My Friendship with Ray Haney (A

MY FRIENDSHIP WITH RAY HANEY

A Fictional Memoir

My friendship with Ray Haney began on the first day of first grade when we both got stuck in crotchety old Mrs. Knuckles’ class. It ended a few months ago, when we were sixteen, on an unexpectedly sour note, sad to say. But now that I just turned seventeen, I’ve gained some perspective on things, which I hope to tell you about, because a strong urge compels me to record and preserve my coming of age stories for posterity, whoever that turns out to be.

It was a good run of about nine years for me and Ray, and though we were just young roustabouts growing up in innocent small-time America, where nothing really exciting or notable ever happened, we packed a ton of living in, more than most kids our age or any age for that matter; enough living, in fact, to fill a whole book with stories of our youthful bravado, carpe diem pranks, and crazy hijinks that got us into a world of trouble on more than one occasion.

There’s a few stories I remember and want to tell you about, and it’s fortunate I’m alive to be able to tell them, if the truth be known, because when we were fourteen, Ray’s mom picked us up from school one day in early November when it got dark like at five, and, terrible driver that she was, she thought she could beat an oncoming car barreling towards us as she raced across the highway intersection that stupidly didn’t have a stoplight. I mean, it wasn’t even close. We didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. The oncoming car struck us broadside going about fifty, I’d guess, and the little station wagon we were in rolled over and over, I’m not kidding, three times, and then we skidded across the highway — luckily no semi-truck was coming — and ended up in the opposite ditch, upside down. It was a frightening surreal sequence of events, and for a second, I thought we’d all been killed because no one was moving and it was deathly quiet.

Suddenly Ray’s mom sprang to life and yelled, “Is everyone all right? Oh, my God! Ray, Ray!?”

Me and a good friend, Brady Evans, had been in the back seat, and in our upside positions, we stammered, “Yeah, we’re fine, we’re okay, Mrs. Haney.” Ray was motionless, though, like he was no longer among the living. I shook him and he eventually came to, and we all piled out of the car before it exploded in flames or something. The most amazing thing of all, for not wearing seat belts and that car being an old piece of tin can junk, was that we had emerged unscathed, that none of us had been injured in the slightest.

When I got home and walked in (it was late, weren’t they wondering where I was?), my family was eating supper together and I excitedly told them the dramatic, near tragic, news, but they all just stared at me with blank looks like they didn’t even believe me.

Mom raised her eyebrows and said, “Oh, c’mon, now.”

My two older sisters and younger brother barely deigned to look up from their plates. Dad gave me a once-over, and said, “Yeah, sure, now sit down and eat some supper, son.”

I did my best to convince them I wasn’t making this up. “Listen! I almost died,” I whined, “Ray’s mom was trying to . . .” but I tailed off, ’cause it seemed useless, like they thought I was just looking for attention. But come to think of it, it didn’t matter, because in my young heart I felt supremely fortunate and grateful to just be alive . . . to tell you these stories today three years later.

I call this period of our friendship the halcyon years, ’cause I recently learned that word and decided it was befitting to describe the broad arc of what seemed like an eternal summertime of escapades when we roamed near and far as free as the birds and as scrounge-worthy for exploration and adventure as the town’s stray dogs. Those summer days, of birthday parties, 4th of July fireworks, kickball games in the yard, and warm evenings catching fireflies and stargazing, they were idyllic times, but always coming to an end with school starting up way too soon, and always a new year to look forward to, with the onset of fall colors and splashing about in piles of leaves we’d then set fire to, and then those god-awful harsh winters with horrific cold winds blowing down from icy Lake Michigan to transform our green, colorful world into a barren but beautiful Arctic landscape of weeks-long blizzards and epic ice storms. But oh how we loved the Yuletide season, because it meant lots of presents at Christmas, and school getting let out due to the crappy weather, and for days on end with no homework or nothing better to do, we’d spend endless hours freezing our asses off while ice skating and sledding and having raucous snowball fights. To be sure, it was all rowdy fun, sometimes escalating into shoving and yelling matches — certainly none of that pussying around with Frosty the Snowman or making girly snow angels or stupid Christmas caroling for us boys!

But the good times were bound to come to an end as we grew up and discovered new interests and became attracted to a new crowd of people and fell under different influences. Yes, all of that happens with most friendships, I’d be willing to bet, but Ray and I, we grew apart, and it was pretty instantly, because of an inconceivable line in the sand my best friend crossed a few months ago. That’s why I’m writing it all down, because it needs to be said, and I don’t want to forget any of it while it’s still fresh in my mind. Besides, for me it’s like a sort of personal therapy to get it out of my system, to make sense of things, but also to preserve it like an archaeological fossil record, or a snap shot of those days like a prehistoric insect trapped in ancient amber, if any of that makes sense.

As far as my earliest memories go, I don’t recall too much, other than meeting Ray on the very first day when the old biddie (that’s what we called Mrs. Knuckles) assigned our seats right next to each other. We teamed up to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, dutifully placing our little hands upon our hearts, and when all was said and done, Ray turned and looked me in the eye, and said, “I pledge allegiance to you, my friend, for all time.” Well, that sealed the deal between us. From that day on, at least for the next nine years, we were best friends, we were the mavericks of our class, the alpha leaders of our pack of knucklehead pals we ran with. For me, I just thought Ray was the coolest guy ever.

As we got a bit older, our awkward, pimply pre-puberty phase gradually gave way to, not quite manhood yet, but to a period when Ray quickly outgrew me and turned into a wiry but sturdy kid given to wearing cowboy boots and rhinestone shirts. He let his strawberry colored hair fall down over his rubbery ears and slicked it back with some kind of gooey substance that smelled faintly of candy wax. I always thought Ray was a cool wranglin’ dude with his cowboy outfit, ’cause me, well, my attire consisted basically of dorky-looking and ill-fitting flannel shirts and dumb white gym shoes or clod-hoppers, and Mom, dang-it-all, always made me go up to the local barber shop and get a no-nonsense buzz cut from the old fart barber, Mr. Rommel. Everyone called him Bugs, though.

“What’ll it be today, young whippersnapper?” Bugs would say when I’d sheepishly enter his hole-in-the-wall shop, sickly aromatic with tonsorial products and cheesy as I’ll get out with crooked pictures hanging on plaster crumbling walls of race car drivers and posters of buxom women advertising some hair product or something, and always, friggin’ always, an out-of-date calendar from the local Farm Bureau insurance agency.

“The usual, Bugs,” I’d meekly answer. And Bugs’d get out his clippers and make short work of my locks until I looked like an under-aged Marine recruit or something. While Ray got to keep his curlyish locks, which really turned the girls on, I think. But what did I know about any of that?

When we were like all of thirteen, Ray fancied himself in the role of his boyhood TV idols. He worshipped the holy heck out of Roy Rogers and idolized Trigger! But he was particularly enraptured with Dale Evans, all dolled up in her sexy cowpoke garb.

One day, I showed up unannounced at his house, and caught Ray in the act of ejaculating on his bed to a framed photo of the hot cowgirl tacked to the low ceiling of his messy-ass bedroom. Now, I had never masturbated myself, or seen anybody do it, and so I was more embarrassed by witnessing the dirty deed than Ray was by my unannounced, intruding presence. In fact, I thought it was pretty odd that Ray wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. Not to mention, you’d think, he’d be madder than a wet mudhen, too, but no, he just perked up and to my immediate consternation he instead suggested that I join him. I balked nervously, because, for one, I’d heard of “circle jerks” but didn’t think guys really did that private act together, and, for two, well, shit, if you want to know the truth, I hadn’t yet experimented with masturbation, you see, ’cause I was still underdeveloped and my hormones were still dormant and my prurient interests not yet aroused, but Ray, well, how shall I say it, Ray was already something of a budding stud with a penis twice the size of mine, and — get this! — he already had pubic hair growing down there, which, come to think of it, wasn’t altogether that surprising, ’cause he was already showing signs of sprouting real whiskers, while I didn’t even have peach fuzz, yet.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that Ray was a serial masturbator. He was always eager to — his words, not mine! — flog his dolphin, do the five knuckle shuffle, or his favorite, as he would say to me when the urge struck him, which was pretty often, “Hold on, man, I gotta make me some of that rock ‘n roll muuu-zak with my pink guiii-tar!” 

Ray’s ejaculatory prowess was, if truth be told, much to my envy and chagrin, and I found it pretty galling, because it felt like I was being left out of some titillating secret of unattainable puberty, while Ray’s sexuality was taking off. It usually went something like this.

Whenever he was over at my place, I would succumb to Ray’s desires practically begging me to sneak up to my Dad’s strictly off-limits private bathroom, which also served as his den. It smelled of Corn Huskers and Listerine, and a huge framed painting of his spooky-looking grandmother whose eyes followed you no matter where you stood hung above the commode.

Ray would implore me to scrounge around in Dad’s old-fashioned cherry wood desk where he stashed his “Private Black Book”, a late 50’s style address book I found one day rifling through his drawers looking for, I don’t know what, but I turned up some interesting stuff besides the Private Black Book, like a photograph of my once handsome dad sitting on a couch with his arm around some unidentified wide-mouthed beauty taken maybe fifteen years ago, and a half-drunk bottle of Dark Eyes vodka that I opened and sniffed but dared not try, and, most astonishing, a rare pistol with three bullets he must have gotten off a Japanese soldier he killed in Okinawa. I’ll never know, because there was no way I could ask him about it without him hauling off and busting my head open for snooping around in his desk drawers looking for I don’t know what.

Well, as you can imagine, it was quite a discovery for a boy my age to find those treasures, but the Private Black Book — pornography! — was especially intriguing ,even though, like the Japanese pistol I revered without picking it up, and the Dark Eyes I left untouched, not once did I ever jack off to those verboten photos.

When I first showed it to Ray, he was immediately infatuated with the sepia-toned photos of the A to Z entries of half-naked women in their oversized panties hoisted above their waists, baring big boobs and seductive smiles. Ray would snatch the book out of my hands and gleefully thumb through the pages until he found just the right gal, then he’d assume a seat on Dad’s sacrosanct toilet, unbuckle and drop his pants, and begin beating his meat, while I just stood there in a kind of goofy trance trying not to look. What the heck was I supposed to do? So I busied myself with rifling through Dad’s drawers some more, and pretended to “keep watch” in case one of my sisters, whose bedrooms were off the hall, tried to barge in, all the while with Ray just jacking the fuck off right in front of me, not the least bit self-conscious. I suppose, after all, that was a healthy attitude, rather than him being shamed and secretive. Oddly, it was me who was shamed and secretive, but I never let on.

I remember the first time I actually witnessed Ray consummate the act. He was scrunched over on the pot with a lewd grin, and I was watching in lurid fascination as he began groaning and breathing heavily and pounding harder and harder until he let out a pleasurable gasp and his cargo of milky semen spewed up in a little arc and came plopping down right on the “P” page of Dad’s Private Black Book. Right on “P” for Pussy Galore.

“Shit-fire, Ray!” I said. “Enough is enough! Dad’s gonna kill me and think it was me! C’mon, man, clean that mess up and let’s get outta here!”

Ray smudged his goopy load with a wad of toilet paper, got up, buckled his pants and handed me the Private Black Book, looking at me with dreamy eyes. “Oh, man, you don’t know what you’re missing. You gotta try it sometime. With — or without me.”

Well, anyway, that never happened! But during the ensuing oddball years of our inseparable bond, Ray Haney and I, we were best friends, and nothing or no one could come between us. We defended one another’s honor in fist-fights we occasionally got into with some of the local ruffians, and we found adventure and excitement whenever and wherever we could, always dreaming of bigger and better things.

Like all small town boys everywhere, we ran wild and got into scrapes and sometimes into trouble, mostly innocent stuff, ’cause at heart we were “good boys” growing up in small town America, doing small town things like earning money mowing lawns and delivering papers; carving our initials on the sides of buildings and trees; playing knock out flies and wiffle ball and organizing take-no-prisoners tackle football games with local dickheads; playing pinball ’til the cows came home; slurping down cherry cokes and ice cream sandwiches at the soda fountain that, now that I think about it, was truly from another era; roughhousing at the park and horseplay at the swimming pool in between serious competition in swimming meets where I once came within a couple of seconds of the free style state record for boys age 11; spontaneous town-wide squirt gun fights and epic water balloon mayhem; and stupid immature kid shit like getting rowdy at the movie theater, unable to contain our interest in boring flicks like Tora! Tora! Tora! and With Six You Get Eggroll.

Beyond our usual escapades and prowling about, the allure and potential for supreme excitement beckoned us one day to explore the musty old room above Walker’s Drug Store in the red brick building built in 1886, so we made a pact and vowed to sneak in to the off-limits, long-defunct IOOF Grand Lodge that used to meet up there.

The mysterious International Order of Odd Fellows.

We had to make sure no one was watching us or coming down the street — and certainly had to do it after Walker locked up his store at 5. When the coast was clear, we crammed our slim bodies through the crack in the door on the side of the building and snuck up the long narrow dusty stairwell, daring to lift ourselves up and over the creaky transom, and drop down with loud THUD! to the floor. After a few nervous seconds, we hesitantly entered the cavernous dust-shrouded, cobwebby room that appeared to be unoccupied since before World War I. We looked around in mutual wide-eyed astonishment at all the marvels and interesting and unusual things that filled the room and stumped and mystified us curious fourteen year old boys.

Ray went over to a decrepit desk and flipped through a huge leather-bound dust-choked ledger containing bizarre scribblings and incomprehensible references, photos of mysterious symbols and strange-looking Initiates’ regalia, and allusions to “Degrees of Order” attained by IOOF members. All quite extraordinary stuff. On another faded, torn page we read over a list of dozens of names, including four U.S. presidents and Charles Lindberg, and wondered if they themselves, those historic, hallowed figures, had stood right in this spot and signed the ledger. We may have been clueless waifs but you’d have to be blind not to grasp the importance of what we had discovered.

