Evil Season

by Michael Benson

The separation didn’t work out. Brutus and his mom were gone for only a few months when they returned with a promise from Elton that he would go on the wagon. Elton went to Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, and stayed dry for a decade, not hitting the bottle until after he and Betty Jo divorced. Once he started drinking again, his health abruptly went south. He was dead within a year. That was 1980. Elton died when he was forty-three.

  “I have no hard feelings toward my parents,” Murphy said years later.

  Elton Brutus Murphy was a bundle of creativity as a kid. He was musical, too. When he was about ten, his parents decided he should take steel guitar lessons. For three full years, he did.

  “Mr. Yagle was my teacher,” Murphy remembered. “I got where I was pretty good at it.” His favorite tune to play on guitar was the theme from the TV show Bonanza.

  After three years, however, the steel guitar lessons ended, and so did Murphy’s interest. But only temporarily. When he was fifteen, he got back into it, taking Spanish guitar lessons for a year. His teacher was Terry Yagle, Mr. Yagle’s son.

  When Brutus was a teenager, and it was normal to argue with parents, he could remember getting into only one verbal altercation with his dad, and he could no longer remember what it was about. He never fought with his mother, ever!

  “My parents’ problems were with each other, not with me,” he said.

  That said, the domestic turmoil was enough to make any boy sulky. Young Brutus sought solace from his troubles by wandering the sixty acres out back that his family owned, fifty acres of orange grove, ten of dense woods. He wasn’t into sports, being on a team or anything like that, and preferred roaming the woods alone, both on his family’s property and that of others.

  That didn’t mean he wasn’t athletic. He loved to swim, and spent hours gliding across the large pond behind his parents’ house. On days when he didn’t feel like a swim, he’d grab his fishing pole and fish in that same pond.

  “Brim [regional name for bluegill, sometimes spelled bream], catfish, and bass,” Murphy recalled.

  For a time, when he was a kid, they had a boat. That was when his dad was still around. And if he wasn’t roaming or swimming or fishing, Brutus could even hunt on his own land: deer, squirrel, and rabbit.

  As he matured, his walks in the grove changed. He went from fantasizing about war, Indians, and treasure maps, to thinking almost exclusively about, as he put it, “easy girls and women.”

  In the movie about his life—the imaginary one playing in Murphy’s head—the soundtrack for this part was by the Beatles, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, and Johnny Cash.

  “I now consider where I grew up a small paradise,” Murphy has stated.

  But paradise didn’t last. In 1970, a hard freeze came and destroyed the orange grove. It was never replaced. Most of what had been the grove, forty-five acres of it, was fenced in and the Murphys raised cattle.

  The remainder of the cleared land and part of the woods were converted into a nursery in which they grew a wide variety of shrubberies. Murphy had to find someplace else to wander alone—someplace that could never be as magical.

  Those acres became a setting for labor rather than relaxation, for he worked in the nursery every day after school until he was sixteen. After that he worked for another nursery and stayed there until he finished school.

  At first, Brutus liked playing Spanish guitar. Better than steel guitar. He enjoyed his lessons. But interest dwindled when he was sixteen and bought an electric guitar.

  Before long, Brutus was playing in a small group, all teenaged musicians. He played rhythm, along with Randy. Billy was on drums; Charlie on lead; Karen and Judy sang. Randy, Billy, Karen, and Judy were siblings.

  They practiced in a barn about a mile from the Murphy house. “We were so loud that my parents could still hear us!” he said. “We played a couple of dances in Arcadia, at the National Guard Armory.” They played the rock hits of the day: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Deep Purple—“Smoke on the Water” was a crowd favorite—some ZZ Top. They played slow dances, too: “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “Green, Green Grass of Home.” The band never had a name. They’d talked about giving themselves a name, but they never got around to it.

