The Tarnished Shooter
Written by: Charles James
To contact the author, you can send an E-mail to: [email protected]
The Tarnished Shooter
Copyright © 2014 by Charles James. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.
ISBN-10: 978-1491060254
ISBN-13: 1491060255
Published by: C&K Enterprises, LLC
This book is dedicated to everyone I have known at one time or another. Some were relatives; some were friends, some, were foe, they, all added insight to my words and ideas written in this story.
Table of Contents:
PART 1: The Early Years
PART 2: Guns
PART 3: The Change
PART 4: The Marines
PART 5: A Civilian Again
PART 6: Reconciliation
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, but based on actual events. This is my first novel and it’s not bad for a knock around guy like me who’d earlier in life had not the slightest bit of interest in stringing words together with pen and paper.
I’d spent years telling stories making things up as I went and found that when I started talking about some of the things I’d been through, most listened in amazement—at least for a while. In time I’d realized I had a treasure trove of experiences that were interesting.
Then one day I started writing all that stuff down, first in notebooks and then with a computer. After about ten years of writing tidbits here and there I started weaving an entire life into this powerful story about beatings, school yard bullying, police harassment, girlfriends, military service, arrests, jail time and adventure. This is all stuff that makes headline news, so I asked myself—why wouldn’t it make for a good book or movie? I decided on The Tarnished Shooter for a title because it sounded intriguing and the narrative involves instances of gun use.
Names and locations were changed to protect those who wouldn’t want to be identified and also to protect myself against law suits or new enemies. Embellishments were added to help the story flow and move in the proper direction. I hope as a reader you find this story entertaining and interesting.
PART 1
The Early Years
Chapter 1
The actions of a fool. It was a damp, raw, late October night in 1975 when I stumbled down our long driveway fumbling for my pack of KOOLS. By the time I got the cigarette lit, I was almost to the house. There were no lights on in the breezeway, so I had to feel my way to find the door knob. I could hear Cosmo barking on the other side of the door. When I entered, I gave the dog a greeting of affection and made my way through the utility room, the office and crawled upstairs to my room. I turned on the stereo—put an album on the turntable—pulverized the almost smoked cigarette in an ashtray and then flopped on my bed. The room started to spin. I felt dizzy and as if I were going to puke from all the beer and shots of Tequila I had consumed at the bars and house parties during the past hours. All the drinking had done me in.
“Fresh Air” by Quick Silver Messenger Service started blasting from the stereo. Evil thoughts were running through my mind because of so many rejections from girls I had met. A minute into the song there was a pounding on the door. Ten seconds later it flung open. I raised my head and saw it was Jack; he stood there with a “What the fuck is the matter with you?” look on his face. I knew he wasn’t happy, but I didn’t care in the least.
He said “Turn that damn music down! I have to work tomorrow!”
“Fuck you, asshole! Get the hell out of here!” I replied and buried my head back into the pillow.
It was my favorite song and I wanted to pass out while drowning myself in its message. Jack ruined the whole mood by busting in like he was some sort of master of the house. Impulsively, I jumped to my feet and thought to myself, “That’s it. I’m all done taking shit from every asshole who thinks he can run my life and tell me what to do.” I fished through a bunch of junk in a built-in cabinet and found my 22 caliber Ruger automatic and a box of ammunition that had been wrapped in a brown paper bag. The gun had been stowed in there since the day I’d left for Marine Corps boot camp. I inserted a magazine full of bullets into the gun. Visions from the past took over my mind as I relived every moment I had been berated or belittled by my father, bullies at school, cops, drill instructors and fellow Marines.
“I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill all you son-of-a-bitches!” I threatened as I ran out of my room. Halfway down the stairs I slipped and slid on my ass all the way to the bottom step.
Jack was maybe ten paces ahead of me. I chased him through the office, past the bathroom and into the dining room where I cornered him. In my eyes, he was a dead ringer for the old man. I looked at him with such hatred and rage, pointing the gun at him from three or four feet away. Oh, how I wanted to release so much bottled up anger. I fired one shot into the ceiling as a release. The crack of that spent bullet woke everyone. Cosmo started barking wildly. My mother, sisters, and other brothers came out of their bedrooms to see what all the commotion was about. They stood in sheer horror to see me acting like a crazy man with that pistol in my hand.
I don’t know why I got so mad. Jack had only wanted me to turn the music down. It was my way of operating, I guess. I stuffed the pistol in my waistband and did another impulsively stupid thing—I called the police. I figured if I didn’t have it in me to shoot my brother, maybe I would show the cops a thing or two and informed the dispatch to send the whole fucking cop shop out to 1721 Edgewater Lane fast, or someone was going to end up dead. I knew a call like that was sure to get someone’s attention.
Knowing the cops were on their way, I began having second thoughts about my intention for a showdown. I ran outside and climbed the stairs to the garage roof. I hid behind the basketball backboard with my pistol, wondering what in the hell I had done.
