Helmet Head (7 page)
CHAPTER 15
Traffic Stop
It was really the Rabbi’s own fault Fagan became a biker. The Rabbi took young Pete to the annual Memorial Day parade and hoisted young Pete to his shoulders. From this vantage point Fagan watched the baton twirlers, the Homecoming Queen and King in their borrowed Sebring convertible, the Mayor in a borrowed Corvette, the 4H, Junior Achievement, JayCees, Boy Scouts and Girl Scout floats, local radio and TV personalities. And then came the Shriners on their mini-bikes. A bunch of fat old men in purple fezes zipping in and out of traffic, performing breathtaking chicanes and not acting their ages.
From that moment on all the Rabbi heard was, “Can I get a mini-bike?”
To which the answer was an unequivocal no.
However, the Rabbi’s neighbors the Thompsons had just such a mini-bike, and young Ralph Thompson was not shy about burning up and down the block. Fagan sat on the curb and stared intently. He wanted to ride that thing so bad he was seriously considering knocking Ralph off his perch and just taking it.
Fortunately Ralph was a generous boy. He showed Fagan how to work the controls and turned him loose. Fagan ran out of gas forty-five minutes later down by the tracks. Ralph soon followed on his bicycle. Fagan ended up pushing the mini-bike two miles home. He was thirteen.
No matter where he rode his one-speed Huffy the wind was against him. It was against him as he pedaled to school in the morning and it was against him when he pedaled home at night, the weight of his backpack pressing between his shoulders.
Someday, he vowed, he would own a motorcycle and not have to do all this fucking pedaling.
In his fourteenth year Fagan grew four inches and stopped thinking about mini-bikes. Now he wanted a motorcycle. The Rabbi laughed.
“After you’re on your own, you can get a motorcycle. But not while you’re living under my roof.”
Fagan haunted the local dealers: Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki. The town wasn’t big enough to have a Harley dealer. He became a paperboy for the
Chesterton Bugle Courier
, rising at five a.m. each day to deliver the paper with a thump to door stoops all over town, seven days a week. He told the Rabbi and Esther he was saving for his college education. He wasn’t sure they bought it, but they were pleased with his discipline. In the summers he took jobs mowing grass.
On day he was mowing the Sanderson lawn on Lake Wyandotte. It was a lazy Sunday morning with water skiers and sail boats out on the lake. The mower sputtered and died by an old elm. Out of gas. In the sudden silence Fagan heard chirping and noticed a distressed robin hopping on a branch, taking off, doing little loops and landing in an agitated manner. He looked down. A hatchling had fallen from the next and was squirming in the grass.
Fagan’s first impulse was to crush it with his heel. But something about the desperate mother’s exertions attracted his attention. He’d heard somewhere that the scent of human flesh on a baby bird would doom it to abandonment so he trekked back to the garage for a can of gasoline and a roll of paper towels. Back at the tree, he gently picked the baby bird up in the paper towels and deposited it among its mates in the nest, which was eight feet off the ground.
He hopped down, fueled the lawnmower and resumed his job.
He didn’t realize until much later that it had been a tipping point.
Fagan turned fifteen on August 15. The Rabbi wouldn’t let him get a learner’s license. “Do we look like farmers to you?”
For four hundred dollars Fagan bought a well-used 250cc Yamaha dirt bike, no title. No license. Couldn’t ride it on the road. Did anyway. He kept it at his friend Josh’s house. There was so much junk in the Peterson garage no one noticed.
All went well until Fagan did a one and a half gainer off a hidden log in the woods and planted his face in the earth. He came home with a huge shiner, limping. Somehow he convinced the Rabbi and Esther that he’d had a mishap swinging on the rope which hung over the lake.
One evening in September the Rabbi had a speaking engagement at the First Evangelical Church of Spartanville, about fifty miles away. He asked Fagan to accompany him and help lug the audio-visual material. The topic: “The Survival of Israel and the Chances For a New Holocaust in the Middle East.”
They were running late. The Rabbi stepped on it, pushing the old Volvo station wagon to seventy-five on the state highway. Out of nowhere, lights and sirens appeared behind them. It was like that scene in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
where the UFOs show up at Terri Garr’s rural home. Whamo!
Chagrined, the Rabbi pulled over to the side of the road. Fagan stared in awe as the trooper got off his big police Harley and sauntered over, book in hand. The Rabbi wore a black suit and tie. The rear seat was jammed with Bibles, Torah, research materials. There was a Support Your Police sticker in the rear window.