  Throughout the rest of his life, Murphy usually had a guitar. He figured he owned fifteen different guitars over his life. As an older man, long after the high-school dance days, Murphy liked to play the songs of Gordon Lightfoot, whom he saw in concert in 1982. He would perform “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

  Throughout his youth, and really throughout his life, there was one constant for Murphy. He was always in tip-top physical condition. Even when he was having deep problems, he was still buff.

  “I always exerted myself in daily exercise,” he said. “I started out as a teen working out with the weights several times a week.” As an adult he always belonged to a gym. He’d lift, run, swim, and relax in the sauna. He also kept exercise equipment at home.

  He got himself in such good shape at one point that he was running eight miles a day, six days a week. When that got rough on his joints, he’d ride his bike, sixteen miles a day, and would swim two miles daily.

  In jail, of course, there wasn’t much to do other than exercise, and it was while behind bars that Elton Brutus Murphy ended up setting his personal records.

  He boasted: “I was in the Leon County Jail, and in one day I did eighteen hundred push-ups. Not at one time—in sets of twenty throughout the day!”

  Chapter 9

  Eco-Adventures

  Murphy lost his virginity when he was fifteen. At the time he was camping with his family in South Central Florida at the Fisheating Creek Campground. The titular creek was supposed to be the most “pristine” in Florida, west of Lake Okeechobee and north of the Everglades.

  It was a standard camping place: paddleboats on a cypress swamp, hiking through the hardwood forests, activities that were known in camping advertising as “eco-adventures.”

  Murphy had an eco-adventure, all right, and it was a doozy. The girl was also fifteen. She was from Miami and very good-looking.

  “Dark brown hair and a medium build,” Murphy said. “I do not remember her name.”

  They took a walk around the campground in the dark and did it on a picnic table. He did remember an awkward moment as they tried to achieve penetration with her panties just pulled down. It was he who realized that they’d be a lot more comfortable, and successful, if she took off her underwear altogether.

  “It was great!” Murphy exclaimed. “And it did wonders for my fifteen-year-old self-esteem.”

  At age sixteen, he discovered scuba diving. He fell in love with it and decided to make diving his career, either as a scuba-diving instructor or as a deep-sea diver.

  He went to Hardee High School in poor, rural Hardee County during the 1970s. Although he claimed not to remember her, Murphy’s classmate Debbie Gulliver remembered Brutus well—and she had nothing but nice things to say about him. He wasn’t the type to get in trouble. In fact, he was considered one of the “smart kids.”

  Brutus’s favorite high-school subject was drafting and auto mechanics, which he took during the first semester of his senior year.

  Brutus was athletic, but he wasn’t a jock. He didn’t play sports and was not a spectator at sporting events. Every once in a while, he’d watch a football game. His favorite sport on TV was the Olympics, especially the Winter Olympics.

  Hardee County, population fifteen thousand, was not exactly the land of opportunity, and the people there were most likely to work in the citrus, cattle, or phosphate-mining industries. Anyone with another ambition split.

  During high school, Brutus wrote to all of the diving schools, read the brochures, and picked the one he wanted to attend. He saved most of his money for two years so that he’d be able to attend a “diving instructor college.”

  As a teen he didn’t require as much solitude as today, and on weekends he could be found
raising a little hell.

  “I used to go out drinking with my friends,” Murphy remembered.

  His best friend during those years was Ralph Lovelady (pseudonym). Brutus was with Ralph the first time he ever got arrested: 1973, possession of alcohol by a minor.

  “We had to spend the night in jail,” Murphy recalled. “Kind of funny now. Lovelady went on to be a sheriff’s deputy out of school.”

  The rest of Lovelady’s story wasn’t quite so funny.

  “Lovelady was still in his early twenties when he himself became a suspect for a series of crimes in Hardee County. When his colleagues at the sheriff’s department came to arrest him, Lovelady shot himself.”

  Others in Murphy’s carousing crowd were Danny Yeomans, of Zolfo Springs, a crossroads a couple miles south of Wauchula, and Randy Wiggins and David Smith, who lived in Wauchula proper.

