A Sense of the Real Places

It has been a bit of time since I strayed from my intent navel gazing on the mid-1970s. So today is an entertainment interlude.

As I was sitting here at my desk I was thinking of what kind of entertainment I would be taking in over the weekend. What came to mind in this down economy is that a couple of disks from the library might do the trick. Thinking further what would be good to watch with my kids but not involving pabulum or mayhem I thought of the work of Horton Foote.

Both of my boys loved To Kill a Mockingbird. When I though of other deeply character driven movies I found myself thinking about the Trip to Bountiful and also Tender Mercies. I cry pretty much every single time I watch the Trip to Bountiful.

As I thought about these movies I remembered that Horton Foote had died recently. I googled the phrase “an appreciation of…” and I found several articles. At the bottom of this piece is one that seems to get it pretty close to right in terms of my feelings about Mr. Foote’s work.

If you have not seen one or both of these two movies go rent them. Geraldine Page got the best actress nod for Bountiful and Robert Duvall got the best actor award for Tender Mercies. Foote got the best screenplay Oscar for Mercies and was nominated for Bountiful.


Horton Foote, an appreciation
A Playwright For The Common Man.
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the March 6, 2009 edition

As a playwright, Horton Foote grappled with the great themes of human existence: love, despair, home, family, identity, redemption. And he often found them all in the lives of people in the little town of Harrison, Texas, the fictional setting for many of his works.

Mr. Foote, who passed on March 4, spent seven decades as a playwright and screenwriter, penning more than 50 plays and films and winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 (for the play "The Young Man From Atlanta"), and Academy Awards in 1962 (for his screen adaptation of the Harper Lee novel "To Kill a Mockingbird") and 1983 (for his original screenplay "Tender Mercies"). He also wrote acclaimed television dramas, including "The Trip to Bountiful," which was later made into a film starring Geraldine Page, who received an Oscar for her role.

Born in Wharton, Texas, Foote skipped college and headed to New York to become an actor. His first play, "Wharton Dance," was produced in 1940. Early in his career a friend, the choreographer Agnes de Mille, urged him to write about his own experiences. Foote eventually produced nine plays centered on Harrison, Texas, which stood in for his hometown. He was in Hartford, Conn., preparing a production of a collection of his plays, "The Orphans' Home Cycle," at the time of his passing.

Across the years Foote's work kept its originality and freshness. "He's a very modern playwright," Michael Wilson, artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company, told this writer during a 2001 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. "Horton has such an authentic and truthful voice. There's not a false bone in his body. I don't think anybody loves theater more than he does, and his love of it keeps intensifying...."

Foote often was present during rehearsals of his plays. "When someone asks a question about his play and Horton answers, it is like being in a room with the oracle," actor Gerald McRaney said in a 2007 Monitor article. "The good fortune of this experience can't be overstated. Actors who rehearsed with Shaw or Wilder or Williams or Shakespeare in the room will know how I feel, but no one else."

Foote was often described as "an American Chekhov," who probed deeply and compassionately into the lives of his characters. In the same Monitor article, actress Elizabeth Ashley called him "one of the greatest American dramatists, because he takes you into the center of the middle of the marrow of that which can only be American."

A leading expert on Foote, Marion Castleberry, a professor of theater arts at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, called Foote's plays "probably the greatest character studies of any American playwright who ever lived. More than anyone else, he's given us a history of America."

Foote's religious beliefs (he was a Christian Scientist) were at the center of his life. "I so earnestly believe that prayer can be helpful and guide you and protect you and inspire you. I mean, I'm in awe," he once told The Christian Science Journal, a monthly magazine published by the Christian Science Church.

But while his plays spoke profoundly about the human condition, they never proselytized. "Well, I often write about nonreligious people," he told the Journal. "And I try to find situations where their sense of humanity is restored or discovered. I think you can be a good person in many ways. And I think you often have to be careful that prayer can seem superficial, because it's a very complicated thing to love your neighbor as yourself."

Asked if the spiritual question "What kind of a man or woman are you?" lay at the heart of his writing, Foote told the Journal:

"I have enormous respect for the human being, because they're asked to take on a lot. And I don't think there's any easy solution. But I think the journey is what you have to finally be satisfied with, but not be afraid of the lessons one has to learn ... it ends up as grace. And you grow, you find a way to continue."

We Shall Come Rejoicing

As I always offer in the start of these pieces I am a liar, inveterate and unrepentant. The people I talk about are composites with the exception of Muffy. (I should mention that Muffy was a bit pissed that I used Muffy instead something else as her fictional name. I got the feeling she felt it implied she was a flake. She most assuredly wasn't. C’est la vie). And so with that caveat I offer the following.

Sheaves bringing in the sheaves, we will come rejoicing, bringing in the Sheaves. Let us labor for the master….

Winter nights in New Jersey are cold and wet but not unbearable. On a particular night in February 1974, I wasn't feeling the chill that was in the damp air. Boone's Farm was warming me deep down inside. Cheap assed Mexican weed was giving my night an extra glow. Explaining my flushed feeling accurately all these years later is hard, it was comfortable, peaceful and giddy. At seventeen mixing the inhibition releasing qualities of alcohol with the mellowing parts of pot was just the right thing to do for a spastic, neurotic over wound and cluelesss teen boy, it was totally pacific.