“Look at this, Ray!” I pointed out a few recognizable names of old-timers from the town, long dead we assumed, but of special interest was the old fart apothecary’s name — William Walker — right beneath Bugs the Barber!

“Verrrrry eeeen-terrr-es-stink!” Ray said with a spot-on imitation of Arte Johnson as the Nazi guy on one of our favorite TV shows, Laugh-In. “It says here that the Odd Fellows’ mission statement was to elevate and improve the character of mankind.”

“Verrrrry eeeen-terrr-es-stink!” I said.

Then we saw below that, in some fancy old-fashioned cursive, someone had elaborated on the Odd Fellows’ mission: To visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead and educate the orphan.

I considered the implications. “Ray, this truly is verrrrry eeeen-terrr-es-stink! It’s all about improving humanity. Nothing wrong with that, huh.”

But we both couldn’t help wonder, what, exactly, had become of the town’s Odd Fellows. Did they all die except for old man Walker and Bugs? Had the chapter folded up because they had succeeded in and completed their mission? What other clues might there be, we wondered.

I flipped over a page where someone had scrawled, “Are you odd enough?” with a picture beneath of a man from like the 1800’s outfitted in pompous regalia holding a staff with a skull. “Weird,” I said, then added with a chuckle, “We’re odd enough, huh, Ray, so I guess that would make us honorary IOOF members!”

I flipped over another page and found more references to the Odd Fellows’ mission, which in sum was to create harmony, make the world a better place, broaden man’s spiritual outlook and improve his mental condition, all noble things because even at my young age I sensed that humanity was in trouble and needed improvement.

“But, why,” I asked Ray, “If it was all in the name of spreading goodness, why and when did they stop meeting?”

“Yeah,” agreed Ray, “You’d think if it was such an important earthly mission for mankind, they’d still be active, huh, ’cause there’s a lot more work to be done. In church we get to hear the pastor’s sermons every Sunday about how evil we are!”

We closed the book and diverted our attention to another corner of the room to see what was behind the big closet door. I pried the heavy, wooden door open and — GASP! — we both jumped back in horror, stunned at the sight of an open casket containing a complete human skeleton! Next to it was a big bucket filled with — get this! — shrunken human skulls with hair on them and wild eyeballs sticking out! What the hell? We were aghast.

Of course, on closer inspection, they turned out to be fake ass baubles, meant to — what? Scare trespassers? If so, it worked! We backed away and were now leery of getting caught, thinking that we could hear old man Walker — or maybe it was ghosts. We had to get outta there — and fast! But first we hurriedly investigated several more ritual objects and oddities: an ornately carved staff; a crystal ball; a box of ceramic stones inscribed with strange markings; and another smaller closet with musty-smelling outfits that looked like old band uniforms hanging up. We then heard, for sure, what sounded like old man Walker shuffling around down in his store, so we got the living hell out of that weird, spooky place.

Over that summer, we returned one or two more times, to take a few friends up there and scare the bejesus out of them with the skeletons and shrunken heads, but the luster and appeal eventually faded. Still, for us, in our minds, even though we thought we’d figured some things out, the IOOF mostly remained a big mystery and we never were quite sure what it all meant or who the Odd Fellows were who convened in secret meetings up there in dim, dusty years past, or what they were really up to, or why they were so secretive, and what those weird skeletons were all about, and the most pressing question of all was: why had this once active and bustling local chapter been abandoned and left to the dustbin of history in our small town? Questions that forever remained unanswered, even though had we thought about asking them, old man Walker and Bugs the Barber might have shared some of their secrets. Or not. 

Not to forget, for how could I, our small town escapades also included stealing away to a local nature preserve, though as kids we never really thought of it as that. Slaughters Pond was a murky, mossy large pool of spring water hidden down off the railroad tracks on heavily forested private property, but we didn’t care, and we never got caught, and since there wasn’t a fence, it was easy to sneak in and venture around during hot humid summer days, when it seemed like we had transported into some steaming, tropical paradise. Too bad the dank pond wasn’t swimmable, but it was a lush habitat for many birds, reptiles and amphibians. We always had tons of — fun, I guess you could call it — shooting a bounty of small songbirds with our BB guns, and finding snakes, turtles and frogs we’d pick up and throw way out in the middle of the pond and laugh as they kerplopped into the water. One day I shot this little sparrow and watched the poor cuss flutter down to my feet, twirling like a fallen leaf, and when it didn’t die, and just squirmed haplessly there, I felt, well, you can imagine, pretty horrible. I never killed another bird or any living being after that, well, except maybe for flies and mosquitos, but they don’t count.

And oh how we loved sneaking out in the wee hours of night to roam stealthily around town like in some Twilight Zone episode, dodging the flunky town cop on the lookout for curfew violators. We’d make our way to the old town cemetery and wander around the creepy grounds, shining our small penlights on the headstones reading aloud faded old epitaphs of long-vanquished residents. Once we tried to break into the ornate stone building that housed the urns containing ashes of the dead, but the windows were barred up, so we contented ourselves checking out more tombstones under the eerie light of the moon until tiring of that, we’d race over to an abandoned old barn that once housed a famous racehorse back in the twenties, and we’d slither through an opening to check out what was in there, mostly old bridles and a broken down buggy, not much memorabilia or anything, but the memory of all of these trespassing adventures was forever lasting because of the simple fact we weren’t supposed to be out and about or entering these musty, mysterious places, especially at one in the morning when, of course, our parents thought we were in bed sound asleep.

There was also this mean and cranky neighbor couple who lived behind the Haney’s, and we delighted endlessly in our devious schemes to torment the redneck hick, Bob Volmer was his name, and his haggard old wife, Marge, I think her name was. Childless and cantankerous, they lived a reclusive anti-social life in a run-down shack, and they hated everyone, especially me and Ray, because we were always trespassing on their land to explore a back forty lot that had woods and a creek where we’d set up a fort and hold secret meetings and pretend we were soldiers or cowboys or characters out of a romantic Mark Twain novel; and where Ray would invariably dig out his hidden Playboy Bunny photos he’d torn out of a magazine somewhere and had hidden in a plastic folder stashed under a pile of rocks and proceed to masturbate; and where we’d sometimes preside over our ragtag band of hangers-on — is that even a word? — they were just a handful of bone-headed buddies who worshipped me and Ray; and then we’d start pretending to be hiding out from the law or enemy soldiers; and next thing we were figuring out some evil stunt to pull on Bob fucking Volmer, who would always come looking for us to run us off his land. We hated him, too, and when he’d had enough, he’d come out of his shithole house and we’d be laughing and mocking him as he emerged, railing at us with arms raised high, and once he came out with a loaded shotgun, blasting a thunderous round into the sky, I swear, and threatened to shoot our asses if we didn’t stop trespassing, goddammit, and leave him the fuck alone once and for all.

You can just imagine all the fun we had and all the shit we got ourselves into during these, our halcyon years.

I liked Ray so much because, for one, I didn’t have a brother, and for two, he was possessed of a manic energy and fierce independence which I admired. He had traits I wanted to emulate. He was inventive and clever, and rife with conspiratorial ideas about how we could rule the world, well, at least our town to start off, and he had a zillion money-making ideas to get rich, mostly fantasies so far as I was concerned, but the fact is, outside of the chump change I managed to earn mowing lawns and delivering newspapers, most of my dough came from little schemes here and there Ray thought up, like the pinball money we got from scrounging up golf balls lost to the course pond and selling them, or washing dogs for fifty cents.

One aspect about Ray that I found a bit troubling, however — but also a bit attractive — was his “bad boy” nature. He was always getting into some sort of scuffle or incident or fight or one thing or another at recess, in the park, at the swimming pool, and in class over his hilarious antics and pratfalls and out-and-out rebellious behavior. All innocent and in good fun, no doubt, until it wasn’t.

Scholastically deficient — or maybe just disinterested — Ray was street smart and a total wiseass more interested in entertaining people than reading his book report in front of the class. Part of his oddball charm was that he had this weird thing going on with a lazy eye, that when he looked at you, it was all askew and you never knew if he was quite looking at you or what. Later, as he developed his risible charades and uproarious theatrics into semi-polished routines, he would use his weird eye to great effect, somehow enlarging it through a mysterious feat of optic puffery or something, and then he’d twist up his mouth in this perfect imitation of funny guy Marty Feldman and go snorting and cavorting about in a demented frenzy of boisterous histrionics that cracked us all up.

Once, during a lull in Mrs. Parry’s 6th grade class, Ray got a bug up his butt and pulled some riotous stunt that led to an outburst of laughter and disorderly conduct on the part of the whole class, so as soon as Mrs. Parry restored order — “CLASS!! CLASS!! CHILDREN!! ENOUGH!! I will have NONE of this! Take your seats immediately and BE QUIET!” — she summoned Ray to approach and very somberly scolded, “Raymond Haney, how many times do I have to tell you there is no place in my class for such nonsense, do you understand?” She then methodically raised her flabby old arm and lifted it slowly back over her shriveled up apple of a head, and before you knew what was happening, she hauled off and smacked him square across the face with the force of a discus thrower — in front of the whole class! I’ve never heard such stunned silence nor seen Ray skulk like a whooped dog back to his seat.

But his shame didn’t last long, and he always had the last laugh. Later that night, we snuck over to Mrs. Parry’s house over by the water tower, quietly walked up the stairs to her porch, and banged loudly on her door a few times, and then quickly fled, but not before lighting a paper bag full of slimy dog shit on fire and flinging it on her porch step. We dashed away and hid behind a car to watch the scene unfold. The old crone soon emerged, utterly aghast at the sight of the small conflagration on her porch. We could barely contain ourselves as she stomped it out in a demented little dance, first with her orthopedic left foot, then her right, and then, the coup de grâce, smushing it around with both her feet before unleashing a scream of anger and disgust at the realization of all the shit she was drowning in! Like I said, Ray always got the last laugh.

So, you see how Ray was a little firebrand constantly getting into trouble — and therefore getting me into trouble with him — in and out of school — but for the most part, it was innocent fun, until it wasn’t, and through the thick and thin, during the halcyon years, we always found adventures and camaraderie.

Because, you see, I didn’t really have any other close friends besides Ray. Well, there was Danny Combs, by virtue of being my next door neighbor, but he was a wimpy little nerd. And there was this other neighbor I called the Kid, whose real name was Timmy Stubbs, and we had some good times together. And I always really liked Brady Evans, a class act at the top of my list as a great friend, too, but it was Ray who was always there for me, always ready for a good time. And so you can imagine how easily I was sucked into the wacky orbit of Ray Haney’s madcap existence, despite what you might call his questionable pedigree.

You see, Ray came from one of those “other side of the tracks” families that your mom and dad always admonished against hanging out with, which just made you want to hang out with him all the more. Ray and his five siblings were all boys with a wild hair up their asses, all except the youngest, a shy, sweet autistic girl named Becky. They were considered “bad influences” and not exactly looked upon favorably as the town’s brightest progeny, for each one, to varying degrees or another, exhibited obstinate, rebellious, eccentric, quirky, and maladjusted personality traits. In fact, the twin boys, Donnie and Ronnie, bordered on being half-wits. All except sweet little autistic Becky, and to a certain degree, Ray, they were total flunkies in school. You really had to feel sorry for the parents, I’d imagine, ’cause Ray’s siblings were a piece of fucking work, if you ask me.

Now Ray’s parents, well, they just let their kids run wild like a pack of dogs. Never one to instill discipline or ensure quality family time, his parents turned a blind eye to Ray and his siblings and let them have the run of things. No wonder I loved hanging out at Ray’s, ’cause in my house, well, there was a modicum of imposed discipline, like we had to be home for an actual family dinner by 5:30, in bed by 9, that sort of thing.

And Ray’s parents, Walter and Beverly, well, they weren’t exactly considered paragons of the community or model parents, either, but then again, who am I to talk, given my own Dad’s problems with alcohol and Mom’s unceasing struggle to balance a “home life” and her work, because, let’s face it, it was Mom who brought home the bacon in our household, unfortunately, too, at the expense of turning us into latchkey, roustabout kids ourselves. But good kids for the most part, just left to our own vices and devices, though there was always food on the table at regular hours, family game day on occasion, and, for me, a secret allowance for helping out around the house. Imagine that, me, the only boy in a family of nothing but sisters, and I was the one who mainly did all the dishes and cleaning, because I knew Mom would send me to bed with a milk carton of malted milk balls and furtively palm me a five-spot from time to time, which helped pay for all the plates of French Fries at the Uptown Cafe where me and Ray would feed our bellies and then our insatiable pinball habit.

So, yeah, who’s to say if the Haney’s were good or bad parents? But with such a large family, his or mine, how could our parents possibly have given equal love, equal time, equal anything to all? In the case of the ill-prized genetic offspring of Walter and Beverly Haney, well, again, who am I to say, but it seemed that Ray and his siblings, and even the family’s two dogs, four cats, five rabbits, and eventually two horses and a pony all crammed in on their tiny lot abutting Bob Volmer’s overgrown spread, well, they all seemed to be cared for, clothed decently enough, and not lacking in nutritional necessities, per se.

Plus Ray, the oldest of the kids, had exhibited at an early age musical proclivities, actually an extraordinary innate talent for playing the piano, guitar, and trumpet, which he called a “bugle”. He loved the Beatles and I’d spend hours at his house just sitting around while he played his repertoire of songs for me, an enduring image burned in my mind of him perched on his piano bench swaying back and forth, in his cowpoke raiment with that slicked back hair, pounding away at the ivories and singing “Play me some of that rock and roll music, any old way you choose it.” It did seem like he was destined for rock ‘n roll stardom.

And so, in this respect, his parents supported him, and nurtured his talent along, I guess, by buying him all those instruments, while all I had was this stupid little wooden pad with a rubber surface and a couple of drum sticks to bang on that I gave up on long before I advanced to a real drum set, which I know my Mom was happy about, because the last thing she wanted in her household was me banging on drums disturbing what little peace she had in our own frenzied household.

