Me & Jack Webb

This is a short story I've been working on for some time. It is a work of fiction, although there are kernels of truth in it. This is the first part; the second will be posted soon. Please let me know if you like it, and if you're a publisher, don't hesitate to contact me!

I think Jack Webb helped me to become a good American. I never met him, but I wish I had. There was just no messing around with Jack. I used to watch Dragnet on an off white, plastic-shelled television, long before we had a color set. His monotone, staccato voice trilled from what my Mom called “the idiot box”, and it positively commanded my attention. When Joe Friday spoke, I listened, because there was no bullshitting him. I secretly prayed I would never have to face him. I knew without question that if I ever had to confront Jack Webb, he would know my crime, he would see my depravity, and he would make me feel utterly worthless, as I ought to.

Jack Webb didn’t use profanity. He didn’t need to. Sometimes he didn’t have to say anything at all. When he gave his look of utter contempt and disgust, with narrowed eyes and a small harrumph to a drugged up hippy who was too stoned to realize he had killed a baby while high on acid, Jack Webb was absolutely righteous in his indignation. I watched that show and swore to myself that I would never, ever use drugs.

I didn’t live in a big city. The gritty, black and white streets of Dragnet didn’t look anything like Normal, which was in color. It was a small town in the middle of Illinois, the home of Illinois State University. I suppose if the college hadn’t been there, it would have been not much more than a farming town, because once out of the city limits, it was overalls and farmers and corn fields. Lots of corn fields. If you weren’t downtown, it was pretty dull.

Money was tight in our family in those days. In fact, it was nonexistent for the kids. My brother and I didn’t have to wear potato sacks for shirts, but we never had any money. We would ride our bikes down to the campus and look at stuff in stores that we couldn’t buy. One store, “Mother Murphy’s”, had all kinds of weird stuff in it, some of which I thought was a little dirty. I remember seeing a poster that had a picture of a woman wearing a skirt standing at a urinal, peeing like a man. The store always smelled like incense, and there were hippies there. I knew all about hippies from Jack Webb.

****
I remember one particularly lucky day in my penniless childhood when I hit the jackpot. I had ridden my bike to a friend’s house without calling first, and nobody was home. It was very hot that day and I was taking my time riding back, aimlessly cruising neighborhood streets. I wasn’t in any hurry, and was absentmindedly trying to see how slow I could go without having to put my feet down. Cracks in the pavement had been filled with tar, and it was bubbling in the heat. I pretended that the black tar in the asphalt was really lava, and if I had to put my foot down, I’d start sinking into the earth and die a horrible, painful death. No one would know, unless a person in a house happened to be looking out the window as I was sucked into the street, but it would still probably be too late for anyone to save me. Such were my musings on that day. As I was looking down, lost in this daydream, I saw a glint of light on something in the road. Snapped back to reality, I put my feet down, backed up a couple steps, and looked again. Shining so brightly, it hurt to look directly at it; there lay imbedded in the tar a coin. A quick move of my head allowed me to see it was a silver dollar, laying right there at my feet. Eisenhower was smiling at me.

I immediately panicked. I sat there on my bike, in the blistering heat of the afternoon, and didn’t move. In the wink of an eye, a thousand thoughts rushed up at once. The first, of course, was that I was rich, and the second, immediate thought was that somebody would yell at me if I bent over to pick it up. I tried to casually turn my head and look around, but I probably wasn’t very stealthy. I was sweating like a buffalo. So I bent over and acted like I was tying my shoe, and pulled the coin from the hot goopy tar. Both the coin and the tar were hot, but it was worth the pain. Anybody watching me would have thought that I had picked up a fire ant; I had to flip it between my hands to try and cool it off. I could feel its sweet heat in my pocket. I pedaled away from there as fast as I could.

In those days, you needed a medium sized paper bag to carry all the candy you could buy with a dollar, and if you were lucky enough to have that problem, it would still take a while to eat all of it. If somebody I knew saw me, like, an adult, which was a distinct possibility, they would know that I shouldn’t have any money. I had to be stealthy. So I rode straight home to get my brother. I didn’t really want to share my booty, but we would be less conspicuous if we were together. I found him three blocks before home, told him the situation, and we took off down the main street as fast as we could go, jumping cracks in the sidewalk where tree roots had burst through the concrete. We rode straight to Hendren’s Market on School Street, which was on the outskirts of the campus. We bought fifty cents worth of candy. We each had a sack, crumpled and sweaty, wrapped around our handlebars as we rode past the park to downtown. We stopped near the student union, where the bowling alley and pinball machines were, parked our bikes in the rack, and sat down on the grass to feast.

