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Moving On: Manslaughter

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DSC04709By Bob Hill

John Vollrath filed out of Club Kaladu along with his girlfriend and his sister. Chris and Adam Short followed suit a moment later, slipping out a north-side exit with Joseph Mader a few feet behind. The three of them pursued Vollrath to his vehicle, where Vollrath was now standing with the driver’s side door ajar. There had been an exchange 10 minutes prior, and Adam Short began shouting at Vollrath about an apparent comment he had made on his way out of the bar. There was a shove, and then a salvo; Vollrath tagging Adam soundly with a wide right to the eye.

Chris Short kicked Vollrath’s door shut. Joseph Mader grabbed a hold of the 23-year old from behind. They were in it now, the lock of the barrel, with John’s sister screaming wildly from the car. Chris Short pulled Vollrath’s shirt up over his shoulders – a maneuver which momentarily blinded the ex-naval officer – while cuffing both his arms. Adam gained his footing, then joined his brother in the fray. There were winding hooks and anchor punches, open blows to the skull and torso. Vollrath spiraled, his body pinwheeling. One hand jerked him forward, another knocked him back. With nothing left but for to falter, something cranial short-circuited, causing Vollrath to stiffen, then go limp, much like a sawhorse being tipped onto its side. Chris Short removed his shirt and threw it down across John’s body. Chris and his brother disappeared into a motel room a hundred meters down the street.

***

I was in Delaware County that weekend, attending a funeral for Joe Kennedy’s nephew, who had died during a sledding accident. Joe and I were sitting at a sports bar on MacDade Boulevard when I noticed a headline running across the TV. “One Dead in Wildwood Beating,” the headline read. It came accompanied by a headshot.

“Hey, I know that guy,” I said. It would have been more accurate to explain that I knew of him.

There had been an incident a couple of winters prior. John Vollrath had punched out several screens bordering a porch outside Gerry Vessels’ house. Vollrath was drunk, and he had made his getaway alone. Gerry spent the better part of a year threatening reprisal, usually by way of intermediaries. Mike Delinski wanted nothing to do with the situation. This despite being long-time friends with both Gerry and John.

Mike was working at Club Kaladu during the winter of 1997, though he was off throughout the night when John Vollrath had been fatally beaten outside. There was only one man working at the door of Club Kaladu on that evening, and he was doubling as a barback, as well. Generally speaking, Jason Palombaro was the closest thing to muscle inside Kaladu. Jason’s father owned the establishment, and he had tricked the joint out with spinning lights and a decadent sound system; a wooden dance floor, industrial fog.

As for Vollrath’s attackers, Chris and Adam Short were primarily affiliated with a local nightclub named Jimmy’s. Adam was only 18 and Chris 20, yet they were plugged into a scene that allowed them to come and go from any bar on the island. Joseph Mader was 21, a seasonal bouncer. He, too, was primarily affiliated with Jimmy’s uptown.

***

John Vollrath had been pronounced dead at 3:44 on the morning of Saturday, February 15th, a little over an hour after the initial call to 9-1-1. The cause of death: blunt-force trauma to the head. The Shorts had been apprehended inside the Landmark Motel; Joseph Mader on his way back to North Wildwood. All three were arraigned on charges of Manslaughter and Conspiracy, a thin matter of intent separating the applicable charges from Murder. Chris and Adam were eventually released on $100,000 bail. Joseph Mader remained behind bars in Cape May County.

On Monday, February 17th, The Philadelphia Daily News posted a photo of John Vollrath on its cover, a clean-cut boy in navy blues. The accompanying article portrayed Vollrath as a born-again Christian; a noble soul whose only reason for being out on that evening was to serve as a designated driver for his sister. One day later, The Daily News ran with a similar narrative pertaining to the accused. Joseph Mader was described as being a “big teddy bear” who just got mixed up with the wrong crowd. Chris and Adam Short were depicted as having come from a hard-working, South Philadelphia family. The Shorts were a churchgoing people, the salt of the earth.

These stories came well-researched, albeit stricken by the usual bias and holes. To wit: The Daily News reported Chris Short was a student at Penn State, presumably because that was exactly what Chris Short had told the Wildwood Police at the time of his arrest. But two days later, on February 19th, Penn State released a statement, explaining that Christopher Short had not been enrolled for the better part of a year. Initial reports portraying Adam as an All-Catholic letterman took a hit once it was revealed he had abandoned the Widener football team following the first few weeks of training camp. Meanwhile, a lot of the positive statements regarding the Short family, regardless of whether they were true, came by way of neighbors along Jackson Street – a tight-knit community of rowhomes with a reputation for taking care of its own.

