By the first week of August, you could already sense the acrid aroma of the new school year drifting into our summer. The first taste of real foreboding began when Mom threw a package of tube socks and several new graphic t-shirts on my bed, one afternoon.
“What are these?!” I recoiled in disgust, as if she’d just tossed a festering string of goat entrails into the room.
“A new wardrobe, so you don’t look like a Georgia rum runner”, she called out from the other room.
New clothes were a downer, but nothing raised the Doomsday Alarm quite like new school supplies.
On a hutch in our kitchen, I found that she had also meticulously stacked packs of number two pencils, Bic pens, Duo-tangs and notebook paper. Fifth grade was coming. And now, every trip to the fridge was an ominous reminder. Just walking past her neatly-merchandised stacks of Super-X supplies made me nauseous.
Those last days were mostly filled with shelling of the Dick Shed and directing our fledgling resistance movement to carry out more random attacks. In our spare time we swam in my pool, watched TV and played late-night street football games with all the neighborhood kids, in front of my house. During that period, we had a half dozen or so near-misses with the Cole Gang. At some point we just stopped venturing out to the other streets in the neighborhood. Too risky. I started practicing punching things again in my bedroom, with Jeff’s ghetto brass knuckle/penny roll invention. I was heading into a dark tunnel.
By then, Jeff and I were clinically addicted to throwing rocks too.
Always needing to take things further than we had before, we escalated the intensity of our mortar fire on Franz by climbing up on the roof of my house and launching across both yards from our own private Mt. Suribachi. The mortars seemed to strike the pock-marked storage shed with extra ferocity. That area of his yard eventually looked like the landing beach at Iwo Jima.
The roof of the house not only became the greatest of all strategic vantage points in this war, it somehow multiplied the dopamine payoff we felt; exponentially.
We would stand on the peak of my brown, shingled rooftop, lob one of those smooth pool stones across the yard and then duck down on the opposite side of the peak–completely concealed from Franz’s eagle eyes in the backyard.
This new assault position wasn’t without its own, heightened risks. Ten feet off the ground, without any cover, we were exposed to the east side of the neighborhood for a split second. Never mind Franz. We were surrounded by potential narcs– Bob McBride, the Eastern Airlines pilot across the street. Mr. Agalieu, the priest who lived next door to Bob. Frank Majors, the beer-guzzling Eastern Airlines mechanic next door, was also perpetually outside working on his boat. There was also the danger that Mom would hear us thumping around on the roof and bust us.
To make matters even worse, I was scared of heights and there was a very real risk of falling off the roof from an off-balance throw. I came close a couple times. All of those apprehensions were quickly dispelled by the rapturous explosion on the shed’s surface. THWAKKK!!! Jeff and I would look at each other, crouching down after a direct hit and get hysterical laughing.
After a couple of these rounds we would climb down, using the Schefflera tree on the corner of the house as a ladder, and go right back to watching Bonanza reruns or afternoon game shows like Joker’s Wild with Jack Barry.
A Surprising Audit
I remember it was a sweltering Saturday morning, shortly after breakfast. Probably sometime around 11:00 am.
Mom was in the backyard mowing the lawn, making neat little rows in the thick St. Augustine grass. I was watching cartoons with my sister.
They say the sign of a true alcoholic, is either when you drink in the morning or drink alone. That need for a morning fix and the simultaneous lack of need for companionship while getting it, is supposed to signify the true addict.
That Saturday morning, Jeff was still asleep in his dark, air-conditioned bedroom next door, and I didn’t feel the slightest hesitation about climbing up on the roof and getting a few mortar shots in before pro-wrestling with Gordon Solie came on at noon. This of course meant that I would be launching directly over Mom’s head while she worked in the yard. In retrospect, it was an insane proposition. But forces beyond my control were urging me to beat Franz by any means necessary.