As we sat having a contest to see who could fit the most Pixie Stick powder in their mouth, we watched the college kids walk by. Some of the students looked like normal (no pun) people, but some of them looked like the crazies on Dragnet. Hippies. Jack Webb said they were dirty and smelly and stupid. Worse, they were not real Americans. They didn’t know how to do the right thing, just complain and make trouble. Hell, I was just a kid, and even I knew that if a man had long hair, there was something seriously wrong with him. Real men had flat tops, which was the haircut my brother and I sported.

As we sat there, we noticed a hippy guy walking toward us. His hair hung to his shoulders, and he had a full but scraggly beard. He was wearing a poncho-like shirt and bell bottomed jeans, with a thick leather belt and a large brass peace sign buckle. He had rings on almost all of his fingers and a wide bandana wrapped around his head. He looked like the pictures of Navajo Indians from my social studies book. He was ambling, just strolling in the sun and smiling at everyone he saw. Whether they acknowledged him or not, he kept on smiling and walking, turning his head in all directions, looking at everything as if it were the first time he’d been able to see. My brother and I looked at each other, and then back at the hippy. We were going to be directly in his field of vision.

With a motion that fit into his gait, he waved at us like the pope blessing an audience. “Heeeyyy…” he said, smiling. Again, my brother and I exchanged glances, but said nothing. To us, he was a hippy. To him, we were kids with blue powder on our chins, gawking. We kept watching him as he walked past, strolling and waving at everyone he saw, until our reverie was broken by the realization that we still had a lot of candy to eat.

Like I said, it was dull in Normal, unless you had money. My brother and I still had five dimes left, so we took a break from eating candy, and went in the student union to watch the bowlers and play pinball. When we had spent the last of the dollar, we rode around town a little while, hoping to find more money. After all, if it could happen once, maybe it could happen again. It was about four o’clock, so we figured we’d better start home. Dinner was promptly at six, and if we weren’t there, we didn’t get to eat. We still had plenty of time, but we wanted to get closer to home.

Normal Park was about halfway home, so we decided we’d ride there, eat our candy and check out the creek, then go home. The park had a playground and a swimming pool, and we spent a lot of time there during the hot summers. There was a creek that snaked through an adjacent cornfield and the park, so if you followed the creek, sometimes you were in the park proper, and sometimes you weren’t. The creek was the best attraction at the park, although the swimming pool was a close second. The cool thing about the creek was that it was always different, and always free. There were places where one bank was really high, and the other was low, and if you were feeling particularly Evel-Kneivel-ish, you would see if you could jump it with your bike and stay dry and fracture-free. There were muskrats and frogs and bones and cool looking rocks and weirdly shaped bottles and unknown, scary looking animal tracks in fresh mud. In short, it was a perfect place for a kid to have a good time for free. We were good at finding fun like that.

We followed the creek for a while, and then sat down on a high bank to finish our candy. We couldn’t take it home, nor could we have any sign that we had been eating candy. At best, our dad would lecture us about wasting money, and at worst, we’d have to share it with our sisters. We ate the rest of the candy, and used a rock to dig a hole in the dirt so we could bury the wrappers. As we were finishing off the cover up process, we saw a body.

It was lying on the other side of the creek that we were on; we could see it through the undergrowth as plain as day, maybe ten feet from the creek bank. We whispered hoarsely about the best way to get closer, as if yelling might wake up the dead person. We finally made our way close, and then we realized that it wasn’t a body. The person was alive. It was a man. In fact, it was the same hippy we’d seen earlier that day. We knew it, but he didn’t. We were terrified, because he had noticed us. He had been lying on his back in the grass when we first saw him, but now he was propped up on one elbow. He still had the same smile, and the same wave. “Hey”, he said, moving his arm in an arc. He looked exactly like the stoned hippies on Dragnet. He wasn’t threatening in the least.

