by Craig Birk
Interlude Six
Gary (14)
Midway through the summer of 1987, in Thousand Oaks, California, Gary was feeling like quite the stud. At thirteen years old, he had already been to second base with a girl. Although it only happened once, and the girl, Millie Adams, had kind of freaked out afterwards and said they could not do it again, he was quite sure that he liked it and was also pretty sure that she would change her mind. If not, he also had a sense that Susan Andrews from his social studies class would let him try it also.
By July 26th, the night of his friend Casey Wilson’s big sleepover party, school had been out for over six weeks and seemed like a distant memory. Eighth grade didn’t start for another five weeks, so Gary’s only concerns were summer baseball and trying to get his hands back on Millie’s boobs. Because he had no source of transportation and there were no social events involving girls, the boobs were becoming less and less important.
On this particular night, neither baseball nor boobs mattered much. This was the second annual big sleepover at Casey’s, whose parents were usually drunk by ten o’clock and really didn’t care what the kids upstairs were doing as long as they were not too loud and did not leave the house. One of the other guys at the party, who was seriously named Larry Hagman, had promised to bring a case of beer, but did not deliver. Some of the guys were disappointed, but Gary, who had never had a beer in his life, was glad and was looking forward to a fun night without alcohol.
His vision involved the guys watching a movie (maybe one with some decent nudity) until Casey’s parents were asleep. Then there would be a round of pillow fights before settling into a serious Nintendo RBI baseball tournament. Gary was nearly unhittable if he got to play with the Mets, who had Dwight Gooden and Bob Ojeda as starters with Roger McDowell and submarine-throwing Jesse Orosco in the pen. He took it for granted that he would win the RBI tournament. He was eliminated early in the pillow fighting last year, however, and was anxious to fare better this time.
Things were going very much according to plan until about forty-five minutes into the pillow fights. Gary already had two victories. Each match consisted of one round of five minutes. The winner was determined by vote among the spectators, unless one person chose to surrender early. Knocking your opponent to the ground twice was considered a victory by technical knockout. Getting hit once with a pillow is not a big deal, but being struck repeatedly in the head could make one quite dizzy.
Gary had a long pillow case with a small hard pillow bunched up in the end of it. This meant it was significantly less maneuverable and it took longer to get the pillow head moving. Gary was forced to take big, long swings. However, due to the greater centrifugal force and extra mass at the end, his pillow allowed for a much greater impact if he could connect. His first fight was against a kid named Ryan who was not very athletic and was an easy pushover. Actually, Gary was surprised Ryan was even invited to the party to begin with.
Gary kept his swings to short circles by choking up on the pillow case and repeatedly connected with blows to Ryan’s stomach, occasionally mixing it up and going for the head. Meanwhile, Ryan was playing more defense than anything and only took a few offensive swings the whole five minutes. Gary probably could have forced a knockout if he really tried, but was satisfied to advance with an easy victory by decision and avoid Ryan the embarrassment of getting knocked down. It was not a challenge.
The second match, against Casey, was more difficult. Casey was a well-skilled pillow fighter. For most of the five-minute match, Casey was able to back away from Gary’s long swings and then step in and deliver quick blows to Gary’s head with his Chicago Bears pillow-cased pillow (Casey and his parents originally were from Chicago).
However, with a minute left in the round, Gary swung his pillow from the left side of his body to his right, missing Casey by a good two feet. Casey didn’t realize this was an intentional miss and that the pillow would be quickly be returning from the other direction, this time with the full force of Gary’s stronger right arm driving it. Casey stepped in to try to connect with a short swing of his own.
Gary’s bunched-up pillow connected squarely with the left side of Casey’s head. It was enough to cause Casey to stumble backward, slightly dazed. Gary did not miss the opportunity. He quickly swung his pillow around his left side and over his head, bringing it back down on the top of Casey’s head with an axe-chopping motion, driving Casey’s head down between his knees. Gary then choked up and swung repeatedly from his right side, delivering rapid blows. Casey was able to block most of these shots with his pillow, but the damage was done. Though the outcome was not a knockout, Gary was easily determined to be the winner.
