The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  It was two weeks or so later when my mother, Darlene, my father, Les, and I stood before a cranky, gray-haired, old judge in a juvenile courtroom. The old judge peered down at me through a pair of thick, heavy, black glasses perched on his pointed little nose and asked sternly, "WHY DO YOU BREAK THE LAW?" He looked down at me with an almost blank expression on his face, as if he was waiting for me to deliver some long and profound statement—as if I was in a confessional and should repent all my earthly sins. Silence filled the room. It felt like when I was at school and the teacher asked me a question and the room fell silent with everyone turned around at their desks looking at me waiting for the answer. All I could do was stand there feeling dumbfounded and lost for words. What could I say? Finally I blurted, "I thought it was alright because my father said it was alright."

  Bam! His fist slammed on the top of his bench. "WELL IT’S NOT ALRIGHT AND I DEMAND THAT YOU DISMANTLE THAT THING BEFORE SOMEONE GETS KILLED!" He rambled on some more, almost screaming about the consequences of breaking the law. I looked at my feet and tuned him out. I wasn’t going to listen anymore because I thought I should have gotten some kind of award for being such an industrious and creative young man. I thought I should have gotten a big write up in the paper making me out to be some sort of boy genius. After all, there weren’t many kids, at least on my block, who could design and build a motorized go-cart by themselves. Didn’t anyone care about that?

  In the days before computers or Nintendo sets, we had to make our own fun and building things was my forte. Now I was standing in front of some cranky, gray haired, old guy who knew nothing about me, slamming his fist down, yelling at me to tear apart my creation. It felt to me like the judge the cops and everyone else involved was making a big federal case out of nothing. What crime had I committed? Who had I hurt? Jack and I had invested weeks of our time building and rebuilding that go-cart and tearing it all apart just didn’t seem fair. It was then when I knew what it was like to be trapped in the cogs of oversized—overstepping—governmentally controlled gears that liked to just grind up people with silly rules. The whole experience fostered a feeling of rebellion in me towards rules and regulations that would stick with me for years to come.

  To my dismay, the judge said he would send a couple of detectives around to make sure that the go-cart was in fact dismantled as he had ordered. The judge also made it crystal clear if I didn’t do what he ordered, I, or my parents, would be charged with contempt of court.

  The next day I anxiously ran for the newspaper when it came out. I was looking for news about my day in court. I turned to the second page and sure enough in the upper half I immediately saw big headlines that read: JUDGE ASKS, “WHY DO YOU BREAK THE LAW?” The article didn’t mention any names but explained why it was illegal to operate a motor vehicle without a license.

  The newspaper never bothered to get my side of the story. I guess it didn’t matter to anyone what a twelve year old boy thought about anything. I still marveled at the fact and was pleased that I made some headline news even if it wasn’t in a positive tone. I cut the article out of the newspaper to save. A few days later a couple of cocky, gum chewing detectives rolled up to our house and observed a pile of miscellaneous junk that had once been my go-cart.

  I wondered why adults were so stupid. And I couldn’t help but ask myself—hadn’t any of those old law-keeping assholes ever been a kid? A judge wearing such powerful looking glasses should have been able to see beyond the end of his nose. He seemed to be just as blind as my father, not able to see any deeper than the surface. As far as I was concerned such petty rules made for an uncompromising way to live. The old man seemed to be pissed off too, and he told me to build another go-cart once the heat was off and everyone forgot me. Who was I to listen to, the judge or my old man? Actually I didn’t want to listen to either one of them; I just wanted to be my own person. They were both stomping on my freedom to be me. I was already sick of everyone telling me what I could and couldn’t do. I was tired of being a punching bag and I was tired of being treated as if I didn’t matter in the world. Like most kids, I felt powerless.

  Chapter 5

  Mitch and Lenny. They were a couple of the guys watching us the day we moved in. Mitch was my age, a small dark skinned, but muscular guy with dark hair who always had a menthol cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He liked to lift weights and was obsessed with having a body like Charles Atlas. Lenny was a freckle faced, bigger guy who lived next door to Mitch—they both went to Catholic schools. Lenny smoked cigarettes too and sometimes liked to puff away on fat cigars. On most days when I saw him riding his goofy looking bike to the store, a thick stream of cigar smoke followed. Like me, he was always experimenting and building things in his garage. His bicycle had this long raked front end, like a motorcycle chopper. We hung out in his upstairs garage workshop quite a bit while he was building a steel framed go-cart. I think it took him three years to finish that project.

  With Lenny everything had to be perfect. He had a father similar to mine who was always yelling at him because something wasn’t done fast enough or right enough. Perfectionism seemed to be everywhere in a neighborhood of non-perfection. It’s a wonder how our fathers survived when we weren’t around to cater to their every perfectionistic whim. Lenny’s father wasn’t disabled, but for some reason he was just angry. We could never figure out why adults were always so damned angry.

  ****

  Most days in the summer when we had time to goof off or weren’t up in Lenny’s garage, we walked to the fishing dock a few blocks away right next to the Main Street Bridge. At the river we scrounged around and found tangled up fishing line with sinkers and hooks attached. Half of our day was spent unraveling the tangled messes of fishing line. We tied a few feet of the untangled line to the end of a discarded cane pole and tried our luck at catching some fish.