I walked past Mom pouring gas into the mower, secretly collected a couple stones from the pool area and proceeded to climb the umbrella tree in the front yard and crawl directly onto our roof. I stood on the peak and eyed my target while licking my lips. It was a gorgeous morning to be alive! My mother never once looked up. She was too busy huffing and puffing and plowing over piles of dog crap with our lime green Lawn Boy mower.
I launched the first mortar in the noonday sun and missed, wide.
I disappeared back behind the peak and then grabbed a second stone.
This time I made sure to plant myself more assuredly. I looked like a demented weather vane, as my lanky 50-lb frame straddled both sides of the peak— one arm extended forward to the west for balance and the other cocked eastward for launch. I hurled the stone with more force this time and it made its trajectory straight towards the roof of the Dick shed. It was gonna come in hot and heavy. I could just feel it.
No sooner had the rock left my shaky hand, and my viewfinder spotted Franz pointing up at me on the roof, from the middle of his backyard. My eyes zoomed in on his enraged face, his translucent lips flapping furiously. I can’t say he was using vulgarities. The lawn mower drowned out every bit of his rapidfire word salad, but I understood enough about these born again people to know that while they may fancy little girls, they sure as hell don’t curse. I immediately dropped behind the east side of the roof’s peak and laid there on the steep incline for a few seconds, clutching my throat–my heart pounding.
I’d been caught!
After months of daily bombardment, Jeff and I had cleverly and quite narrowly at times, evaded capture–but the jig was finally up. I’d gotten greedy for revenge. Careless.
I peered ever-so-cautiously over the edge of the roof, towards the backyard, and could see Franz in the corner of his yard, waving my mother down while she mowed. She didn’t see or hear him for several seconds and I hissed a desperate incantation in her direction– “Don’t look up, don’t look up! Keep mowing, woman! KEEP! MOWING!!!”
And then his frantic waving caught her eye and my spell was broken. The entire contents of my gut avalanched into the lower colon.
She turned the roaring mower off and the quiet of suburbia instantly returned to the neighborhood. She marched wearily towards the fence and I heard Franz apologetically say, “I’m sorry to bother you.”
I ducked down and laid flat against the pitch of the roof again, staring up into the Miami sky. In the twinkling of an eye, all the possible punishments pinged my internal mailbox at once. It was curtains for me. I was unable to conjure any possible outcome where I would survive the threshing machine of Mom’s wrath. Severe beatings, solitary confinement in her gulag, endless leaf-raking, mind-numbing lectures, compulsory book reports… I teetered on the brink of hyperventilating.
I lifted my nose over the peak again. Now I could hear only the faintest murmuring. Franz was using his hands to explain something. He repeatedly pointed to an area in the opposite corner of his yard. Eventually I saw my mother nod her head and Franz walked away to the far side, near his back patio. Mom stayed there watching him, both elbows resting on the chain link fence that separated our yards. He momentarily disappeared.
Franz eventually emerged from behind the patio, pushing a commercial-grade wheel barrow across the yard to my waiting mother. Piled inside the wheelbarrow’s red, steel tray was a mountain of rocks– of all colors, shapes and sizes. Even a professional body builder like Franz struggled under its weight. As he strained to haul it across the grass, rocks were tumbling off the edge onto the ground. He parked the wheel barrow at the corner of the fence and continued lecturing with his hands, as my mother nodded silently. It looked to be several hundreds pounds of rock and stone– a heap, some three to four feet high.
Franz motioned again to his patio. There were obviously additional piles behind there.
He had a complete audit of our bombing campaign, from the very beginning. He pushed several stones aside near the top of the pile, and with two firm hands pulled out a craggy chunk of South Florida limestone. That thing weighed at least 25lbs! I remembered the rock vividly. Jeff and I had dug it up somewhere and run towards the edge of the yard at night, giving that boulder the ‘ol heave-ho. The impact was fearsome. Every stone in that pile told a tale.
I watched from my high tower as the back of Mom’s head sunk forward and then shook slowly in disgust. I’d seen enough.
