R-172 Where Interesting Old Ladies Come From

 In the end it turned out that at 17 years of age, I didn't know a goddam thing.

I didn't know that then, of course. Nor did I for a long time afterwards. I figured I knew everything I needed to know, and had nothing important left to learn.

There's your first clue to "stupid" by the way -- anyone who thinks they know everything about anything, much less everything about everything, is presumptively stupid right out of the gate.

I was out on my own for the first time, finishing up high school and working as a stocker at a local grocery. I had far and away enough hours to graduate, and was just marking time till someone got around to handing me a diploma. In my head, I was already gone.

In what was to become a lifetime predilection, I had a little money coming in, so nothing would do but that I spend it -- in this case on my first place to  live.

It was an entire house.  No, I didn't buy a house on a part-time high school stockboy's earnings. But I did pay rent on it, along with Mark and Josh and Dennis.

Dennis was 20 or so, and the closest to my age. Mark and Josh were 22 and 24 respectively.

It was a 1900 square-foot, two-bedroom house genteelly settling down into itself at the bottom of a dead-end street in a dead-end part of that tough little outlaw city. It was a shithole, I guess. I don't think I ever noticed one way or the other. I was raised around there a lot of years and it all looked fine to me.

But the living-room was large and the kitchen adequate and that little Bane Street shithole shortly became the most out-of-control party place on that end of town. It was the coolest thing I'd ever done up to that point in my life.

I had one of the bedrooms, Mark the other. Josh and Dennis would blow through as the mood and weather took them, and slept wherever was available when they happened to be in.

Dennis was a hard-core party-hearty type and his  good-looking 6' blonde and burnished surfer-boy looks made him very popular, not that anyone within 1000 miles had ever even seen a surfboard before. This meant he was usually spending the night or nights or a week or two at some girl's place.

The few times he overnighted at the house was because he had partied till he passed out in a corner somewhere and just hadn't got around to leaving or some girl had gotten fed up with him and chucked his ass out. He was pretty spotty with his part of the rent, but he'd always eventually come up with it, especially if Mark or Josh crawled up his ass about it.

Josh came and went on his own schedule, often disappearing for a week or two at a time, and hardly ever spending more than two or three days at the house in a row. He always slept on the couch in the livingroom, noisy, quiet, partying, loud music, or whatever. I believe the man could have slept through a London air raid, but for some reason, he could never get comfortable in a real bed.

Josh's brother Mark was a fireplug-shaped pile of muscle topped by dark hair and tense, dangerous eyes. He laughed a lot but behind the jokes and manic smiles he absolutely radiated a wobbling, knife's-edge balance that felt on the verge of tipping into some astonishing violence at any minute.

Josh, on the other hand, while sharing his brother's Mediterranean/Italian dark complexion, was tallish and could be mistaken for skinny.

"Mistaken" because he was actually as hard as a coffin nail, as they say, and made mostly of high-tensile piano wire, drop-forged blades, and steel rods.

Dennis and I had never been anywhere, really. We were just a couple of local boys. I can't for the life of me remember how I met any of them, although I suspect it was related to the mechanic's shop and gas station I'd worked the previous year.

But Mark and Josh, even at their young ages, had already done their time in the military.

Josh was Army Infantry and had done two tours and part of a third in Vietnam. Mark had also done two tours in Vietnam but with the Marines. Both of them had Purple Hearts for combat wounds and, I think, various other decorations that neither would ever, not even once, not even in passing, discuss at all.

Both men's' eyes looked like they were a thousand years old.

Mark had a volcanic temper 24/7, frequent migraines, and occasional flashbacks to night ambush patrol, especially when he'd been drinking, which made him a right exciting roommate.

Josh's life was spent in unsmiling, smoldering quiet, always watching. He'd occasionally come unwound which would usually end with various iterations of police and jail.  

One late night Josh and I were in his Jeep looping the drag once just to see who was out and about. We were supposed to be on a quick beer run and people were waiting on us, but they could wait an extra 20 minutes.