  We sat on the long wooden docks that ran for a couple hundred feet alongside the river adjacent to the bridge, smoking, talking, and trying to catch the big one. We never caught any fish, usually we caught big old used white rubbers, which were always floating on the surface of the water near the dock and getting caught on our line. We threw the rubbers at each other from the tip of a stick, laughing and dodging them, talking about how disgustingly funny they looked. Mitch looked up and down the river at all the men fishing, most of them black and tried to guess which one of those guys the nasty balloon-like things belonged to, and then we laughed some more. At first we used to think guys wore them to piss in so they wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. Later we learned what they were really for.

  Lenny and I shared details about the whippings we got from our fathers the day before. We tried to calculate who got the worst ass-whipping or chewing out and then laughed about that too. With a smirk on his face, Mitch was constantly asking us if and when, or why we got beat. He didn’t have to worry about such things. His mother and father were divorced and both alcoholics. Half the time, they didn’t know what he was into. If we weren’t down by the river fishing, the three of us hung around downtown, or went swimming at the park, or we hopped the freight trains that crawled through our neighborhood every couple hours and took little rides out into the country. Sometimes we rode in the open boxcars to neighboring cities. We were train riding fools and loved every minute of it.

  We liked to live on the edge, and we were always taking chances. We were young and dumb to the dangers, but true freedom to us was taking all sorts of risks even if it meant possibly losing a foot or a leg to a train wheel. Nobody wanted to be called a chicken. Sometimes my new friends and I ended up down at the police station for questioning about goings on in the neighborhood. One day we were exploring the old abandoned Diamond Match Company building and got caught—the cops hauled our young behinds down to the cop shop. They threatened to charge us with trespassing or breaking and entering. We went through hours of interrogations in little smoke-filled rooms as detectives sucked on their pipes and asked us stupid questions. The gumshoes
leaned back in their squeaking metal chairs looking at us, trying to get into our devious little minds—like they had all the time in the world to question us. They wanted to know if we broke into other buildings or stole things out of garages, or who we knew that might have committed those kinds of crimes.

  They were always trying to get us to think they liked us and then they used that false sense of friendship to try and get us to sign statements involving ourselves or others in petty crimes. They were pretty crafty when it came to interrogation techniques, but we saw through it all. We thought it was all just a big joke and never fell for their good-guy or scare tactics. If our parents had been the pillars of society or had tons of money, I don’t think we’d have been interrogated like second-rate citizens. My early run-ins with the law clued me into the fact that the kind of people the cops wanted to throw in jail were, poor kids, like Mitch, Lenny and me.

  Jumping onto a freight train was easy since we all lived only a block or two from railroad tracks. On one of our little train rides back from out of town, I jumped off the train just before the railroad bridge. Jumping off at the very spot where we had all jumped off numerous times before. This time—Jack and Mitch didn’t jump. Mitch yelled to Jack over the noise of the rattling boxcars.

  “Jack, did you see that?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “Frank busted his head open on one of the rail-road ties in the weeds back there!”

  “I’m not jumping off!”

  “No, me either!”

  I stayed down on the ground holding my hands over my ears to block out the train noise. I kept waiting for them to jump and watched as the train pulled away. I could see their puzzled faces peering out of the boxcar trying to see if I was still lying in the weeds. Mitch looked like he had another half smoked cigarette in his mouth. I thought maybe Mitch didn’t want to jump because he was still smoking. The train crossed the bridge, started picking up speed again and disappeared. I dawdled along hoping they jumped off on the other side of the bridge somewhere and would come running up from behind, but I ended up walking the two blocks back home alone. I figured I might be in trouble if the old man asked me where Jack was. No. I knew I would be in trouble. Big trouble. It was my job to keep tabs on just about every movement my brothers and sisters made. I snuck in the back door tip toed up the three stairs into the utility room and peered into the kitchen. When I noticed the coast was clear—I made my way up the carpeted stairs and hid out in our bedroom to wait for Jack.

  My father was in his first floor bedroom listening to records. He had stories on records sent to him from the blind school he had attended in Chicago. When he was listening to his stories, we had to be extremely quiet; everyone would sneak around the house on tip-toes trying not to make any noise. I figured I was safe because sometimes he stayed in his bedroom for hours listening to those records. At the time he was a machinist and worked on the night shift and since it was late afternoon I knew he would be going to work soon. At least I hoped. I hadn’t seen Jack or Mitch in a half hour and wondered what had happened to them. An hour later I heard the phone ring. The old man stomped out of his bedroom and angrily answered, “Hello!” was talking to someone inquisitively asking “They did what?” I didn’t know why he wasn’t at work. From what I could overhear it sounded like Jack and Mitch had ridden the train twelve miles south all the way to the next town. They had gotten caught by one of the switchmen at the rail yard after they finally jumped off. We had all been there before. It would have been easy to get caught because there were trains switching cars at all times of the day and switchmen were everywhere.

