Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Page 12

  During the next couple of weeks, Chuck trolled the residents with relentless energy. His investigative fury knew no bounds. He was determined to find witnesses. I only needed to check with one. I sought out Johnnie and asked him: "What the fuck were you thinking about?" Then he offered what would become his testimony: "Everybody said it had to be you. They said you or Ken were the only ones in this house with balls enough to try something like that."

  As the trial approached, my only concern stemmed from the fear of a set-up. I had made some enemies while running the sports teams, deciding who would play and who would sit. I worried about the possibility Chuck might squeeze someone into lying themselves—and I knew I just couldn't tolerate another liar in the courtroom, even though that might have been an example of universal justice at its best. Those fears grew worse when I learned that Chuck had a secret witness primed for the stand.

  The proceeding began with the panel trying to cow me into submission. They demanded my grade point. Although it was a hearty three-five on a four-point scale, they still reminded me that I should be using my time to push it even higher instead of getting involved enough in something like this to face a trial. When they called it the "feces case," I had to suppress a laugh. But they were the ones laughing after Chuck presented Johnnie as the core of his case, admitting he hadn't seen anything but only assumed it. Then I paraded my goons—Ken, Doeda and Surf—who testified they'd been with me all the time. I never asked if they'd seen me shit down the stairwell, so they never had to lie. But then I told the jury I hadn't done it. I said I was being railroaded by an overzealous P.A. That's when Chuck played his trump card.

  As his secret witness, Chuck offered a little snit from the Grotto who had a grudge from a football game. He took the stand and offered his evidence. In the week before Chuck left for the weekend, he said, he had overheard me tell Ken, "When Chuck leaves town, the shit's gonna fly." As silly as that sounded, I still felt compelled to clarify the record. I lectured the laughing jurors on the meaning of that phrase as a figure of speech and not a literal call to action.

  "I say it all the time," I told them. "Shit's gonna fly. You do, too."

  Exonerated unanimously, I stood before the dean of housing two days later to receive his decision.

  "I won't overturn a unanimous verdict by your judicial board," he said through a smug sneer. Then he looked over the top of his glasses and added a threat. "But I know you did this. And if you get involved in anything else—any little thing—I will move you out of there."

  Although I triumphed in the feces case, he managed to make good on that threat three months later. The second showdown involved a scheme the rogue had hatched to use money from the dorm's highly restricted recreational fees account for a decent party in a barn somewhere with a keg of beer. We persuaded a majority of the residents to transfer those funds into a scholarship for the neediest member of Francis House. The rules we wrote specified no restrictions on his use of the money. The recipient could spend it on books, tuition, housing fee, or anything he needed.

  "Hell," I told the group before they voted to approve it, "he might even be so grateful he just spends the whole six hundred dollars throwing a party for everybody."

  When Ken emerged as the only applicant in a dormitory of forty men, Chuck smelled a rat and set about frantically working to derail the scholarship. But there was little he could do. We even convinced the director of scholarships to make a special presentation after the start of the second semester in January when Ken would get his check. Reading the fine print, however, Chuck discovered a loophole. I had specified that the recipient also had to reside in Francis House when receiving the award. So, just before the semester's end, during final examination week, he busted us having a shaving cream fight in the bathroom, blowing off a little steam. And the next day, just three days before the deadline for Ken to get the money, I found myself standing once again before the dean of housing, who, this time, had a genuine smile on his lips.

  "Can't this wait until next semester?" I asked. "I have two finals tomorrow."

  Unimpressed, he ordered us split up and moved to opposite ends of the Missouri campus. And we had to vacate Francis House that night.

  TWENTY-TWO

  August 1967

  "WE WON'T ROB YOU"

  I had written those words in psychedelic block letters across an old, brown paper grocery sack so I could tape it to the side of a suitcase. The words were printed large enough to be visible from a considerable distance. I filled in the colors. Black for the "W" and the "B;" red for the "E" and the "Os" in "WON'T" and "ROB;" yellow for the "T" and the "U;" green for the "R;" and, purple for the "W," the "N," the apostrophe and the "O" in "YOU."

  Professional Gary had worked eighteen-hour days during June and July in a hell hole, galvanizing chain link fences to save money for his impending junior year at Mizzou. The rogue had allowed it because he knew August belonged to him. Actually, the rogue had owned the whole last year, sacrificing my sophomore grade point average and granting the professional just enough room to survive. The Francis House feces case and our subsequent expulsion from the dorm had just been one of the rogue's many accomplishments the past year. We'd had fun, and I had no regrets about letting him run the show for a while. We had planned an ultimate shenanigan as an exclamation point on the summer, scheduling August to hitchhike from St. Louis to Los Angeles, up to San Francisco, and back across the west just in time for the start of school. Of course, Ken would serve as traveling companion for this adventure that would be our last road trip of life together. His rogue had flunked him out of Mizzou the past year, and all that lay ahead for Ken was Vietnam. He never should have chosen chemistry as his major.