Three of us were walking in that dark damp February night, I think. There might have been a fourth person but I only remember talking to two other people. Our path had started behind the new high school and we were walking through a field. Could have been coming from a basketball game or a maybe pep rally or something else altogether but we were on a mission. Onward march onward was the inner cry.

In trying to remember this incident I first thought the field might have been corn but upon reflection I don't think so. There were furrows and scrub brush about so I think it must have been an asparagus field in fallow. Getting whipped by the long stemmed plants and breaking through the ice in the bottom of the furrows my feet we getting soaked and my arms were stinging but who cared; we was lit. We wuz as the hipsters would say stone cold immaculate.

Walking on we were working our way through all the songs we knew so as to provide us a cadence. Sugar Magnolia had come and gone as had Smoke on the Water. Reaching back for more material I found myself deep into the old Baptist hymns. What I was singing was stuff that I had heard a hundred times or more. When you sat through four hours of church each Sunday you just learned some righteous gospel songs. Some songs you just heard again and again because that little old lady always requested her favorite hymn at every evening service.

Rock of Ages, Amazing Grace and now Bringing in the Sheaves, we (well mostly me with the other two just mouthing along) were hitting all the old Fanny J. Crosby style stuff. We were giggling now almost uncontrollably thinking that the sheaves in question must have been pot. I mean why else would anyone want to work that hard in heaven, right?

Mike and Mary (short for Marion), and I were pushing on. Lest there be any doubt our journey was focused on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Mike was 18 and at that time in NJ you could buy booze at 18. I have a couple of bucks, Mary had a couple of bucks and Mike had the ID. More Boone’s Farm awaited us.

Why we opted for this overland route eludes me but the promise of more wine made the slogging through the fields seem worth it. Most likely our path was chosen because in this small town if we were seen walking down the paved and thus dry street that was the route to the bar, one or all of our parents would have know where we were headed and why within the half hour. As they say it's a small town and the news travels faster than wheels.

As we walked and sang, well mostly as I sang in my very flat very off key voice, Mary kept commenting that she could not believe that I knew all the words to those songs. But I did. It came easy to me. When she commented about my steel trap memory for lyrics she laughed a laugh I had never heard before. It is a laugh I will never forget.

As hard as it is to describe I can remember that laugh in all its mellifluous detail. It was more than a giggle, but not a belly laugh. It wasn’t condescending, derisive or forced. Mary's laugh was warm and affectionate.

The sound of that laugh took me by surprise and knocked me off my feet. This laugh meant there was a member of the opposite sex who wasn’t being cruel to me. As long as that laugh lasted it meant Mary wasn't pointing out my failings in dress for you must understand that then as now I was the antithesis of stylish. Again the sound of gentleness in that chuckle meant she wasn't making a joke at my expense over one of my faux pas of some sort or another. The sound was pleasant; clearly she was honest to goodness appreciating my absurd and densely packed memory of song lyrics.

Lyric upon lyric was stuffed in my head. My life to that point had been spent lying awake at night in my bed listening to underground radio on WMMR the radio station. I knew Time Has Come Today by the Chambers Brothers, The Streets of London by Ralph McTell, I'm a Man by Muddy Waters and all of those hymns. Hey the second the needle hit the outer groove of American Beauty I was singing along to Box of Rain start to finish.

Wet and cold, stoned and drunk something inside of me changed that night. Mary's laugh gave me just a smidgen of self confidence. It really gave a spark to a sense that there were some parts of me which if strung together in a public persona might get me laid. Understand I was an male American teen, I wasn’t looking for meaning I was looking for pussy. That laugh, that night opened up the door to me understanding that there were things other than good looks and the ever elusive cool that would allow me to connect in a romantic relationship.

I never slept with Mary but I did fall head over heels in love with her. I know that we had a connection that was mutual at least for a few years. I also know she had a much better head for understanding what sex would have done to our relationship. Mary's warmth nurtured me and taught me to accept who I was. It also sort of motivated me to refine some of the better points of my own nature.

We got more wine that night and we went out riding the back roads over behind HoJos on the Turnpike. And we went out riding again and again over the next several years. While we kissed and fondled (just a little bit) she always kept real sex at a distance. It was a wise choice. Although the years have moved us far apart I will always appreciate that walk on a dark wet night. It started me on the process of becoming who I am today. I will always love her for finding something in me to connect with and value.

Dark hair, blue eyes, freckles, porcelain skin and an understanding of the world far beyond her years she was a beauty. I hope life has been good to her.

Of Sidewalks and the Aurora

Grey early evening but it is not raining, at least not yet. The sidewalks are a mess. City crews have been out. Concrete dust, empty holes and yellow, blue and red painted arrows are everywhere. My pathways through the neighborhood are just plain ripped up and gone, vanished in the span of a day. My mind wonders if everyone who is tied to the two breadwinner lifestyle find things as simple as street maintenance as confounding as I do? I mean there was a notice I suppose, it said I had to pay the city $220 as my aliquot share for "sidewalk repair." Maybe.

Each morning I get up and take my shower in the dark. While my wife and kids are just beginning to stir I am packing lunch bags and conjuring up breakfast. Yeah conjuring describes it. One child won't eat toasted bread, one will. One won't eat friend eggs and the other won't eat scrambled. About the only agreement at this meal between the two of them is on the subject of bacon. Yeah it is like that song says, if it may result in bacon I would kill that porker with my own bare hands. And then there comes the dash to the car and the kids are off to school, and me to the bus stop and work.