  The switchmen called the cops and the cops called my folks to come and drag their delinquent asses back home. My father was furious with Jack because he hadn’t jumped off the train when I jumped. I can hear him now. “Why in the hell didn’t you jump off that God damned train when Frank jumped?” Jack told me the old man balled-him-out all the way home and embarrassed him in front of Mitch.

  My father had an explosive temper and was livid when he had to pick up his disappointing son for not jumping off that train when he had the chance.

  An example of his off-the-wall temper outbursts went something like this. One day I was sitting on the carpeted floor in the living room watching our black and white console TV. I was a few feet in front of the set mesmerized by the program I was watching. For a moment I was caught off guard, not paying attention to what was going on around me. He came stomping in, reached down with his big right hand and grabbed a fistful of my hair. I screamed—“OUUUUCH!” He said, “Come along with me my fine feathered friend,” as he picked me up by the hair dragging me through the house and out the door. He stopped at my blue three-speed bicycle parked in front of the garage. I was still crouched over grimacing from pain as he continued his firm grip on my hair. He seemed to be enjoying the pain he was inflicting on me. He pointed to the little metal license plate dangling by only one wire hanger from my bicycle seat and demanded to know why it wasn’t fixed. I responded in a scared submissive young boy’s voice, “I don’t know.” He threw me down to the concrete, releasing his grip and barked back, “Well fix the Goddamn thing right now!”

  I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. And he made me mad because he made such a big deal out of it. Having a little license plate dangling by one hanger wasn’t going to cause the world to end and I probably would have fixed it sooner or later anyway. Petty little things like that gave him ammunition to jump on me and make me feel stupid and small, or maybe it made him feel big and powerful. When young I used to cry when he started yelling at me because his reprimands were so demeaning, usually after the yelling, came the cuff on the side of the head. I would cower in a protective posture sort of ducking, never knowing exactly when the cuff was going to come. When my eyes welled up with tears and I did start to cry, expecting the smack on the side of the head, he would say, “Quit your God damned balling or I’ll give you something to ball about!” He liked to talk in a loud, over-bearing, in-your-face manner, pointing his index finger, sometimes poking it into my chest while he yelled at me.

  When he questioned me, he demanded I look him in the eye and answer his question as soon as he asked it, or he thought I was making up lies. I hated looking him in the eye because those thick glasses he wore made his eyes look three times bigger. It always felt to me like his piercing blue eyes were looking right through me and he could even read my thoughts. Sometimes I used to think he was mean and nasty to me just because I had such good eyesight. There seemed to be no other explanation.

  Because he always demanded I tell the truth, implying I was lying—to be spiteful—I decided to become a master at telling tall tales. With practice, I learned to stop crying when he yelled at me and I got good at fabricating stories while looking him in the eye. Little by little, I developed what I coined a “fiction mind.” My invented dialog ran sort of parallel with the truth so it was easy to jump back and forth telling a story of half-truth and half-fiction. If something didn’t sound just right I could say I forgot or didn’t remember—I could tweak the story any way I needed it to go. It was all in the name of survival—my own form of defensive ammunition. I had to learn how to do that as a tactic to keep from getting whipped every time he interrogated me, because sometimes telling the truth would get me into more trouble than the something made up. I learned to hold back my tears and just internalize everything—including all my emotional feelings. No sadness. No joy. My face was a poker face. If nobody knew what I was thinking, nobody could derail my state of mind.

  My brothers and sisters were always getting into something and if one of them came running into the house crying, the old man always asked me what happened—sometimes I didn’t know what happened, so I had to fabricate some kind of a story. They were always threatening to tell on me if I did something to them in an attempt to get them to shut-up.

  If there were enough consequence to get an actual ass whipping he would slowly pull the belt off his trouse
rs, making a big production out of it. He found pleasure in doubling up on the leather by folding it in half and cracking it in his hand reveling in the fear I had on my face. Then he started delivering the painful blows wherever they may have landed. During those attacks I was totally defenseless, cowering in the corner or against the piano getting whipped like a bad dog that had shit on the carpet. Can you picture a big man with intense rage brutally attacking a small boy using a belt for a weapon or even his bare hands and showing no mercy, just to prove a point? On many occasions it was easy to find my back up against the old player piano dodging his doubled-up belt blows. If the piano cover had been left open exposing the keys, my hands ended up pounding out a symphony of horror as I dodged and ducked the blows being delivered, adding more chaos and noise to the already tense situation.

  If I was only big enough to grab that belt from his hands—I could have gone at him like he went at me, then asked him how it made him feel. It was unbelievable how much rage and fear I harbored from years of that kind of abuse at his hand.

  To help quell my feelings, I turned to the liquor cabinet in the laundry/utility room. That was also the room where most of the whippings took place and where Joanna had her piano lessons. After the beatings, when things cooled down, I would sneak a few swallows of some peppermint schnapps or brandy just to calm my never-ending anxiety over the things that went on in that room. Before I went to school or when nobody was around, I went into the cabinet and sipped on the bottle to feel the warmth of the booze as it settled down my throat and into my stomach. When I did that, it felt like the internal anxiety I was feeling eased up, not completely gone, but enough to notice a difference. I got sort of a warm numb feeling in my head.