  Murphy’s other close high-school friend was Randy Newsome, but he wasn’t a drinking buddy. He, too, went into law enforcement for a time, working for the Wauchula Police Department (WPD). For some reason he didn’t stick with it, and Randy ended up driving a truck.

  “I haven’t seen any of them since high school,” Murphy said sadly.

  Brutus Murphy went out on the occasional date during high school, but he had no long-term girlfriends. A couple of the girls he went out with were Deborah Clanton and Lorraine Baucum.

  Then there was Rose. Ah, Rose. He remembered many things about Rose, but her last name wasn’t one of them. She was from Arcadia, which was about twenty miles south of Wauchula, along Route 17.

  But his most memorable experience with a girl during his teen years occurred on his eighteenth birthday, and her name was Sheryl Hayes.

  “I’d been socializing with her at Hardee High. She’d agreed to give me some on my birthday,” Murphy recalled. Trouble was, she was only fifteen.

  Brutus and Sheryl, his brother Dean and his girlfriend, and a couple of other couples went camping near Sheryl’s house. Dean was Brutus’s only sibling, fourteen months younger than Brutus.

  If only everyone had kept their yap shut, then everything would have been great: “Sheryl made the mistake of telling her younger sister where she was going. So here we were, all camped down by a creek in a pasture, and I had a condom on about to do the deed, when out of nowhere here comes a truck tearing out across the pasture with its lights on coming toward us. Sheryl says, ‘That’s my father, Brutus! You better run and hide!’”

  Brutus took the advice and scurried—no shirt, pulling up his jeans—behind some brush and trees along the creek bank. He peeked out and he could see three men, all with guns, who looked like Sheryl’s father and two brothers. He heard Sheryl’s dad barking orders. The whole party was ordered into the back of his truck. Then Brutus heard the man calling out to him.

  “I have everyone in the back of my truck at gunpoint. Unless you want something to happen to them, you will come out of your hiding!” the man shouted.

  So Brutus came out and got into the truck with the others. The two brothers held guns on them.

  Sheryl’s father said, “Brutus, how old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” Murphy lied.

  “It’s a good thing you’re not eighteen,” Sheryl’s father said, “or I’d break your scrawny-looking neck, you being with my daughter the way you were!” He was a big man, outweighed the teenager by a hundred pounds. “Brutus, I called your folks and they are going to meet us at my house,” he said.

  When Brutus’s parents arrived, his dad defused the situation. The teen had to promise never to have anything to do with Sheryl ever again, and it was a promise he had no trouble keeping.

  He went to his senior prom with the new girl in school, named Vanessa Coons. “We had a good time there, but that was it. Afterward, we went our separate ways,” Murphy recalled.

  Looking back on his life, Murphy feels like high school was kind of a blank, a waiting period. “It wasn’t until after high school that things began happening to me,” he said.

  Brutus moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and attended PADI, which meant Professional Association of Diving Instructors. It was the best school out there. Their registered motto was: “The Way the World Learns to Dive.” PADI was, and is, the world’s leading scuba-diving training organization, although Brutus got the impression that tourism was their bread and butter.

  The school offered courses right there, locally, of course; but it also offered courses at a variety of global vacation spots. These were courses designed, it appeared, for folks with serious coin.

  It was cool that they didn’t just teach scuba diving. They did things to help the world as well, through their conservation efforts. The school was less than a decade old, to boot, founded in 1966 after a couple of friends—one teacher and swimming instructor, and one a salesman for U.S. Divers—came up with the idea over shots of Jack Daniel’s. Both had come to the conclusion that scuba-diving schools were poorly run and made entry into the world of underwater breathing much more difficult than it needed to be.

  Murphy took the ten-week resident training course designed to graduate open-water scuba instructors. He completed the course in December 1975 and received a variety of certifications. He became an instructor, equipment repair specialist, senior lifesaver, and American Red Cross instructor of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

  Certificates in hand, Brutus Murphy moved to Key Largo, Florida, where he was self-employed as a scuba instructor at the Bryn Mawr Marina & Campground. He concentrated on speed, and became convinced he could train and certify scuba divers faster than anyone else around. He got so fast that he could do it in three days.