With fear running icily through my central nervous system, I slid off the roof and down the umbrella tree.
I was determined to go off the grid for a couple days, live off the land, if need be.
I tried my safehouse first– directly next door at Jeff’s place.
I knocked on the front door several times. Jeff’s two Dobermans, Thor and Frida, barked angrily inside before the face of a very drowsy-looking Jimmy Joe appeared in the crack of his doorway.
“Jeffery is sleeping”, he croaked. Jimmy used Jeff’s full name whenever he was irritated.
He evidently saw the fear in my eyes, but was never one for warm chit chat or words of comfort. He closed the door in my face. I stayed on his front porch staring at the well-worn oak door, and considered my best options: Run away and join the carnival. Become a pro-wrestler. Launch a career in smut-peddling. Travel the country by Huffy bicycle. Man, I was fucked. I also had to poop. Badly. I went back home and braced myself for the horsewhipping of the decade. Hopefully, I could dart into the bathroom before she saw me, and delay the hand of doom by 30 or 40 minutes.
I walked back into my house like I was ascending the gallows pole before a jeering mob at Market-Cross Edinburgh.
Mom was inside the kitchen, cooling off with a glass of water in her hand. I tried to slip down the hallway to the bathroom, but she spun around as I passed the kitchen.
“Are you kidding me???” she bellowed, full throttle.
“What?” I volleyed back pathetically, like I didn’t just see her cataloging four months of my war crimes in the corner of our yard.
“Hundreds of pounds! Hundreds!!!” her voice began to crack with overdrive saturation. “Rocks… rocks! From only God knows where!!!”
I swallowed, dryly.
“On the roof???” she continued.
I looked at her blankly and braced for the side of a mountain to fall on me. Instead, her volume came down inexplicably.
“Don’t ever embarrass me like that in front of that asshole again”, she surprisingly pleaded. “Please?”
My mouth tried to form words.
“OK, OK!” I finally managed to say, feigning exasperation.
With that she slammed the empty glass down on the counter and walked out through the sliding glass door, to go finish the lawn. As she opened the patio door, she repeated herself in a way that indicated she was talking to someone else. Ancient ancestors, perhaps.
“Please!” she implored to the sky, without looking back at me. “Please!”
A wave of blessed relief washed over me as I stood in the kitchen. Then I really had to poop.
Sister Rat!
A few days after all of this, I was at Jeff’s house for a good part of the morning and came home to get some lunch. After downing my customary peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk, I went to my room to have some “reading time”. I locked the door and went for the most easily accessible magazine in my collection: one that was sandwiched inside the letter Q in my World Book encyclopedia collection. (Note: At nine years old, “reading time” was literally just that. Nothing more. But at that age, an eyeful was all I wanted or needed)
I opened the dusty volume and my familiar High Society magazine was gone.
Had I forgotten to put it back? Had I accidentally left it out? Maybe I’d gotten a little careless over the past month, but I was never that stupid. I looked inside my Fischer Price castle, where I’d stashed another Oui or Chic magazine for quick-access. Maybe I’d placed it in there the last time by mistake. Also gone.
I had four or five other easy-grab locations throughout my room. I checked them all. Those were gone too!
Half of my remaining inventory was burglarized– right out of my God damned bedroom! Picked clean.
This could be the work of only one person. My sister, Chris.
I checked the secret vault systems, inside my chest of drawers, and those were all still there. So, it wasn’t all gone.
But I was clamped tightly in a catch-22.
Complaining about stolen smut to the authorities was out of the question. Confronting my sister about going into my shit, was also a zero-sum strategy. There was no recourse for justice. I’d been busted. I was going to have to just lump it… again.
My mother was an anti-smut vigilante. I don’t think it had to do with the idea of naked pictures, per se. I think it had more to do with the idea of her baby boy viewing naked pictures. Whatever the case, she was perfectly irrational about my eyes seeing nudity. This phobia of hers seemed to last into my adulthood.
