Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Page 9

  Those times in Flint formed the kind of idyllic salad days on which many couples usually build their lives together. We struggled some financially but learned to live within our means. And many times when I have needed to find peace in the midst of some later life hassle, I have retreated in my mind back to that time when the world stood filled with promise. Just as she had at Mizzou, Boop became one of the "guys"—a mascot at The Flint Journal. Several nights each week, staffers would gather at a bar beside the shoe shop to blast away the stress, and she fit right in. By the time we left in 1971, she had become so engrained that a fellow reporter felt obliged to include her in the final scene of a farewell movie he'd prepared for my departure party. He ended that film by telling the crowd, "Here's the real reason we tolerated Taylor these past two years." Then his film cut to a long shot of Boop walking away from the Journal building, twisting her ass in a miniskirt, and looking back over a shoulder to wink.

  But our relationship had started to change in a subtle way even before we entertained thoughts of leaving Flint. The catalyst came in the surprising form of my draft lottery victory, the one that placed my birthday so far from the front that we could finally plan on a long-term future without an interruption for the draft or Vietnam. We suddenly had to face a troubling question: Had we really expected a concept as serious as long-term? We should have been overjoyed with the lottery as a deliverance, and, on the surface, we appeared to celebrate. But we never discussed the doubts. For the first time, however, I got scared about commitment, and I believe she did, too. Those doubts stormed to the surface as we questioned our next moves. Buy a house? Have a baby? Buy furniture? Get into debt? Meanwhile, we privately confronted the more basic question each on our own: What did we really want with our lives? In lieu of an answer, we just marched along.

  Boop enrolled at the Flint campus for the University of Michigan while I focused on my job. She seemed pointed to the future. Then I came to a conclusion that I needed to move on to a bigger challenge in a place with a better climate. Although she wanted to finish school, Boop agreed to relocate our shared life adventure, provided I found a place interesting enough to her. Houston worked for both of us.

  Once again we couldn't afford the out-of-state tuition in Texas, so she had to find a job and wait a year to become a resident. This time, however, she wanted something more interesting than shoe repair and found it teaching in a school for retarded children south of town. We bought a second car for her and began our lives again. I worked nights at the police station while she worked days in the school. After a year, we woke up one morning to discover we really didn't know each other anymore. Boop had the courage to be the first to voice a doubt, and it took me by surprise.

  "There's a problem, Gary and I don't know what it is," she said one day in December of 1972. "But this just isn't working any more. Something has to change."

  Despite our liberated view of the world on the surface, we still clung to those Midwestern values that considered divorce an unspeakable word. But what was wrong with me? I wondered. My self-esteem flushed down the toilet, and I decided to give myself a thorough character exam. In the end I determined the problem: In my focus on the future, I had become a square. I was an old man at the age of twenty-four. I didn't even listen to rock music any more. And who knows how I performed in bed? All these things, I decided, would have to change.

  By the time Boop finally left in March of 1973, I was prepared for the end. We had been to a party the night before. We woke up on Sunday and made love. Then she told me she planned to rent an apartment that afternoon. I chuckled as I remembered a teasing comment from a friend at that party. When he asked Boop to name her favorite song, he said, she had looked at me and sighed: "I Can't Get No Satisfaction."

  She really busted me up for a while, but I recovered. And I quickly became grateful she had the strength to stop our charade. It worked out best for us both. Although we were married for nearly four years, I still look back on that relationship with the sort of memories reserved for a high school romance. In many ways we functioned more like brother and sister. But we crossed a bridge into the adult world together and learned the value of helping each other along.

  Her candor with me helped me get my life back on track. And she was one reason I had a promising career. What if she never comes back? I asked myself. What if she'd never come at all? I replied. I confronted the demons of possession and dispatched them with development of a new philosophy: We can only expect from another person what they already have given. Anything more is gravy.

  In my personal makeover, I grew one of the earliest beards seen at The Post and won the nickname Junkyard from my colleagues who often heard me joking about the lyrics from the Jim Croce song about "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" being "meaner than a junkyard dog." They said it seemed to fit my new persona. I developed a social life again. And I got my reward about a year after the split when one of Boop's friends told me Boop had been complaining only half in jest about our divorce. Boop had told her, "I dump a guy because he turns into a stiff and then what happens? Three weeks later he's cool."

  But it couldn't have happened if she hadn't dumped me. I realized that. I also realized I harbored only one regret about our marriage. I had practiced fidelity. I thought wistfully of all the attractive women working that courthouse in Flint. But I had been true and turned them away. Many times again when I have needed to find peace in the midst of some later life hassle, I have retreated in my mind back to that time in Flint, when the world stood filled with so much pussy that eluded my grasp. There has been more to finding my "happy place" than recalling idyllic times with Boop. Besides my beard, I had grown a new attitude about fidelity—never again. Everyone should have secrets they can take to the grave. I wanted some of my own.

