20th Reunion

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.
Benjamin Disraeli

Timeline 13:07h 13 September 2010

I was telling my teenage daughter this story yesterday. She found it amusing, so I’ll share. (I had buried it somewhere in my subconscious, when she asked me: “Dad, were you ever in trouble with the law?”) Nah. Not really.

We were having a JV Football party, which essentially meant a bunch of pimply fifteen year old boys standing around in the woods on a Saturday night, invariably underdressed for the wet and cold Peekskill weather, passing around bottles of Southern Comfort or warm beer or both. There were never any girls at these “parties”. They were too smart, no doubt. On this particular occasion we were in the woods behind Lakeland Middle School.
Suddenly several angry grown men appeared, cursing and crashing through the brush with flashlights. We all scattered, each of us running in a different direction like a flock (herd? brace? gaggle?) of frightened deer.
I ran until I was out of breath, exhilarated at the chase and at having escaped. I stayed still and listened for a while; I heard nothing. Silence. After an eternity (it was probably two minutes) I decided to circle back, stealthily of course, and reconnoiter. Perhaps my buddies needed rescuing from whoever those men were, or fell in a ditch and twisted an ankle, or some such.
I went about twenty yards when a large man grabbed me by the neck. “Gotcha”, he said and dragged me by the scruff through the woods. I thought I ran four miles in but we were at his car (a police cruiser) in about ten seconds. It was literally right there.
He plopped me in the backseat and the interrogation began. “Who are you?” “Where do you live?” “How old are you?” “Where do you go to school?” “What were you doing in those woods tonight?” “Do you know such and such, and so and so?”
Now, I hadn’t been in any trouble of any kind before. I had never even met a policeman, let alone been manhandled by one. That cruiser’s backseat seemed like a jail cell to me; it was huge. I was terrified. There was flashing lights and strange smells and noises and guns and other important stuff that made me realize how young and small I really was. He was asking me questions and working his walkie-talkie and telling the dispatcher to verify my home address and call my parents and, well dang! Five minutes ago I was bragging to my buddies about my exploits on the football field, and now I was ready to give up my mother just to be able to climb out of that car.
The “interrogation” went on for about twenty minutes. Seemed like five years to me.
Turns out someone had thrown a molotov cocktail at a house in that area the weekend before, and he wanted to know if me and my friends were involved.
When he realized that I knew nothing about it, and what a pissant I really was, he finally let me go. But not before I gave up every name of every “bad boy” I ever knew, from kindergarten through high school. I was the biggest stoolie you ever saw. I was giving up friends, acquaintances, strangers, real and fictional characters (“…maybe it was the Son of Sam, or The Riddler, or Gollum, I dunno, please sir just let me go sir!!”)
So, once again I find myself disgusted with myself, for some embarrassing adolescent episode that happened thirty five years ago…no wonder that one had stayed deep down until yesterday.

With useless endeavor,
Forever, forever,
Is Sisyphus rolling
His stone up the mountain!
Longfellow. The Masque of Pandora