Perhaps the notice provided the date the work was going to commence or maybe not. I mean I looked at that official looking paper when I got home. Yeah I was focused. It came on a night when I got here first and it was time for a Dad special meal. This means tomato sauce and burger was to be involved. Tomato sauce can cure all ills. Boboli bread and tomato sauce and burger equal a meat lover's pizza. Pasta and tomato sauce and hamburger avec fromage equals backed ziti. Two hands, buns and a frying pan mean a Cheeseburger in Paradise. Me, meat and tomato sauce mean a city notice just doesn’t get the respect that official looking city seal should command.

Somewhere I read a book about reclaiming the margins of life. The author implied that we had to set times for things like dinner and tasks and leisure. He implied that turning off phones and TVs and radios at meals and during the early evening hours were the way to go. Each night when I get home I have to check the homework online for each child. Each night when I get home I have to open up the computer for their research. (I did mention the dinner thing above right usually occurring concurrently with this process). The topics are always so damned easy too. Tonight one off project was to list fifty relatives you have (dead or alive) and define their relationship to you. Here come those damn consanguinity charts.

Maybe that doggerel ascribed to Ben Franklin was right. I remember it because it was burned on a piece of wood that hung on my bedroom door when I was a kid. I think it was a souvenir from some place out west. It went like this:

As a rule,
A man's a fool,
When its hot he wants it cool,
When its cool he wants it hot,
What it is he wants it not.

I think life in general is like that, if it weren't frenetic I would be bored. If it is frantic I am stressed. There is no happy medium well except for Madame Marie who keeps that bottle of gin beneath the folding card table which on which she tells fortunes.

I am not upset at the city by any means for the sidewalks need to be repaired. Really. It was only last week I almost did a header out there on one of those 1 inch heaved expansion slots. What upsets me is that I seem to be missing bigger and bigger things. Maybe one day due to my harried pace I will look around and my neighborhood will be completely and utterly gone. Maybe they will have moved it en masse to another part of the city or state. I mean I am just saying given how distracted I am it could happen and I would be none the wiser until I got home and only an empty pit remained.

There are times when I think it is only me that feels this way, and then I watch someone from work on the phone talking in that terse "What do you mean” voice to someone a child, a creditor whoever but it is the same tone I get when something has just whizzed by me. Maybe it is the technology. Maybe. Or maybe it is the willingness to just give up and give in to an unsustainable pace of living thrown at us by others in our communal quest for more, more, more (Thank you Billy Idol). Either way I don't really see it slowing down anytime soon.

I took a break to think when was the last time life was slow? I think it was on a camping trip to Rabbit Blanket Lake. As we sat out there in the northern Ontario night the campground was nearly empty, but we had a waterfront lot. The air was cool and the cell phones were out of range so the place was silent except for a few muffled conversations. The campfire crackled and a nice cold beer was nestled in my hand. Sitting there on a camp chair I looked up at the stars. Yeah, the moment didn't last long, but it was a slow moment, a special moment. Maybe this summer I can create another special moment like that. I hope so.

Before I die I want another shot as seeing the aurora put on a good show. I have only seen it once but it was ethereal and satisfying.

I Found My Thrill... *

Neat, mirror-shinny napkin dispensers, each in its own space, each equidistant from the next one, sat on the counter. Formica and white the counter stretched on for the length of the long thin front room of the diner. Between the napkin-holder/condiment stations sat those old jukebox units with metal tabs, tabs you pushed or pulled to move between pages listing song after song.

Round stools of chrome and sticky vinyl covers, a vinyl that made fart like sounds on hot days when you tried to move your butt around to get comfortable were bolted down for the whole length of the counter .The menus rested in little trestle things on the inside edge of the well worn counter. Wrapped in clear, but yellowing vinyl like your great aunts couch the numbers on the price column had been whited out and written over so many times you ended up guessing what the blurs really added up to. You hoped those crumpled dollars in your blue jeans would cover it.

The menus carried the death we all approach so quickly now in all of its tasty component parts. As your read each item you could smell the burger on the grill and catch that hot moist warm odor of the fries in the deep fat fryer coming from the kitchen. The first beverage was coffee. The next was Coca Cola and this was the real thing, the real stuff no saccharine, no aspertaine just vanilla and lots of carbonated sugar water.

Heinz Ketchup sat on the counter along with a squirt bottle of mustard of unknown origin. That squirt bottle with the brown caked cap at the top so yellow that it clearly was not a product of nature's bounty. The service was as quick as it needed to be and if you wanted it that coffee I mentioned was black and fresh and it didn't require sixteen different directions be given to the server; it was just coffee for chrissakes.

The place was the Fernwood Diner although it might have been the Summit or the Empire or even the Point Diner. A few menu items might change based on the nationality of the owners, but there was always a burger basket, a couple of shakes, the diet plate (peaches, lettuce and cottage cheese) and usually Coke products.

The kitchen staff dressed in white. The waitresses dressed in little pale outfits with aprons that were white, black or which matched the color of the outfit but with some frills at the edge. The women were older, always older than I was and they smelled of coffee and cigarettes. They talked fast, smiled (usually) and would crack a quip. Their apron pockets jingled with the sound of tip money. While these ladies might offer a mild double entendre there was no cursing and no overt sexual talk. This was before America threw in the towel and every conversation had to be punctuated by profanity and every line of talk had to end below the belt. You told the filthy joke about the midget the penguins and the Pope out on the steps leading into the diner, but never at the counter. Even then life was earthy and real but it stayed its nasty self outside the door because rules inside were rules.