"There's that fucker," Josh suddenly exclaimed, and without signal or warning cut a tire-smoking U-Turn to pull in behind the decrepit, patch-painted Camaro we'd just passed. He flashed his lights and the Camaro pulled into a fairly populated parking lot that was commonly used for night-people gatherings.

Josh stopped behind him and reached under his seat and pulled out a "tire thumper". This was a stick probably about 16" long and as big around as a nightstick. About 3-4" of metal collared one end of the stick, meaning it was essentially a club with one heavy metal end. Truckers use them to "thump" their tires to see if they're flat or going low, which is about the only way to check them, especially the inside dually of a trailer.

Anyhow, they were pretty common in those parts and popular among people who couldn't legally carry weapons (such as Josh) because of prior run-ins with any of a number of parts of the judicial system. It's not a weapon, you see. It's a tire-related tool, at least until it's USED as a weapon.

Josh stepped down out of the Jeep, but when I started to open my door to follow he said, "We may have to leave in a hurry. Stay there so I don't have to collect you."

His tone brooked no argument, and I shrugged and shut my door without saying anything. Josh nodded, and said "I'll be right back," then went to work shattering and scattering literally every piece of glass out of the driver's side of the Camaro from the license plate light to the headlights and turn-signals, and every window between including the windshield.

The car was stuck between the Jeep and a parking barrier and couldn't move, and no one inside seemed inclined to get out, which Josh resolved by simply dragging the driver out onto the pavement through the now-non-window.

The driver, a greasy-haired, blonde, pock-marked doper who matched his raggedy-assed car, was a street-kid I vaguely knew. He dressed in a weird late-60's combination of pimp-wide bellbottom Levis and ragged t-shirt, both of which highlighted his skeletal frame.

In the clutches of black-jeaned and t-shirted Josh, he looked like a mangy, starving rat-terrier in the jaws of a Rottweiler.

By now, fast getaway or no, I was out the door and yelling at Josh to stop and get back into the Jeep.

"Josh, if you hit him with that thing it's assault with a weapon and you're going to prison." For a split second he dropped the doper who fell like a sack of wheat, and turned on me with an expression that turned my bowels to water, then the madness behind his eyes began to fade. I grabbed that flicker of sanity.

"Let's get the fuck out of Dodge before the cops turn up," I said. "Josh, you listening?"

"Yeah," he said, then turned to the driver he'd dragged out onto the pavement and kicked him in the ribs, hard. "So what do you have to say now, you little cocksucker?" The driver gibbered and Josh said "Yeah, that's what I thought."

He looked at me again, irritated. "I thought I told you to stay in the Jeep."

The cops had us before we were even out of the parking lot.

As always, it took three of them to take him down. They all knew him, so the "investigation" was pretty perfunctory. They didn't even bother to ID me, but, surprisingly let me take his Jeep home. Normally they'd impound it so he'd have to spend another $150.00 to get it out. I think they thought I might steal it, which would have amused them no end.

A week later he convinced a judge to let him OR ("Own Recognizance") out of jail, which I found out one afternoon when I got in from work and he was sitting on the livingroom couch drinking a beer.

"You look like shit," I told him.

"Yeah," he shrugged, "the cops never got around to transferring me to the County lockup, so I spent it all in the City jail. It's pretty  grim." He finished the beer in two swallows and said, "Where's my keys?"

I tossed them over to him.

"I just drove it home. Haven't even started it since."

"That will work," he said. "Thanks."

He lay down on the couch and wrapped the blanket we used as an upholstery cover around him. "Gotta get some sleep," he said, his eyes already heavy. He suddenly snapped full awake and pointed at me.

"Next time, stay in the fucking Jeep," he said, then without another word, sound, or twitch, dropped into deep sleep for 15 hours.

Six or eight months later he pled to simple assault and resisting arrest and took a $200.00 fine and time served. The Camaro kid said the fight was his own fault, and no, he had no clue who might have damaged his car. He was also well-known to the local law enforcement apparatus, who collectively shrugged and decided if he didn't give a shit, they didn't either.

