) stupor I then tried to block the door and his way out of his bedroom. With his forearm he pushed/threw me across the room. My father was sixty years old at this time and still worked with his hands whenever he could. He had strength. I was six-foot-tall but weighed 140 pounds soaking wet. I was a wussy.
After the window broke, most of the guys were hooting and hollering at the penny thrower across the street. Mostly it was laughter and shit like “Oooooh, Mr. Todd’s coming to git you.” It really hadn’t sunk in that breaking the window was maybe not the smartest thing to do given the prior confrontations. On the other hand, when you are loaded things don’t sink in as quickly, do they?
Apparently, someone in the group of guys had heard some part of the altercation in our house. This is because they had grown quieter by the time I got to the front window. Perhaps my scream of “Dad, put the gun down” was kind of loud. Maybe, you think? Picking myself up off the floor I jumped to the front window and screamed. The only thing I remember is screaming, "He's got a gun", and then following him down the stairs.
My adrenaline was pumping because I was about 15 paces behind my old man as he came off the stairs and reached the front door. Holding the gun in one hand, its barrel almost straight up, he hit the door with the same forearm that had sent me across the room. He popped that old wood door open.
I could hear confusion and screaming outside. Someone yelled, “Get, get, get” and another “Fuck, he’s really got a gun”. What I saw was like a Warner Brothers cartoon. People’s legs were moving but not carrying them anywhere. As I hit the front porch my father headed down the steps. And then it happened: the gun fired off.
My father stumbled on the last step and the gun discharged almost straight up. An eerily similar sensation to what I felt just then is clearly described in the Peter Gabriel song, “Family Snapshot.” Gabriel’s lyrics build to a crescendo as the narrator a John Hinkley type assassin waits for his victim to approach in a motorcade. The tempo of the song picks up during the narrative and just as the shooter/narrator pulls the trigger the whole pace of the song changes. It becomes a soft ethereal ballad.
The scene in my head at the time was like the scene in the song. The charged and frenetic actions that I observed changed and what remained was a still and quiet space that had come unhinged from reality. At the moment the orange flash leapt from the barrel of that gun into the black night sky. Maybe even before the sound reached my ears, time seemed to stand still.
In the surreality of that moment just after the gun fired. I can remember lots of odd details. Very small details. I can remember I wore a tee shirt. My skin was moist but not sweaty. There were the old kind of street lights, glowing with blue light, illuminating the scene. In my mind’s eye people were moving but they looked washed out and indistinct, like peripheral characters in an Edward Hopper painting. My head turned and the scene panned into the movie of my memory. The quiet moment was over and everything was rushing and running and people were screaming. Car doors were slamming and the front doors of the nearby homes were opening. One person kept yelling “Mr. Todd don’t kill me,” even though my father was nowhere near him.
As my father came off the steps of the house the biggest of the guys screamed and almost cried. Of all the bizarre things he held onto the hood of his car. It was a gray Plymouth and 6 years old at the time. In his wavering voice he kept saying “Please Mr. Todd don’t shoot my car.” He kept repeating this over and over again as my father strode past him and turned into an alleyway that led to a parking lot where some of the other guys’ cars were located.
Think about the absurdity of this. You are in a situation where you are facing a man with a gun who is pissed off enough to smack his own son across the room and you are afraid he will shoot your car? What was that about?
Having personally been chased at gunpoint by a man with a loaded 9 mm pistol in his hand I have some experience with this topic. In my case the man was a golden gloves boxer on acid with transient sexual orientation issues to resolve. (This is another story for another day.) However, when I was faced with a man pointing a gun at me my thoughts at the time were more along the lines of "God, let me live." God, I will never do that [insert particular sin here, masturbation, dope smoking, etc.] ever again.” When I was confronted with the reality of gun violence, I wasn't thinking please don't hurt my personal property. This moment was not the young man’s best display of situational focus.
Once my father turned the corner into the alleyway the story changed. Cars burning rubber peeled off in three separate directions. Porch lights came on everywhere. People up and down the street came out saying things like it was about time. Not a single one of the people that had been on Draybold’s stoop was to be seen.
I ran inside and flushed all my small dope stash down the toilet. Given the questionable loyalty of my friends, friends my father had just apparently attempted to shoot, and knowing the police were very definitely going to be involved the flush option seemed like the percentage move. I mean it was the right choice from my perspective to keep my ass out of jail. This is even though I hadn’t done anything wrong in this situation. My “friends” would be determined to get back at my Dad with tensions running high. Given the highly charged nature of events that night they might mention my stash to the cops or try and trade off a bust of me for a dismissal of any charges they might face.