I got to know this diner well because it was where I hid. Whenever I came to visit Muffy in her working class Philadelphia suburb, I would stay with her in the first floor flat she rented. Her apartment abutted the back of the Fernwood Diner. My gear, clothes and backpack were always stowed out of sight. If Muffy's parents came by for a visit, especially if they came by early, I had to be elsewhere. Thus when that doorbell rang I would haul ass out the back door and head over to the Diner.

Each time I would go into the Fernwood no matter what time of day or night I would normally order a burger and fries. Normally my visits at the diner would last a half hour or so. Having been hustled out to avoid detection I would get a Philadelphia Inquirer and I would work the crossword, slowly, very slowly. My vocabulary came from that puzzle, it wasn't the Times but it was hard enough.

I would wolf down the burger but I would play with the fries. One fry, one dip into the ketchup and one small sip of the Coke, do another clue. You sipped the Coke in small sips 'cause nobody refilled nothing 'cept an occasional warm up on coffee for free. Setting down my pen on the folder newsprint I would keep watch out the big glass window that wrapped around the chrome facade to see if the parents' car was gone. No matter how many times this routine happened the Buick would never leave soon enough. Most of the time I would be nearly done the puzzle with the odd five letter word left to finish when I say the car pull away.

Each and every time I was wasting another precious moment of life in the diner I would flip those little metal tabs and move the metal sheets with the little red and white labels identifying each song, artist and b-side until I had seen them all. There would always be a couple of current songs, like Elton John's Mona Lisa's and Mad Hatters or Rocket Man. And there were a bunch of songs like Aretha singing Respect or Chain of Fools. CCR was also heavily represented.

Tucked on each of those metal pages were some classic oldies, Charlie Brown, some Fat's Domino and Gene Pitney. It was weird it was like the juke box was trying to be all things to all people. If my visit were later in the day I would play Credence or Elton or something else with a good solid beat. Kids my age 18 or 19 would nod their heads along but I could see the staff was just tolerating it. Most of the time during my exile I just didn't play anything, hey a dime did not come easily out of my pocket.

One morning and I think it was a Saturday. I mean it probably wasn't a Sunday because almost invariably I would already be hitchhiking back to Michigan on a Sunday unless I had gotten a ride back lined up off the ride board on campus. Usually this didn't happen because Philly was six hundred miles away from East Lansing. Well, anyway the parents showed up early and unannounced. Tennis shoes, t-shirt and jeans no socks and maybe commando in the underwear department I bolted for the diner. Luckily I had some money in my pocket. For a change I made my order wrecked eggs and zeppelins with liquid sunshine. And there was some loose change.

I flipped that dine a couple of times weighing what kind of nasty looks I would get if I played something on the jukebox at 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. Finally I just decided to say screw it and dropped it in the slot. I was committed now but what to play. The pages went back and forth five or ten times. Finally I opted for an oldie. Punching D-9 I picked Blueberry Hill. What happened next was surreal.

As the song began to play one of the waitresses was heading into the kitchen. From where I sat I could see the guy washing dishes and the cook and another guy who seemed to be doing some prep. As the song got to about the third word all of these guys started to sing and dance. True story it was like watching Frankie Avalon, James Darrin and Bobby Rydell all singing along and doing their best moves in prep for their next Bandstand appearance. Well except these guys were fat, middle aged and wearing soiled cooks’ whites. Every time that door swung in or out these guys were singing in dancing and cutting up stuff and flipping eggs and whatever. The waitresses were singing too, on key and with a lilt in their step. It was clear that this had happened before, many, many times.

Me I just put my paper down and took it all in. Hey I don’t know why, but it was an amazing moment. All these people doing this little bit of musical theatre for themselves for whatever reason and being in a good, nayh great mood for two minutes and thirty eight seconds.

Maybe it was just that song. Maybe they had a shared experience and the whole thing was tied to someone that was now gone. I don’t know I didn’t ask and nobody volunteered. When the song ended the dancing stop and the magic moment ended. A couple of minutes later and the parents pulled away. I left some coins, paid at the register by the door and left.

I think this memory sticks with me because it was unexpected, unique and surreally beautiful. I could go into a hundred diners and play a hundred oldies and nothing like this would ever happen again. But it did happen that day when I was at loose ends and my ten cents put it into play. Serendipity?

Stimulus, mental and fiscal

Lunch time is here and I am sitting in a coffee shop listening to Dar Williams sing “I will not be afraid of women.” All I can say is that this does not apply equally to me. Fear of those with two Xs (okay at least caution) has always proved the most prudent course for me. I am just saying.

There is something wonderful about being in friendly place with good music on the music system. In the course of the few minutes I can stay here I can hear the good ole Grateful Dead, Snow Patrol, Led Zeppelin, Sandy Denny and some old Gaelic thing that has a chorus about being drunk again. You shouldn’t sit at your desk all of lunch. The mind and the body need to wander. Support the economy, buy a latte today.