I never did find out what the beef was about in the first place.

Mark actually was more dangerous than Josh. He was a lot more fun to hang out with, mostly because his weirdness didn't take the dark, morose turns that Josh's did. They tended more to the unpredictably incendiary.

He was generally pretty stable as long as he didn't drink, and more usefully, he mellowed to smiling tolerance and bon-homme and a new appreciation for the girls who used to hang around the place when he was smoking hash, and to a lesser degree, marijuana.

The hash discovery was a happy accident. Back then it was so expensive that he'd never bothered with it, even when he was in SE Asia. This all changed when Josh turned up one night with a tin-foil wrapped package the shape of a small brick containing around 1/2 kilo of dark, oily, Turkish hashish. Even in those days it was worth somewhere between $5K and $8K, and that's in late-60s dollars. 

(Oddly enough, it's about the same price now, but in 2022 dollars - legalization efforts have driven the relative prices down.)

I hadn't a clue where he got it, although I suspected it was something related to a military contact from the old days. He never said. Of course, he never said much of anything.

Since this stuff is smoked in pea-sized gram-or-less chunks that produced a long high and, for all the partying, none of us were 24/7 stoners, a half-kilo represented weeks, or maybe even months of use.

I dunno, maybe Josh was selling it on the side, but I never saw any indication of it, and the brick never seemed to get that much smaller.

Personally, I was a juicer (drinker) and didn't (still don't) have much use for other drugs in general and cannabis-related drugs in particular. I  didn't like the high, which made my thinking muddy, besides which a not-uncommon result for me was becoming unbearably paranoid.

I almost never indulged, and the one time I shared hits on that hash pipe with the glowing bead of Turkish goodness, it knocked the shit out of me until the next morning.  

Not a fan, thanks.

Then, disaster.

As I said, there was a lot of partying going on at the house. One of the regular attendees was pretty, petite, free-spirited, blue-eyed and brunette Amanda. An almost stereotypical 60s hippie girl, she was friendly as a puppy.

Dennis had brought Amanda around one night and she eventually started coming around on her own even after Dennis had moved on to other conquests.  We liked her and she liked us, and she was down for about anything that involved a little grass and only rarely actually getting around to having sex with anyone. The key word there being "rarely", as she'd almost never indulge, and only then as the mood moved her and on her terms.

Mark and Josh both had a "big-brother" vibe going with her for some reason, which made her essentially invulnerable to anyone who knew either or both of them. Getting much past the "flirting" stage with her unless she signed on for it was navigating  dangerous and choppy waters. She'd as well have been accompanied by a pair of ill-tempered timber wolves. In fact, she was probably safer with us than she was going to school. I'm not sure she even noticed.

But I've learned since then that sometimes girls know more than you probably think they do.

I think that is at least partially why she wasn't even a little bashful about enthusiastically getting naked or as near to it as some rare situation demanded. Eh, hippie girls -- what are you gonna do?

During one long night one of the stoners got lost in a project that involved trying to make gloves out of tin-foil.

Don't ask.

Watching him fart around making aluminum hands, it occurred to us to try to make a full-body version of Amanda because why not. None of us had anything approaching artistic talent, so we opted for the more straightforward method of molding her in the tinfoil, sort of like the stoner's glove, but more of a one-sided mold rather than a 3-D sculpture.

Amanda thought this was a terrific idea. She stripped to her panties and lay on the living-room floor and three or four of us, including a couple of girls, laid sheets of tinfoil over her and carefully molded it to her shape from ankles to throat, which was made vastly more entertaining by her giggling and trying to not squirm around.  

Apparently the process tickles, "...but less than paint," as she informed us.

We discovered that the individual sheets could be pinched and folded into one another which meant we didn't even have to use scotch tape, which was the first idea to hold the whole thing together. This was good because the scotch tape plan utterly ignored the fact that we'd have better luck finding a gold brick than tape in that house that time of night.  I can't even imagine how we turned up a roll of Reynolds wrap. The glove guy might have brought it with him for all I know.