Matters became increasingly muddled due to a discrepancy regarding what had led to an initial exchange between John Vollrath and the Shorts inside Kaladu. One version favored Vollrath, insisting he had been eyeing up the Shorts for several minutes, having noticed them making fun of a mentally-handicapped man on the dance floor. Another supported the accused, suggesting Adam had approached John to request that he stop leering at their girlfriends. In all matters pertaining to the Defense, any sequence of events appeared largely immaterial. Counsel was tasked with exonerating a trio that had pursued one victim to the extent of pummeling him amidst the horrified screams of his girlfriend and his sister. Varying attempts to justify that by explaining the victim might have been staring at someone in an untoward manner, well, those attempts would represent some strange alchemy, indeed.

And yet these narratives, these stories people told themselves, they had a way of slithering into the zeitgeist, where they were geared and bent and refashioned into causes. Less than 24 hours after John Vollrath’s death, certain locals took to pointing fingers at Club Kaladu, insisting the establishment lacked a proper carding policy, perhaps an able crew of bouncers. Others began calling for Joe Palombaro to be stripped of his license, to be forbidden from operating another club within the city limits. But the major push – the push that had been lying dormant in city council for years – took the form of an emotionally-charged effort to roll the closing times at Wildwood bars back from 5 AM (during the summertime) to 3 AM, year-round. This was a ploy that preyed on hearts and minds, a way of convincing the dejected that John Vollrath – a local who had sustained a fatal beating at 2:30 AM in the middle of the winter – would be remembered as a martyr, not a victim. The problem was it missed the point, in much the same way Wildwood at large had been missing the point for well over a decade.

Old-timers immortalized the original Wildwood as a picture postcard where moonlight split the ocean as lovers basked along its side. Theirs was a world of Artie Shaw and Easter Sunday; pastel parasols and the annual Baby Parade. Meanwhile, current business owners continued promoting this idea of Five-Mile Island as the rootin-tootin den of inequity it had very obviously become. The lack of balance created a schism, with cold-war battle lines being drawn along the middle. On the one side, staunch tradition; on the other, debatable progress, with very little in between.

The Moreys had begun to spearhead an effort commemorating Wildwood’s Doo-Wop era in the hopes it might achieve for local tourism what the Victorian era had long been accomplishing for Cape May. It was the Broken Windows Theory, repurposed – develop an establishment full of architectural flare, and you’ll attract a clientele that reflects that. Dress the joint up like a fraternity or a brothel, and you’ll attract a clientele that reflects that, as well.

Redevelopment was only part of the equation. Another aspect had to do with recognizing what an indispensable part of the economy summer tourism represented. There was an emboldened sense among locals that the summer people added up to nothing more than easy money. Take their income, serve them with citations, yet never recognize that the town’s offseason livelihood depended on them. These people, these citizens for a day, they deserved the respect their taxable contributions should afford. In a town of weighted prices, on a boardwalk full of scams, there should be no feigned surprise when rain-made rubes returned the favor by vacationing at another place.

***

At the time of John Vollrath’s death, I had been living in Wildwood – on and off – for five years. Two summers before I had arrived there, on Memorial Day weekend of 1990, Susan Negersmith’s body had been found behind a dumpster outside Schellenger’s Restaurant. There were 26 areas of trauma about Negersmith’s body, including vaginal bruising, unidentified blood and the unidentified presence of semen. The official cause of death: alcohol poisoning, complicated by exposure. For a time, skeptics assumed Wildwood might have been eager to dismiss the case due to the fact there hadn’t been any capital murder stemming out of the city for years. Despite the eventual intervention of both the FBI and the State Police, along with a re-examination of Negersmith’s preserved larynx (that changed the official cause of death to strangulation), Susan Negersmith’s case had gone seven long years without closure. In the meantime, DNA evidence had become a forensic mainstay, prompting one to wonder what could have – and should have – been, assuming Negersmith’s case had been investigated consistently. Any chance of that seemed vague now, relegated to black whispers, unfounded speculation regarding whether unnamed locals might have been accompanying Negersmith on the evening before her body was discovered. Court documents show police encountered Negersmith a little after 2 AM on her way home from a party. The 20-year old female was being assisted by several males, and after engaging with one of those males, the Wildwood Police allowed the group to continue on their way. This, of course, raises the question: What would motivate a sworn officer to turn his back on an underage female who was barely able to walk, a female who was staggering along an open-air mall at 2 AM with what appeared to be an all-male contingent of strangers? An honest answer might reveal some damning evidence. And yet, without any requisite preponderance, it appeared as irresponsible to speculate on the one hand as it did for the police not to intervene on the other.