There were several trials and I believe at least one appeal was spawned by this event. My father was charged with assault. Three of the street corner hangers on were charged with malicious destruction of property or something similar. However, those details (at least for me) are lost in time's haze.
As the trial approached in our town's municipal court my "friends" played all sorts of mind games with me. They struck up odd conversations and tried to learn details about my father’s gun. In that they claimed my father had placed the gun inside the window of their car their counsel probably figured that should have some vivid memories of the weapon to bolster that allegation. As most psychologists will tell you, this isn't necessarily true. Average people in stressful situations will focus on one meaningless thing or another when faced with imminent harm. Many times, those things are so mundane as to be of no use in reconstructing the event. When faced with stress induced by an accident the person in a car will remember the interior colors of the car or the fact that the parking decal on the window was peeling off as opposed the angle at which another vehicle struck them.
My "friends" repeatedly asked me about this at school. Given the potential danger to my father's freedom, I wasn't willing to participate in these conversations. While I was a stupid stoner, I wasn’t that stupid. It is of note that my “friends” had committed early on to a story that involved my father breaking open his shotgun and reloading it before he approached them at their car. My father never talked about this as he awaited his hearing. My "friends" kept asking me what gun he used, what gauge, etc. I really couldn't answer. Not because I wanted to stick by my father, but because I really didn't know.
When I tried to stop my father from leaving with the gun, I focused on him, his features and his attitude. And I was stoned. My memory has never been that accurate even on a good day. Given the stress, the smoke and the speed at which the events transpired I really had no idea what gun had been used. We had five or six different shotguns in the house along with a couple of rifles. With my sense of urgency relative to making sure my own house was in order I didn't hang around outside for the post-game analysis to note the choice of weapon either. I was too busy at the toilet making sure that the contents of one very special baggie went down after I flushed.
By my parents’ decree I was not allowed to attend to the hearing as an observer. I wasn't subpoenaed by the state either so I couldn’t just ignore my parents’ wishes. Pretty much everyone else in town was there watching. It was an evening hearing because in small towns like ours we had a visiting judge come by one or two times a month. This was based on the docket. In order to allow the judge to conduct his other court duties in other jurisdictions, we selected a time that fit his schedule, Tuesday night.
I have to say that was one of the longest nights of my life. While I was a punk and had issues with my father, I did not want him to get jail time. It really wasn't based on my feelings that I would somehow suffer shame should this occur, but knowing what had happened it just didn't seem fair.
After about 2 or 2-1/2 hours my parents returned home. They were happy. Based on testimony at the trial the Court found the guys on the corner's version of events not reliable. It played out like this according to what I was told. All three of the guys in the car claimed to have seen my father break open his gun and put a fresh shotgun shell into it. If I remember correctly, the first witness on the scene other than the guys who broke the window was a hunter. He calmly told the Judge that my father held a pump action shotgun when he reached them. Such a gun would be loaded from the side and not be broken open to load. Apparently a second adult witness was willing to testify to this fact or did testify to this fact. With the gun issue in play the Judge was not willing to buy the rest of the story that the three fleeing vandals were trying to offer.
I have struggled throughout the telling of this tale how to characterize the people out on the corner that night. They were all people I knew. Some of them were my classmates in grade school. Some were people I met hanging out on the street corner. At the time I thought of them as friends and I have used that term until this point. However, the definition of friendship I would apply today would only cover two or three of them. The rest would now be considered just acquaintances traveling in the same social circle. In a small town when you didn’t have wheels, the lines between friends, enemies and guys you just hung out with were very permeable. Because of this I will identify these folks in the period following the gunshot with the parenthetical “friends”
And I have to say I was there when the gun fired. I was not in the alley where my father confronted my three fleeing “friends”. What was said there in that back parking lot and what really occurred there I think is now lost to time, at least any fully accurate version. My father is dead after living a good long life and after having lived it without equivocation, mainly. The three of my friends in the car are older and hopefully sober. Given their mental state that night, and between the fear, the dope and the primal drive toward self-preservation I don’t think their memories could be trusted. However, they told their version of the story to each other and to anyone else who listened again and again. Inaccuracies repeated enough become a reality of their own.