  I'm still not sure how or why my rogue had emerged so savagely in the fall of 1966, as I began my sophomore year at Mizzou. Maybe he came out because the professional had caged him so successfully the year before. As a freshman without a car, and, inspired by the intellectual offerings of college classes, I had transformed into a hermit. I had left high school behind and settled in to get an education, driving my grade point to honors college status. My budding domestic had pledged our love to my high school sweetheart, still in her junior year back in St. Louis. She wrote us a letter every single day, confessing her love and always misspelling "sweet" as "sweat." The domestic thought it cute. The professional grunted. The rogue nearly puked. But the professional remained in charge, reading the books, writing the papers, and dominating those freshmen days.

  Suddenly, however, as the new school year dawned in September of 1966, my old high school running buddy Ken had joined me at Mizzou after spending his freshman year at a junior college in St. Louis. The rogue had always liked him. We became roommates in the dormitory and I felt something stirring in my gut. Secure in the honors college, where an F equaled only a C, I had brought my 1962 white, convertible Chevy to campus and things started to change. Before I knew what was happening, the rogue had dialed my girlfriend and dumped her long-distance, sending the domestic sniveling for a standing ten-count in the corner of the ring where my three personalities did battle.

  I did enjoy watching the rogue that year, as he nearly forced the professional into early retirement. Of course, the heartbroken domestic was still crying in the corner, unable to protest the rogue's reign of revelry. One week the rogue watched quietly as the professional worked hard to get us the highest grade on the first of three tests in our honors math class. The rogue had not said a word until we visited the professor for the results and learned the score had positioned me for a final grade no lower than C.

  "So, let me get this straight," I heard the rogue asking before the professional could stop him. "If I never attend the class again or take the other two tests, I can still get a C?"

  "That's right," said the professor, looking a little confused. "If a C is good enough, you have that now."

  "Deal," said the rogue, extending my hand and then mumbling some more nonsense about how this would provide me the
extra time to handle other challenging course work and get extra credit in those. The rogue knew we wouldn't be wasting all that free time on frivolity like academics. We had beers to drink and two coeds to juggle. The professional started to pout. The year was looking hopeless to him. So, he just stepped out of the way, surrendering our sophomore year to the rogue.

  Under the rogue's direction, I started working nights in a bar, playing poker until dawn just in time for my morning classes, and often finishing a week with no sleep from Tuesday through Saturday. A couple of co-eds recruited Ken and me to drive on a road trip to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break.

  The rogue enjoyed his first taste of forbidden love that Spring semester, too, when I established a liaison with a coed engaged to a guy still living in St. Louis. She visited him at home on alternate weekends while I inserted a girl from one of Columbia's two women's colleges into her spot in the monthly rotation, providing our first experience at relationship juggling, and successfully skulking under the radar as an infamous "other man."

  Once that school year ended, the rogue convinced me to spread my wings by finding a new job away from my dad's lawnmower shop. That's how I wound up at Boyles Galvanizing instead of St. John's Lawnmower Service for the summer. The boss at Boyles welcomed me with a smirk and said, "You're going to learn why you want to stay in college, boy." He taught me how to operate some machine that reduced the gauges on long rolls of wire. I would stand beside the machine while the wire ran through a shaver at high speeds. Every fifteen minutes the wire would break and start snapping around like a power cable severed in a storm, sparks shooting from the end. Each time, I would race to stop the machine before the flailing wire could whip around and poke me in the eye. Then, I would fire up a torch to weld the broken strands of wire back together and start all over again. In another part of the building, other workers weaved the coils to make chain link fencing. I regularly worked a second shift helping drag the finished fences through a boiling pool of zinc galvanizing agent designed to coat the wire against corrosion. I wondered about the stench and the fumes as I watched a toothless old man eating Gerber baby food for lunch. I asked him if he had worked there long.

  "Sure have," he said. "Ever since I got out of high school about ten years ago."

  So the prospect of a cross-country trip by thumb seemed the perfect reward for my suffering in the first two months of this summer, one that would become known as the notorious "Summer of Love." Songwriter Scott McKenzie provided the anthem, inviting all the hippies to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood where we'd wear flowers in our hair. He could not yet appreciate the significance of Charles Manson's parole that summer as well. But we all knew the Beatles would make a comeback with their classic Sergeant Pepper album. Ken and I weren't hippies, but we joined the migration anyhow. We just looked like a couple of short-haired, college boys when we stood beside the nation's iconic Route 66 outside St. Louis and stuck out our thumbs, hoping some strangers would take us west. I thought my "We Won't Rob You" suitcase would catch an eye.