Word of the Negersmith case reverberated like a rifle-crack during the opening holiday weekend of the 1990s. In retrospect, it should have been viewed more like a harbinger. During the summer of ’92, a fatal stabbing during Senior Week, followed by the sudden disappearance of a Canadian transvestite who still had not been found. During the winter of ’93, the execution-style murder of an unarmed father that traced its way back to the LA Bloods. During the winter of ’96, the murders of Erin West and Becky Russell, followed by a fatal stabbing at the Firehouse Tavern. And now, less than two months into 1997, the brutal death of a Wildwood local at the hands of three other males, all of whom were well known throughout the island. Whoever you were, whatever your association to this city, it was clear that something integral had soured. One could feel it in the blocks just off the boardwalk, one could sense it whenever wandering alone. The danger, it was palpable, and it came hanging like an old snail’s gut now, laid out bare for all the world to see. John Vollrath’s case was moving forward. The case of Susan Negersmith, a summer tourist from New York, would be forced to inch and claw its way back into the public sphere.

Day 1,196

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB.)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: Every Road Leads Back To Wildwood

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Harold-Feinstein-Bad-Luck-Tattoo-Coney-IslandBy Bob Hill

Ernest Ingenito was a wayward seed, boy; a stinkin’ varmint void of core.

Ernest Ingenito, who spent his adolescence spinning in and out of juvie, who was drafted during World War II; who was dishonorably discharged after assaulting his commanding officer; who served a two-year bid at Sing-Sing before settling down in southern Jersey; who found himself a second wife and built himself a family; who drifted into exile; who philandered like a hog.

Ernest Ingenito, boy, who lit out across the Pine Barrens one November night in 1950, en route to see his estranged wife and two children; who forced his way in through their parlor before gunning down his father-in-law; who shot his wife down with a carbine while both sons hid down the hall; who chased his mother-in-law out through a door, across a field, into a home, where he blew her brains against a wall.

Ernest Ingenito, boy, whose batshit crazy killing spree claimed the lives of five innocent people while critically injuring four more; whose wife, Theresa, lived to tell despite a bullet in her torso; who, upon final sentencing, was quoted as insisting, “I am sorry about them, naturally. But I do not feel as if I am responsible at all.”

Ernest Ingenito, boy, who benefited from a loophole in the system that allowed him to serve out five life sentences concurrently; who was released from Jersey Prison during the Spring of ’74; who found a home in Mercer County and sought out work as a stone mason; who’d been remanded to state prison during July of ’94; who would die while serving out 200 years as a result of 38 counts of deviant sexual behavior, each of them involving the prepubescent daughter of his girlfriend.

Ernest Ingenito, boy, who came up hard on the mean streets of Philly; who was stationed in Virginia throughout the height of World War II; who once massacred nine people across both Gloucester and Atlantic Counties; who was born – and for a time, raised – in Wildwood, New Jersey.

***

It was the second week in September, 1994, and I was sitting on a boardwalk bench along the jagged crook at 26th Street, sharing a Marlboro cigarette with a Derry lass named Anna Kaye. Anna Kaye was pale as paper, short and thin with auburn hair. Anna was dressed in orange clamdiggers, still boasting a slight blonde streak from the summer days that had passed.

Anna Kaye was all but stuck now, stuck in Wildwood, stuck in Jersey, having exceeded her work visa more than a year or so before. Anna was renting a one-bedroom down on Spicer Avenue, living alone in the same space that she had once shared with her ex-boyfriend. Anna ran the boardwalk games just south of Mariner’s Landing, and – much like me – she’d been scrounging for what little work was still available, tearing down the very tentpole stands where she had previously been employed.