Smackwater Jack and Me

What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real life people is purely unintentional. No true statement, concept or even logical construct was used in the creating of what follows. Well except for the broadest sense of the truth that is imbued in living, that 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 mundane and hopefully meshes. Told in the first person with some variant of myself as the narrator the tale is not my life, but the life of a character who might have some of my attributes. This is an old story that I have not posted because I have never felt comfortable with how I had written it. The tale came to me one day as I lay upon a park bench thinking what a child growing up in New Jersey might have experienced. Maybe it was last dark dopple bock 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.

My Old Man, His Gun and the Hot Summer of 1972

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

I offer the Paul Bowles, (and I often try to communicate that piece to others), because of how important the finite memories each of holds within are. Personally my memory is starting to fade. 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 am writing 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 a miserable affair all around. Temperatures stayed hot and the air was always very humid. The moist air was filled with the gritty dirt kicked up by 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 hot noisy summer nights you would taste every grain of that dirt suspended in the 110% humidity. Sandy and gritty that dirt turns into little black spider web thin strands in the interior crook of you elbow when it mixes with your ever-present perspiration. If you rub your neck to wipe away this sweat, the mixture of moisture and dirt smears on both your hand and neck. The resulting admixture has the color and texture of fine grit black sandpaper.

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 opened and the constant drone of a window fan clearly audible, sleep if it ever came was sweat drenched and uncomfortable. On nights like those sleep came only from pure exhaustion. Built on reclaimed swamp and still surrounded by swamp the place was stifling.

Intrusive harsh sounds were 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 2 miles out of town all conspired with the heat to deny me and everyone else 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 the black hours.

Produce trucks would park 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 was done with much engine chugging and grinding gear noise. Sleep was a precious commodity in August 1972 in small town, New Jersey, for me, my family and pretty much everyone else around.

Sleep deprived people aren't willing to take much shit from anyone.

1972, in addition to being a hot summer, was part of a time of great change in this country. Class divisions were growing. Racial tensions were rife. Just a few years before our cities had burned and some of the empty ruins stood not that far away from my home. A 13-mile drive would put you in the midst of burnt out blocks of row homes. I haven’t forgotten. It was the era of the generation gap and rioting in the street over Vietnam. Even among people of the same race the cultural gap between a teenager and a fifty-year-old man in 1972 was probably as great as it ever had been in America.

In my little 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 the garages where the motor heads twiddled with wrenches on Chevys, and only Chevys. In 1972 LSD was hitting the small towns of New Jersey like the lightning bolt. Reefer was plentiful and openly toked.

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 a chance to go to the beach and rent a room in a boarding house. Didn’t someone say idle hands are the devils workshop? It was in this mélange that my stoned longhaired smart assed friends, my father's short southern temper and one 12 gauge blue steel 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 is found in a short excursion to the thickets and woodlots of South Jersey several years before the events of August 1972.

Each fall when various birding seasons would come in my father and middle brother would head out into the fields to go hunting. Coming along in addition to the forenamed family members would be the family dog, Coal, a jet-black cocker spaniel and I. After a short ride to some fairly dense woods we would all tumble out from the car, well at least the dog and I tumbled. It seemed I would no sooner be struggling to my feet than Coal would get himself hopelessly tangled in the nearest briar patch. As his black coat grew more and more enmeshed in the briars there were ear-piercing yelps and howls and whines. When this cacophony of misery arose it fell to me to perform my only function on these trips, that is, crawling into the briar patch to retrieve the whining simpering canine. Yes, in our family hierarchy I was lower than the dog. Oh, my ongoing psychological trauma. Fucked me up pretty good.

Any way when we would be 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 at the first time I did this was between 6 & 7 years old. I think the first gun I shot was the 16-gauge shotgun. What I remember as I pulled the trigger was a feeling a ferocious kick from the gunstock and then finding my sorry, scrawny, lower than the family dog ass self lying flat on the ground. Har, Har, Hars all around. Well, at least it was funny to 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 bad mojo; they were both powerful and scary. Such fear is something that I will always remember. Despite having learned to shoot a .22 and a 410 in my early teens I always knew guns had a 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 had attended engineering school in Brooklyn for a couple of terms but ran out of money and he 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 odd years. He was a company man.

My dad did his time at "the Plant" like many, many dads in my little town. He had worked shift work before I was born. He hustled, grunted and because of his engineering skills moved up in the hierarchy. As the years marched on he was moved to day shift, first as foreman, then as a supervisor. Despite the actual color of his shirt he always remained a blue-collar boss. He had a staff of better than a 30 people who reported to him. Some of them were process guys (i.e., the guys who made and maintained the system that made the Freon) and some were the truck drivers who delivered the stuff. My old man was straight; he was a tee totaling Baptist and even served as church moderator for a spell.

The old man once told me he didn’t believe everything he heard in church but he felt being there was good for you so he went. In my memory 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 went on to be DuPont’s U.S. Freon operation’s vice president. Not bad for a guy who hadn’t even really graduated from high school.

Well anyway my old man worked hard for his money. He in 1972 got to "the Plant" by 8 a.m., left at 4:30 and took business calls up until about 10 at night. Unlike today working at home was not the norm in 1972. Back then he went the extra mile. Thus when he decided he wanted to go to bed it was important for him to get some sleep. My father had to sleep. If he didn’t sleep he didn’t work well. If he didn’t work well he wasn’t happy. He was a man who believed in the order of things. He believed in working hard, in coloring within the lines, in putting in forty hours. He had grown up in the depression and having a job was important so doing what it took to keep that job meant something.

