Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (12 page)

She really busted me up for a
while, but I recovered. And I quickly became grateful she had the
strength to stop our charade. It worked out best for us both.
Although we were married for nearly four years, I still look back
on that relationship with the sort of memories reserved for a high
school romance. In many ways we functioned more like brother and
sister. But we crossed a bridge into the adult world together and
learned the value of helping each other along.

Her candor with me
helped me get my life back on track. And she was one reason I had a
promising career.
What if she never comes
back?
I asked myself.
What if she'd never come at all?
I
replied. I confronted the demons of possession and dispatched them
with development of a new philosophy: We can only expect from
another person what they already have given. Anything more is
gravy.

In my personal
makeover, I grew one of the earliest beards seen at
The Post
and won the
nickname Junkyard from my colleagues who often heard me joking
about the lyrics from the Jim Croce song about "Bad, Bad Leroy
Brown" being "meaner than a junkyard dog." They said it seemed to
fit my new persona. I developed a social life again. And I got my
reward about a year after the split when one of Boop's friends told
me Boop had been complaining only half in jest about our divorce.
Boop had told her, "I dump a guy because he turns into a stiff and
then what happens? Three weeks later he's cool."

But it couldn't have happened if
she hadn't dumped me. I realized that. I also realized I harbored
only one regret about our marriage. I had practiced fidelity. I
thought wistfully of all the attractive women working that
courthouse in Flint. But I had been true and turned them away. Many
times again when I have needed to find peace in the midst of some
later life hassle, I have retreated in my mind back to that time in
Flint, when the world stood filled with so much pussy that eluded
my grasp. There has been more to finding my "happy place" than
recalling idyllic times with Boop. Besides my beard, I had grown a
new attitude about fidelity—never again. Everyone should have
secrets they can take to the grave. I wanted some of my
own.

SIXTEEN

Mid-1970s

A series of timely trends converged
in the 1970s to transform those years into the decade of what I
call the Great American Boomer Bacchanal. Future historians should
look back at the '70s and recognize them as the years when the
so-called sexual revolution peaked. For starters, on the scientific
front, birth control pills, and intrauterine devices had removed
one of the great fears of unprotected sex by providing secure
methods for contraception. With enhanced antibiotics licking the
threat of serious venereal diseases, scientific advances appeared
to have rendered the condom obsolete.

Then, on the moral and social front, the
largest population bubble in U.S. history had entered its most
active and experimental sexual age, as troopers in the first
generation of the World War II Baby Boom reached their
mid-twenties. Each old enough to have sampled first love, most were
just completing initial attempts at marriage. With many divorced or
wishing they were, innocence had vanished. Fears of singles-bar
serial killers would not become a deterrent until the exploits of
Ted Bundy splashed across television screens with his trial in
1979. And the threatening reality of AIDS as a serious sexual
disease scourge would not emerge until the early 1980s.

In short, getting laid in the 1970s
was about as difficult as getting sand on your feet while strolling
a beach. So I emerged from my first marriage in March of 1973 and
quickly enlisted in the revolution. For about four months I stayed
single, and at times it wore me out. I moved into an apartment
complex known as "Heartbreak Hotel." The place catered to
short-timers suffering breaks in relationships, and everyone
enjoyed nursing their sorrows together. Two of Boop's girlfriends
also assisted my transition, and, finally in September, I rented a
more suitable one-bedroom apartment in Houston's Bohemian Montrose
section—a neighborhood that better reflected my fantasies of a
bachelor pad inhabited by the big city reporter.

Seeking self-improvement and still
curious about fulfilling my potential as a writer, I signed up to
take a few night courses at the University of Houston in creative
writing and literature. Oh yeah, this program also included the
potential for meeting some new women, and that's where I met wife
number two. Let's call her Cindy. A tall, dishwater blonde with a
shag hair style, she was described by some back then as resembling
the actress Diane Keaton. Just twenty-one, Cindy was trying to
finish a degree in English. She worked days as a secretary for a
physician who performed hand surgeries. She was married to an
accountant who had wooed her when they were students at the
University of Texas in Austin. He'd graduated, landed a job at a
firm in Houston, and they had relocated the year before. She had
about a year left on her degree program.

Cindy was quiet in class and never
spoke to me. But she had a girlfriend in the class who did, and the
girlfriend arranged for us to get together. The girlfriend was
nursing a crush on our professor, a mid-thirties guy then separated
from his first wife. One night about a week into the class, the
four of us ended up at the professor's apartment to drink wine and
debate the meaning of life. Of course, things quickly
deteriorated—or maybe escalated—and we discovered more immediate
meaning in the physical. Within a week Cindy had assumed control of
my sex life, or at least the central core of it, and then we
returned to discussions on the meaning of life.

Her life was in shambles. The
husband was a bum. She was struggling to find her own focus. She
wanted to leave but just didn't know how. They had gotten married
in school because she thought she was pregnant. When they
discovered a false pregnancy, her husband rebelled and treated her
poorly, like a man who had been tricked. She suffered no physical
beatings, but he didn't respect her, talked down and blah, blah,
blah. It all sounded like some script from soap opera central, and
I listened through my reporter's skeptical ear. I figured the
husband probably had an equally sad tale, but I wasn't there to
make judgments. I was there at first to get laid. I also discovered
the risk of having sex with another man's wife in his bed added an
extra level of excitement. We never came close to discovery, but,
then again, my tenure as her extramarital lover didn't last that
long. I mentioned once or twice she'd be welcome to stay with me
while sorting things out. So, one Sunday night, she showed up at my
door with a suitcase in one hand and her cat in the other. I let
her inside, and thus began a wild but rewarding rollercoaster ride
destined to last six more years. Neither of us made any promises to
the other.