And one day, I’ll never forget, a man showed up to deliver a big box that Ray ripped apart with fervent glee — it was a brand new electric organ his parents had bought for him! Cool! Man, was I impressed! That whole day Ray jammed away, magically able to pound out Beatles songs and other rock and roll tunes with a raw unmatched talent for never having taken a single dipshit lesson. I swear, I don’t think I ever saw Ray or knew of him formally studying music, but he sure could play like he was born for fame and fandom, but the best he could manage, it turned out, was playing “bugle” in the junior high band and staid organ hymnals at his weekly religious services. It seemed like such a waste of talent.

Getting back to the subject of the Haney’s providing for their children’s peaking nutritional needs, Ray, I must now break the news to you, had the most absolute shit diet on earth. I know that sounds strange to say, but by the time we were in the 4th grade, I started noticing something very peculiar about Ray’s eating habits. Frankly, I always wondered how he could have sexually matured faster than me, and how he could have grown bigger and stronger than me with such improper nutrition.

Because . . . Ray Haney’s alimentary anomalies were legendary!

All the boy ever ate, in one form or another, was potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes! And when I say he only ate spuds, I mean spuds and only spuds: French Fries. Home Fries. Potato Chips. Not once did I ever see him eat anything else: no meat, no vegetables, no fruit that I can think of, no cake or candy, no milk, just potatoes and sodas and sometimes ice cream treats. Not once did I ever witness his mom fix him a decent meal. Such was the extent of his aversion or inability (?) to eat anything else, that his dad once offered him $50 — FIFTY DOLLARS! — to eat a hamburger, which Ray refused to do. It’s all a bit crazy, because you wonder how a kid could grow strong bones and teeth and muscles just eating goddamn fucking potatoes. I always wanted to think maybe Ray had severe food allergies, but more likely he had a whopping eating disorder, don’t you think. Maybe his mom force fed him gummy vitamins or something, who knows.

One day I was over at Ray’s playing Jarts or some stupid yard game when we looked up and there was the big exhaust-spewing boxy Lay’s truck backing up to the Haney porch. Ray excitedly rushed over to help the delivery guy unload — I swear! — TEN BOXES! — of barbecue potato chips! TEN BOXES! Each box containing a dozen bags of crispy, tangy chips. That was his breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next couple of weeks, along with, of course, a constant stream of French Fries and fried potatoes. As you can guess, I ate my share of potatoes, too, while in his company, but strangely enough, given his love of the versatile tuber, I never once saw him eat a baked potato or potato salad, or even my favorites, hush puppies or hash browns. Just French Fries, fried potatoes and potato chips. To this day, if one of my new friends and I get to talking about things, and I bring up Ray Haney’s weird food fetish, no one believes me when I tell the story of his bizarro diet that consisted of 100% fried potato product. 

Now when I think back on Ray’s mom and dad — Beverly and Walter Haney — the first thing that comes to mind is how downright zany Beverly was. I mean, she was ditzier than a meerkat on speed! As for ol’ Walt (that’s how me and my buddies referred to him in secret) — well, ol’ Walt was basically this unapproachable ogre with wiry black hairs springing out of the back of his neck and ears, and he had this big ol’ honkin’ nose that I could see where Ray got his schnozz from. Truth be told, I never really liked ol’ Walt. I always suspected a false piety and distinct perverse nature about him.

Beverly, on the other hand, struck me as the classic knows-her-place, ball-and-chain housewife, with a charming but melancholic nature, and there was something a bit “off” about her that I liked. I can’t put my finger on what, exactly, but ditzy and zany are the operative words! Heck, maybe she just had some sort of nervous condition, as they call it, or some mental aberration, who knows. Certainly not me. I mean, what the hell did I know? I was just a shy, not quite nerdy kid, into sports and all, and pretty danged good at everything, but because of my stunted growth, I was never as big as all the other guys my age, and suffered for that in more ways than one (like being bullied in the 8th and 9th grades), but as a good friend of Ray’s, I spent a ton of time hanging out at his place, and so I got to notice and observe a lot of things about his parents, especially Beverly since she was the one always around, not being the bread winner like ol’ Walt. I saw her as just a plain common housewife consigned to home and chores.

But in truth, Ray and I tended to ignore all the family drama and went about our friendship business apart from the comings and goings of both our families. We swore to and upheld our bond of friendship, finding succor in each other’s companionship, because if the truth be known, we were both pretty much from broken, struggling families.

One day over at Ray’s I saw Beverly washing her reddish curls in some sort of sudsy liquid — turns out it was beer! What kind of a character does that? Was the woman nuts, or did she have a beauty secret? Come to think of it, as I got a little older and my juices started flowing, I noticed that Beverly was actually kind of pretty and sexy, in a downplayed way. I always imagined that she longed for some handsome stranger to sweep her off her feet and whisk her away to Never-Never-Land and leave behind her banal world. What I remember about her mostly, though, is that she struggled to keep a clean home and feed all her kids and wash all their clothes, and get them off to school in time, while also having to attend to the menagerie of animals that had accumulated in the fenced in backyard, now expanded to include a rooster, four chickens and some hamsters, because we all know the kids did shit when it came to cleaning up around the house, let alone to tending to the animals and pets. For being just a plain old common housewife, why shit, Beverly should have been paid twenty bucks an hour or something for all the work she did to keep things together and running as smoothly as things could run in the Haney household.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Beverly could be a pretty decent homemaker when she put her mind to it and applied her domestic talents, for she was always cleaning (no big surprise) and she was conscientious enough to ensure food on the table at semi-regular hours, but it seemed that no one really sat down to eat together as a family, like we did at my house.

One time I was over there, Beverly had cooked up some hamburgers and served ’em up with dollops on the side of that canned syrupy fruit salad, and me and all the siblings, except Ray, gobbled it all down with relish! For her oldest boy, she offered preferential treatment and prepared a special batch of fried red potatoes for him, which he devoured heartily. What confounded me most about Ray’s shit diet, though, is that I don’t once ever recall him being sick, or having a cold, or having to go to the doctor’s, or complaining about being hungry. Not once, if you can believe that.

Now as for ol’ Walt, to me the guy was a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in an enigma, to borrow some expression I heard the other day. He was, for the most part, MIA on the home front, a disappearing act — ostensibly owing to his enterprising nature, his so-called entrepreneurial endeavors — which is to say his workaholic personality. You see, ol’ Walt was hardly ever home, except when he was on the few rare occasions he made his presence known. But I’d bet that over the years I saw him no more than a handful of friggin’ times.

Ray openly admitted his dad was hardly ever around, so he felt like at times he didn’t have a dad, and I told him, “Join the club, Ray, me neither,” ’cause of my own dad’s problems with alcohol. But you can be sure that ol’ Walt was around when it was time to gather the troops, scrub them clean, and whisk them off to church, never a Sunday sermon to be missed. And, I remember this, ol’ Walt would take Ray out of school sometimes, and they’d be gone for two or three days off somewhere, doing what I’m not sure, ’cause Ray really never told me much about those episodes or where he and his dad disappeared to. Naturally, I always was curious, but kept my mouth shut, why Ray seemed to have a slight limp for the next few days like maybe he’d been on some kind of arduous nature outing or something. But that made zero sense at the time.

I will give ol’ Walt credit, though, for trying. Through some means lost to my recollection, he managed to secure ownership of the town’s most popular — well, only — restaurant, an old-timey diner with pinball machines you could tilt and play for hours on end, with old photos of movie stars and Hollywood memorabilia, and cherry red pleather booths, and an americana juke box that for a quarter played honest to god honky tonk country music and shake your booty rock ‘n roll. I can’t tell you how many times we sat in one of those booths, plates of French Fries and cokes at the table, feeding the juke box quarter after quarter to hear Jumping Jack Flash and Going Up the Country and Bad Moon Rising over and over. I like to think that maybe Ray had something to do with all those cool tunes in our dumb hick town, being the musical wunderkind he was.

But, hold on, there’s more that ol’ Walt, the small town tycoon, presided over. His little empire also included a run-down movie theater with a torn screen, sticky cement floors from years of spilled cokes that never got wiped up, and ripped seats popping their springs out. He was also the proud proprietor of a once grand miniature golf course, but it, too, was now in utter disrepair. It’s amazing that anyone frequented these places.

Now, on top of ol’ Walt’s legitimate businesses, he had a few side hustles going on to bring in extra money, mostly bone-headed schemes, in my estimation. One was this idiotic enterprise he signed up for as an independent operator of “Pet Switchboard”, and charged Ray, who subsequently enlisted me, to run the thing. It was an ad that caught ol’ Walt’s eye one day in Popular Mechanics: “MAKE $$$ FINDING LOST DOGS AND CATS!”

As a franchisee, you had to go around and convince all the people in town who were pet owners to sign on for ten bucks a month, then you gave them these I.D. tags to put on their pets’ collars, and if someone’s dog or cat got lost or stolen, the I.D. on file with the Pet Switchboard Operator could then be traced back to the owner. Even at my tender age and utter lack of business savvy, the whole thing seemed ridiculous, ’cause, c’mon, if my dog got lost or stolen, that’d be the end of it, ’cause more than likely, he’d gotten run over, as happened to about five of my sorry-ass pooches on the main road in front of our house that everyone speeded by on. Well, needless to say, we solicited all of about six gullible local pet owners (maybe they just felt sorry for us) to part with their money, and in the end, not two months into it, the stupid business went belly up.

Ray said, “File this in the D.I. folder — for Dumb Ideas.”

But ol’ Walt railed on us, telling us how lazy and unmotivated we were and didn’t put in enough effort to making it happen. Yeah, sure, right.

But, the biggest boondoggle of ’em all, in my mind, was when ol’ Walt parted with his hard earned money to invest in what I thought was a risky and questionable scheme to convert an abandoned used auto lot into some sort of menagerie to exhibit exotic animals. Yes, you heard right, “exotic animals”.

Ol’ Walt gathered us all around the table one night on one of his rare appearances, announcing to Beverly and all us wide-eyed kids that he was set to launch “the greatest show on Earth,” he proudly proclaimed, then, a minor retraction, “Well, at least in Kickapoo County.” He elaborated that an unnamed associate had given him a “screaming deal” on the land. “I couldn’t turn it down, you see,” and he went on and on about how it was “just perfect” for his long-time dream to own what he liked to call an “exotic animal palace”.

The land he purchased was just beyond the outskirts of town, and he had already consigned to build a couple of structures, erect some big top tents, pave walkways, and landscape the whole shebang in faux African-looking decor, all without any of us having a clue about it. He had already put up a ginormous sign off Route 33 that cheesily advertised “Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park.” He hoped that crowds from the bigger cities in Kickapoo and adjacent counties would come in droves. Then ol’ Walt pulled out a binder and showed us photographs of his project in the making. “We’re opening in one month,” he said. “Ray, I want you to be in charge of admissions and concessions.”

But, as we came to find out, Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park was really nothing more than a depressing concrete jungle consisting of boxed-in enclosures and gnarly cages imprisoning the most mangy-ass animals you ever did see. I don’t even know where or how ol’ Walt ever got his money-grubbing hands on the poor creatures to begin with. Or how or why I ever consented to work the concession stands there with Ray on hot muggy nights. But that Ray, he had a way, he had sway, and swagger, in his business pretensions, following as he was in ol’ Walt’s footsteps, and he made it sound like we could make a lot of money and have a shitload of fun to boot, “and meet some chicks from the city, if you get my drift,” he nudged me in the ribs with his elbow.

Speaking of following in his dad’s footsteps, ol’ Walt was a God-fearing man, a dubious quasi-respected pillar of some local hick church with the name Christ in it, but I can’t remember which church exactly, ’cause you’d never believe that a little shit town like ours had something like ten fucking churches, I swear. As Ray was being molded — or tortured — however you prefer to view his inculcation in the ways of worshipping the Lord — he was always being forced to choose between church and, well, having fun, with me, ’cause you know I wasn’t much of a believer and performed every act of subterfuge in my powers to avoid having to go to Sunday Catholic Mass and Wednesday Catechism, being from a “good” upstanding Catholic family as opposed to what my mom called the “heathenish” cult religion the Haney’s adhered to.

So poor Ray, he was set up early in life for this great conflict, to be an upstanding Christian, or a wayward free soul runnin’ wild with the pagans, which ol’ Walt actually once labeled me when I convinced Ray to skip service one Sunday morning in favor of hitting the golf course. I remember ol’ Walt, the Lord’s disciple and disciplinarian, giving Ray a fierce whipping with his belt on his bare ass — “it’s for your own good, boy!” — when we returned from our golf rounds (I made myself scarce real quick like), and who knows what else ol’ Walt may have doled out to Ray as deserved punishment for his own good, but I could hear him cursing and maligning his boy for consorting with me, his religiously truant buddy. Ray also got grounded for a month and was told he couldn’t see me, and was ordered to attend mass every night for the next two weeks. I felt so sorry for him, but he didn’t seem to mind much and took his punishment with a grain of salt, and actually proclaimed his belief in and love of Jesus Christ, he told me sincerely, and shared a bombshell bit of news that when he grew up he wanted to be a minister. I never believed him for a second.

So, things on the Haney homefront were always fun and light-hearted . . . that is, until ol’ Walt showed up. I’d be over there hanging out and suddenly the ogre would appear and, man, when ol’ Walt showed up, everyone dropped what they were doing, ten-hutted, and Beverly scurried about haphazardly like a juggling clown trying to rustle up an impromptu platter of food for her hungry man. All us kids would scatter off into various rooms or outdoors at the first opportunity, but ol’ Walt insisted this time that Ray and I sit down at the table with him as he presided over his pathetic domestic kingdom, mumbling inaudible tirades to Beverly to “Hurry up, woman, can’t you see I’m HUNgry! Plus, I gotta get back to the store to meet some clients tonight!” all the while ignoring poor little autistic Becky’s pleas for attention.