This only left Larry, who had won the event last year. Gary expected a two- or three-minute break before the final battle. However, during these next few minutes the course of the night took an unexpected turn.
“As much as I would like to kick Gary’s ass and win pillow fighting again this year, I think we should do something a bit more grown-up,” Larry announced.
All of the other nine boys gathered at the event stared at him in silence, wondering where this was going. “I am sorry I didn’t score the beers like I hoped to,” Larry went on, “but since we can’t get drunk, we should at least go toilet paper someone’s house and fuck it up,” he finished, with a smile on his face.
To win support of the idea, Larry also announced that he and Casey had found a dead raccoon in the backyard and they would set it on fire on the front doorstep of the house being attacked.
Casey acknowledged that his parents had three huge cases of toilet paper from Costco in the garage and probably would not notice if one was missing. Also, Casey mentioned that they could take the twelve eggs in the fridge if they made one of the frying pans dirty to make it look like they cooked them for a late snack.
Gary was not happy with this plan. He was looking forward to his chance to defeat Larry in pillow fighting and then kicking everyone’s ass in RBI. He also knew he could probably talk everyone into throwing one or two dollars into a pool for the RBI tournament. He figured if he won ten bucks he could add twenty percent to his current net worth, most of which was safely hidden at home under the sweater of his stuffed Winnie the Pooh doll.
Gary tried to steer the night back toward his original design, and even went so far as to call Larry a pussy for trying to avoid finishing the pillow fight tournament. It did not work. The toilet-papering idea had an unstoppable momentum. This being America, a quick vote was taken. It was seven to three in favor of toilet-papering. The decision was final.
One important choice remained. Whose house to hit? After about three minutes of discussion, a target was identified.
Patrick Zell was a sophomore at the local high school. At the end of the last school year he had hooked up with Casey’s seventh-grade girlfriend, Mindy Stewart. It was widely known that Mindy had sucked his dick, but this tidbit was not mentioned among the group of young adventurers planning their mission from Casey Wilson’s bedroom.
The next thing Gary knew, he and Larry were rifling through Casey’s dresser drawers trying to find dark clothes to wear. Within minutes they were entirely clad in black, looking something like pre-teen versions of Joe Pesci in Home Alone.
The ten boys took great care to sneak out of the house quietly. Casey’s bedroom was a loft-like structure above the garage. Once armed to their satisfaction, the group exited out the window. One at a time, they climbed down a steeply slanted section of the roof onto a fence that divided the front yard from the back yard before dropping six feet into the soft bushes in the front. Casey explained that this was important because it allowed the group to silently enter the front yard without having to open the very noisy gate. While this was true, the the group just as easily could have walked out the front door. Casey’s parents had mowed through three one-liter bottles of Fetzer White Zinfandel before passing out around 11:15 p.m. They were in no position to hear, or care, who was entering or leaving the pr
operty.
Gary touched down in the bushes last and quickly scanned the horizon, searching for the rest of the platoon which was now huddled behind a big oak tree in the front of the yard. It took a few moments to find them because everyone was wearing black and it was a dark, moonless night. Casey lived in one of the original developments of Thousand Oaks and this section of the city did not have street lights.
Gary waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, noticing how much cooler it had become at night. The temperature had dropped over thirty-five degrees from its peak of ninety-four in the afternoon. A slight wind caused the trees to rustle and created the feeling of being in the wilderness instead of upper-middle-class Los Angeles suburbia. Gary thought he heard a wolf howl in the distance but was not sure if it was real or if he simply imagined it. He felt a stab of fear before reminding himself the whole thing was no big deal. He blinked his eyes a few times and then jogged over to the other guys.