  Almost immediately, our first ride came with a Mexican headed for…Mexico, of all places! Assured we had driver licenses, he stopped at the first grocery store to buy a small cooler, a bag of ice, and a case of beer. He climbed into the back seat and ordered: "Drive to Amarillo." He obviously planned to turn south from the famous roadway at that Texas Panhandle city, but he passed out somewhere in Oklahoma. We hoped he might sleep right through the stop. Something awakened him, however, and we found ourselves standing beside the highway in the night this time, seeking salvation at two in the morning. It arrived quickly in the form of an old mail truck rehabilitated by a thirty-year-old Bostonian headed west in pursuit of a girlfriend. Riding with him was another hitchhiker, a kid about our age headed home to San Francisco. It seemed the whole world was a-thumb that summer, and the other hitcher, of course, invited us to look him up when we headed north from our initial destination of Los Angeles.

  We had secured a couple of places to stay in Los Angeles and planned to hang out there for a couple of weeks before hitching north to San Francisco. My dad's sister, Aunt Francis, had offered a place to sleep at her home in Azusa, one of the Los Angeles suburbs. We also had an invitation from a rich chick named Laura who lived in a mansion in Palos Verdes and had attended one of the women's colleges in Columbia.

  We needed only a couple of days to reach LA, even after the rehabilitated postal truck broke down in New Mexico. We caught a lift with a big trucker who carted us all the way there. In Los Angeles, we continued hitching around town and even slept one night along the Santa Monica Freeway when we couldn't catch a ride back to Azusa. Laura picked us up and took us to the beaches. But we didn't even last one night at her house because her dad suffered a nervous breakdown while we were there. We awakened to his screams, "Who the fuck are they? Who are they?" Then Laura carted us back to my Aunt's, where my thirty-year-old cousin had come to visit. She was living in San Jose, just outside San Francisco, so we accepted an invitation to travel back to her house and make it the base for our exploration of Flower Power Central.

  Hitching around again, we located our friend from the postal truck and roamed around with him for a couple of days. I recall waking up one morning in a car on a cliff above the Pacific at Santa Cruz to the sound of sea lions roaring above the surf. As unsophisticated rubes from the Midwest, we didn't dabble in the drug culture there beyond sampling a little marijuana, which didn't seem to be as interesting to me as drinking beers. One stranger tried to recruit Ken to join his drug manufacturing business after Ken identified himself as a chemistry major at Mizzou. We both laughed, recalling his grade point, and declined the invitation.

  With Labor Day gone and the Fall semester on the near horizon, we started home from San Jose much the same as when we had left a few weeks earlier from St. Louis. My cousin dropped us at a tangle of connector freeways that would lead us to Interstate-80 and the northern route back home. I stuck out my thumb and took stock of my situation. I had sixty dollars cash in my pocket and stood two thousand miles from home, dependent on the fortunes of the road to get me there with no guaranties.

  I realized I had never felt so free as on that morning outside San Jose. I didn't know it then, but I would never feel that free again.

  Our only anxiety about catching a ride occurred when we risked a detour from the interstate south to Lake Tahoe just to see the place. The summer crowds had cleared, and we found it nearly deserted. I still have a picture someone snapped for the two of us, sitting on our towels on a beach by the lake with my "We Won't Rob You" suitcase in the background, loafers and sleeping bag off to the side. I'm wearing a gray University of Missouri T-shirt while Ken sits shirtless with his best Marlon Brando smirk across his face. We waited several hours for a local in a pickup to haul us back to the highway. Then we shot back to St. Louis, again in record time. The cops in Cheyenne escorted us out of town there with a laugh and warning: "No hitching inside the city." We rode down to Denver and stayed overnight in a YMCA. Then we picked up Interstate-70 for the return through Kansas City back to St. Louis.

  At the time I thought very little about the logistics of that trip. Mainly, I felt like a failure because we went all that way and never got laid. I was beginning to fear we would never make it as cocksmen. But we had traveled at least five thousand miles all together, most of that by thumb, and lived for a month on one hundred dollars or less. We'd seen the Pacific and the sea lions, San Francisco and the hippies, Sunset Strip, and the Whiskey A-Go-Go. It would only be in later years that I could come to appreciate the magnitude of the accomplishment itself and the precious nature of those memories.

  Back at Mizzou, reality had been waiting to pounce. Ken would be Army-bound within months, and I was destined to meet Boop in just a few weeks with that errant phone call to her dorm. The rogue had enjoyed his time behind the wheel, but the professional decided to lock him in the trunk for a while. Of course, neither knew the domestic stood poised to emerge and
lead us in a totally new direction with Boop for the next few years. But the rogue had not retired. He was just in hibernation, dreaming blissfully about the great times he knew were yet to come.

  TWENTY-THREE

  1970s

  If your roommate-lover came home late after a workout at the YMCA, you'd expect to find a gym bag filled with sweat-soaked clothes. Sure. And that's what Cindy figured one evening in early 1974, about six months before she got pregnant. I knew that's what she had expected once I saw the contorted look on her face, after she peeked inside to find my T-shirt and shorts still neatly folded with a pair of white crew socks rolled tightly in a ball. Fortunately, we had a guest from the apartment next door chatting away, or I might have been clobbered with that bag.