That summer of 1972 was just not his time for good sleeping.Into that hot summer of that turbulent year came a mix of idleness, alcohol, pot and discontent with everything. This swirling maelstrom brought teenage emotions to a boil. Like Brando’s key line in the Wild Ones it 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 were listening to the Doors, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper and Humble Pie. We played it loud enough to hear and sing along too. We played it loud enough so that even those who didn’t want to hear it had to listen.

Music carries a great distance on hot nights, 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 little frame houses assaulting those poor working stiffs trying to catch 40 winks.

Across from my house was an old convenience store/lunch counter that had folded. Each night after it grew dark the local punks would begin to gather there. I should note that I am using the royal we here. On any given night I was more than likely there for a little while, but never for the duration. Most nights I had a 9 or 9:30 p.m. curfew. This was part of my parent’s limit setting strategy. The funny thing was that you could get really, really stoned by 9:30 p.m. On most evenings when I came in I ducked through the living room quickly and went to my room to read a book or listen to music without my totally (totaled and?) intoxicated self being noticed. I still don’t know if most of the time they were aware that I was stoned or not. The only time this became an issue was once when I was truly toasted and I bumped into the doorframe to the living room and apologized to it. They found that kind of difficult to ignore.

We stood outside on the stoop of that old convenience store or sometimes 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 stoned and loaded. 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 after all an all male aggregation. Clearly our grasps did not outstretch our reach.

Our minds were little and my friends’ dreams were so normal as to be mundane. Their aspirations were average to the point of boring hopelessness. Well it seemed that way to me at the time. As the years have gone by I have realized that their dreams were no less valid than mine but at the time the place seemed small and their goals even smaller.To give you a sense of how limited life was in this little 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 with 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 with 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 Rayburn's store late one night and telling them I was going to college and I wasn't coming back. Realistically who among the guys was I going to talk to if I stayed around? I wanted to go places, see things; I wanted to learn more stuff that you could get sitting around watching T.V. The guys just didn't get it. They thought that going to work for uncle Duppy (pronounced Dew Pew-our pet name for DuPont); drinking beer at Jimmy’s 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 Plum Street side puffing on another in the chain of L& Ms that would eventually bring on the heart attack that would kill him. Apparently he listened to my whole soliloquy. He later asked me why I was so dead set on leaving. I asked him point blank what he saw for me in town if I stayed. He really didn’t give me an answer.

I think him overhearing that conversation really changed his attitude about whether I should go to an out of state college. Up to that point he was resisting me going anywhere but Rutgers based on the money issues. I think when he thought about what would happen to me if I stayed around he was okay with my leaving.”

Clouds of smoke from Marlboros cigarettes and Columbian weed floated but really didn’t move from the place where we were stood on those nights. There wasn’t much of a breeze to be had on any given evening that summer. If you don’t remember Columbian was good weed. We had bloodshot slits for eyes and were utter drooling idiots. We drank lots of 7 ½ ounce pony bottles of Rolling Rock as the cure for cotton mouth. A 7-½ ounce bottle fits roughly into the palm of your hand. It will slip easily into a crevice or one’s pocket if the New Jersey Troopers rolled by. Late at night on backcountry roads it was great sport to wail 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 alleviate that dry gummy taste.

With the above as 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 just a little after nine even in midsummer. It was August hot and it was a Sunday night. I, in a bit of a blur, had managed to jam a cassette tape into my mighty Symphonic tape deck. I mean it was really jammed in there. The cassette was caught in the deck not turning and it would not eject. I don’t know why but I do remember the trapped tape . Caught in the clutches of that cheap assed tape player was Stephen Stills eponymous first 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 was helping me his mechanically inept sixteen year old son try and remove the now mangled tape. My help was limited because well I had that musty rope smelling cologne on and my mind was elsewhere. With a thin screwdriver and pliers he was trying to coax the cover off the cassette player so as to extract the tape. This was tedious and delicate. Good thing he wasn’t stoned.

My father as he was performing the delicate surgery on the music machine had already been grumbling about the punks standing on the stoop across the street. Dad had been grumbling about it for days. He had “talked” to them several times in the past week. My father’s version of talking usually involved a fairly deep voice yelling out the window “Don’t you boys have a home of your own to go to?” This would at least quiet them down for a while. Most of the members of this rag tag crew were the sons of people my father was connected with. The connections between my father and their parents were varied, a coworker at the plant, a fellow usher at the Baptist church, etc. Occasionally the implicit threat that the above statement carried, that is “keep it up and I am calling your father,” wouldn’t work. Tonight as fate would have it was one of those nights 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 20 years olds in the mix. These were guys who had graduated, gotten factory jobs and still lived at home. Additionally a couple of them were ne’er do wells that were destined for jobs like septic tank cleaning, fuel oil delivery man or even lower. If I went back there today these guys might still be drinking those pony bottles, sitting on the same corner and then looking at me with their glazed eyes would say, “Rufus, where you been? I ain’t seen you in awhile. It would almost be as if three decades hadn’t passed.

My local tribally assigned nickname was Rufus. It was from a Bob Denver character on the “The Good Guys” a short-lived sitcom. One of my associates himself known as Velvet had given my nickname to me. I can see a puzzled look on your face. Why should a teen/man have the relatively feminine “Velvet” for a nickname? Velvet was short for the Velvet Asshole-a moniker derived from his pickiness about what toilets he was willing to use at various bars.