Within minutes, squad cars with sirens and flashing lights came down the driveway. Cops scattered themselves throughout the moonlit property. I came out of hiding, into their spotlights and began running my mouth with the gun pointed at my head—talking all sorts of useless shit about killing myself or others—apparently out of my mind from the alcohol. A detective I knew from previous encounters cautiously approached the stairs.
“Frank is it alright to come up and talk?” he asked as he slowly ascended. I began feeling threatened and shifted the gun from my head to his head.
“Easy Frank. What’s going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like the whole fucking world is against me.”
“We can get you the help you need…I’m not against you. Come on, Frank, give me the gun.”
With the gun pointing at the detective, I could feel the adrenaline in myself and perceive the apprehension of everyone who surrounded me and at the same time, sense the itchy fingers on the triggers of shotguns and pistols below. It was a miracle I wasn’t gunned down like a rabid dog before I had a chance to speak. Not that I was going to spew words of wisdom. I wanted to be in control for once. I wanted to be the one calling the shots. The cops had been targeting me for all sorts of petty neighborhood crimes for years and now they had me in their sights. I could be dead in the amount of time it would have taken a cop to pull the trigger and send a .38 caliber bullet spiraling into my brain. At the age of twenty, I was ready to take my own life, or maybe end someone else’s for reasons I didn’t understand.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps I was out for a bit of revenge or attention. All I knew was that I had a gun in my hand and everyone within earshot was going to listen to what I had to sa
y. Then as I looked at all those cops cowering behind police cars and trees with gun barrels aimed at me, I knew I really didn’t want to kill anyone and I didn’t want to get gunned down either. I realized I was in big trouble and my fifteen minutes of shame were up. With a promise from the detective that I wouldn’t get stomped into the ground for pointing my gun at him, or get beat up in jail for all the nasty names I had called them, I slowly handed the pistol over to the detective.
I was immediately commanded to lie on my stomach with my hands and feet spread out. A uniformed cop came up on the roof and clamped the handcuffs on me with a vengeance. Arrested and under control, the detective read me my rights, charged me with reckless use of a weapon and hauled me off to jail. Many of the cops at the scene knew who I was from previous encounters and seemed quite pleased with the fact that I was in the back seat of a police cruiser headed for jail.
The next morning, suffering from a massive hangover, disheveled and embarrassed, I was escorted from the fifth floor jail to the courthouse below. I was shackled in handcuffs as I stood before a young judge who ordered me to undergo a ten day psychological evaluation at the county hospital.
I was immediately driven to the nut house about five miles out of town. All kinds of thoughts were running through my mind. Would those guys do experiments on me, or shoot drugs into my veins like I’d watched on TV? I was assigned a little room with only a bed and table attached to the wall. The door to the room was metal with a wire mesh reinforced window.
I was allowed to watch TV in a designated area, so I sat around most days watching TV for lack of anything else to do. Nobody said much to me. A day after I got there, I felt different and suspected they were putting drugs in my food. An older lady kept an eye on the patients in the TV area where there was a couch and four other cushioned chairs positioned in a semi-circle in front of the tube. A few days after my arrival, a cute young female psychologist with short blonde hair, wearing gold hoop earrings asked me some questions. After fifteen minutes in her office, I was escorted back to the TV area. She didn’t seem to have the time or interest in finding out too much about me. What could anyone learn about someone in fifteen minutes? I wasn’t trying to fake anything—I was just angry and depressed all the time.
A few hours after I talked with her, a couple of guys wearing white uniforms escorted me to a room full of electronic equipment and hooked me up to an electrical device called an EEG to monitor my brain waves. They put this paste that seemed like oatmeal on fifteen different places on my head and attached thin wires to the oatmeal-like stuff. If weird, abnormal patterns showed up, it might be a sign that things weren’t physically right with me. Then I could blame my problems on anything but myself. The evaluation came back inconclusive. I guess if there was something bothering me, the answer couldn’t be found by the doctors or that machine. Yet I knew there was something wrong. I could feel it. A couple days after the EEG test the cops came and got me and took me back to jail.
My court assigned lawyer was a short and stout guy in his mid-fifties. He wore big black-rimmed glasses, and had a flat top haircut and he talked with a loud raspy voice. He wasn’t Perry Mason, but seemed like a guy who had been around the block an few times when it came to legal advice for the charges against me. He counseled me like he thought I was nuts and had advised me to plead guilty and just get the whole damned thing over and done with. I figured “fuck it” and took his advice and was sentenced to ninety days in the county jail. I was relieved when I didn’t get a year in that shit-hole. The holiday season was just around the corner and spending Thanksgiving and Christmas on the fifth floor in a puce-green cage was not my idea of a good time, but now I had a debt to pay. I guess the judge couldn’t point his finger and tell me to go sit in a corner and think about what a bad boy I was. Jail accomplished that.