Finally, Beverly, slopped down some greasy hunk of meat and anemic-looking overcooked vegetables on ol’ Walt’s plate, and added two slices of untoasted Wonder bread slathered with bright yellow margarine, and ol’ Walt dove right in and gulped his food down in beastly inhalations, not speaking a word or betraying nary an emotion. Beverly then served up Ray and me some delicious, I’ll have to admit, home fries, and then served herself and took a seat opposite ol’ Walt at the kitchen dinette, daintily forking at her own modest plate of pork chops and iceberg lettuce salad with a wedge of pale tomato all covered in vomit-colored Thousand Island dressing.

Finally, ol’ Walt gruffly excused himself with the pretense he had to get back to attend to some business or another at one or another of his businesses. It was damn hard to keep track of him and his comings and goings, so mostly he just did whatever the fuck he wanted to, and everyone seemed fine with it because, let’s face it, ol’ Walt was not the most pleasant person to be around, and we were all glad and relieved when he made his exit.

One thing, too, I could never figure out about ol’ Walt, was his finances, and why, if he indeed owned all those so-called successful businesses, why wasn’t the family wealthier? Come to find out, just last week I learned from one of my teachers that Walter Haney was MIA most of the time not because he was a working stiff trying to provide for his family, but because the man had a secret gambling addiction and frittered away most of his money playing poker in the barrooms across the state line, not more than thirty miles away, and furthermore, he was a terrible and dishonest businessman, and never could keep a good crew or stable manager at any of his businesses, so they all went to hell, basically. But his gambling was a big “Ah ha!” moment, explaining his lengthy absences and the wise guy wads of bills he’d seem to be flush with every now and again, flashing them to his kids, doling out fives to the little ones and a ten or twenty occasionally to Ray. Once, believe it or not, he gave me a ten spot, too! But last I heard of him, he was broke, and all his businesses, save Haney’s Diner, had gone bust. His fervid religious nature seemed out of character for such a dissolute loser through and through engaging in immoral activities while professing a deep sincere belief in “the Good Lord” and “the Holy Book”.

Thinking back on things, though, I really liked Beverly, because she struck me as a maverick, a square peg of frivolity and inventiveness in a round hole of cornfield conservatism and schlock. I felt sorry for her, though, and even at my tender age, I could sense in her a soul trapped in a body in a life she didn’t want. Making the best of things in her spare time, when she wasn’t bending over backwards to care for her errant brood, inept and incompetent though she was at times, or perhaps she was just plainly uninterested, didn’t care, or was just sick and tired and fed up with it all, she tried her hand at and found modest success writing saccharine little ditties that she had printed up on greeting card stock paper, folded and cut, and sold them at the local IGA and crafts fairs and the like. She was really good at it, and in another life, down some unrealized revolutionary road, she could maybe have gone on to New York, or at least Chicago, and made something of herself in creative advertising or marketing.

But like I was saying, Beverly was very ditzy minded which didn’t exactly help her focus and plan and manage things properly in ol’ Walt’s home, what with having her hands full doing all the chores and keeping a wary, watchful eye on her scattered brood. One day, waiting for Ray to hurry up ’cause we had to meet some buddies to earn a few bucks cutting corn out of beans in the hot sunshine for a couple of hours, I stood off in a corner watching Beverly vacuuming the white shag rug in the family living room, by now having seen better days ever since six of us boys were overnighting it at the Haney’s a few months ago and had snuck out on a rainy night when, a bit later, we returned and tracked in mud all over the brand new white shag rug! Ol’ Walt, you see, had dumped a load of dirt out in the yard, who knows what for, ’cause the Haney’s didn’t have a garden, and we boys were jumping and climbing all over it in the drizzle, then it started pouring so we ran back in the house and that’s when, barely giving it a thought, we soiled the brand new white shag rug with our muddy tracks. What on earth were we thinking, or not thinking? You can imagine how furious Ray’s parents were at us, and how much it cost to have it cleaned.

Distracted by that bad boys memory, of which no real dire consequences resulted that I can recall, I was all the while patiently waiting for Ray to hurry up and get the hell out of the bathroom, where he had ensconced himself, because, honestly, I think he was in there fucking masturbating again.

Meanwhile, I was watching and could hear Beverly faintly reciting one of her little ditties she probably was making up on the spot. Over the whiny roar of the Hoover, I heard her plaintively sing:

“I’m home all alone doing my chores / down on all fours / scrubbing the floors . . .”

When the vacuum sputtered out. I missed a line or two, then could hear an almost bluesy inflection, a sad coda to her little jingle:

“I’m home all alone / sigh and a groan / cleaning the rugs / and killing the bugs.”

By now my patience was wearing thin with Ray, ’cause we were gonna be late for our ride out to Fender’s farm and miss out on some good pinball or movie money, so I yelled through the bathroom door, “Hey, Ray, c’mon, man, what’re you doin’ in there, let’s go!”

A few seconds of silence, a slight sigh and a groan, then Ray responded, “Hold on man! I’m coming! I’m coming!”

Which I’m sure he was! That’s when I looked over at Beverly, and she slyly winked at me, not sure why or if it had anything to do with, well, anything at all other than her boy — future rock star or pious minister? — strummin’ on his pink gui-tar. 

About three years ago, we must have been thirteen, nearing fourteen, me and Ray came up with this hair-brained plan to explore the exotic twists and bends of Mossy Creek where it rushes past the bucolic hamlet of Oxbow, population 108, if that.

The idea we hatched was to get his mom, who had a hair appointment in the town over from Oxbow, to drop us off at Mossy Creek Bridge, our launching point to bushwhack downstream — “a fur piece” Ray reckoned — all the way to the old dilapidated Cooley farmstead, long ago abandoned, and rumored to be haunted by the sad specter of one of the Cooley girls who was, so the story goes, murdered in her upstairs bedroom back in 1948, it must have been, by some wayfaring psychopath, but it turned out, so the story goes, she had really been bludgeoned to death in her sleep with the blunt end of a maul by her jealous boyfriend, but they couldn’t pin the crime on him, so he got away with bloody murder, so the story goes, until the vengeful father, Sam Cooley, tracked him down and put a bullet between his eyes and then turned the gun on himself in his murdered daughter’s bedroom. Or so the story goes. We hoped to sneak in through a broken window or something and see if we could find any clues, some remnant of the tragic mayhem, maybe faded blood stains on the walls, or Sam Cooley’s old rusted shotgun, who knows, but it was an exciting prospect to put our detective hats on and try to glean a few clues among the cobwebby rubble of the run-down house. We’d only driven by the place once, a long time ago, because it was far from our town, out of the way hidden in a maze of dirt country roads in the neighboring, poorer county, and mostly people avoided it as a cursed and spooky place, but by way of Mossy Creek, we figured it was, like, only a mile or so downstream, and we could easily make that and get back in time to have Beverly pick us up.

Beverly approved our plan, hedging a bit, but giving in finally, figuring it would be an adventure for us boys and allow her some alone time. Before she dropped us off, she gave us precise instructions to be back at the bridge at two pm sharp, which was great, because that would give us almost three whole hours to explore!

The day had an especially exciting appeal because over the past week torrential rains had swelled Mossy Creek nearly beyond its banks, but with sunshine the last couple of days, the water had run its muddy course and enough ground looked exposed to dare to venture onward. But if you actually checked out the foamy white swirl of Mossy Creek barreling madly down its sinuous channel, it was probably totally irresponsible of Beverly, whom my Mom had entrusted me with for the day, to even begin to think it was okay to let us embark on our little riparian adventure under such dangerous conditions.

“Okay, mom,” Ray assured. “We’ll be back in time. See you at two!”

Beverly admonished us one last time with a little wag of her finger, “You boys better not be late, either, or I’ll have your hides!”

And off we marched downstream from the bridge, BB guns slung over our shoulders in case we had to fend off a wild beast or some deranged fucking hick out there looking for trouble, and come to think of it — this is nuts! — we didn’t even bring a canteen of water or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with us ’cause, well, we thought we’d be gone just a couple of hours.

Before we knew it, we were lost in a wet, lush world of pungent black walnut trees and osage orange growing along fertile stream banks. We hoisted ourselves up their slippery trunks, shimmying up using ropy vines to help us ascend to high branches before swinging like Tarzan and tumbling back down to the soft earth where we rolled around like pigs in mud. We found plenty of lucky charms all about us — round, smooth shiny buckeyes — and stashed a couple of them in our pockets, and then we reached down for fallen hedgehogs, we called ’em, and tossed them overhead like grenades where they exploded open on hitting the ground or a tree trunk.

We were in heaven in our adolescent boy’s world of playing Indian warriors, lost cowboys, archaeologists, and explorers, with every little thing grabbing our attention. Cheap thrills and easy to please entertainment for us boys who could delight and revel in the simplest of pleasurable moments in the great outdoors along a beautiful crick.

We couldn’t tarry too long in any one spot, though, no matter how alluring, because we had an end goal in mind, remember — to investigate an old murder! — so we pressed farther and farther on, around unfamiliar bends in the creek and finally came to a dead-end on our side of the streambank, where the only way we could keep going was to take a big breath — “Ready, set, go,” I said to Ray — and enter an area of thigh-deep water and ford to the other side with the help of crude walking sticks to maintain our balance and keep us from falling and being swept away. It was a risky thing, crossing over to the other side, because Mossy Creek was more dangerous than it looked, but being athletic and brave we made it across safely and continued pushing on, through the mud and puddles and occasionally forced up on the higher banks where we stomped through prickly thickets of wild blackberries, stopping to scarf down sweet delicious handfuls that slaked our unconscious hunger and thirst, and then onward another hundred yards or so, on the lookout for the tell-tale indicator of the haunted farmhouse. Finally, we came upon three bullet-riddled DANGER! NO TRESPASSING! KEEP OUT! signs tacked to a huge gnarled tree.

“Wow, Ray, we made it!” I exclaimed triumphantly.

“Cool! Let’s go for it,” Ray said.

He led the way, delicately pinching a rusted strand of barbed wire and lifting it up so I could shimmy underneath, and then I took hold of it so Ray could follow, and at that instant we both froze on hearing an alien sounding howl and screech, quite chilling in effect. We looked at one another with wide-eyed expressions of “HOLY SHIT!”

“Did you hear that?”

It sounded like a horse whinny, but coarser, and more violent, with one fierce animal in deadlock with another frenzied one. Then we heard this spine-tingling, bloodcurdling guttural barbaric yelp from some agonizing animal, all happening within earshot, but we couldn’t see the action. Scared witless, make that shitless, we hid behind an old shed for a few moments, our BB guns at the ready, about as useless a weapon as could be in this situation of maybe having to protect ourselves against a fierce, hungry beast. We were frozen in our tracks, listening in horror to the primal struggle which finally let up and we were able to go take a look and see what turned out to be the scene of a mountain lion kill, we suspected, based on a bloody ripped apart carcass of a deer with its pile of slimy guts spilled out, the bulk of it dragged away into the brush by the big beast. The whole event shook us up badly on the one hand, and on the other, it fascinated us to no end to witness a life and death struggle before our very eyes.

“Shit, man,” Ray said, “I didn’t even know there were mountain lions around these parts.”

“Me neither. I kinda knew about them, ’cause my dad and his hunting buddies claimed they saw one once out in the boonies over near Clampittville. Ever been out that way? I haven’t, it’s pretty far, but I guess mountain lions can range pretty long distances.” Ray nodded silently.

By this time, our adrenaline was pumping pretty good, and we took one look at the haunted house, which was totally boarded up anyway except for a couple of broken windows with dangerous jagged shards of glass preventing us from dare entering, and at that moment we both swore to God that we heard eerie screams and moans coming from the upstairs room where the atrocity had taken place, and decided without further words or ado to get the hell out of there, right now, lickety-split!

We raced back down the yard, through an abandoned apple orchard, not even stopping to pick up a couple of good-looking ones that had fallen to the ground, and in our haste to scram the fuck out of that creepy place, we nearly tripped over buried remnants of rusted out skeletal farm equipment hidden in the yard overgrown with tall prickly grass and thistles, a riot of weedy sticklers and burrs and foxtails that tore us a new one, but we made it safely back to the creek where we took a quick breather for a few minutes before heading back upstream to the bridge.

We’d been so involved in our fantasy pursuits and alleged detective work at the haunted house that we figured, what, maybe a couple of hours, tops, had passed. We didn’t know, or hadn’t even thought to care, but as it turned out, we were like — “Oh, shit!” — because when we finally thought to look up to judge the position of the sun across the cloudless sky, we reckoned several more than two hours had somehow slipped by and it was probably nearing four or five.

We said, “Oh, shit!” in unison.

“C’mon, man, let’s pick up the pace,” I urged.

“Plenty of daylight left,” Ray said — “if we hustle back.”

And so we hustled like nobody’s business back upstream, following our original tracks, fording the deep pool again, where, out of mental mush and physical fatigue, we both fell in, and I lost my BB gun, dammit. We stopped for a moment to feel around the bottom of the pool, but it was nowhere to be found. At that moment, we were exhausted and realized we hadn’t had any water and felt sunbaked and dehydrated, so we looked at one another, shrugged, and bent over to cup up some of Mossy Creek’s water where it was riffling over some rocks, a pretty scene glinting in sunlight and reflecting tree and sky in the pool, and we helped ourselves to several big gulps and splashed our faces and felt refreshed enough to move on.

We had to keep pushing, pushing, and finally, thankfully, we knew we were nearing the Mossy Creek Bridge when we saw a big vine that had come tumbling down after Ray had swung on it too hard. That’s when we next heard our names being called out with hoarse urgency. We saw two burly guys in overalls approaching, slashing through the brush, and then more echoes of our names being called out, and finally, a big search party of a dozen men appeared, out looking . . . for us!

These were caring, concerned, deeply worried men from our town and the surrounding area who had formed a search party to track our whereabouts. We were presumed lost, abducted, or worse, dead. Everyone was placing bets on the most pessimistic outcome possible, given Mossy Creek’s raging torrents and how long we’d been missing.