There were a variety of other nicknames inclusive Beastley, Preacher and Turk. Turk was short for Turkalurkus a bastardization of Tuberculosis. His nickname derived from a disease because he was viewed as being so depraved as to qualify for categorization as his own pathogenic sickness. There was also Thor based I believe on size alone.

The junior factory rats with some solid cash coming in bought toys with their money, a new Dodge Challenger for example. They also bought most of the beer and Columbian. A factory job paid well and they bought lots and lots of beer and lots and lots of 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 with all the attendant stench, noise and smoke.

Did I mention that was a small rural town on a very hot and very 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 mentioned before), so access to beer was limited. My home town was a dry always, and the entire county was dry except for takeout beer from one sole bar on Sundays. That bar was twenty miles away and everyone was too stoned to drive that far.

Of the 20 or so people that ultimately congregated on the defunct Rayburn’s store’s stoop that night, most had been made fearless by the Columbian. And it was good Columbian that was in town right then. This was similar to the stuff I smoked the night my body and mind dissolved and 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 the window of my bedroom watching the street light so the atoms of my body would not dissolve and float away in a vapor. Damn I am digressing again. My focus and memory just never have been that good since high school.

So there we were. It was hot. My Dad was busy doing fine dexterity taxing work trying to get the tape out of my cassette deck. I twisted my head at an odd angle so I would appear to be watching him, paying attention was kind of required in these situations when fatherly help was being 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 additionally it was also not a loud noise. It was just a pop followed by cracking noise sort of like crinkling old cellophane. Shortly after the noise my mother came sweeping into the room very upset. She in a bit of 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 that a guy named J. J. had taken a penny and thrown it at our front door. Apparently the stoned 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 after the fact conversation, the guys had figured out they would have to be moving on soon because Mr. Thompson was going to be going to bed and they were pissed because they really didn’t have anyplace else to go. The bars were closed and a couple of the standard sites, abandoned fields and the like were off limits because they had been chased out of them recently by the State Police.

J.J. 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 through out 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 had been a couple nights of eleven thirty disruptions and outbursts. He had called the New Jersey State Troopers about it once but the Staties didn’t show up for about 45 minutes. By the time the jackbooted cops had arrived on the scene the punks had already left. When there is nobody there, there ain’t a whole lot that can be done. The old man had also had shouting match through the window with my friends on another night a day after the police had been 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’ve had it. I’m getting my gun.” He sprinted for the stairs to his upstairs bedroom and the closet where he kept his guns. I ran after him. To this day I have no idea why. I mean I tended not to mess with my father when he was mad. Could have been the number of times I had met with 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 suck. 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 was throwing a couple of shells into the gun. As would come out later at the trial the ammo was birdshot, not usually lethal to humans, but significantly worse than rock salt.

Standing in the doorway to his room I starting yelling, “Dad put the gun down.” And in my stoned (but rapidly clearing) stupor I then tried to block the door and his way back 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 hands whenever he could. He had strength. I was six foot tall but weighed a total of 140 pounds soaking wet. I was a wussy.

Across the street after the window had broke, most of the guys were hooting and holler at J.J. Mostly it laughter and shit like “Oooooh, J.J., Mr. Thompson’s gonna 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 just don’t sink in as fast now do they?

Apparently someone in the group of guys had heard some part of the altercation in our house because they had grown somewhat 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 just screamed. I don’t remember much more that yelling in a raw scream “He’s got a gun” and then I turned and followed him down the stairs.

My adrenaline must have been pumping because I was about 15 paces at most 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 popping 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 scene from a Warner’s Brother’s cartoon. People’s legs were moving but they weren’t carrying them anywhere. As I hit the front porch my father was headed down the steps off the porch. And then it happened; the gun went off.

My father had stumbled on the last of the steps and the gun discharged almost straight up. An eerily similar sensation to what I felt just then was clearly described in the Peter Gabriel song, “Family Snapshot.” Gabriel’s lyrics build to a crescendo as the narrator an amature 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 mind just then was like the scene in the song. The charged and frenetic actions that I was observing 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 and maybe even before the sound reached my ears the moment just stood still….

In the surreal quiet of that moment just after the gun fired I can remember lots of odd little details. I can remember I was wearing a tee shirt. My skin was moist but not wet with sweat. There was the old kind of street lights, the ones that gave off 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 was panned into the movie of my memory, and then the quiet moment was over and everything was rushing and running and people were screaming. Cars doors were slamming and front doors of the nearby homes were opening. One person kept yelling “Mr. Thompson don’t kill me” even thought my father was nowhere near him.

As my father came off the steps of the house the biggest of the guys, Thor, was screaming and crying. Of all the bizarre things Thor was holding onto the hood of his car. It was a gray Plymouth and it was about 6 years old at the time. In his sobbing voice he kept saying “Please Mr. Thompson 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 in 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 scarred he is going to shoot your car? What the hell was he thinking 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 black 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 line of "God, let me live. God, I will never do that [insert particular sins 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. Thor could be one dense motherfucker.

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 on that had been on Rayburn’s stoop was to be seen. I ran inside and flushed all my small stash of dope down the toilet. Given the questionable loyalty of my friends, friends my father had just apparently tried 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 even though I hadn’t done a thing wrong in this situation that I could think of. My “friends” were clearly going to try and get back at my Dad and 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 end up facing.