My brother and I bolted as fast as we could go. We splashed through the muddy creek, crawled up the embankment like we were escaping from hell, ran to our bikes, and rode toward the police station that was on a hill just beyond the park. When we got there, we burst into the lobby, and ran to the desk, muddy and hyperventilating. I told the desk cop, as calmly as I could, that there was a drugged out hippy lying in the park, acting all weird. He and another cop asked us to show them where he was. I was both terrified and exhilarated. I had to point out the bad guy to the cops. I felt like I was a helpful kid on Dragnet.

We left our bikes at the police station door, and walked with the cops toward the hippy. When we got close enough to see him, the cops told us to stay back. We, of course, let them walk a ways toward the hippy, and then circled around them to a bend in the creek that was littered with cement sewer tubes that weren’t big enough to crawl in, but big enough to afford us cover while simultaneously offering a perfect view of the confrontation. We couldn’t hear what was said, but we could see.

The hippy was lying on his back, arms splayed, with one knee toward the sky when the cops walked up. The cops apparently said something as they approached, and the hippy sat up, smiling. He waved. He sat for a few seconds while the cops talked, looking at them and always smiling. The cops must have told him to stand up, because he got to his feet. One of the cops had his hands on his hips during the conversation, and the other kept his hands to his sides, gesturing now and then, pointing toward the park. The hippy shrugged a few times, always smiling. My brother and I watched intently; we were sure somebody was going to pull out a gun. Then one of the cops put his arm on the hippy’s shoulder, and turned him around, handcuffing him. They stuck their hands in his pockets and we couldn’t see what they pulled out. The hippy was still smiling. He nodded his head “yes”, and then they all started walking back to the police station.

It was starting to get dark, but there was no way we were going anywhere until the hippy was in the station, and unable to identify us. We watched them until they were all the way up the hill, practically at the police station door. Right where our bikes were. If that hippy ever saw those bikes again, we thought, we were doomed. We could never ride them again. Once the cops were in the station, we ran up the hill to get our bikes.
On the way home, we tried to convince ourselves that we had done the right thing. Hippies meant drugs, and drugs were bad, and there was no doubt that whatever it was that the cops pulled out of that guy’s pockets was drugs, I just knew it. Jack Webb would have been proud of us.

When we got home, we didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I ate dinner, as usual, watched Dragnet, and was sent to bed, as usual. I had a room in the basement with a bunk bed that I shared with my brother. There was a small rectangular window in our room, but being a basement window, the restricted view it offered was ground level. The window was small, and we could squeeze in and out of it, but it was too small for an adult. In the daytime, we had an excellent view of the backs of the evergreen shrubs that my Dad took great pains to take care of. From the front, it looked like a green rectangular block, but from behind, we knew it was several bushes neatly trimmed to appear from the front as one whole shrub. My brother and I would play back there, because the bush was almost hollow inside, and we made matchbox car race tracks in the dirt. It was one of many forts we had. It was an excellent place to hide, because adults couldn’t fit back there.

It was my week to have the top bunk, and as my brother and I lay there, we talked of the episode of Dragnet that we watched earlier. At the very beginning of the show, Joe Friday and Bill Gannon walked up to a house with a shrub much like ours, only the yard on the TV was much bigger. Somebody had called the cops because a man was trying to eat the bark off a tree. And there, in the flowerbed in front of the house, a body was laying face down, head buried in the dirt in front of the shrub. When Joe and Bill pulled his head up, we saw that his face was painted two different colors, right down the middle, dark and light. He was incoherent as Joe and Bill snapped at him. He smiled a lot and behaved as if he wasn’t sure what was going on. He didn’t look anything like the guy we had seen earlier in the day, but his demeanor was exactly like the hippy we had turned in to the cops. All smiles.

I don’t know how my brother felt when he saw the freaky guy on the TV, but I could feel my skin crawl. I thought it was a dead guy, but when Joe pulled him up, he was alive. He had dirt and wood chips on his shirt, and I couldn’t help thinking that he must have had them in his mouth as well, but he never spit anything out. How long had he been lying like that? How could he breathe? And his face was two different colors. He was hopped up on drugs, of course, that’s how he could do it. The implicit lesson I learned right then was that drugs made people do crazy things, superhuman things, like breathe while buried. By the end of the episode, the guy with the painted face (his name was “Blue Boy”, we learned) had died of a drug overdose. Joe Friday said it was acid, and just the name of it made me think of every cheesy horror movie I’d seen where someone inevitably falls into a vat of acid and is completely disintegrated. Why in the world would anybody swallow acid? Joe intoned that Blue Boy had started out smoking grass, which was a gateway drug to the hard stuff like acid, which is what finally killed him. My brother and I agreed before we fell asleep that we had done the right thing by turning the hippy in. We had undoubtedly saved many lives. We both fell asleep content, knowing we would have made Joe Friday proud.