One of the sweaty men yelled out to the others, “I found the Haney boy! He’s alive!” and grabbed him by the arm. Another wet, muddy man yelled, “I got the other kid, he’s okay!” They kinda shook us by the arm and roughed us up a little, not out of meanness, but more in the spirit of relief and happiness that we were found alive and unhurt, if a bit worse for the wear with cuts and scrapes and we even had leeches and ticks on us the men had to extract. Plus we were sunburned as hell, and both of us started to feel cramping in our stomachs from the dirty water we’d drunk earlier.

The men marched us back to Mossy Creek Bridge, practically scolding us the whole way, where we came upon a cheering crowd of damn near the entire town of Oxbow, population 108, if that, all peering over the bridge railing, eyeballing us and shaking their heads in wonderment at the roiling water whooshing below on its way to the Wabash, then to the Ohio, on to the Mississippi, and into the great Gulf of Mexico where our bodies had been rumored to end up. If it hadn’t been so danged dramatic and all, it looked like the good townsfolk were having a shindig or something up on the bridge. But far from that, as we were about to learn, the gravity of our disappearing act had caused great and unprecedented consternation among all present.

The ominous flashing of police car red lights (the county sheriff and his two deputies) were the first clue that we were in for a good licking. Then we spotted Beverly and my Mom, the last person I expected to see. Beverly rushed over and snatched Ray from the arms of the wet, muddy man and slapped her errant boy across the face, then gave him a big hug and started crying. My Mom, was she ever red-faced with anger, but she sighed in tremendous relief that her errant boy was okay, too, and hadn’t drowned like the whole crowd of gawkers insisted had happened, because what else on earth could have happened? Certainly not a bit of boys-will-be-boys hijinks. Mom grabbed me by my arm and said, “Don’t you know better than to do something like this! You had us all scared out of our wits that you and Ray had drowned to death. You should be ashamed.” Then she spanked me on the bottom about five times, kinda hard, not that it hurt, it was more that I was totally embarrassed by the whole episode, with all these people, mostly strangers, surrounding us and watching with lurid fascination at this point as Mom was demanding that I thank every member of the search party. There was nothing more I could do but almost cry, ’cause I hurt so much from being sun-blasted, tick-ridden and now on the verge of shitting my pants from a cramping gut full of diarrhea.

The irony of it all is that it was my birthday the next day and Mom was going to give me Grandpa’s stylish old Hamilton watch as a coming of age birthday present, but she said, “As punishment for being so irresponsible, you are grounded and there will be no watch for you, young man.” I’m not sure what punishment was doled out for Ray — I can guess — but I always thought not getting that watch was funny, in that I had lost track of the time, but maybe if I’d had that watch on me, we never would’ve lost track of the time and none of this would’ve happened; but then again, there’d be no story to tell if we hadn’t lost track of the time, so, all in all, it was pretty worth it to have gotten in trouble like this and caused the whole town of Oxbow, population 108, if that, and most of my town, a heartache of worry, and anyway, before long, everyone got over it and forgot it ever happened, and I ended up getting that watch a few months later at Christmas.

All in good time. 

Yeah, me and Ray, we shared lots of good times and a few bad times, branded with the tattoos and scars of our experiences. We loved our weekends, during the long summer, when we’d spend most of the day golfing, sometimes — Ray’s big money-making idea! — wading chest deep into the big trap pond and submersing to the murky depths to dig up brand new golf balls we’d locate by feeling around in the squishy mud with our feet, and then take them to the golf ball washing thingamajig at the club house, polish ’em up, and sell them for a buck apiece, which always netted us some great pinball money! I’ll never forget the time we once hauled in, I’m not making this up, over a hundred golf balls that were all brand new looking once we gussied them up! We pocketed like seventy-five bucks that day — huge money for two teenage kids!

Come evenings, we’d catch a ride to Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park to work admissions and the concession stand from seven to eleven. In some ways, the gig totally stunk, literally, because of the foul-smelling accumulation of feces and urine surrounding the filthy cages in such close proximity to one another with zero ventilation in the muggy night, but we got over it, ’cause we were able to gorge ourselves on all the candy and popcorn and corn dogs we could stuff into our pieholes.

Ray ran the concessions and I manned the admissions gate, greeting all manner of people from all over the place, mostly faces I didn’t recognize, people from different cities and backgrounds, 99% white conservative folks, and I never could understand how such a crappy place like Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park appealed to people from as far away as Clay City, Fairland and Eagleton. What? Just so some fat asses could eat cotton candy and stroll around the pathetic walkway with their obnoxious kids screaming and yelling and making fun of all the pitiable animals? Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park was really nothing but a pathetic joke, if you ask me — for pathetic people!

The “Safari Park” attraction was just an open dirt field contained by a perimeter of flimsy fencing where all the pathetic fat asses could pay ten bucks (ten bucks!) to ride around in a sputtering golf cart to gander at some seriously pathetic animals: one docile, scabrous giraffe; a stationary armadillo hiding out behind some rocks; a pair of giant tortoises staring blankly at a dinky water hole, where ol’ Walt got them, I don’t know; an underfed bear; an infirmed-looking elephant; a wildebeest or some kind of beast of obvious advanced age; and a skin-and-bones zebra slowly moving to and fro. Now, who in their right minds would pay ten bucks (ten bucks!) to see such a sorry-ass menagerie of miserable animals?

The rest of the animals in ol’ Walt’s zoo spent their forlorn existence cooped up in fetid concrete cages in the Monkey House, the Lion House, the Reptile House, and so on. They were just cheap quonset huts, is all, lined up irregularly along the walkway filled every Friday, Saturday and Sunday with gabbing gawking tourists. Nice job ol’ Walt. And yet people kept coming and paying the $5 dollar admission fee, the $10 Safari Park round-about, and loaded up on sugary snacks for them and their kids. Things were “so successful” that ol’ Walt started making plans to expand and open up on the weekdays. Not too, too fast, but may be on Tuesdays and Thursdays to start out.

Ray and I always felt like one day we were just gonna sabotage the place and set all the forlorn creatures loose on the world, but we figured they’d just come back, because what the hell was an elephant going to eat out there in the cruel world, or a fucking ape going to do in the cornfields, or where was a decrepit lion going to roam and hide in the sparse woodlands of our town.

One day after working the stinking joint for several months, we had reached our limit, especially after I had to call the manager, Buck Rasmussen, on the walkie-talkie to come and quell a mini-riot in the Monkey House. Some punk kids were heckling and tormenting a bedraggled chimpanzee, who had only been trying to masturbate in peace. I could see the gang throwing objects at the poor cuss, who began to screech and whimper and get all agitated, which prompted the yahoos to throw more rocks and sticks at the chimp, who promptly threw them right back with wicked force and precision.

The punk kids, probably drunk, were laughing, and one mean ass dude then stepped up the cruelty factor and threw a Pepsi bottle that struck the chimpanzee in the head, opening up a nasty gash. Blood was flowing and the chimp began howling in pain and rushed over to the bars of the cage to confront his tormenters. At that, the mean ass dude blew a nasty cloud of cigar smoke in his face, threw the lit butt at him, and kicked him in the chest through the bars of the cage causing the chimp to go reeling backward and bang against the wall and crumple to the ground, utterly defeated and in a state of sorrowful agony.

All these acts of indignity and unbearable cruelty, for a few cheap laughs. What heartless idiots. I wanted to knock their fucking teeth out. I knew even at my young age, having been expert at torturing flies and frogs and shooting snakes and birds, even once conspiring with some mean-spirited dickheads to insert a firecracker up a kitten’s ass, I now knew it was wrong, wrong, dead wrong. I gave all that stuff up, the senseless killing at Slaughter’s Pond (irony of ironies!), and I couldn’t understand how people could be so mean to any creature, especially helpless ones.

I could take no more, so I approached the scene of commotion to try to do something, but was powerless against this mob of reprobates. I didn’t know any of them, and they were all bigger and older than me. They told me to FUCK OFF PUSSY BOY! — so I urgently called Buck again on the walkie-talkie to come quick. Ray then showed up and tried to intervene, arms flaying and elbows swinging, doing his best to fend off the group and keep them away from the cage, but the mean ass dude, bigger than Ray, even, punched Ray in the gut so hard that Ray fell to his knees and the brute then kicked him hard in the ribs a couple of times. Ray could barely get up, and when he did, he staggered off to the side and puked.

Now, I was getting scared and worried, and wondered where the fuck Buck was, because things were out of hand. Ray was incapacitated off to the side, bent over and holding his belly, and the chimp, poor thing, was carrying about in an uproarious tantrum, and soon a crowd had gathered, and that’s when the gang split, taking one last pot shot at me and the chimp. In a selfless act of valor, Ray had regained enough strength to give them chase with a steel rod he’d pried off an unused cage, but they were long gone and it was more symbolic than anything that he tried to avenge the moment.

Of course, just then Buck arrived on the scene, explaining he had been waylaid attending to another emergency when some seven-year old shit for brains had stuck his hand in an enclosure and got his finger nearly bitten off by a rabid raccoon. Buck threw the chimp some fruit which mollified him somewhat, and I tried to coax him over to pet him, but he’d have none of it. Ray was now feeling better, thank goodness, but I could tell he was chagrined that he had taken a beating like the chimp. I tell you, my two favorite beings on this earth enduring and suffering such indignities — my best friend, Ray, and my favorite animal of all, the chimpanzee named Stanky — that stuck in my craw a long time. I was further devastated to learn that the already somewhat unhealthy Stanky died the next day, not from heartache, but from literal heartburn, when he had picked up the lit cigar butt the mean ass dude had thrown at him and, trying to puff hard on it, accidently inhaled it where it lodged in his throat, seared his lungs and heart, and suffocated him in an agonizingly painful death with no one around to save him.

A few days after this incident, Ray and I were walking the back way home from school, and we thought for a disorienting second that we were hallucinating when we saw a pair of scruffy baboons shuffle off into the bush, then a scrawny-ass bear standing doing nothing by the side of the road, then that sorry excuse for a zebra grazing in a hay field, and finally, what we swore was a flabby old elephant. I mean, how can you mistake an elephant for anything other than an elephant. We were dumbfounded, though, and figured the animals must somehow have escaped from Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park, which is crazy, because they were imprisoned in their cages, weren’t they? So what the hell was up?

Of course, Ray and I knew exactly what the hell was up, because as employees of Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park, we were saddened and fed up with the horrendous conditions and decided we were finally going to do something about it. So one night, after the place closed down, while the manager, Buck, was attending to closing time duties, Ray and I snuck around and secretly unlocked all the cages and left the doors just barely ajar so that Buck, on making his final rounds, didn’t notice a thing in the dim light.

Well, as we neared town, we saw that all the roads were closed and the police had blocked off an entire square acre outside the town. What the hell? We approached two of the local law enforcement lackeys, a couple of bozos named Wimpy and Jigs, right out of Mayberry or something, and they told us with a tinge of sadness and alarm in their voice that one of Ray’s little brothers, Junior, had gone missing. Oh shit, we thought, but didn’t flinch.

“Yeah,” said Wimpy, “We have an eye-witness who claims to have seen Junior being carried off by that dangerous lion, what’s his name?”

“Andy,” said Jigs, “We got no clue neither how all these animals escaped, but we’ve gotten reports of monkeys and boa constrictors and other animals on the loose, and just heard tell a few minutes ago that Judge Dickerson’s ’64 Mercury was totaled by a rampaging elephant.”

Wimpy looked us up and down, almost suspiciously, I felt, and said, “Whoever did this, there’ll be hell to pay.”

Ray and I looked at each other, not betraying our secret that had totally backfired on us. The best intentions, we learned at such an early age, were paving material for the road to hell. The horrifying realization that Junior had been snatched up and eaten by Andy was just too much for our little minds to grasp and our innocent souls to bear, and yet we couldn’t exactly confess to our malfeasance, now, could we? No way, no how, so we vowed to take this secret to our graves, our dirty little secret that we were responsible for Junior’s death.

Wimpy put his arm around Ray’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry about your little brother. We’ll find that sumbitch lion and shoot his ass dead and whoever did this, we’ll catch ‘im and there’ll be hell to pay.”

But the next day, it was like something out of a storybook ending, because a search party had been organized by the good townsfolk, who had also brought in a professional tracker and hunter, and in due course they turned up Junior, safe and sound, along with Andy. Turns out, Junior and Andy were best friends. Andy was Junior’s favorite zoo animal, and over the months, the loner Junior, something of a gentle half-wit giant, had begged and begged his dad, to no avail, to let him take Andy home as a pet. That day, when Junior spotted poor old Andy, confused and disoriented, limping back behind the hardware store in the grungy alleyway, he coaxed the old boy over and led him down a path to a secret swimming hole area where they’d be left alone in peace and Junior could attend to a piece of glass stuck in Andy’s paw, poor old infirmed, and darn near toothless Andy. He couldn’t have been more harmless! Once Junior had extracted the shard of glass from Andy’s paw, Andy gave Junior a huge licking of gratitude with his big old wet feline tongue.

After scouring every nook and cranny of the surrounding area, the search party found the unlikely pair at the break of dawn, snuggled up together, both sleeping. They had spent the night by the creek camping out. Junior awoke with a start at the sound of the search party tramping into his camp, and Andy stirred groggily, struggling to his feet, but sadly, before Junior or anyone could stop him, the trigger happy professional tracker put a bullet square between Andy’s eyes, and that was the end of poor old loveable Andy. In fact, a whole hit squad was now out and gunning down any and all stray animals in sight, including a report that two dogs belonging to the town dentist were among the casualties, having been accidentally mistaken for dangerous wild dingos.

Well, as you can guess, that was the nail in the coffin for Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park. For me and Ray, it was a bittersweet ending to our summer money-making gig, despite never meeting any city chicks to make out with, as Ray promised me we would. 

