Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (15 page)

One of my pranks did result in the only
failing grade of my high school days. But, even that episode
reinforced my view that a balanced Renaissance Man can always enjoy
a secret life as a hooligan. On this occasion—in the last semester
of my senior year—I took advantage of a substitute teacher for our
math analysis class. An unsuspecting, over-eager rookie, he played
right into the hands of me and one of my cohorts named Ken. Over
the years, Ken and I had carefully honed a fake-fighting routine so
well known in the school that classmates had learned to ignore it.
We could have been stunt performers in the movies. This sub had
been in our class about ten minutes and was writing furiously on
the blackboard, when Ken started the action.

"Hey, Taylor, I'm not taking any
more," he yelled, standing up beside his desk at the back of the
room.

"That's what you
think," I shouted, lunging in his direction. By this time the sub
was spinning around at the blackboard and knocking chalk to the
floor. I got to Ken and ran my left hand across his cheek, meeting
that palm with my right to produce an echoing
Thwack
with the illusion of a sweeping
slap across the face. Ken's role involved a pratfall backward over
his desk and into the wall of the room. The sub froze at his desk,
and I'm sure he couldn't understand why the whole class started
clapping. But they had seen all this before. Ken got up and took a
bow. I did the same and returned to my desk. The episode was far
from complete. Our teacher returned from his sick day enraged. He
ordered us to move our desks into the hall and said we could not
return to class until we had copied the trigonometry
tables.

"I'm not doing that," the rogue
spoke right up, adding, "I'll sit in the hall and read a book if
you want but I'm not copying those tables."

"You have an A in this class right
now. But I can make it an F."

"Go ahead, make it an F. But I'm
not copying the trig tables."

So I sat in the
hall reading several books during his class for the rest of the
year. The rogue's recreational reading list for that period
included paperback classics like
Candy
and
Tobacco Road
. Ken sat there, too, for
a while—until he finished copying the trig tables. Then he left me
alone. I wasn't concerned. My grades had always been so strong that
one F wouldn't hurt my final standing. Already accepted at Mizzou,
I didn't need anything from that teacher or his class. Even he had
said I had learned math analysis well enough to post a grade of A.
Surely, I thought, the knowledge itself is basically what we
need.

That teacher approached at graduation with a
serious smile across his face as I stood reviewing my final report
card. He extended a hand.

"No hard feelings," he said. "I
just hope you learned something from this."

"Yes sir," said the rogue,
suppressing a laugh. "Yes, I certainly did."

TWENTY-ONE

The 1960s

The rogue's Tom Foolery only
escalated in college where I became the central focus in a
legendary incident known as the Francis House Feces Case of 1966.
That adventure forced me to wrestle deeply with the concept of
honesty and became the foundation for another personal philosophy
establishing what I call my law of ultimate resolutions. That law
seeks to answer the dilemma: When can you lie? Using that law as
our guide, the rogue determined I can lie whenever the punishment
for telling the truth would realistically threaten our survival,
and as long as we are sure the lie will succeed.

To those who would call that an excuse to do
whatever you want, the rogue responds that he has found he only
rarely has again encountered those circumstances, as long as he is
honest in his assessment of survival. Few confrontations in life
truly threaten your survival. It also is more difficult than many
might think to lie successfully about anything for very long.
Sooner or later, you always get caught, and usually you are better
off when exposure comes sooner before the first lie creates an
impenetrable web of confusion. So, for me to lie, I must be certain
my life is on the line and believe my lie is solid enough to save
it.

I won't lie to get ahead. Only in
self-defense.

The Francis House incident began innocently
enough one Saturday night in October when I was sitting around my
dormitory room with three pals discussing our lack of plans for
that night. My high school sidekick Ken had become my roommate, and
we were joined in our discussion by two fellow residents of Francis
House who called themselves Surf and Doeda. We were feeling
liberated because all authority figures from the dorm had left for
the weekend. That list included our official personnel assistant or
P.A. as we called them. These student-employees received
complementary room and board to live amongst us in the public
housing facilities and function much like dormitory cops, keeping
the peace and snitching off delinquents to the housing dean. Also
missing that weekend were all other elected Francis House leaders,
except for me. And I only served as the house jock chairman,
running its intramural athletic programs because I had been the
quarterback on our flag football squad. So the rogue was feeling
like The Authority in Francis House that night.

From somewhere in the dark recesses
of his troubled mind, Ken suddenly suggested he would like to take
a shit down the four-story stairwell of the dorm. He had some
disagreements with a couple of freshmen who had rooms in the
basement, or what we called the Francis House Grotto. He said he
wanted to shit on them. Several minutes later, Ken sat parked with
his ass over the rail on the fourth floor grunting like a pig. I
stood in the stairs, watching from below, while Surf and Doeda
stood guard left and right. We literally had all exits covered. But
Ken couldn't do the job. After a couple of minutes he surrendered,
jumped off the rail, and kneeled panting with
exhaustion.

"Oh, hell," the rogue suddenly
said, seizing control and moving up the stairs. "Watch down here,
and I'll do it."

I recall the shrill whistling sound
of the rogue's turd as it sailed down the well and then Splat as it
hit the tile floor in the basement. We hustled back to the room and
sat around on our beds to see what would happen. What occurred was
the most amazing transformation of a building I could ever imagine.
It resembled the change that occurs between the minutes before a
department store's doors open and the minutes after, on the day of
a sale. One second you could hear yourself breathe. The next, all
you heard was a roar. I was shocked that such a tiny bit of shit
could trigger such chaos.