“Sir, do you know why I stopped you?”
“Yes, officer. I was exceeding the speed limit. I have no excuse.”
“You in a hurry?”
“I’m late for a speaking engagement at the First Evangelical Church in Spartanville.”
“This your boy?”
“Yes sir. Say hello, Pete.”
“Hello, officer.”
“You clergy?”
“I’m a rabbi.”
The cop examined the Rabbi’s license and registration. He handed them back. “How about I escort you into town, and after this, you stay within the speed limit, Rabbi? That all right with you?”
“Yes sir. And thank you, officer.”
Fagan lit up like a Saturn booster launch. His eyes had seen the glory. The seed was planted. If the Rabbi had any idea his son wanted to be a cop, let alone a motorcycle cop, he might have moved them all to Israel.
***
CHAPTER 16
Hot Dog
Fagan’s only friend and partner-in-crime was Josh Peterson. They met in the 7th grade, phys ed pariahs. Josh was the Fat Boy. Fagan was the concave-chested wraith. Josh was the original gun nut. His father was an avid hunter and Josh knew all there was to know about guns. He had access to his father’s rifles and pistols. With the bullying Josh endured, it was a miracle he didn’t pull a Columbine. He never expressed a wish to blow his tormentors away.
They would borrow Josh’s father’s rifles, go into the fields and blast away at anything that caught their interest. One day Josh loaded dum-dums into his father’s scoped 30-06. Rifles over their shoulders they hiked through the fresh April fields to a tree line. Josh sited down on a crow in a tree.
“Watch this.”
He squeezed the trigger. The crow exploded like a feather bomb and the sudden report launched a dozen others into the air cawing. Josh handed the rifle to Fagan.
“Here. You try it.”
They walked down one side of the windbreak until they spotted a squirrel sitting in a tree. Using the crotch of another tree to steady the rifle, Fagan sighted in. The fat squirrel loomed large in the cross-hairs. Fagan squeezed the trigger and the squirrel exploded into fur and flying meat. Birds took to the skies.
“Gimme the rifle!” Josh enthused. “I see a barn cat!”
Josh’s most prized possession was the Waffen SS dagger he got from his grandfather who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. The boys would huddle in Josh’s basement bedroom poring over pictures of the Third Reich, goose-stepping around and yelling in bad German accents. Fagan knew well the horror of the swastika. Maybe it was his id crying out,
I am not a Jew!
Fagan worked at a local country club as a caddy one year. Myron McDonald was the Head Caddy. He liked to punch Fagan in the arm as hard as he could.
“Levi!” he roared. The other caddies roared with him. It was the height of wit.
Fagan and Josh watched horror movies. Fagan’s taste ran toward
Godzilla
,
Gojira
,
Anaconda
,
Tremors
. Josh favored torture-porn:
Saw
s I through V,
Hostel
s I through IV,
Last House on the Left
. They sneered at
Star Wars
and referred to their adherents as “stookies.”
It was Josh who turned Fagan on to comics. Fagan had always regarded them as silly. The only ones he’d seen were
Archie
and
Richie Rich
. Josh showed him what was happening at Marvel and DC, characters like the Punisher or Hellblazer.
Ghost Rider
in particular intrigued him. The idea of a flaming motorcyclist. If Fagan had to be a superhero, he would be Ghost Rider. From there it was but a hop skip and a jump to the EC crime comics of the fifties, which Josh owned in hardbound. He bought them himself from money he earned from his paper route.
Fagan could not believe the lurid tales of suffering and vengeance and they fired his imagination in all the wrong ways. Josh showed Fagan his father’s secret stash of
Playboy
and
Oui
. The only reason Fagan didn’t start his own collection was fear of the Rabbi. The Rabbi was the personification of kindness, but his disapproval was like a lead blanket.
Josh had a younger sister named Adrian who was a brainiac and ran interference for him at home. She was plain, wore glasses and had an instinctive sense of how to cruise under the radar.
Josh’s parents gave him a Volkswagen Beetle on his fifteenth birthday. Farm kids could get a permit at fifteen. Josh and Fagan would drive around looking for small game to blast.
Once when Josh stopped the car to take a shot at a barn cat in a barnyard, the farmer saw him and rushed out of his barn clutching his own shotgun. Fagan hadn’t thought a VW could burn rubber like that.
After that he declined Josh’s hunting trips. They still spent plenty of time together. Despite his predilection to shoot animals, Josh was a good friend, kind and generous. His size disturbed him but he couldn’t control himself. He ate like a starving dog. Saturday night’s they’d cruise to the Dog & Suds on Main Street and park in the shadows to watch the cool kids flirt, blurt, roll and testify. Fagan usually got the meal from the pick-up window as he was less likely to attract attention.