For example, in 1982, when I was 13, we got Adelphia cable TV installed at our house. Quickly, Jeff and I discovered the monthly Cable TV Viewing Guide, which provided a detailed schedule of movies being broadcast on the premier channels. We began to shrewdly note the movies which the guide described as having “graphic nudity” or “explicit sex” and jotted the showtimes down in a little notebook.
One night we announced to my mother that we were going to watch Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill at 9:00pm. She drilled us on the content, and we both assured her that it was just a good slasher movie. Mom was really spooked by slasher films, so she was guaranteed to be sequestered far from the living room while we watched. Of course, we loved horror movies and thrillers but the rest of the story— as Paul Harvey used to say– was that the guide warned that Dressed to Kill had “graphic nudity”. It even put the phrase in a bold font. Mom never checked the guide anyway, so we were safe.
Anyone who’s ever seen De Palma’s classic, knows that the opening minutes feature a shower scene with a closeup of Angie Dickinson soaping up her blonde bush with gusto. We had anticipated the standard R-rated fare, which was usually 10-20 seconds of boobage or maybe a sex scene under a blanket. We had no idea such majestic glory awaited us. Even by today’s standards, it’s an explicit scene. As Angie got her lather game on with a bar of Ivory soap, my mother’s smut-detection system alerted her from across the house. As if on a mission from Satan, she stormed in right at the climax. I was so transfixed by the suds that I didn’t actually hear her coming down the hall. She just seemed to materialize like a poltergeist in front of the TV.
“No!! Mom!!! Please” I pleaded breathlessly, right before she hammered the off button with her clenched fist. She stood in front of the television for a long time, staring at both of us with her arms folded and her lower jaw jutting forward. No amount of begging was going to change our destiny for that night. I knew this.
“PORNOGRAPHY!!!” Mom frothed. “Not in MY house!”
With that, Jeff went home for the night and Dressed to Kill was forever forbidden in our house. In fact, it wasn’t until the wonders of YouTube, more than three decades later, that I could really go back and study that cinematic triumph in detail. That’s how my Mom rolled with smut.
In 1978 she possessed most of my cherished collection. Knowing her rage over my eyes viewing boobs and bush, I assumed that at any moment she would be taking me away to military school or to go see the priest. Just like with Franz, I waited for a tornado of judgement to descend, but it never did. Just a creepy silence as the eye of the storm passed over.
After a few days, I couldn’t take it anymore and I asked Chris obliquely, “Have you been in my room?”
She was working on a latch hook rug of Snoopy and didn’t even dignify my question by looking up.
“Nope”, she said, emotionless– as she pulled another piece of rug through the small tapestry with a metal hook.
I burrowed an incredulous gaze into her brown mop. Lies.
Mom never said a word to me.
This event taught me that human beings can handle almost any fanciful explanation for the misfortunes that befall us. The one thing they can’t handle is NO EXPLANATION. In the absence of a solid theory for the disappearance of my smut, I invented my own crackpot explanations. For years I believed my sister stole them and resold them on the black market. Or that Joey, on a mission from his older brother Robert, had been allowed into my room by my sister to reclaim his property. At some point I even entertained that God had somehow partially raptured the good ones from my room, like the Old Testament patriarch Enoch.
In 2024, as I was preparing these essays, I discussed some of the incidents of the summer of 1978 with my sister Chris (age 52). She finally, after 46 years, confessed to snitching on me and plundering– or maybe re-plundering, as the case may be– nearly my entire collection of vintage smut.
This revelation provided some closure, but it didn’t explain how I once again magically evaded Mom’s horsewhipping that summer.
The Miracle of the Ginger Scapegoat
The exact series of events that led to the infamous street fight, are lost to the sands of time. I wish I could remember how it started. I know there were smaller skirmishes in that final week of summer– and I have a few fuzzy recollections of those.