Ray and I would spend hours after school playing pinball at a local joint, feeding the buzzing, ringing beast of a machine all the quarters we could scrounge up from our piggy banks, from begging our parents, and even from devising this clever little machination of attaching a piece of chewed bubble gum to the end of a long stick and poking it down the grate outside Bugs’ Barber Shop where, for some reason, all kinds of coins had fallen down in the grate, and we’d fish out the loot every other day to supply our pinball habit.

One day, having run out of quarters, we decided to go explore down near the railroad tracks, an alluring area for us because we’d play like we were hobos or escapee prison convicts. We loved watching out for the big freight trains that’d come whooshing by every couple of hours, and sometimes more frequently, catching us off guard, and we’d always fetch a nickel or penny out of our pockets and place it on the tracks, then dive off into the bushes at the last second as the train roared by blaring its horn, the engineer either waving or shaking a fist at us, then once passed, we’d eagerly go in search of our flattened coins. I still have a couple of those petty talismans, precious but illegal mementos of those times. Illegal, I say, because one day when I showed my old man one of them, he told me it was illegal to destroy government property, and pennies and nickels were government property, he told me, which got me all scared and paranoid that I was going to get put in jail or something, so I took my stash of them — about fifty different flattened coins — and buried them in the back yard in my doggie graveyard.

One lazy do-nothing kind of day, we were having a contest to see who could walk the farthest balancing on the hot rails — barefoot! We were both good at it, but it was kind of like a torture test, or like an endurance thing walking across hot coals, to see who could out-macho the other.

That’s when we noticed an out-of-place figure with a bandana tied around his neck and outfitted in grubby overalls, wearing a funny kind of rain hat, and sporting an oversized denim jacked with a million decals sewn in of places he’d been to all over the country. We immediately took him to be a railroad tramp!

Appearing almost as an apparition, he quickly disappeared down into a little hollow of brush just off the tracks up ahead. Ray and I exchanged our by now familiar “what the hell?” glances of feigned bemusement, and decided to investigate. Approaching, we could hear tinny sounds of a transistor radio, and smelled funky stogy smoke or something that we turned our noses up at, ’cause it really stunk!

“Ray, what the hell. . .?”

“Man, I don’t know. Let’s take a peek in there.”

But rather than a “peek”, Ray actually said “pee” and the next thing I knew he had whipped out his pecker and began whizzing down into the hollow, to the great consternation of whoever the fuck was hunkered down there. Like a cobra striking, the mystery man suddenly erupted from his shelter yelling gruffly, “What in the tarnation do you think yer doin’ pissin’ down here? Yer mighty lucky you missed!”

Ray feigned innocence and astonishment. He declared, “Why, sir, I had no idea that anyone was down there.”

“No idea, eh! Ya little punk, I oughta . . .”

And at that, the stranger snatched Ray by the scruff of his neck like a helpless alley cat and began shaking him furiously, until finally I jumped to action and kicked the old stiff square in the shinbone, and we were off and running away as fast as we could from that crazy piece of scrofulous shit who next thing we knew was chasing after us down the tracks, yelling for us to stop, stop, please stop.

“Hey, come on back, fellas, no harm, no foul, I forgive y’all. A gink down on his luck like myself, why alls I need is a little bunkie company now and then.”

Despite or because of the incongruity of the situation, we actually surprised ourselves and stopped, turned around, and waited to see what would happen next. That’s when we noticed his not too pretty face, pockmarked with dimples like a golf ball and prickled with scruffy whiskers, but it was his soft eyes and warm smile that made us do a double-take, ’cause it was not a mean man’s face, but a gentle hobo’s face of worldly grace and kindness with a hint of wisdom. Sure, it could have been a put-on, so we remained on our guard, uncertain but intrigued at the hobo’s sudden turn-about.

“Listen,” he began, “My name’s Buford. Buford Frodge.” He emphasized the accent on BUE-ford. “I come from Tennessee. Ya can call me Jed. Why not let’s us be friends, okay.”

Jed stuck out a grimy hand as a declaration of his professed amity, and Ray and I just stood there in a dumbfounded trance, looking at each other, like what the hell, averse to clasping hands with Jed’s outstretched arm, what with the grubbiness and dirty bitten down fingers and all, but finally, we both reached over and shook his hand.

Then Jed said, “C’mon down to my hideout. I got a surprise awaitin’.”

Ray and I exchanged glances, at a loss for what to say, but we were oddly curious and tempted by the stranger’s strange offer. Were we afraid of him? Not really. The guy wasn’t even forty, probably, but he seemed older because of being world-weary and weather-beaten and, well, he seemed pretty dang harmless, like toothless old Andy, just a little rough around the edges, down on his heels a bit.

It seemed all Buford Frodge wanted was a little companionship. Nothing wrong with that, is there? And Ray and me, well, we were open to things, call it curiosity or naivete or whatever, but the arrival of a real-life railroad-riding tramp in our little town was just too exciting and novel to ignore. So we followed Jed a ways down the tracks until we came to his hidden makeshift shelter. We scrunched down in like getting into a submarine or something, and it was like entering a fetid den of some god-forsaken species not of this earth. But it was a bigger tunnel-like hole than we first made out, and we took seats on the mats of grass Buford had spread around so we were all in close proximity facing one another.

Jed said, “Listen, I’m just lay overin’ in yer town a day or two, until the big rambler for L’ullville Kentucky passes through day after tuhmarra. Then I’m gonna hop that slick rattler and ride it til kingdom come. Wanna tag along?”

Ray and I looked at each other, delighted by the prospect, but a bit flummoxed, realizing all sorts of possibilities in the moment at the outrageous but unlikely suggestion of actually living out our own railroad adventure kinda like Tom and Huck’s rafting adventure we read about in seventh grade year before last.

HECK YEAH! Sounds like a whole lot of fun! Our wide-eyed enthusiasm filled Jed with the piss and vinegar of a brand of excitement the likes of which he hadn’t experienced in years, or so it seemed by this zany little jig he started doing, and judging by the gnarly-ass smile he flashed at us, revealing a row of unkempt crooked yellow teeth, we could plainly see Jed was in hog heaven at the prospect of us accompanying him all the way to at least Louisville and who knows how much farther beyond the big city on the Ohio River where, he told us excitedly, we would meet up with a whole crew of rail riders who knew the ropes and could help us get to just about any place in the States we had a mind to get to. The unconstrained freedom of the road — the rails! — was simply too alluring and we were giggling and getting all excited, and without thinking things through, we were about to say HECK YEAH, JED! But of course, we quickly returned to earth, realizing there was no way we could go with Jed.

Ray said, “Wow, it really sounds fun but we’ve got summer school on Tuesdays, and church, you know, and we both mow lawns and do other work, so it looks like we’ll have to pass.”

I said, “Yeah, maybe some other time. Will you be coming back this way next summer?”

But I could tell Buford was a bit downcast at hearing the news. “Besides,” I said, “our parents probably would never let us go with you. Sorry, Jed.”

A light went off in Ray’s eyes. “Hey, there’s nothing to prevent us from having some fun right now, is there?”

Buford perked up and in a conspiratorial flourish he pulled a small flask of hooch from his coat pocket. He took a hefty swig and let out a big, “Ahh! That hit the spot. C’mon boys, A little hooker of fire water won’t hurt ya none. Here, go ahead, have some.”

Ray and I were used to exchanging “what the hell” glances, but this time we shared a “what the hell” shrug, because, after all, we were into our fifteenth year and who said we weren’t old enough to have a little old “hooker” of fire water. Some of our friends had been drinking beer since they were thirteen. So right then and there, in Buford Frodge’s grody hideout hole, we took our first ever sips of the rank libation, which he declared was the last of his “hunnert proof” Pirate’s Booty — a rum dum’s delight. I went first, barely allowing the rim of the bottle to touch my lips, hell, not because I was scared but because of Buford’s stinky backwash and nasty-ass hygiene. After three sips each we were feeling pretty good, I’ll have to say. Actually, we were feeling pretty darned goofy good.

We settled in like old pals and basked in Buford’s tales of the rails. He was quite the storyteller, spinning yarn after yarn, each one more unbelievable than the last. It was surprising Buford was so literate, ’cause one look at him and you’d think he was an imbecile.

We listened spellbound to him croon on and on about all the transients, vagrants, vagabonds, hobos, drifters and tramps — “some mighty fine folk, ya’d be surprised” — that he’d met on the road over the years, making them out to be the most fascinating characters on earth, always a new cast of characters to meet up with in some lonesome railyard, always taking care to avoid the “pussyfooters” or “bulls” or “dicks”— the railyard police — not to mention con men and grifters — a devil-may-care, ne’er do well life of sneaking around to hop another train to who knows or who cares where, just “the freedom to be unshackled, to traverse these great U-nited States” from the purple mountains majesty of Colorado to the endless pine forests of Maine, on over to gritty Chicago to pick up some itinerant work maybe.

“Now,” he told us again, “I’m headed back down south, to L’ullville, then home to — yep, ya best be believin’ it! — on to BUE-ford, Tennessee, yessiree, to check on my poor sick mum.” There was a tinge of sadness in his voice and the hint of a teardrop in one eye.

Throughout his raconteuring, Buford made opaque references here and there, whether intentional or not, about some shady doings and admissions, things and events and people that raised our eyebrows and put us a bit on our guard. We could tell Buford was holding in a few secrets; there was something dodgy about ol’ Frodgy, but what that was, we could only conjecture. We were still just too young, I guess, to have insight into what sorts of untenable, wrong side of the law shenanigans Buford was engaged in with or without his fellow moochers, scofflaws and grifters. One thing was for certain, though, Buford seemed to really like us and enjoy our company. I noticed, too, that all the while he was keeping a sharp eye on the two of us as he spun his ensnaring web of alluring railroad tales.

Then things took a turn for the worse and really went south. Buford paused in regaling us of his escapades, and pulled out some rolling papers and began fashioning a roll your own cigarette. He lit it with one of those old-fashioned flint lighters with a naked mermaid woman, and let out a big puff of smoke — the same rank odor we had smelled earlier wafting up from his grody hideout hole! It wasn’t no stogy smoke, but rather some of that wacky tobacky we’d been hearing about. Some kids in our grade were already smoking it, but they were considered bad kids, the ones your parents warned you about, and here we were on the threshold of getting stoned on some stink weed with a knockabout from Tennessee named Buford Frodge.

“How about a drag on some of this here fine Mary Jane?” Buford reached over to hand us his raggedy joint.

Naturally, we were reluctant to indulge. We watched Buford kick back and take a few puffs, blowing out swirling clouds of bluish smoke into the den. Even if we had declined to partake of his stink weed, we would have surely gotten high just breathing in the smoky residue hanging in the air. What the hell — Ray and I decided to give it a try. I went first, taking a good long pull, unaware, or uncaring, that Buford’s spit had grossly soiled the end of the butt, but after another puff, and Ray joining in, it hardly mattered. Before we knew what was what, our minds were reeling, and we felt a sense of detachment and strangeness — a transformation to a muddled mental state of mush and disorientation, but at the same time, exhilaration. We just hoped we weren’t gonna get so screwed up we’d forget about the time and miss dinner and then everyone’d be worrying sick about us and probably send out a search party or something.

Buford pulled out a small glass vial. I thought it was aspirin, but it wasn’t. He tumbled five little purple pills into his hand. He popped one, and told me and Ray to pop one.

“Look here, punks, hang on to them other three pills, ya never know when they might come in handy.”

Ray took the purple pills and stashed them in his pocket, looking at me with that conspiratorial grin so familiar by now, seeming to say, “Oh, I know these’ll come in handy!”

In my growing delirium, I half-shrugged and closed my eyes, feeling quite unsteady, out of body, increasingly out of my mind, but oddly euphoric at the same time.

“Ray, we’re stoned, man!”

“Yeah, to da bone!”

“How you feelin’?”

“Pretty good. You?”

That’s all I remembered saying. Things started to get very weird, even scary, because I don’t know how much time had all of a sudden passed — it could have been five minutes or five hours — which was totally bizarre and disconcerting not knowing — and it seemed like I was having, or had had, an out of body experience. I was in a panic, suddenly finding myself outside the grody hideout hole. I was on the tracks, peering down at Buford and Ray. My vision was blurry and my heart was racing and then, like that, my whole body went slack and my stomach felt sickened, not from the hooch and grass and pill I had errantly swallowed — but from what I could see that Buford was doing to Ray.

Both Buford and Ray were prostrate, with Buford nestling his body up against Ray. Both of their pants were pulled down to their knees. Buford was fondling Ray all over, and in a sickening realization, I saw a thrusting motion that was Buford giving it to Ray in the ass! I couldn’t believe my eyes. Is this what hallucinations were? It was hard to tell if Ray was conscious or half-passed out, or what, but then he began squirming and groaning and I could finally hear him beseeching Buford in a meek voice to stop, but his feeble protestations only served to turn Buford on more, and he kept hammering and grinding away despite Ray’s futile effort to escape, because poor Ray was so immobilized by all the drugs he’d ingested, and then I remembered seeing Ray reach into his pocket and pop another purple pill at some hazy point, thinking that could not portend anything positive. I was plenty stoned myself — more stoned than I ever wanted to be — so I imagined Ray was in a near comatose state and exceedingly easy to take advantage of against his will.

It didn’t occur to me right off how I ended up outside on the tracks while this horrible incident was unfolding down in that nasty hole. I’m guessing that, before things escalated, I must have gotten claustrophobic or something and climbed up and out to get some fresh air, and that’s when Buford leveraged the moment to take advantage of Ray, because I can’t imagine Ray actually acceding to a — suggestion? — request? — to take it in the ass by this now-disgusting stranger. I mean, see, it was clear to me that Ray wasn’t gay or interested in men at all, no way, no how, not that there’s anything wrong with homosexual relations, but this was no such thing. This was out and out rape and sodomy.