I dreamed about hippies that night. It was one of the most terrifying dreams I’ve ever had. In retrospect, nothing really scary happened in the dream. I mean, I didn’t get attacked and eaten by a monster or anything, like my normal dreams, but I woke up sweating and panting just the same.

In the dream, I was in my bed, just as I was when I had fallen asleep. But the small “kiddie” type baseball lamp on the desk was on, and I was the only person awake. Our desk sat just below the window. My dad had built it; it had spaces for two chairs, and it filled the gap between the closet wall and the wall that separated our room from the den. We would stand on it when we wanted to crawl through the window in the summer. The lamp was a cheap ceramic thing, shaped like a cartoonish boy smiling with huge teeth, and holding a bat. The shade had various MLB team logos on it. It was the picture of childhood tranquility, but something was very wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be awake, and the light wasn’t supposed to be on.

I was sitting up in bed, with the covers pulled up to my waist, when I heard crunching noises outside the window. Something brushed up against it; I could hear it. Something alive. Fear ran through me to my stomach like a cold drink on a hot day. I heard, and felt a shuddering feeling in my ears, like when water comes out of them after swimming. My entire body felt like rubber as I looked at the plain curtain covering the window, just above the grinning baseball lamp, burning when it shouldn’t have been. Then the curtain moved, and the same hippy we had turned in to the cops poked his head through. I tried to yell to my brother, but no sound came out. I knew the window was too small for him to climb through, but as I watched, paralyzed, he slid right in, like a snake through a paper towel tube. He looked at me and smiled. I couldn’t move at all. Then another hippy came in. And another. The first hippy greeted them all with a nod and a smile as they came in. He waved his arm like the pope, welcoming all kinds of hippies into our room. Within ten seconds, it was filled with smiling hippies. They weren’t doing anything but milling about, like zombies, smiling at each other and saying “hey”. My heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t hear, and I wondered why everyone else in the house couldn’t hear it as well. Looking down at them from the top bunk, I could see dandruff and bugs in the parts of their greasy hair. They stopped milling about, and then, one by one, they all turned their heads up to look at me. They stopped smiling. And as they looked, their eyes opened wider and wider. I tried to scream again, but I was mute and frozen.

I woke up breathing like I’d just run a marathon. I was drenched with sweat. The lights were off again, and I could hear my brother breathing. As my heart slowed down, I could even hear our dad snoring faintly from upstairs. I was safe. I fell asleep again, and by morning, the world was right again. I remembered the staring hippies, and still felt a chill from them, but it was just a dream.

Later that summer, long after the hippy incident had passed, I remember needing to ask my dad a question. I found him in the family room, watching the white plastic TV. My dad rarely watched television; he mostly just watched the news. I went up to him and started to speak, and he shushed me right away. Now, when my dad made the shush noise, that meant to stop talking immediately. He was serious, and was intently watching the TV, so naturally, I looked to see what was holding his interest. And there on the screen was a sight that literally made my knees go weak. It was a hippy on the screen. He was wide-eyed and crazy looking. His expression was exactly like the ones on the staring hippies from my dream. Exactly.

I could faintly hear the voice of the newscaster droning on about bodies or something, but I wasn’t listening. I was miles away, nearly fainting from fear. I remember my mother reading me a book once, called “Watership Down”, in which a frightened rabbit had frozen in fear, too frightened to move or to even save itself. It had gone “tharn”, as the book said. I had gone tharn looking at the TV. I didn’t know why the face was on the screen. I only knew that I recognized that look. Blood had been rushing around in my head, so much so that I couldn’t hear, but I did catch one thing the announcer said before I fainted. The hippie’s name was Charlie Manson.

* * * * *
Part Two of this story coming soon. Be sure and comment if you want to see the rest of it!