Once we were done (and I'll admit it was some of the most intricate, fascinating hands-on detail work I've ever done on any project in my life) we carefully peeled it off of her in a single piece.

As the old woman in “Titanic” said, it was the most erotic experience I'd ever had, at least that didn’t result in actual sex. Judging by the flushed faces of my coworkers, boys AND girls, I wasn’t  the only one.

After some discussion, we used a couple of clothes-pins and some wire to hang it from the ceiling, making it appear to be standing in the corner between the couch and the armchair, "hollow" side out toward the center of the room.

It was not perfect by any means -- we never did sort out how to do the arms, so it was mostly a torso and legs -- but was pretty friggin' impressive, especially when she stood next to it in her ragged cutoffs and crop-top in the same pose looking as delighted as a kid on Christmas morning.

If this were happening today, we'd doubtless have taken a million pictures of the project and the result, but being then, and being poor, we only managed three or four crappy square Polaroids of her standing next to it, a picture that as far as I know exists now only in my mind.

But this is where the problem started. Amanda wanted one of the pictures because she thought the whole thing was hysterical, and fair's fair. It was actually her after all...

...and two days later just about dark, she called us from a pay phone in a panic and said her dad had found it and was on the warpath. She wouldn't give us up to him, but he'd called the cops anyway.

This was bad. We figured it would be about 30 seconds before they talked to the cops in OUR city and figured it out (we weren't exactly low profile).

We weren't too worried about getting wrapped around the axle over Amanda, since she claimed to be 18. Who knows, maybe she actually was. Either way, a glance at her would explain any discrepancies in judgement on that score.

No, our problem was that any cop with half his wits about him would smell the months of parties crawling like a horror-movie mist out the front door before he got close enough to even knock.  

This, for those of you playing at home, is what we call "probable cause".  In short, we expected men in blue with a warrant in hand to be in tearing the place to the ground in about 30 minutes, which expectation was considerably enhanced by the drug/liquor/PTSD-fueled paranoia.

(No one called it PTSD back then, by the way. In fact, no one officially noticed it at all, so far as I could tell.)

Fortunately, we were in a comparatively dry spell and really had nothing but some paraphernalia and residue laying around the place. They'd have to work their asses off to figure out who owned even that bit, and all for a couple of misdemeanor hits that would barely amount to a fine.

But none of us wanted to be anywhere around that silvered brick consisting of a pound of the finest hash in the state. In those days THAT was no-bullshit go to prison stuff and it had such a potent earthy reek, I doubted they'd even need a dog to home in on it.

Mark and I swept through the house and filled a garbage bag with miscellaneous problematic stuff and ran it to the city dump while Dennis and Josh disappeared the hash. There wasn't anyone in the city we could trust with that amount of anything, much less primo hash, so they buried it out in the desert for later retrieval when the heat went away.

But the heat never went away. That's not to say it never let up -- it never began at all. We never heard another word about any of it, official or otherwise.  

Much later I found out second or third hand that Amanda's father had shipped her to Murray, Utah to live  with some maiden aunt who had time to keep close track of her for the rest of the summer, after which she began her Freshman year at BYU.

We never heard from her again. Amanda was a good kid. I hope she did well.

After a couple of weeks, when it was clear that nothing was coming of it, we all relaxed. For a minute anyhow. Then Josh and Dennis went out to dig up the hash.

They couldn't find it. Who knew that a couple of stoned guys off-roading in the middle of the night in a pretty-much featureless desert couldn't figure out a couple of weeks later where they'd dug a 2' deep posthole? In retrospect, it seemed like a pretty obvious flaw in the plan.

To say this put everyone into a foul mood would be to vastly understate the case. We four drank beer and passed around a bottle of Jack and commiserated and called each other dumbasses. Mark was getting pretty drunk and loud about it, and Josh tried to get a handle on it, but Mark wasn't having it.

"You and that stupid motherfucker" (here gesturing in the general direction of Dennis) "lost it, and I'm supposed to just get over it? Fuck you, man."