The three in the car all claimed that my father broke the gun down, reloaded and hung the barrel into the window of the car to which they had fled. They maintained that despite a firearm hanging in their faces inside the window, they still fled. I believe people claimed their car threw stones and burned rubber as they departed. Wasn’t there an old Charlie Daniels song like that?
I knew these guys. They were young and when faced with real danger they were pussys, just as I would have been in such a situation. Given my experience in a hearing room, and with other people over time, the likelihood is that had the gun actually been in the car window they would have frozen and been incapable of operating the vehicle. More likely than not, one of them might have pissed himself. (Come to think of it that car never smelled quite right after that night, ever.)
My guess is that the gun remained up in the air the entire time. My father was a serious hunter and gun safety advocate. Most hunters that are really into safety carry their guns with the barrel up. It just seems more likely. (But then again, most hunters don’t rush out to shoot punks with birdshot.) Still, I may be wrong and there may be a middle ground with the gun being held at a middle level and my father closer to the car than he claimed to be in court. I just don’t know.
The trio members were all found guilty of various charges against them. My father was convicted of discharge of a gun within the township limits, a civil infraction or an ordinance violation. It had the same legal impact as being cited for letting your dog loose to befoul someone else’s yard. It didn’t generate a criminal record. My father paid the fine and was happy. The noise had abated and he didn't have a rap sheet.
The trio appealed, and they may have appealed again. Knowing the legal system as I know it now, being an administrative law judge, the three of them each must throughout this process have had to outspend my father by a factor of 6-10 times in legal fees. Eventually on appeal they were found not responsible for some if not all of the charges. It didn’t matter that they had spent far more than the fine would have been after trial.
Following the shot my relationship with everyone did and didn’t change, all at the same time. As a result, I believe I gained some respect for my father and he for me as well. It was a turning point when the silence, the bristling neck hair and the invective vanished. I developed a grudging respect for my father’s consistency and steadfastness in his actions and values. He, by virtue of the fact that I stood up to him, probably concluded that there were things I would not tolerate or accept as appropriate. Maybe, just maybe, I might be right on an issue or two. And that sometimes I was a reasonable voice. It wasn’t that the stresses of father/son conflict were eliminated or that we got along all sunshine and roses. No, we just weren't at each other’s throats all the time day in and day out.
As to the level of contact with the guys, we still smoked dope together from time to time. And I would still occasionally ride around drinking beer with one or two of them. But for the most part some distance had been introduced into the relationship. At first it did not seem significant but it grew. It is clear to me now that in the days just after the incident the tension over the upcoming hearing placed some of the gulf between us.
Probably just as significant in the changing of the relationships was that I became clearly, if not painfully aware, that I would have to leave my home town to become whatever I was meant to be. As my awareness of that fact grew, I think I grew away from my friends. My substance abuse abated a bit and I made connections with kids from other towns. Our regional high school had four or five different communities that attended. I found friends with different lifestyles to hang out with. The relationships weren’t defined by my old man, nor by the things my “friends” and I had done since we were five years old.
My father clearly had enough of the nonsense. Beginning the next summer, we would spend each summer at the beach in a rented house a block from the ocean. We would be there from June to mid-September, or in other words pretty much the entire commercial produce season. Dad would drive fifty miles each way to work and back. This was so he could walk on the beach in the evenings and enjoy himself, free from the hothouse of teenage idiocy. I think he also learned something about himself from the whole affair. As weird as it sounds, I think Dad learned to let some things go by unchallenged. In the remaining ten years of his life, he became almost Buddhist in his acceptance of some pretty major personal failings and the foibles of those around him. Maybe accepting would be too strong a term, but it seemed he came to countenance fools a little more easily.
When I think about the changes that ensued, they probably saved my life. In a short period of time, a couple of guys had passed. Some had criminal histories, stuff that didn’t get buried in juvenile records. I could have been there, but the emotional and physical distance that the shotgun blast caused allowed for a major change in my life.
It would be difficult to imagine what I would be now had I not spent the ensuing summers trying to come to some kind of emotional/spiritual oneness with the waves that kept crashing up against the Ocean City beach. These waves rolled in in the morning, came at midday and came tinged with amber light at the sunset. They were the waves that grew so high with a summer squall. They were placid waves lapping a cool September morning beach. Maybe it was for the best.
And oh, those two songs I quoted, several radio stations in the Delaware Valley played with multiple dedications to my father that following fall…