“Hey there’s Faggot with his friend Big Pussy!”
“Hey Faggot! How you two love birds doin’?”
Fagan often wondered why they subjected themselves to that ordeal. He was aggressively, obsessively heterosexual but like most boys his age didn’t have the slightest idea how to score a girl. Silently acknowledging each other’s hopes and longings, Fagan and Josh never discussed girls except to express their disgust when someone they liked started dating someone they didn’t.
Fagan kept his peeper phase to himself. Staring through blinds, saving the images up for when he was home alone in his basement lair. With the monster models and torture devices.
The Rabbi wouldn’t permit video games in the house but Josh had plenty. He loved
Grand Theft Auto
and
Call of Duty
. He’d sit in front of his computer for hours blasting away with remarkable accuracy. He was the only person Fagan knew who trained for video games on real firearms.
They ate together in the school cafeteria. Once a week the school served hot dogs. When this happened, the muscled and mulleted Myron McDonald, a thug who fancied himself a wit, would lay in wait for Josh, swoop down unexpectedly, pluck the hot dogs from Josh’s plate and stuff them into his face like a wood chipper. All the time smacking his lips and spraying spittle.
One day Josh took a glass tube from chemistry class and inserted it into one of his hot dogs. The look of shock on Myron’s face was like the sun rising over the Pacific. From Vietnam, obviously. After consultation with Josh’s student adviser, students and parents (Mr. Peterson was, after all, a veteran), it was decided that Josh would be suspended for a week.
McDonald was a well-known troublemaker tolerated for his athletic prowess. The principal talked McDonald’s parents out of pressing charges, pointing to the fact that Myron himself was open to numerous bullying charges. Young Fagan had volunteered to detail numerous instances of anti-Semitic behavior and of course the school system could not tolerate that.
Josh returned to class in October. For Halloween, Josh and Fagan planned to dress as a mad scientist and deranged assistant. Josh was the idea man. Josh called the shots. He would be the mad scientist although they both knew that in reality, that is, in the fictionalized reality of horror movies, it would be the little guy Fagan playing the mad scientist and Josh the hulking assistant with one finger up his nose.
Josh procured an outsized white lab coat with a hacksaw sticking out of one pocket. He greased his hair into a huge pomp like a wave about to break and wore thick glasses with adhesive tape around the bridge. He lovingly splattered the lab coat with red paint. He carried a black leather satchel which contained a six-pack of Coors and a couple of joints.
Fagan wore an OshKosh B’Gosh coverall, had made his face up with putty and fake blood to expose scavenged canines, fake stitches and carried a garden spade over his shoulder.
They weren’t trick or treating. They were too old for that.
They weren’t going to any parties. They hadn’t been invited.
They were just going to cruise Main Street and enjoy the scene.
They arrived at the Dog & Suds at eight-thirty and the streets were chock-a-block with trick-or-treaters from the very young, ferried from house to house by their parents, to teenagers with backpacks full of soap and toilet paper. Josh parked his car at the back end of the lot out of the lights and in the shade of a molting locust tree.
Fagan waited in line behind Freddie Krueger. When it was Fagan’s turn he ordered three hot dogs and two root beers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As he returned to the car he saw Mullet-head Myron and his evil sidekick Claude Owens leaning over Josh’s windshield shaking a can of spray paint.
Outraged, Josh burst from the driver’s door and reached for the can of paint.
“Stop it!” he howled.
Myron slammed his fist into the big boy’s gut doubling him over and causing him to go to his knees. Claude Owens, who wrestled varsity and looked like a big pink boar laughed and kicked Josh in the ass sending him sprawling.
“Help me,” Josh cried pathetically.
Fagan threw a hot dog. It hit Myron on the back of the head, startling him into turning, looking at Fagan, then down at his feet where the hot dog lay.
“Did you just throw a hot dog at me?”
Fagan dropped the food and ran. He ran through the parking lot, across the alley, behind the feed store, and didn’t stop until he lay gasping with pain lancing through his side behind the Piggly Wiggly, a bolus of self-loathing lying in his gut like concrete.
Myron and Claude didn’t bother to pursue but the next day the tale of his hot dog and subsequent flight earned him a new nickname. Hot Dog.
Fagan and Josh drifted apart.
Years later Fagan heard from a friend that Josh had died of AIDS in New York.
***