I recall being held down and pummeled once by two of the Cole brothers while lining up to get a Bubs Daddy from Pancho the ice cream man. And the taunts and threats from Mary Drake and Hippie Robert were an almost daily occurrence.
The teens knew better than to fight directly with Jeff and I. That was a breach of neighborhood ethics. The Cole Gang had the flexibility to deliver quick beat-downs and issue general threats, but an unspoken Code prevented them from truly whipping us.
The loophole in this Code was the Girl Clause, which allowed a teenager like Mary Drake to assault any of us, at any time, with whatever means her depraved mind could invent. That freckled, metal-mouthed freak fancied those bendy, yellow sticks from the Schefflera tree to exact her punishments. That week, I saw a lot of stick-to-skull action. And there was little I could do about it.
The only thing I remember prior to our battle royale was a kind of verbal scraping that started early in the morning and continued all day. Someone said something to someone in passing and tempers escalated over the next several hours. It wasn’t more complicated than that, I’m certain. It didn’t matter what was said. Everything came back to stolen smut.
They insisted we had it.
Jeff and I denied any involvement.
They called us liars and threatened to kill us.
We insulted their mother.
And ’round and ’round we went.
When I look back on this incident now, it’s crazy to think that a bunch of teenagers would waste even a second with Jeff and I. We were nine years old, for God’s sake. But even at that age, I think our unfiltered obnoxiousness and sense of entitlement rattled even the most mature in the neighborhood. Something about our sheer audacity demanded violence.
By the early afternoon, Jeff and I had been pushed back to the safety of my front lawn, along with a number of our younger, equally deranged affiliates– Christopher Sabol, Mike Canary and the Majors brothers, Tim and Todd. Kids of all ages just started coming to 108th avenue to watch.
Opposite us, in the street in front of my house, grew a congregation of teens and some other kids, whom we rarely ever saw in our ‘hood. For us, this felt like Showdown at Big Sky. And because we had home turf advantage, I was especially mouthy and disagreeable.
Before we realized what was happening, there were about 20 kids milling around my house, all threatening to destroy one another in varying degrees of sadism. The Cole Gang leaned on the handlebars of their BMX bikes in the street and whispered directives to the underlings standing around them. Small talk like “Go kick his ass”, “You can take him!” were clearly heard from our vantage point. Sean Cole was already assigned to me by his brother.
Mary Drake was off to my right, loudly smacking bubble gum and interjecting homophobic slurs– mostly at me, for some reason.
The verbal exchanges continued ramping up. Taunts about masculinity, penis size and sexual orientation seemed to blow around like little dust devils in my yard. At some point, bored and eager to up the ante, I threw one of the landscaping stones into the mob and inadvertently clobbered Mark Cole right on the top of his head, hurling him off the seat of his BMX bike. I meant to just send it in his general direction, but it accidentally became the Hail Mary pass of the summer. This caused both sides of the mob to gasp in horror. It’s become a classic Loony Tunes cliche, but I can testify that a direct hit on the top of the noggin actually does make that hollow coconut sound effect. Mark was now lying on the asphalt and holding his head. He was really hurt.
Jeff and I roared. Bullseye, bitch! But my celebration was contrived. I was scared and knew instantly that I’d made a very, very bad mistake.
Jimmy Joe, who unbeknownst to us, had been watching the entire conflict from the living room window of his house, ran out the second this happened and told everyone to break it up and go home. Appallingly self-righteous, he lectured Jeff and I in front of everyone– with real aggression too—as if we were somehow the only adults in the room.
“You two should know better!” he reprimanded angrily. This public dressing-down, encouraged more heckling from the older kids.
Whose side was this guy on? I thought to myself in outrage, as I looked around.
“You two think it’s funny when someone gets hurt?” he asked us as Jeff and I stared at him, faces red with resentment. “What if I kick both of your asses in front of everyone here and we all just laugh at you?”