Of course, the guys from the Grotto found me
quickly. After all, I was The Authority that night, and they needed
help. They were at my door whining about shit in their hall. I
started to feel a little guilty.

"I'd better go have a look," I
said, and we all went down stairs.

"Yes," I said, "I think that is a
pile of shit."

"What are you going to do about
it?" one of them asked.

"Clean it up."

Then I went to the janitor's closet
to get a broom and dust pan. I cleaned it up and went back to my
room as the dorm grew quiet again. But the solitude didn't last.
About fifteen minutes later, the uproar began anew. When we heard
someone yell, "We got him, we got him," the four of us blew out of
that room as fast as we could. In the stairwell I saw a P.A. from
another dorm holding an impressionable freshman named Johnnie by
the arm with a lynch mob from the grotto gathering along the wall.
I quickly learned that, in the excitement over delivery of the
first bomb, Johnnie decided to get involved. He had run into a
bathroom, filled a pizza box with turds, and tossed its contents
over the rail, where they rained down upon the visiting P.A. as he
headed up the steps to investigate the earlier altercation. I knew
Johnnie as a country boy, just off the farm, but I still couldn't
fathom his thought process. I shook my head and shrugged my
shoulders as the P.A. led him away.

The next evening I was summoned to
the room of the Francis House P.A.—a large, humorless senior named
Chuck. He was fuming and wanted to know what happened. I told him
somebody shit down the stairwell, and then they caught Johnnie
throwing shit over the rail after I cleaned up the first
load.

"You know Johnnie will be lucky to
stay in school," Chuck said, starting to play me like some cop on a
cheesy TV show. "But he's remorseful and admitted what he
did."

"It would be pretty hard for him to
deny it."

"But he says he didn't start it. He
says it was you."

My brain started to compute the options. I
knew only my three pals had seen it. I also knew exposure might
mean expulsion. I concluded my life was literally on the line.
Chuck obviously expected me to break down, fall to my knees, and
beg for his mercy. In an instant, I decided to call his bluff. If
he wanted my life, I decided, he was going to work harder for it
than this. And I knew I could not waiver in my response.

"Nope, Chuck. It wasn't me. I don't
know where you'd get that."

He looked startled, and then he grew
angry.

"I'm going to prove you did it. I
don't feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for that little freshman who
has to live with this on his record just because he wanted to be
like you."

I just stared at him like I thought
he was crazy. Then I walked away with an empty spot in the pit of
my stomach. According to dormitory rules, I had the right to a
trial before a jury of fellow residents known as a judicial board.
But judicial board proceedings were extremely rare as disputes
between P.A.s and residents usually settled without trial. And a
judicial board's ruling did not necessarily mean resolution.
Ultimately, any verdict went to the dean of housing for a final
decision. I knew I had to prepare for a full-blown case, and I knew
it would involve lying under oath. I had confidence in just about
every aspect of this showdown except for one thing: How would they
describe this incident in the indictment?

During the next couple of weeks,
Chuck trolled the residents with relentless energy. His
investigative fury knew no bounds. He was determined to find
witnesses. I only needed to check with one. I sought out Johnnie
and asked him: "What the fuck were you thinking about?" Then he
offered what would become his testimony: "Everybody said it had to
be you. They said you or Ken were the only ones in this house with
balls enough to try something like that."

As the trial approached, my only
concern stemmed from the fear of a set-up. I had made some enemies
while running the sports teams, deciding who would play and who
would sit. I worried about the possibility Chuck might squeeze
someone into lying themselves—and I knew I just couldn't tolerate
another liar in the courtroom, even though that might have been an
example of universal justice at its best. Those fears grew worse
when I learned that Chuck had a secret witness primed for the
stand.

The proceeding began with the panel
trying to cow me into submission. They demanded my grade point.
Although it was a hearty three-five on a four-point scale, they
still reminded me that I should be using my time to push it even
higher instead of getting involved enough in something like this to
face a trial. When they called it the "feces case," I had to
suppress a laugh. But they were the ones laughing after Chuck
presented Johnnie as the core of his case, admitting he hadn't seen
anything but only assumed it. Then I paraded my goons—Ken, Doeda
and Surf—who testified they'd been with me all the time. I never
asked if they'd seen me shit down the stairwell, so they never had
to lie. But then I told the jury I hadn't done it. I said I was
being railroaded by an overzealous P.A. That's when Chuck played
his trump card.

As his secret witness, Chuck
offered a little snit from the Grotto who had a grudge from a
football game. He took the stand and offered his evidence. In the
week before Chuck left for the weekend, he said, he had overheard
me tell Ken, "When Chuck leaves town, the shit's gonna fly." As
silly as that sounded, I still felt compelled to clarify the
record. I lectured the laughing jurors on the meaning of that
phrase as a figure of speech and not a literal call to
action.

"I say it all the time," I told
them. "Shit's gonna fly. You do, too."

Exonerated unanimously, I stood before the
dean of housing two days later to receive his decision.

"I won't overturn a unanimous
verdict by your judicial board," he said through a smug sneer. Then
he looked over the top of his glasses and added a threat. "But I
know you did this. And if you get involved in anything else—any
little thing—I will move you out of there."

Although I triumphed in the feces
case, he managed to make good on that threat three months later.
The second showdown involved a scheme the rogue had hatched to use
money from the dorm's highly restricted recreational fees account
for a decent party in a barn somewhere with a keg of beer. We
persuaded a majority of the residents to transfer those funds into
a scholarship for the neediest member of Francis House. The rules
we wrote specified no restrictions on his use of the money. The
recipient could spend it on books, tuition, housing fee, or
anything he needed.