Larry and Casey assumed leadership of the operation and whispered instructions. The group was to maintain zero visual contact with potential civilians. This meant that if any cars came, everyone should meld into the darkness and remain still until the threat passed. If they were spotted by a cop, instructions were to hide if possible. If not, the order was to scatter and avoid capture by any means. The meeting point was back at the house but only after you were sure you were not being followed. Larry reminded the group that Thousand Oaks cops were “a bunch of lazy fucking pigs” so this pretty much just meant you had to hop over a few backyard fences to get away. Casey solemnly reminded the participants that anyone caught was on their own and could in no way implicate the rest of the group. Larry threatened serious physical harm to anyone who snitched and held up the plastic bag holding the dead raccoon to emphasize the point. In the darkness, Gary rolled his eyes at the overdramatic approach.
After a few more minutes of babble, Larry and Casey got to the interesting part of the plan, what they would actually do when they got there. Casey took the lead here, and it finally occurred to Gary that this was a well-planned event and not a spur-of-the-moment idea in the middle of the pillow fight tournament. It seemed Casey was more upset about the Patrick Zell situation than he had let on.
Casey announced the battle plan: “All right guys, each of you is armed with three rolls of TP. Additionally, Dave has a bag of confetti for the yard, Larry has a dozen eggs and I have a baseball bat for the mailbox. When we get there, split into groups of two and start the TP process. One guy throws over trees or branches and the other guy tries to catch. Then tear and re-throw. Try to get it as high up as possible and don’t worry about the bushes at eye-level that are easy to clean up. While you are doing this, Larry and I will sneak into the backyard and use half of the eggs on high-level targets. We will then come around and hit the car and the front of the house with eggs. They have a BMW they usually leave in the driveway. At this point, Dave will confetti the yard. Finally, if we still have cover and no one is coming out, I will place the raccoon on the welcome mat and light it on fire. Once the fire is lit, Gary takes out the mailbox with the bat and I will ring the doorbell. Then we run like hell. Avoid the expressway on the way home and cut through the Turnburry’s yard and across the creek instead.”
Gary could see that Casey was quite proud of his plan, but he still had a few questions about the wisdom of this mission: “Hey guys, I realize Zell is a dweeb, but don’t you think this is a little much? I mean, it is probably just the parents who will have to clean everything up, not him.”
Larry: “Gary, quit being such a pussy.”
Casey: “Yeah.”
No one had further questions, so the unit got underway. Larry quickly ran out from behind the tree and headed north on Hummingbird Lane. He maintained a crouched position as if avoiding enemy fire. Each man followed in a single line, with Ryan bringing up the rear and Gary just in front of him.
The boys returned to base in Casey’s bedroom seventy-three minutes later and debriefed about the mission. All targets were hit. Twenty-four rolls of TP were now hanging from the trees in the yard, the lawn was heavily laced with confetti, the mailbox was destroyed, eggs were splattered all about, and a smoldering pile of raccoon remains lay on what was the welcome mat.
They encountered no police and only a small number of civilian drive-bys. The boys felt confident they were unsighted and congratulated themselves on a job well done. Casey went to the garage and brought back a six-pack of root beer and a six-pack of Coke to celebrate with.
It would not be for another four days that they would learn that Casey got the address wrong and they actually attacked the house of Pamela Boardman, an innocent girl in the class below them. The Boardmans had a long talk with their daughter about who would want to do something like this to them. They were very concerned about her associating with such disgusting kids. No one considered any connection to the actual assailants, and the attack went unsolved.
Perhaps some good did come from the event, however. Much to his own surprise, Larry felt extremely guilty about what happened. A few days later he walked over to the Boardmans with the intention of confessing and offering to help clean up, but he chickened out at the last minute. While he never accepted responsibility, he did learn an important lesson about the value of good intelligence.
Years later, Larry was part of another group, this one flying F-17s over Iraq. His job was to guide five-hundred pound bombs to their targets, regardless of what they may be. Larry didn’t mind killing people. Actually, he felt pretty darned good about it when he did his job well. But he cared passionately about the quality of his work and he understood the costs of error. One fall day in 2004, Larry disobeyed an order to bomb a small camp of tents outside of Basra because he felt the intelligence was suspect and something seemed wrong. He probably would have been severely punished had it not turned out in debriefing that the target in question was part of a British field hospital.