I didn’t know what to do. I was horrified. My stoned mind raced. Should I run and get Mom or call the police? Not a good idea at all, because of my mental condition and all the trouble I would certainly get into over having done drugs and violated a solemn oath to Mom that I would never, ever drink or do drugs. So I decided the only honorable or logical course of action was to be a hero and rescue Ray myself. But I was out of my senses. I could only stare down blankly, but horrified, into that awful hole, transfixed in stuporous indecision in my own immutable agony watching helplessly, until finally it gave way to overwhelming worry and insurmountable disgust at the lewd scene of poor Ray squirming about, unable to mobilize or fight Buford off because of his lame, drugged state. Ever so slowly my befuddled mental state began to break — this was some evil shit goin’ down— and I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to act.

NOW!

I yelled at the top of my lungs, “BUFORD! STOP IT! STOP IT! RAY, RAY, CAN YOU HEAR ME? RAY! ARE YOU OK?”

Taken by surprise, the slimeball rapist looked up at me with a maniacal grin, still thrusting away. He shouted, to my horror, “SHUT THE FUCK UP! YER NEXT! C’MON DOWN HERE NOW AND GIT YERS WHILE THE GITTIN’S GOOD! WHAT’RE YA AFEARED OF, MY LITTLE LAMB?”

I froze, knowing I had to act now, quickly, decisively. I picked up a big rock off the tracks and heaved it down the hole with all my might, and was blown away when it struck Buford squarely up side his head knocking him senseless just long enough for me to leap down in the hole and shake Ray out of his delirium, help pull up his pants, and then carry him to safety like a wounded soldier out of a bloody foxhole.

Up and out of the den of iniquity, we ran like hell — stumbled more like it — and didn’t even look back — until we heard Buford cursing and yelling at us with feral insanity, “I’M GONNA KILL YA LITTLE FUCKERS! I’M GONNA KILL YA BOTH!”

But that was the last we — or I should say I — ever saw of Buford Fucking Frodge. Later on, I was compelled to go to the library and secretly look up some stuff on hobos. I found a rare book called The Secret World and Code of Ethics of the American Hobo. Fascinated, I read about the Hobo Code of Ethics Rule 13, which stated: “Do not allow other hobos to molest children. Expose all molesters to authorities; they are the worst garbage to infest any society.” A few lines down the Code of Ethics had a provision wherein other hobos would necessarily “clamp down” on “jockers” or “wolves” — predators like Buford Frodge who would take on runaway boys as apprentices and groom them for homosexual relationships in exchange for protection and teaching them the ropes of survival riding the rails.

Naturally, we never told a soul about what happened down in the grody hideout hole. After my undercover visit to the library, when some time had passed and Ray and I had recovered and felt ready to talk about things, he confessed something that shook me up pretty badly — are you ready for this? Because I sure wasn’t!

Ray told me he was used to getting fucked in the ass! He never really saw it as rape. For Ray, it was no different from getting an ass-whipping with a belt. Ray had actually expected something like it to happen during our encounter with Buford Frodge. But what shocked and appalled me the most — perhaps more than the despicable perverse act of violence — was that Ray told me in some ways it wasn’t all that bad. If it was inevitable, he told me, it was best not to fight or struggle with it, just accept it. That was an unheard of and unspeakable thing for me to get my head around, that Ray could so resignedly accept getting fucked in the ass by a grown man as something normal, because it was not homosexuality that I had a problem with, it was man-boy rape that bothered me, the taking advantage of someone, an innocent, of drugging and raping them. But when Ray told me that his own father, ol’ Walt, had been doing the same to Ray ever since he was seven years old — seven years old! — going back to when we first met, spanking him with his belt on his bare ass — for his own good — and then rape fucking him in his little boy ass, why that shattered me to the bone, absolutely destroyed any sense or faith I had of this world being a good and kind and caring place like the Odd Fellows or Ray’s holy church wanted to make it out to be, and that Ray, who told me EVERYTHING, had kept this dark and dirty secret from me, why that shook me to the core of my being.

But Ray took it like he took a whooping, or getting grounded, or having to go to mass every night for two weeks. “Just part of life,” of living and learning, of accepting punishment “for his own good.” 

A couple of days after the “incident” Ray and I were eating ice cream sundaes at the drug store and overheard the town clown cops, Wimpy and Jigs, bragging about the “big bust” they’d made the day before when they hauled in some homeless disorderly drunk who’d been seen hanging around down by the railroad tracks. Turns out, too, the old geezer had warrants out in other states for his arrest on a variety of charges, including armed robbery and forgery — even rape and murder! Jesus, to think!

Well, the months and years, they rolled by, idyllic for the most part, but we were both growing up, becoming older, and I’d like to say wiser, but in truth we were growing apart. And where all that would have taken us, beyond our teenage years, is forever unknowable, because it all came to a sudden, crashing end one day when Ray committed an egregious act, an unspeakable transgression, that he had the gall to blame on me!

You see, all this time, the innocence of youthful serial masturbation had given way to viler urges and baser desires as adolescence gave way to incipient manhood. To escape his dysfunctional family, Ray had frequently spent nights over with me, especially when my older sisters’ cute friends would also be staying over. I never thought anything of it, never put two and two together.

Sometimes, the girls would host a pajama party sleep-over, and if Ray got wind of it, he’d always make a plan to spend the night. What he was most interested in at this stage of his life was not sneaking out in the middle of the night or watching old episodes of Batman and The Twilight Zone until past midnight, or whatever it was we used to do together when we stayed over at one another’s place. Ray was now into sneaking around in the dead of night when the girls were all asleep in the fold away cots or on the couch and gingerly approach them as quiet as a church mouse so he could . . . feel them up.

When Ray first told me about his derring-do middle of the night antics, feeling up my sisters’ girlfriends, I was like, “Uh, Ray, are you kidding? That’s not right.”

But he persuaded me to set aside my chickenshit reservations and accompany him on one of his furtive feel up missions one night when Cheryl Brown, who was sixteen, hot and sexy, and her tantalizingly nubile friend, Janet Cummings, who was fifteen, were invited over to spend the night.

Ray asked, “Hey, do you mind if I sleep over at your place with you tonight?”

Though I was older and growing weary of sleeping in my little bed with Ray, I consented, thinking maybe we could set up the tent and sleep outside. “Sure, Ray, no problem.”

I was leery of Ray’s intentions, his blatant ulterior motive for wanting to spend the night. I harbored a deep conviction — against my better ethical judgment — that it just wasn’t right, but I went along with it anyway, ’cause Ray always held sway and convinced me it would be cool, “and just you wait, you’ll see.”

At around one in the morning, Ray jostled me awake out of a weird dream and I followed him guiltily as we snuck out of my bedroom and tiptoed out to where the girls were sleeping. I hung back a little out of deference to Ray’s expertise in these matters, watching him stealthily approach the two sleeping girls. Janet was clad in just her skimpy panties and was braless under a tee shirt. She was lying there so tenderly, lightly snoring, like a kitten, when she momentarily gave Ray a start appearing to open her eyes. Ray froze for a second in the muted dark, before feeling emboldened to make a move.

Ever so cautiously, he began to pet her thigh and lift up her baggy tee shirt to try to get a peek up in there, but that was too risky, so he bent over and sniffed her longing crotch, then turned and looked at me and licked his lips, flashing me a grin and a wink. I cringed, I really did.

Then, Cheryl stirred and moaned in a dreamy state as though she was half-aware of what was going on. Titillatingly, by accident or design, I’m not sure, one of her delectably budding little breasts slipped out from beneath her loose tee shirt, and her legs “inadvertently” opened wide to expose what Ray later called her “pulsating camel toe.”

It seemed she was onto the charade and didn’t mind one little bit. It was hard to tell if the girls were faking sleep, but now, after a few silent cautious moments, it appeared both girls were indeed sound asleep. I dared not hone in on Ray actions or make a move to touch one of the girls myself, even though I was starting to feel something tingly down there at the thought of it all and the near olfactory sensation of sweet-smelling armpits and crotches, despite my best efforts to quash this clearly wrong lustful emotion from surfacing and unleashing upon the girls.

I could see now, with a mixture of surprise, amazement and disdain, that Ray had taken his pecker out of pants and had a hard-on and was starting to jack off right there on his knees. That did it for me, shattering my prurient reverie and fantasies. I turned away and went back to my bedroom, not before urging Ray with frantic waves of my arm to knock it off and come quickly before he got caught red-handed. How different this was from back a couple of years ago when Ray was floggin’ it on the toilet to Pussy Galore’s picture in Dad’s Private Black Book when I thought that was bold!

Well, these lewd shenanigans persisted every so often for a couple of months. Then one day Ray hatched a demonic plan to spend the night, having gotten wind that a new sexy friend was staying over — seventeen year old Beth Mansfield who was, hands down, as hot as they come, and just innocent and flirtatious enough to make you think she wanted you, but it was pretty obvious she was a virgin and had zero intentions of “putting out” as she came from a very nice family, she was a “good girl” and a cheerleader at school.

Ray had confided to me one day that he was infatuated with Beth to the point of stalking her. He was determined to be the first to “pop that honey’s cherry.” I was taken aback at his crude language and bold assertion. This no longer sounded like the Ray Haney I knew and admired and respected, but what the hell . . .

“Ray,” I pleaded, “That’s ridiculous, she doesn’t want anything to do with you. Besides, you’re a fucking virgin yourself!”

I was half-joking, not really knowing, but figuring it must be so because Ray told me everything, so if he’d had intercourse with a chick, especially with Beth Mansfield, then believe me, I’d know about it!

“Look, I’ll bet you twenty dollars I can get into her panties! Tonight,” Ray bragged.

The bet seemed a ludicrous proposition and gross exaggeration of Ray’s sexual prowess and appeal to Beth, because Ray Haney was decidedly not Beth Mansfield’s type, and besides, rumor had it she was already in a relationship with Tim McGonigle, the basketball team captain.

“Ah, screw that fucker,” Ray told me. That only served to embolden him to follow through on what began to seem to me more and more like a twisted revenge fuck.

Still, I was pretty clueless and passed on the bet, and blew the whole thing off, because I knew Ray too well, and knew he could not ever, would not ever, do anything untoward or bad, or purposely hurt anyone. Harmlessly feeling up my sister’s friends, and jacking off at the altar of their bed, that was one thing. But a revenge fuck? Nah, no way. Still, I was curious if and how Ray intended to plumb the depths of Beth Mansfield’s aromatic, virginal bush, but I dropped it.

Come that fateful night a couple of weeks later, we all hung out together and enjoyed snacks and sodas and played some card games together with my middle sister and her friend, Beth Mansfield. I couldn’t believe my sister actually let us hang out with them, but the mood was convivial and my sister liked Ray, and Beth thought we were both “cute” and fun, too, so things were looking up for Ray and his plan.

At one point, I saw Ray go fetch Beth another Diet Tab from the kitchen and didn’t think anything about it until a few minutes after that. Beth began complaining about being “soooooo groggy” and then her words became slurred. She said she felt “dizzy” and “off” and had to go to bed. Poor girl, I thought, what’s that all about.

Beth ended up barely making it to the couch, and nearly passed out on the floor and had to be helped put to bed by my sister, who thought Beth had just taken sick or something. We all ended up calling it a night, and went our separate ways to hit the sack. Ray and I fell asleep side by side in my junior bed, which was beginning to feel smaller and smaller by the second.

I had actually forgotten about Ray’s bet from a couple of weeks ago, regarding his lustful scheme, and even Beth’s sudden turn for the worse at the card game didn’t rouse my suspicions much, but the next morning, when we were woken up by a hubbub of loud talking and crying, I knew something bad had happened. It was Beth drowning in tears, explaining to Mom and my four sisters, all gathered about her, consoling her and trying to make sense of what she was saying, before finally realizing that the poor girl was telling them that something awful, inexplicably bad, had happened to her during the night.

Ray and I skulked out of my bedroom over to where the incident was unfolding in the living room. Beth was supine on the couch staring up at the ceiling blank-faced with swollen eyes. I was incredulous and highly disturbed by the scene, and thought it very odd (suspicious) how Ray was looking so hang-dog and sheepish. Beth turned over on her side and between near uncontrollable sobs, looked at us and blurted, “Which one of you creeps did this to me?”

The collective look of astonishment and consternation on my Mom’s and sister’s faces in their half-formed putative belief that perhaps it actually was ME who was the culprit, made my head spin, my heart ache and flutter, and my stomach and guts turn upside down and inside out, all of which made it appear like I actually WAS the guilty party.

Ray was just standing there hanging his head, nodding, pursing his lips resolutely, his steel trap of a mind spinning a web of deceit, figuring out how to implicate me and get him off the hook. After a long dramatic pause, he looked up at my Mom and eyed Beth, and pointing directly at me said, with emphatic conviction, “It wasn’t ME! It was HIM!”

Beth, my Mom and sisters all looked at me disbelievingly. I was overcome with a mix of uncontainable emotions seething up from deep in my bowels with volcanic fury. I was simultaneously aghast, flabbergasted, and gobsmacked by the utterly false smear, the blatant, patently dead wrong allegation. Initially, I stuttered and stammered in an aphasic state of angst and horror that such an incomprehensible turn of events was actually happening, that Ray had actually pointed his finger at ME and blamed ME for the atrocious act committed against Beth!

My senses returned and I launched into an eloquent defense of my honorable self, and didn’t hold back one ounce besmirching Ray’s flawed moral character, making known his many sexual proclivities and perversities and how he’d been sneaking down over the months to feel up all the girls who’d been staying over. Audible gasps filled the air and eyeballs near popped out at my revelations, but it seemed that I was winning my Mom, sisters and Beth over to my side as the more truthful version of events unfolded.

But Ray was never one to back down. I could not believe my ears! He continued to categorically deny everything! He said I was the one lying, I was the ringleader and instigator, I was the rapist, I was the one with the purple pills! (Oh, my God, how could I have forgotten about Buford’s purple pills he’d given to Ray?) Ray insisted convincingly and passionately, wanting to know how could he, being an upstanding Christian, possibly be responsible for committing such a monstrous and heinous act? My jaw dropped at the realization that I was in the presence of someone I no longer knew. Ray Haney: prevaricator, sociopath, sick individual. How had it come to this? Given he himself had been abused and raped since he was seven years old, perhaps that explains it. Will I ever know, really?