  “I definitely taught the shortest course in the United States,” Murphy boasted.

  Chapter 10

  Bermuda

  While teaching scuba diving, Brutus did his best to stay up on all of the latest developments by reading Skin Diver Magazine, which featured ads for—and feature articles about—new equipment. There was lots of gorgeous photography, and the magazine was part travelogue, with articles about the latest hot spots to dive, always suitable for a luxurious vacation, and other things to do while there. He always learned something with every issue. They had Q&A columnists in different categories, like technology, medicine, teaching, and “turning pro.”

  In one issue of Skin Diver, Murphy read an article about U.S. Navy underwater photographers. It sounded like the perfect job, he thought—and so he enlisted in the navy in 1976. He endured boot camp in San Diego, California; then he moved to the Naval Air Station Pensacola, where he attended the navy’s School of Photography.

  From there he spent the remainder of his five-year hitch at the Naval Air Station Bermuda. When it came to military service, this was about as good as it got. Murphy loved it there. He worked in the base’s photo lab, which was part of the Atlantic Fleet Audio/Visual Facility.

  “It was a great job in a paradise of a location,” Murphy reminisced.

  The base he lived on had been an air force base until 1970. He lived in Bermuda for four years. During that stint he took thousands of photographs, both as part of his job and on his own. He was a photographer for the base weekly newspaper, the Bermuda Skyliner. For years on end, Murphy had photos in every issue. He eventually got to the point where he was Bermuda’s number one naval photographer, photographing naval events at both bases on the island, as well as all sorts of related activities.

  Murphy offered a quick aside: The United States left Bermuda in 1995, but the island remained, for obvious reasons, a great place for reunions, not that Murphy ever attended any of those.

  “Not that all of the events I photographed were that exciting,” he admitted.

  If the military loved one thing, it was ceremonies. There was a ceremony every day, awards, promotions, whatever. Lots of marching, bands playing . . . Brutus Murphy took pictures of them all.

  And, then again, some photography jobs were very, very exciting. He was in charge of the aerial photography as w
ell, and he got to ride in a Huey H1N helicopter once a month.

  In sharp contrast he also worked as the base portrait photographer and—his camera mounted on a tripod—took thousands of studio portraits of base personnel.

  But home base for Murphy during those years was the darkroom, where he spent many enjoyable hours, becoming a master of developing film and printing photographs.

  Some of his tasks were downright spooky, in a secret agent James Bond kind of way. Murphy served a role in the then-ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union.

  “I had clearance to handle classified material and developed aerial photo surveillance photos taken from a P-3 Orion reconnaissance plane,” Murphy said.

  The P-3 was a land-based, long-range, antisubmarine patrol aircraft, flew at 28,300 feet, had a mission radius of 2,380 nautical miles. And, if things got nasty, the P-3 could bite back, as it was capable of holding ten tons of ordnance. Judging by the photos taken from the P-3, Murphy figured there wasn’t a Soviet ship or submarine in the Atlantic Ocean that the U.S. Navy didn’t know about.

  Murphy says that his photographic work became of such a high quality in Bermuda that he was offered a job teaching photography at Los Angeles Community College-Overseas. Brutus explained that he didn’t have a college education, but the lady from the college said none was needed. And besides, Brutus came highly recommended by Chief Clinton. And that was how he ended up teaching Photography 101 for three semesters. The course covered photographic and darkroom techniques. After his second semester as a teacher, the college presented him with a “provisional teaching credential.”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but Bermuda was mostly just fun. Murphy and a friend of his, fellow Photographer’s Mate John Pappas, bought an inflatable boat and motor together. They decided to get the best, so they bought an Avon, the number one manufacturer of inflatable boats since the 1950s. Their boats were built by hand from tough materials and came with a ten-year warranty.