Coincidentally, Cindy also had
grown up in St. Louis, leaving there her senior year of high school
when her dad got a job as a professor at Texas A&M University
in College Station about ninety miles northwest of Houston. Her St.
Louis high school had been just a few miles from mine. So we
decided to take a trip down Memory Lane to St. Louis during
Thanksgiving weekend and stay at my family's home. I introduced her
as my new roommate and got a stunned look from my dad that
translated: "I thought this only happened in San Francisco or
Tanganyika." My little sister told me later she had been expecting
a total skank but was pleasantly surprised with Cindy's demeanor.
My mom said, "I thought maybe you'd move back home after your
divorce." I could only shake my head in wonder. My only regret
about the trip occurred when my high school girlfriend visited on
the off chance I had come home for the holiday. She, too, had just
recently divorced and obviously desired her own trip down Memory
Lane. Unfortunately I couldn't figure any way to sneak off. The
week was just too short.

So, Cindy and I started playing
house, and it was different from my marriage to Boop. Cindy worked
all day and attended classes at night with an eye toward
graduation. I quickly recognized her as an extremely driven and
ambitious woman, uncertain of what exactly she wanted to do in life
but determined to make it meaningful. I respected that. We operated
fairly independent of each other, and she started to grow on me. We
took a trip together to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, sharing
rickety old buses with peasants and their chickens, hiking around
the Mayan ruins, and then staying a few days on a Caribbean island
off the coast called Isla Mueres. We rented hammocks and slept on
the beach. It was all very third world and certainly exotic to be
tramping that area before Mexico's resort-building boom occurred.
We were good for each other at that time in our lives.

But I'm not sure
either of us ever saw our relationship then as a long-term
proposition. I know I didn't. I needed some time to recover from my
divorce and reconstruct my future around a vision of myself as a
loner again. She needed a sanctuary for finishing school without
the distractions of a disintegrating marriage. Our relationship
provided a vehicle for both goals. Looking ahead with a fresh
attitude, I began to entertain visions for solitary travel. A
friend had just returned from a year's sabbatical bumming around
Africa, and I wondered if it wasn't time to move along from
The
Post
. Cindy and I both knew a turning
point of some sort lay just ahead if we could only sort through the
fog and map a path. That turning point arrived, but not in the way
we expected.

About a month after I covered the
1974 prison siege in Huntsville, Cindy wanted a serious talk. I
expected her to ask about our future. I figured she had reached a
conclusion for herself. When she told me she was pregnant, I was
stunned. She had stopped taking the pill and switched to an IUD. I
guess it just hadn't worked.

"I'm not having an abortion," she
volunteered defiantly as we discussed our options.

OK
, I thought, if she is going to have
the baby, I will be a father. There's no way to change that. But I
never had entertained any desire to raise children and had fought
every way possible to prevent it. Her condition ranked among my
worst nightmares.

Commit the crime,
gotta do the time
, I thought to myself,
laughing a little.
Would I really
consider
conception a crime?
And the time? That would be a twenty-year sentence
for me at the least. Should I run? Should I just pay child support
and turn the kid into a monthly bill without any larger constraints
on my life?

Nope, I decided more quickly than I
believed possible as I reviewed my options. Here is a new
adventure, I concluded: fatherhood.

Discussing things further, we backtracked the
days to determine where this might have happened. When we
pinpointed the date, I shook my head.

"Remember that night you came to
Huntsville during the prison riot, and we slept in the tent behind
the prison administration building?" I asked.

"Shit," she said. "That
means…"

"It means we made that child on the
lawn at the Texas Department of Corrections while I was covering a
major news story. This kid will be a real legend at the
paper."

It was worth a good laugh before we
went to bed with the sobering thought that the mysterious maw of
parenthood stood gaping before us, ready to swallow us
whole.

SEVENTEEN

Mid-1970s

If the news of Cindy getting
knocked up during the prison riot wasn't enough to generate gossip
at the paper, our "wedding" set a new standard for
chitchat.

"First things first," I told one of
my colleagues at the paper, outlining my strategy for
transformation into a family man.

"Reminds me
of
Lady and the Tramp
," he replied. "Cindy takes a junkyard dog and turns him into
a real show animal."

I had saved about fifteen hundred
dollars and decided to start with the purchase of a house. Unsure
of how long our relationship might last, I thought it best to
accumulate some assets. Within a week I found a little bungalow in
Houston's gentrifying Heights neighborhood, just north of downtown.
A purple, one-story stucco structure about fifty years old, it had
been converted to a duplex and needed work. But I was surprised I
had been able to find a place where I could afford the payments. I
managed to buy into that neighborhood at an opportune time for a
price of fifteen thousand dollars with seller financing by a little
old lady who had owned it for years. I spent a few days painting
the interior and had carpet installed. Then we moved from the
apartment into the house.

Cindy had seen an obstetrician and
started on her vitamins.

We ticked off our
to-do list and decided the only thing left was to get married. I
was covering county government at the time and worked at the
courthouse. So I told her to come over on September 18, 1974, and
meet me at noon in the offices of Judge Larry Wayne, a friend who
served as justice of the peace for the downtown precinct. He had
acquired a nickname of "Marryin' Sam"—after the character in
the
L'il Abner
comics—because his chambers stood just down the hall from the
county office that processed marriage licenses, providing couples a
convenient location for one-stop nuptials. Wayne led all the
county's justices in wedding fees, earning more from performing
marriages as a sideline than he did from his judicial salary. Cindy
showed up over the lunch break wearing one of her early maternity
outfits, and we walked inside his office, license in
hand.