Josh said he'd brought it in the first place and didn't have to put up with any shit from a dumbassed jarhead about what he did with it, and Mark asked why not since HE had to put up with a stoner infantry pussy who couldn't find his ass with both hands tied behind him.  

Things rapidly deteriorated.

Having stayed completely below the radar of both of them, I finally decided to call it a night, as I was worn out and needed some sleep. This decision crystalized when Mark ripped a leg off the coffee table and charged Dennis while yelling that he'd show Josh how to handle "gooks who are screwing with you". Apparently he'd decided that Dennis had ripped us off.

Josh got the table leg away from Mark and Dennis dove out of the front door and disappeared into the night, so things worked out, but by now Mark was in the full-blown middle of one of his psycho episodes and I just wasn't in the mood.

I locked my bedroom door that night, mostly to keep either of them from trying to recruit me to their side of the argument, and slept like a stone. As I said at the beginning: At 17 years of age, I didn't know a goddam thing.

The next morning the place was trashed. Josh was back in his spot on the couch sleeping and Mark was passed out in the easy-chair, his head thrown back, snoring loudly. I packed my shit and moved back across town to my parents' place before either even stirred.

I didn't see any of them for months. By that time I had been through Basic Training and AIT, and was back in town on leave. I ran across Mark and Josh drinking coffee one night down in the ratty cafe where I was eventually to meet my wife.

Josh saw me walking up to the table and smiled. This was disconcerting, as I'd never seen him smile before. Mark glanced around and said "Where the fuck have you been?" as if I'd just wandered away from the table a few moments before.

I gestured indicating the new military field jacket and polished combat boots.

"What the hell have you done? Jeezus, you even got a haircut," said Josh.

"It's good enough for you two, it's good enough for me," I answered. "I've been in for about six months. I was bored and figured I'd probably be drafted anyway."

They glanced at me again then at each other.

"We fucked up," said Josh, and Mark grunted agreement.

"You gotta do what you gotta do," said Josh, "but if I was you, I'd run, or hide, or go to Canada. Get out before..." he trailed off. "Well, at least keep your head down," he finished.

"Naw," I said, "I'll be OK. So far I like it."

Mark glanced down at my polished boots.

"Fuckin' lifer," he said. Josh's turn to grunt in the affirmative. They went back to their coffee and never even glanced my direction again.

I actually worked in the same organization as Dennis many years later. He seemed disinclined to talk about the old days, having converted from dry-land surfer-boy stoner into a generally well-regarded solid citizen. His ashes were scattered in a favorite hunting spot up in the mountains ten or fifteen years ago.

Mark married a woman as crazy as he was and they spent decades orbiting each other like a pair of black holes, unbreakably bound and ripping each other to shreds. They seemed happy enough. 

 He became a member and sometimes commander of several local veterans' organizations and a was major advocate for mental health treatment and care for combat vets. He was buried with full military honors, making it into the new millennium by a couple of years, I imagine to his considerable surprise.

Josh just kind of dropped out of sight, going to work in the mines and eventually retiring. He nearly made 80. I stumbled across his obituary the other day, which is what sparked this little run of memory. 

It was two paragraphs and didn't mention any family at all. The picture showed me exactly the same guy who knocked the glass out of that car, except a lot more lined and gray. He was sitting unsmiling in a living room somewhere wearing a wife-beater shirt and with a beer in his hand. Evidentially it was the best picture of him they had.

He was buried with full military honors not far from Mark.

Amanda will be in her early 70s now, if she's still alive. I imagine I could find out, but I really don't want to know. She exists in enchanted perfection in the unreliable narrative of my memory, and that's enough. But I sometimes wonder if she ever thinks of us, or maybe even drops into a reverie and does that little-girl giggle for a second when wrapping something in tinfoil...mostly, I wonder if anyone knows now how interesting this old lady was back in her day. Maybe she still is.

I hope so, on all counts.

I think it's safe to say that those months in that place changed the course of my life for good or ill. As I told Mark and Josh that night in that ratty cafe on that dangerous street in that hard little city: "I like it."

And now, here we are.