A bunch of the Cole Gang faction cackled at his suggestion.
Truth be told, I was way more scared of an angry Jimmy Joe than I was of that pimply-faced hippie, Mark Cole. Jimmy had no misgivings about bitch slapping us in front of an eager audience.
Still, I found it outrageous that this sermonizing came from the same teenager who used to tackle my emaciated, stick-like frame in football games and send me flying face-first into the sidewalk, as he chuckled. On several occasions as a young kid, my Mom would have to dress flesh wounds caused by Jimmy Joe being overly-aggressive with me in games. He took particular delight in plowing into me when I ran on the sidelines with the ball. I always told Mom that I’d slipped on my bike or taken an accidental spill in a game, but the fact was, most of the time it was Jimmy “packing” me. And for all that, I reserved a sharp degree of side-glancing disdain as he walked away and went back inside his house.
The oxygen had been momentarily sucked out of our fire. But the rock I’d thrown and the public humiliation of the direct hit, kept the embers smoldering. No one left and the smack-talking continued.
And no sooner had Jimmy Joe closed the door to the house and rocks started flying again.
Then real fighting broke out.
From that point, I only remember tangling with Mark’s younger brother Sean in the front yard, my bony fists and twig arms flying. When those tactics failed– and in my case, they did rather quickly– we both resorted to shoving and pulling hair. I had pretty good form. My Dad had taught me how to box and to throw a right hook when I was about six years old, but my wrists were so skinny, that any harsh impact with another solid object caused a shock of pain to shoot through my body. I hit Sean in the face, and it felt like I broke my hand. I just wasn’t cut out for fist fighting. He had a couple years on me too.
All around me was a flurry of more airborne rocks and curses. Other kids were scrapping too. A solid two months of stolen porn angst and pre-adolescent anxiety had been uncorked. I can still remember Sean’s reddened face and clenched jaw, as we slugged it out beneath the bottlebrush tree under my sister’s window. I can also vividly recall asking myself, “Why are we doing this?”
No sooner had this question bounced around in my empty dome, and the reaper-like silhouette of my mother appeared in her bedroom window.
“Heeyyyyy!” her witch-siren screeched across the yard. Every eye turned to the window.
“Knock it off! NOWWWW!”
The dust settled and all of us braced ourselves against the blast emanating from the window. When Mom was mad, she sounded like Gamera on a tear through downtown Tokyo. I heard the scream all the time and it still frightened me.
“Helloooo?” she called out to her dumbstruck audience. “Do any of you speak English?!”
With mathematical clarity she performed the proper order of operation, dispensing with me first and then her surrogate son, followed by everyone else.
“Greg, come inside. Jeffery, go home. And the rest of you, hit the road!”
Twenty pairs of eyes just blinked at her.
“Nowwww!!!” she roared.
There was a punk, ginger kid who lived across the street from the Cole’s house. His name was Brock Rutland and he was roughly the same age as Jeff and I. He belonged to the more uncouth sector of the 108th Court tribe (one street west of us), and we never associated with him. That whole side of the neighborhood seemed to be made up of a lot trailer-oriented, air boat-ridin’ white folk.
That afternoon, Brock had been one of the louder mouths in our midst, stoking the flames of vengeance, all the while never actually throwing a single punch. Through the whole fight, he remained in a safety area– off to the far side of the fray. Coincidentally, right next to Mary Drake.
Brock interrupted the mob’s collective moment of paralysis, with his own response to my Mom.
“Hey lady, why don’t you shut your big fuckin’ mouth?” he asked matter-of-factly.
With all these decades between me and this event, I still can’t fathom a nine-year old having the balls to talk to a grown-up like that. I can see my mother in the open window of her bedroom, the screen giving her silhouette the hazy appearance of a death angel.
Brock’s vileness percolated in the air for a couple seconds as every human present took a deep breath. I’d never dared to use profanity around my mother, let alone curse at her. With that, her hand slashed downward– the rampage button firmly depressed — as she pointed and screamed “Get that kid!!!”