My little stunt hadn’t surprised some. My temper was getting more and more out of control. My grandmother wondered how or why I would do such a thing. My mother was upset because I was in jail, but I felt as if nobody really cared. As long as I was sweating it out behind bars, everyone could move on with life and not have to worry about me or my anger. I was surprised myself having done all that shit. I’d always thought my brother and I had been tight. We even shared a bedroom most of our younger years, but things were different now. Something had changed in me.
While I was in jail, I learned one of Jack’s friends had slipped a tab of purple haze into my drink at the party I’d been to. I remember a few weeks before that party, the same guy, a Native American he was, had introduced me to mescaline; he claimed the drug would make me feel like a free spirit. I believed him and took a couple of the pale yellow pills. A half an hour later, I was tripping, seeing all kinds of weird shit. My dog’s head looked all rearranged and when I urinated my piss was a bright colored green. I learned from that experience to stay away from hallucinogens. I was not one who wanted to lose that much control. After that, I never believed what any dope head had to say about anything when it came to drugs.
Every day in jail was a torturous twenty-four hour event, confined to a six by five foot receiving cell. There were no books. No TV. No radio. Nothing to drown out the constant, loud ringing I was now hearing in my ears. I thought I was going insane from the high pitched noises that would not stop. Maybe I was nuts. I was climbing the walls with panic, feeling a little out of balance too. With permission from the jailers, I was taken to a doctor. A brief examination revealed the high frequency nerve endings in my left ear had been permanently damaged. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
The doctor prescribed Valium to combat my anxiety. Once I started taking the Valium, I succumbed to a demonizing world of nightmares and endless sleep. All sorts of horrors floated in and out of my drug induced mind. One side effect of Valium is lucid dreaming.
My little cage and the bad memories of the past closed in on me more and more each day. At meal times a tray of barely edible food was slipped under the sliding steel door. Sometimes dirt from the underside of the steel door found its way into the food. Jailors didn’t give a shit about stuff like that. At first it was easy to not eat, then slide the tray back under the door and play it cool. It only took a couple of missed meals before my hunger set in. I had no choice but to eat the tainted slop shoved under the door or starve. I began to imagine what it would be like to have to go to prison and live in a cage for five, ten, or even twenty years To me, those were some scary thoughts. I didn’t want to be a throw-away, locked up and forgotten like an old dog chained to a tree in the back yard.
The jail cells were painted a strange sort of green because some brilliant psychologist claimed it was a color that would ease hostility. But it didn’t seem to work on me. Green, yellow, or blue—jail was jail and no color was going to erase my rage of being locked up. How did I get to be in such a sorry psychological state of mind? I guess it started years before.
Chapter 2
Who really knows why people do the things they do. Nobody knows what others are thinking or why they think the things they think. Frank Henry Barker is my name and even though I don’t recall the first few years of life it seems like I was fighting a daily battle. When one grows up in a dysfunctional family, things tend to get out of control real fast. Many days I’d be sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal and two minutes later I was on the floor getting an ass whipping by a man three times my size for nothing more than spilling a few drops of milk. From the time I was a little tyke it was almost as if I had a target painted on my back.
The memories I have of my younger years are not good and they reel in my mind day and night. Even though that is the case, this story is not just about the many instances of violence and emotional abuse I suffered at my father’s hand. Many of those issues spilled over into other areas of my life which made for a very colorful arsenal of misdeeds perpetrated on my part.
Perhaps I could have let so many things that bothered me just roll off my shoulders and continued on like every
one else with a steadfast determination to be a good boy. Instead—I developed a diminished attitude toward all authority figures. My state of mind developed into a kind of depressed and anxious funk. Over the years I fine-tuned survival tactics to cope with those issues.
I don’t have too many memories before the age of nine except that I was always trying to win friends or at least get others to like me. Quiet and shy, I don’t recall being successful at making many friends. The few friends I did have were outcasts and trouble makers which got me into trouble too.
The first time I did something newsworthy was when I was nine years old while living at an old house in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
It was during the summer when an older neighborhood kid and I accidentally burned a garage down trying to blow up some thirty-eight-caliber bullets he’d stolen from his father. We thought we were smarter than the average kid on the block and could blow them up like fireworks. First we tried smashing them with a hammer, but that didn’t work, so my friend got the bright idea to pour gasoline on them and light a fire. The fire started to go out, and the bullets still hadn’t exploded, so he was going to throw more gas on the fire, but he tripped and gas spilled everywhere. In a matter of seconds, the whole garage was on fire, with flames shooting into the air some twenty feet or more.
We watched in sheer terror as the structure burned to the ground. By the time firemen arrived, all they could do was spray water on a smoldering mess of charred wood and garage junk. Crowds of people stood around watching and wondering what had happened.
I knew I had to get out of there fast, before anyone started asking questions. If my father found out I was any part of that fire, I would most likely get severely punished. In a panic—I ran home and hid out in my bedroom until the coast was clear. I was anxious, and my heart was pounding as I envisioned the possibility of a doubled up, black leather belt across my behind. I wouldn’t be able to sit down for days.
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