There were several trials and I believe two appeals spawned by this event. My father was charged with assault and battery, a felony in the great state of New Jersey. Three of the street corner hangers on were charged with malicious destruction of property and a couple of other offenses now lost (at least for me) in the haze of time.

As the trial approached in our little municipal court my "friends" were playing all sorts of mind games with me. They struck up odd conversations and tried to draw out 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 so. 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 to be of no use in reconstructing the event. It may be 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" questioned me on this point repeatedly at school. Clearly given the potential danger to my father's liberty I really wasn't going to be a willing participant to 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 before he approached them at their car. My father never talked about this as he awaited the trial. My "friends" kept asking me what gun he had used, what gauge was it, etc. I really couldn't offer an answer. Not because I was trying to stick by my father, but because I really didn't know.

In the room when I was trying to stop my father from leaving with the gun I was focused on him, his features and his attitude. And I was stoned. My memory has never been that great 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 go to the trial 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 trial because in small towns like ours we had a visiting judge come by one or two times a month based on the docket. In order to allow the judge to conduct his other court duties in other jurisdictions we took a time that fit his schedule, Tuesday nights.
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 had found the version of events of the guys on the corner not reliable. It played out like this. All three of the guys in the car claimed that they hadseen my father break open his gun and put a fresh shotgun shell into it. If I remember this right the first witness on the scene other than the guys who had broken the window was a hunter. He very calmly told the Judge that my father was holding a pump action shotgun when he reached the could have been a teen massacre scene. Such a gun would be loaded from the side and the gun would 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 as to how to characterize the people out on the corner that night. They were all people I knew. Some of them had been my classmates since grade school. Some were people who 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, but the definition of friendship that 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 moment the gun went off with the parenthetical “friends”

And I have said the gun went off and I was not in the alley were my father confronted my three fleeing “friends”. What was said there in the back parking lot and what really occurred there I think is now lost to the passage of time, at least any fully accurate version. My father is dead after having lived 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 would listen again and again. Inaccuracies repeated enough acquire 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 the presence of a firearm hanging in their faces inside the widow of their vehicle that they still managed to flee. I believed they claimed their car was throwing stones and burning rubber as they departed. Wasn’t there an old Charlie Daniels song kind of 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 human beings over time, the likelihood is that had the gun actually been in the car window they would have froze and been incapable of operating the vehicle. More likely than not, one of them literally would have pissed himself. (Come to think of it that car never did smell 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 a serious gun safety advocate. Most hunters that are really into safety just 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 a middle level and my father closer to the car than he claimed to be in court. I just don’t know.

The members of the trio were all found guilty of the various charges against them. My father ended up with a conviction for discharging a gun within the township limits, a civil infraction or perhaps an ordinance violation. It had the same legal impact as being cited as a citation for loosing your dog to befoul someone else’s yard, that is it didn’t generate a criminal record. My father paid the fines and was happy. The noise had abated and he really didn’t have a rap sheet.

The trio appealed, and I think appealed again. Knowing the legal system as I do 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. I think I gained some respect for my father and he for me. It was a changing point where the silence, the bristling neck hair and the invective vanished. I developed a grudging respect for my father’s consistency and certitude in his actions and values. He, by virtue of the fact that I stood up to him, probably came to a conclusion that there were things I would not tolerate or accept as appropriate and maybe, just maybe, that I might be right on an issue or two. And that maybe sometimes I was a reasonable voice. It wasn’t that the stresses of father/son conflict were gone 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 trial placed some of the gulf between us. Probably just as important 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 it was I was to be. As my awareness of that fact grew I think I moved mentally away from them. My substance abuse did abate a bit and I did start to make connections with kids from other towns. Our regional high school had four or five separate communities that attended. Thus I was able to find friends with different lifestyles that I could hang out with and the relationships weren’t defined by my old man, nor by the things my “friends” and I had done vis a vis each other since we were five years old.

My father clearly had enough of the nonsense. Beginning the next summer we spent each summer at the beach in a rented house a block from the ocean. We would be there from May to mid September or in other words pretty much the entire commercial produce season. Dad would drive the fifty miles each way to work and back so he could walk on the beach in the evenings and enjoy himself, free from the hothouse of teen age idiocy. I think also he learned something about himself from the whole affair. As weird as it sounds I think Dad learned to let some things just 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 foibles of those around him. Maybe accepting would be too strong a term, but it seemed he learned to countenance fools a little more easily.

When I think about the changes that ensued they probably saved my life. Within about four years two of the guys who had been out there that night were dead from drug issues. A good number had serious criminal histories, assault and drug convictions; the kind of stuff that didn’t go away at age 18. I could have been there, but the emotional distance and the physical distance that blast of bird shot caused allowed for a major change in my life.

It would be hard 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. The waves that came in the morning, the waves tinged so many shades of amber by the sunset, the waves that grew so high with a summer squall and the placid waves lapping a cool September morning beach. Maybe it was for the best and maybe my old man was ultimately right in standing his ground.

And oh, those two songs I quoted, every freakin’ radio station in the Delaware Valley must have played about a 100 dedications of each one to my father that following fall…

A Note

Chris,

Thank you. It is now one year since I started doing this. One year and about 125 or so posts. I appreciate your suggestion because I really do love blogging. I may never get a book done about all the stuff that happened in the past, but I have shared a few stories.

G Manitou