We all looked at each other in alarm. Two seconds later my front door flew open so hard that the stop chain broke and a barefoot, 32-year old single mother came galloping out of the gate with her finger still pointing like a prison shiv. “Get that God damned kiiiiiiiiiiiid!“
In the twinkling of an eye, every single teen and pre-adolescent– who had minutes earlier been calling for violence– united in perfect solidarity and turned against Brock, who was already halfway down the street and crying as he ran. Some jumped on their bikes, most followed on foot.
Mom was on his heels. Mark and Robert followed after him on their bikes. I was close enough to hear his pathetic whimpering and crying. But Brock had the advantage of a near-death adrenaline boost. He also had a ten second head start on everyone.
He ran hysterically up his front porch, and found the front door mercifully open. He slipped inside and disappeared, the clunk of the deadbolt coming down just as the entire mob arrived on his doorstep for blood.
My Mom knocked on the door, out of breath, as the congregation milled around in the street behind her, waiting to see the battle ax laid to the root of Brock’s tree. We were all inexplicably friends now. Even Mary Drake was being a sweetie pie and laughing with me.
Brock became our sacrificial scapegoat. Maybe a small part of everyone quietly rejoiced that it wasn’t them being herded to the killing floor.
Mr. Rutland eventually answered the door. He was a notorious foul-mouthed ginger– a corpulent, abusive replica of Brock, I suppose. Or vise versa. My mother later explained to me that Brock merely talked to her, the way Brock’s Dad spoke to his wife. It wasn’t Brock’s fault he shared DNA with that guy.
We couldn’t hear their conversation from the street, but apparently Mr. Rutland was extremely rude to my mother and dismissive of his own son’s vulgarity. After my mother leveled her own choice words, Pop Rutland momentarily disappeared as he went to fetch Brock. He emerged a few minutes later, dragging Brock by the collar to apologize to my mother’s face. We couldn’t hear that either, but we could see Brock was crying like a baby– a fact which we would remind him of for the next five years. It looked fake to us.
Eventually the crowd started to disperse and in a flash, petty warlord conflicts were laid completely to rest. It’s so weird how conflicts in life get settled sometimes. The method doesn’t seem to matter. What settles things is a swing of the ax. So long as someone–anyone, actually– gets hit.
My mom walked back home, and left with a low key warning to the mob to stop the fighting and just enjoy the rest of the summer. “You won’t have many of these left”, she reminded us with a wag of her shiv. “Don’t squander it!”
Mark Cole gave a hearty and sincere “Yes, m’am!” which was then repeated sincerely by every teen and child in that group. “Yessss, m’aaaam…”
As it happened, Mom’s admonition to enjoy the limited supply of summers was eerily prescient.
Mark Cole didn’t get to enjoy too many more. He died in a horrible traffic accident in 1981.
From that day forward, until his last one, we shared the streets and lived in each others passing shadows and never mentioned another word to each other about that weird summer, when retribution and a stolen cache of magazines were the only thing on our minds.
Brock remained the perennial whipping boy, into our teens. I’m not at all proud of this fact. He was hit too hard in football games, tripped too many times in the hallway at school and ridiculed publicly way too often. When we were ten years old, Jeff and I built a stuffed, life-size effigy of Brock, using some of my Dad’s old clothes. It sported a fuchsia turtleneck sweater with the name BROCK blazoned across its chest in Sharpie marker. The effigy lived in my closet most of the time and was dragged out periodically— usually for sexualized pranks or acts of aggression. One time I brought him to school for a performance art skit we wrote which involved Jeff and I stomping “Brock” in a mock wrestling match. We both got A’s for that performance.
At some point in Middle School– probably when Jeff and I were 13–we had a sober conversation about our bullying of Brock.
“He’s not a bad guy, actually”, Jeff confided.