But there we were in the moment, caught in a he-said / he-said situation, but obviously my Mom believed me, and I think so did my sisters and Beth, but Ray was doing his best to hornswoggle them with clever lies and gaslight them with counter-punching alternate scenarios, it was all so confusing. Mom wanted to hear more about the “feeling up episodes” and how long they’d been going on, and I told her, and she scolded me for not having told her sooner about Ray’s lascivious midnight forays. In HER house! Under HER roof! With HER daughters!?

But Ray didn’t budge. He just stood there and continued with his bald-faced lying sack of shit defense. “I’m telling you,” he insisted, pointing squarely at me with a scornful look of deprecation and anger, “It was him who did this to you, Beth. I respect you too much to ever think about doing such a thing. I’m a Christian, you know that!”

I stopped him short, calmly refraining from a visceral urge to scream or punch him. “Ray, man, you’re sick! Once you get out of jail or the psychiatric ward, wherever they end up putting you, you’re gonna need more than God to help you.”

Then — no one saw it coming. Without warning, Ray dashed off in a stunning and sudden exit, darting out the door as fast as he could run. I was too emotionally overwhelmed to chase after him, and then Mom got on the phone and called the police and in ten minutes Wimpy and Jigs had arrived to file a report and then went off to corral Ray and bring him to justice.

Mom then called Beth’s mom to explain what happened, and then an ambulance came to take Beth to the doctor. It all happened so fast and everyone was in tears, even me now, because I felt betrayed by my best friend, and appalled by his actions, and felt real sorry for poor Beth who now might even be pregnant, and what a horrible way to have to lose your virginity. Luckily, it turned out Beth was not pregnant, but she was now “damaged goods” as her distraught mother told my Mom.

Well, as you can imagine, that was the final nail in the coffin that sealed the end of my friendship with Ray Haney. 

POSTSCRIPT:

Present day.

I’m excavating some musty old boxes buried in my closet that haven’t seen the light of day since I moved into this place years ago. I pry open a few and root around through a jumble of forgotten memorabilia and family heirlooms and silly tchotchkes I’ve held onto like a pack rat from the ancient misty past.

I’m not really looking for anything in particular, just curious to see what’s in the boxes — maybe some valuable baseball cards, some photographs, a yearbook, those precious miniature silver-plated chalices Dad brought home from China at the end of the war — who knows what I might find.

Hah! What’s this? Why, it’s Dad’s Private Black Book! I can’t believe it. I turn to the P section and — there’s Pussy Galore, her fading sepia-yellow toned face smeared and partially blotted out from when Ray tried to clean off the semen he’d spilled when he came on her all those years ago up in Dad’s bathroom jacking off with me watching sheepishly. I flip through for a quick look-see at the other by-gone sexpots and place it back in the box reverently.

Mostly, I’m in a once in a decade mood to clear out the clutter in my life, wondering if I should Marie Kondo the whole shebang.

I open a box the size of a ream of paper and pull out the contents: a dog-eared, coffee-stained handwritten draft in semi-neat cursive, and a typewritten final manuscript with a dozen brittle rubber bands securing the bundle of flimsy yellowing typewriter paper. A note is scotch-taped to it:

~ FOR MY EYES ONLY ~

My God! What have I unearthed? How could I have forgotten that all those many long years ago, when I was nineteen, I had written an account of what happened between me and Ray. I had scrawled a hasty first draft of the memoir on rule-lined paper, and then typed up the story on my old Smith-Corona in the year 1974. I’d completely forgotten it existed, and I’m certain I never shared with anyone the salient truths, salacious details and lurid aspects of the rise and fall of my friendship with my best childhood buddy, Ray Haney.

Until now, dear reader. Dive in. The entire story — word for word as I wrote it — is published on my blog. 

Reading the story over for the first time since I finished spilling my guts out — a couple of years after the “incident” — the memoir brought back some truly fond memories of my friendship with Ray Haney in the “halcyon years”, in what seems like a reliving or retelling of our Tom Sawyeresque and Huck Finnish adventures.

But all those grand times were negated by everything that went wrong, beginning with our secret and wrong-headed tryst with the grotesque monster Buford Frodge, the midnight forays to feel up my sisters’ girlfriends, and ending with the drugging and raping of Beth Mansfield and blaming the odious act on me. Sadly, the events of just a single year overshadowed and cancelled out all the good memories and fun times and precious friendship we shared over the previous eight years.

During the passage of years we never saw one another again. I never cared to know anything of him, but over time I heard from various friends the following information about Ray Haney’s post-high school happenings and whereabouts:

After the “incident” when Ray had bolted out of the house, he somehow returned home, eluding his parents and siblings, and packed a quick bag and split the scene. A genuine runaway, he no doubt got himself tangled up with some “jocker” and became what was known as a “lamb” or “Angelina” — a young boy taken under the wing of an older hobo for protection in exchange for sexual favors. Somehow, Ray was able to evade the authorities for fifteen months; a private eye his parents hired to track him down couldn’t turn him up. His name and photograph even appeared on TV as “missing” or “abducted”. It wasn’t until April 1, 1974 that a crack FBI team finally located him in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and arrested him on charges of rape and sodomy.

I was able to piece together from various reports that Ray had hopped a train the very night of the “incident” — with none other than the mercurial Buford Frodge, as crazy as that sounds. Apparently, the law enforcement authorities in our bozo town had to release Frodge that very day, after holding him for a couple of weeks, because of insufficient evidence to document his crimes in other states, and they couldn’t pin anything on him here, as he hadn’t done anything illegal in our state. Well, if they only knew. They arranged with the Chattanooga authorities to return Ray, in chains, but the Good Lord must have been on his side because the Mansfield family mysteriously declined to press charges. Rumor had it that ol’ Walt had sicced some goons on the family, threatening harm if they so much as whispered their intent to prosecute his innocent boy.

Back in town Ray proceeded to knock up a local girl named Marla Foster. They picked up stakes and moved to the bucolic town of Oxbow, population 108 —  soon to be population 113 — when the third of their kids was born in three years. Out of a delayed sense of Christian guilt, perhaps, Ray finally married Marla, but ever afflicted with a wild hair up his ass, he vanished a month later, abandoning his brood and hightailing it out of town.

Rumor — nothing but rumors! — had it he fled back down south to Chattanooga and took up with a floozy Buford Frodge introduced him to, and on the run from child abandonment and child support payments, the couple skipped the country and managed to skedaddle to, so it was confirmed, the Dominican Republic, where he set up his Worldwide Church of Christ, Scientist and Ministry in a renovated barn in a poor coastal city.

As a big Chicago Post exposé uncovered, the Worldwide Church of Christ, Scientist and Ministry was a sham religious organization that bilked people out of millions of dollars through various pyramid schemes and Ponzi scams, and flooded the church’s coffers with the blood money from dozens of ingenious but phony, illicit tax-dodging enterprises cloaked in the good graces and auspices of the Worldwide Church of Christ, Scientist and Ministry.

Such was Ray’s abundance of trustworthy charisma that he was able to hoodwink first the local populace, then as things spiraled he magnificently ramped things up to pull off the biggest swindle ever by a sham religious outfit — if you didn’t count Scientology, that is. 

I had gone away to college, then moved to Las Vegas for my career, got married, had kids, all the conventional stuff; while Ray was going down a very different path, leading a double life of pious Minister and secret criminal mastermind in cahoots with his dad, ol’ Walt. It was even rumored they were involved in a cabal of organized sex trafficking rings in the Far East using his respectable Worldwide Church of Christ, Scientist and Ministry as a front to recruit young children.

Things were going nicely, that is, until his arrest in 1990 brought him down and made headlines in several big city newspapers, when he was arrested, convicted and jailed for ten years, then finally released on parole. The local press had a field day trying to get to the bottom of Ray Haney’s empire. I actually remember reading about that — and remember not being too, too surprised. But still, I was intrigued to learn about Ray Haney’s comings and goings, his whereabouts and his long list of errant deeds.

Ray then took up a fairly conventional straight and narrow life with a new bride from Singapore, settling in an undisclosed location in Tennessee. Not much was heard from Ray Haney from then on — nor any further news about Buford Frodge — according to my sources, but they all said he had enough money to last a lifetime having stashed the bulk of his ill-gotten gains in a private off-shore account somewhere in the Cayman Islands — it was rumored.

As for the rest of the Haney brood, here’s what my sources told me:

Beverly Haney finally divorced ol’ Walt in 1977 and moved to Chicago with a loverboy she’d been having an affair with for a few years, a passing through trucker who treated her like a real lady, but, unfortunately, dumped her a few months later, but that was all right, because Beverly had come into her own and finally realized her dream of working for a top-tier marketing agency in the Loop, albeit just an ad rep. She retired in 1992 and moved to Tennessee to be close to her son, Ray, and her four grandkids — the previous three, born from his dalliance with Marla Foster in Oxbow before his skipping out on them, moved away and were never heard from again. Beverly lived out the remainder of her days in peace and quiet, dying in 2015 at the age of ninety-two.

Ol’ Walt kicked the bucket in 1984, somehow able to avoid prosecution for his accomplice role in Ray’s gangster-affiliated scams. He took his scandals and secrets to his grave where he was buried in a decrepit cemetery on the edge of town on a drizzly day with hardly anyone in attendance. His tombstone reads:

HERE LIES WALTER HANEY, FATHER, HUSBAND, FRIEND. MAY HIS SOUL REST IN HEAVEN IN ETERNAL PEACE.

All of the Haney boys met gruesome fates. The twins, Donnie and Ronnie, and the other half-wit, Billy — along with two other unlucky dumb fucks — were killed in a car accident in 1988 when they’d been out drinking and carousing, speeding at 100 MPH and crashing into a tree on Route 33 right in front of the long-defunct overgrown remains of Walt Haney’s Exotic Zoo and Safari Park.

Poor Junior made it to just twenty-nine, before he perished from a blood infection after stepping barefoot on a rusty nail and never going to the hospital until it was too late. I found it cruelly ironic, recalling how he’d saved Andy the Lion’s life by pulling a big shard of glass out of his paw.

Sweet autistic Becky was the only college educated — and surviving member — of the family. She went on to become a successful county D.A. One of her cases involved accusations of tax fraud, extortion, and embezzlement going back years, against her own father and brother, for misdeeds and wrong-doings on a variety of things related to ol’ Walt’s “legitimate” businesses.

And wouldn’t you know it — just today, an oversized photograph of Ray Haney appears in my Facebook feed. I’ll never understand how those algorithms work! Despite his gray hair, wrinkles and verging on an old-looking fifty-four, I instantly recognize Ray. As the full photo comes into view, I can’t help but laugh out loud. Ray is sitting at a table — same mischievous grin, now toothless, same oddball quirky eye, now clouding over — and, get this, he is presiding over a . . .

Mountainous pile of French Fries!

Some things never change.

Another odd thing happens a few days later. I come upon a little snippet in the newspaper about a truck driver who takes a wrong turn down a dirt road, overturns his semi and his entire cargo spills out of . . .

Dozens of boxes of Potato Chips!

As if that’s not funny enough, the article quotes the driver’s boss, one “Ray Haney” (not our protagonist) who drolly explains the situation as “the chips falling where they may.”

That is an absolutely true story!

A year later.

I’m on Facebook posting one of my Lost in Vegas photos when a friend request and private message alert pops up from — Ray Haney of all people! Attached is a photograph of a poster tribute he’d made, listing 305 people and friends in his life who’d made a big impact on him, 305 people and friends who meant something to him, 305 people and friends who were near and dear to his heart.

At the top of the photo, in bold and italic letters, he proclaimed:

IS MONEY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE? NO! FRIENDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN ALL THE RICHES IN THE WORLD! Friends are LIFE, PEACE OF MIND & JOY in a bankrupt world. Friends are a COMMUNITY to help one another in times of need and strife. I just want thank my 305 friends listed below who have brought me LIFE, PEACE OF MIND, JOY & ENCOURAGEMENT as I turn 54 on August 17.

My eyes then focused in on a huge block of tiny-print run-on names, many of them my friends from the old days.

Guess who is #1 on the list of Ray Haney’s 305 most important people and friends?

ME!

ME?

Yes, ME!

I’m stunned to see my name at the top of his list; stunned to realize that after all these years, no matter that we had gone our separate ways, led separate lives worlds apart in every conceivable way, never once saw or contacted one another; never spoke or heard from or cared about a single thing in either of our lives — decades after I had basically cancelled him out of my life — here it turns out that Ray Haney all along — ever since that first day in Mrs. Knuckles’ first grade class when he turned to me and said “I pledge allegiance to you, my friend, for all time” — loved me and carried me in his heart as his very best friend through thick and thin, good and bad, ups and downs. In his mind, despite my perpetual absence and our breakup and severing of relations, I was still his best friend for all time. Somehow, in his mind, I was able to bring him LIFE, PEACE of MIND, JOY & ENCOURAGEMENT to his dying day.

All I can say is:

WOW!

WOW!

Exactly one month later.

I’m back on Facebook — it seems the whole world is made manifest through the algorithms — and the specter of Ray Haney appears in my feed. It shows him in better days, posing on the steps of his modest home in Oxbow, population 113, holding his littlest in his arms. The post informs us, his friends near and far, present and past, all 305 of us whom he held in the highest esteem, that, at age fifty-four, my former friend Ray Haney, has died of cancer.

I choke up a bit, but can’t stop a small chuckle from asserting itself as I wonder if it was because of all that acrylamide in his veins from overdosing on too many fried potatoes.

Rest in peace, Ray Haney. May the Good Lord forgive you for all your transgressions and sins. May we all be forgiven for our own, too.

THE END