  SIXTEEN

  Mid-1970s

  A series of timely trends converged in the 1970s to transform those years into the decade of what I call the Great American Boomer Bacchanal. Future historians should look back at the '70s and recognize them as the years when the so-called sexual revolution peaked. For starters, on the scientific front, birth control pills, and intrauterine devices had removed one of the great fears of unprotected sex by providing secure methods for contraception. With enhanced antibiotics licking the threat of serious venereal diseases, scientific advances appeared to have rendered the condom obsolete.

  Then, on the moral and social front, the largest population bubble in U.S. history had entered its most active and experimental sexual age, as troopers in the first generation of the World War II Baby Boom reached their mid-twenties. Each old enough to have sampled first love, most were just completing initial attempts at marriage. With many divorced or wishing they were, innocence had vanished. Fears of singles-bar serial killers would not become a deterrent until the exploits of Ted Bundy splashed across television screens with his trial in 1979. And the threatening reality of AIDS as a serious sexual disease scourge would not emerge until the early 1980s.

  In short, getting laid in the 1970s was about as difficult as getting sand on your feet while strolling a beach. So I emerged from my first marriage in March of 1973 and quickly enlisted in the revolution. For about four months I stayed single, and at times it wore me out. I moved into an apartment complex known as "Heartbreak Hotel." The place catered to short-timers suffering breaks in relationships, and everyone enjoyed nursing their sorrows together. Two of Boop's girlfriends also assisted my transition, and, finally in September, I rented a more suitable one-bedroom apartment in Houston's Bohemian Montrose section—a neighborhood that better reflected my fantasies of a bachelor pad inhabited by the big city reporter.

  Seeking self-improvement and still curious about fulfilling my potential as a writer, I signed up to take a few night courses at the University of Houston in creative writing and literature. Oh yeah, this program also included the potential for meeting some new women, and that's where I met wife number two. Let's call her Cindy. A tall, dishwater blonde with a shag hair style, s
he was described by some back then as resembling the actress Diane Keaton. Just twenty-one, Cindy was trying to finish a degree in English. She worked days as a secretary for a physician who performed hand surgeries. She was married to an accountant who had wooed her when they were students at the University of Texas in Austin. He'd graduated, landed a job at a firm in Houston, and they had relocated the year before. She had about a year left on her degree program.

  Cindy was quiet in class and never spoke to me. But she had a girlfriend in the class who did, and the girlfriend arranged for us to get together. The girlfriend was nursing a crush on our professor, a mid-thirties guy then separated from his first wife. One night about a week into the class, the four of us ended up at the professor's apartment to drink wine and debate the meaning of life. Of course, things quickly deteriorated—or maybe escalated—and we discovered more immediate meaning in the physical. Within a week Cindy had assumed control of my sex life, or at least the central core of it, and then we returned to discussions on the meaning of life.

  Her life was in shambles. The husband was a bum. She was struggling to find her own focus. She wanted to leave but just didn't know how. They had gotten married in school because she thought she was pregnant. When they discovered a false pregnancy, her husband rebelled and treated her poorly, like a man who had been tricked. She suffered no physical beatings, but he didn't respect her, talked down and blah, blah, blah. It all sounded like some script from soap opera central, and I listened through my reporter's skeptical ear. I figured the husband probably had an equally sad tale, but I wasn't there to make judgments. I was there at first to get laid. I also discovered the risk of having sex with another man's wife in his bed added an extra level of excitement. We never came close to discovery, but, then again, my tenure as her extramarital lover didn't last that long. I mentioned once or twice she'd be welcome to stay with me while sorting things out. So, one Sunday night, she showed up at my door with a suitcase in one hand and her cat in the other. I let her inside, and thus began a wild but rewarding rollercoaster ride destined to last six more years. Neither of us made any promises to the other.

  Coincidentally, Cindy also had grown up in St. Louis, leaving there her senior year of high school when her dad got a job as a professor at Texas A&M University in College Station about ninety miles northwest of Houston. Her St. Louis high school had been just a few miles from mine. So we decided to take a trip down Memory Lane to St. Louis during Thanksgiving weekend and stay at my family's home. I introduced her as my new roommate and got a stunned look from my dad that translated: "I thought this only happened in San Francisco or Tanganyika." My little sister told me later she had been expecting a total skank but was pleasantly surprised with Cindy's demeanor. My mom said, "I thought maybe you'd move back home after your divorce." I could only shake my head in wonder. My only regret about the trip occurred when my high school girlfriend visited on the off chance I had come home for the holiday. She, too, had just recently divorced and obviously desired her own trip down Memory Lane. Unfortunately I couldn't figure any way to sneak off. The week was just too short.