“No, he’s not”, I admitted shamefully.
From that moment on, we cut Brock some slack. Enough time had passed. We allowed ourselves the grace to forget. He was never officially part of our tight brotherhood, but he was invited into some of the collective mayhem of our teen years. I could tell he liked that. I never again brought up the fact that he once told my mother to shut her fucking mouth.
Epilogue
I learned about Dick Franz, while resting my elbows on the same corner of fence my mother had during the War Audit of 1978. Trent, who still lived next door to Franz– directly behind my house–spotted me in the yard one day and called me over to talk.
By this time, it was the early 1990’s. I was in my 20’s and about to get married. Trent had been working as a mechanic in some shop somewhere. The shenanigans of our shared childhood in Kendall, were long behind us.
“Hey man, did you hear about Richard?” he asked me.
I hadn’t heard a word about Franz in a very long time. I found out why.
Trent said Franz’s youngest daughter Victoria had a sleepover party at the house with a bunch of her friends. She was in high school at the time. Franz tried to rape one of Victoria’s classmates as she slept, the girl fought back, ran out of the house and went home to tell her parents. Before authorities could apprehend Franz, he’d slit his wrists. He apparently died soon after in a hospital.
Later on, confirmation of this story came from Dick’s former pastor who, in a bizarre twist, would become my future father-in-law. His details differed somewhat, but the basics were the same: Franz pulled some heinous behavior with a child, the child reported him and Franz ended his own life rather than face reality. A true coward’s way out, no matter how you sliced it.
As Trent unspooled the whole sordid tale, I remember taking my Astros baseball cap off. Not out of respect for the dead. But because I was sweating like a bitch. The story was a lot to absorb. It struck a strange, emotional chord in me. My mother had called it, back in 1977 when Franz first moved into the neighborhood.
The passage of time had totally softened me about him.
I had gone years regretting the harshness with which we singled him out. I’d somehow swept aside the revolting, predatory facts of what he did. Time had caused me to rewrite the whole slant of the story. In my revisionist version, I’d become the bad guy, the depraved sinner– and Franz was the victim. I was the one who’d been out of line with the rock throwing, the child soldiers, the bottle rockets and using KISS as a tool of psychological warfare.
Fuck that, I thought as I stood there. And fuck him.
I took it all back.
Evil had lived behind us. And he liked to wear Fruit of the Loom tank tops, Jesus sandals and sniff little girls’ crotches.
There was no way for us as kids to grasp the reality of his darkness. We knew a few things about the world back then. But not that kind of stuff. So, in a way that I’ll never fully understand, the Universe quietly signaled to us that Dick Franz needed to be beaten. And for a brief time in this sick world, beat him we did.
We beat him in the early morning, we beat him in the midday sun and we beat him in the midnight hour. We beat him between stealing magazines and after peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We beat him after episodes of Heckle and Jeckle and right before our umpteenth replay of Rock n’ Roll Over. We beat him with gritted teeth and through gales of laughter. When we were bored with beating him, we sent children—some who could barely read or write—to beat him in our stead. We beat him with all means available and by any means necessary. We were cudgels in the hands of the cosmos.
I looked over at the old shed, which was still there on the far end of his property. It was rusted and permanently dented to hell. The grass in the yard was uncut. It was uncut because the guy who used to landscape the yard obsessively, was deader than a turd on the tundra.
Trent and I wrapped up our discussion. I bent down– still holding my cap with my left hand– and picked up a small stone at the fence line, between Trent’s yard and mine. I held it up at eye level and his eyes sparkled. For a short time Trent too had been a child soldier in our war. He knew exactly what that rock meant.
I wound my pitch and sent the little shard of limestone beaming across the yard. The shed was a lot closer than I’d remembered it and the rock hit the side almost as soon as it left my hand. “Thwaakkk!” it echoed in the somber afternoon, as I put my cap back on and felt a long-familiar nudge of dopamine.