  So, Cindy and I started playing house, and it was different from my marriage to Boop. Cindy worked all day and attended classes at night with an eye toward graduation. I quickly recognized her as an extremely driven and ambitious woman, uncertain of what exactly she wanted to do in life but determined to make it meaningful. I respected that. We operated fairly independent of each other, and she started to grow on me. We took a trip together to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, sharing rickety old buses with peasants and their chickens, hiking around the Mayan ruins, and then staying a few days on a Caribbean island off the coast called Isla Mueres. We rented hammocks and slept on the beach. It was all very third world and certainly exotic to be tramping that area before Mexico's resort-building boom occurred. We were good for each other at that time in our lives.

  But I'm not sure either of us ever saw our relationship then as a long-term proposition. I know I didn't. I needed some time to recover from my divorce and reconstruct my future around a vision of myself as a loner again. She needed a sanctuary for finishing school without the distractions of a disintegrating marriage. Our relationship provided a vehicle for both goals. Looking ahead with a fresh attitude, I began to entertain visions for solitary travel. A friend had just returned from a year's sabbatical bumming around Africa, and I wondered if it wasn't time to move along from The Post. Cindy and I both knew a turning point of some sort lay just ahead if we could only sort through the fog and map a path. That turning point arrived, but not in the way we expected.

  About a month after I covered the 1974 prison siege in Huntsville, Cindy wanted a serious talk. I expected her to ask about our future. I figured she had reached a conclusion for herself. When she told me she was pregnant, I was stunned. She had stopped taking the pill and switched to an IUD. I guess it just hadn't worked.

  "I'm not having an abortion," she volunteered defiantly as we discussed our options.

  OK, I thought, if she is going to have the baby, I will be a father. There's no way to change that. But I never had entertained any desire to raise children and had fought every way possible to prevent it. Her condition ranked among my worst nightmares.

  Commit the crime, gotta do the time, I thought to myself, laughing a little. Would I really consider conception a crime? And the time? That would be a twenty-year sentence for me at the least. Should I run? Should I just pay child support and turn the kid into a monthly bill without any larger constraints on my life?

  Nope, I decided more quickly than I believed possible as I reviewed my options. Here is a new adventure, I concluded: fatherhood.

  Discussing things further, we backtracked the days to determine where this might have happened. When we pinpointed the date, I shook my head.

  "Remember that night you came to Huntsville during the prison riot, and we slept in the tent behind the prison administration building?" I asked.

  "Shit," she said. "That means…"

  "It means we made that child on the lawn at the Texas Department of Corrections while I was covering a major news story. This kid will be a real legend at the paper."

  It was worth a good laugh before we went to bed with the sobering thought that the mysterious maw of parenthood stood gaping before us, ready to swallow us whole.

  SEVENTEEN

  Mid-1970s

  If the news of Cindy getting knocked up during the prison riot wasn't enough to generate gossip at the paper, our "wedding" set a new standard for chitchat.

  "First things first," I told one of my colleagues at the paper, outlining my strategy for transformation into a family man.

  "Reminds me of Lady and the Tramp," he replied. "Cindy takes a junkyard dog and turns him into a real show animal."

  I had saved about fifteen hundred dollars and decided to start with the purchase of a house. Unsure of how long our relationship might last, I thought it best to accumulate some assets. Within a week I found a little bungalow in Houston's gentrifying Heights neighborhood, just north of downtown. A purple, one-story stucco structure about fifty years old, it had been converted to a duplex and needed work. But I was surprised I had been able to find a place where I could afford the payments. I managed to buy into that neighborhood at an opportune time for a price of fifteen thousand dollars with seller financing by a little old lady who had owned it for years. I spent a few days painting the interior and had carpet installed. Then we moved from the apartment into the house.

  Cindy had seen an obstetrician and started on her vitamins.

  We ticked off our to-do list and decided the only thing left was to get married. I was covering county government at the time and worked at the courthouse. So I told her to come over on September 18, 1974, and meet me at noon in the offices of Judge Larry Wayne, a friend who served as justice of the peace for the downtown precinct. He had acquired a nickname of "Marryin' Sam"—after the character in the L'il Abner comics—because his chamber
s stood just down the hall from the county office that processed marriage licenses, providing couples a convenient location for one-stop nuptials. Wayne led all the county's justices in wedding fees, earning more from performing marriages as a sideline than he did from his judicial salary. Cindy showed up over the lunch break wearing one of her early maternity outfits, and we walked inside his office, license in hand.

  "The time has come," I told Wayne, who took one look at her and started laughing. He escorted us into his office and began to mumble some ceremonial nonsense before I cut him off.

  "We'll just take the five-dollar job."

  He looked a little surprised but then signed the bottom of our license without any elaboration.

  "OK, it's done," he said, handing the certificate back to me. "It will cost you thousands now to get out of this."