Anna Kaye did not like to talk about her family. She never talked about her friends or all the dreams that she had left behind. Anna never talked about the fact that there were now seeds of southern Jersey in her accent; that her once-sharp diphthong had since grown dull. Anna never talked about the fact that barring marriage, fraud or deportation, she might never see North Ireland again. She was a stranger in a strange land now, a disconnected number with no further information. As a consequence, Anna had grown ultra-inquisitive, forcing the arc of idle discourse to prevent it from circling back to her.

Anna Kaye and I were on a half-hour break, mulling over a page-one story from The Philadelphia Inquirer. This story was about a 17-year old named Dolores DellaPenna who’d gone missing from the Tacony section of Northeast Philadelphia during July of 1972. According to The Inquirer, 11 days after DellaPenna disappeared, her arms and torso had been discovered off an old dirt road in Ocean County, New Jersey – every fingertip shaved down to avoid identification. One week later, DellaPenna’s legs were discovered along an unbeaten stretch of Route 571, eight miles removed from the original site.

DellaPenna’s head had never been recovered, nor had anyone ever been officially charged in connection with the crime. But her story had suddenly taken on new relevance, thanks in large part to a pair of highly credible state’s witnesses, both of whom had surfaced almost simultaneously, more than 20 years after the crime.

Both witnesses were prison inmates, one of them an outlaw biker who had previously written to DellaPenna’s father, confessing he was the former owner of a borrowed vehicle that was used in the abduction. The second witness, who was only 16 years old at the time of the attack, put himself inside a North Philadelphia auto garage where he claims DellaPenna had been taken on that evening. According to the second witness’s testimony, DellaPenna had been brutally beaten and then gang-raped by a small group of drug dealers, all before being held down and dismembered via a machete.

Dolores DellaPenna, the second witness insisted, was still very much alive when the dismembering began.

The one significant detail both witnesses seemed to agree upon was that Dolores DellaPenna had originally been marked for abduction following the alleged theft of a small quantity of drugs from a summer stash house located in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey.

Twenty-two years had passed between Dolores’s initial abduction and the point at which these two witnesses had come forward. Due to the delay, three of the six main suspects were now dead.

***

The violent crime rate in Wildwood had dropped by an astounding 16% during 1994, including a 26% drop in sexual assaults and a 23% drop in aggravated assaults. The local police force had gotten back to making quality arrests, improving its year-to-year clearance rate by 6%. Nonetheless, the island’s public image was continuing to suffer, due in large part to several highly-publicized incidents that had taken place inside the city limits. There was the unresolved matter of Rene Ouellet – a Canadian transsexual who had disappeared into the Wildwood night during the summer of 1992. There was also the long-lingering matter of Susan Negersmith, a 20-year old from Carmel, New York whose 1990 death in Wildwood had been ruled accidental, despite 26 separate areas of trauma on her body. In addition, there had been a significant uproar surrounding the recent acquittal of one Stephen Freeman, a 20-year old from Delaware County who had been accused of fatally stabbing his high school rival while on vacation in North Wildwood during the Summer of 1992.

Anna Kaye and I spent close to an hour discussing the ins and outs of Wildwood’s public image on that afternoon.

“So this Stephen Freeman,” Anna asked me at one point, “you’re telling me that he was from Delaware?”

“No,” I said. I was staring straight up at the sky, “Stephen Freeman traveled to North Wildwood from Delaware County. Delaware County is a tiny suburb in southeastern Pennsylvania, about 15 miles north of the Delaware state line. Delaware County is mostly white, upper-middle class, Catholic … you get the idea.”

“And how exactly is it you became such an expert on Delaware County?” Anna Kaye asked sarcastically, “What are ya, from there?”

“Fuck, no,” I said. I was folding up The Philadelphia Inquirer as I stood to leave. “I’m from here.”

Day 600

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: Maple Street Memories

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By Bob Hill

You could tell by the way that kid came screaming around the corner – all high knees and elbows – there was trouble closing fast behind. Seconds later, a pair of shirtless silhouettes appeared in his wake, twin aluminum bats reflecting in the moonlight.

The kid was a quarter of the way down the block before one of the silhouettes wound up and let fly, chucking his bat end-over-end, like a pickaxe in mid-air. It struck the kid square in the back, propelling him forward, where he fumbled for a moment, before falling to the ground.

Then the entire world went silent, save for the static thud of aluminum alloy, and the guttural screams of that scrawny, helpless kid, writhing wildly on the sidewalk.

I watched the horrid episode from a second-story porch across the way. Once both the silhouettes had disappeared, I put my beer down and hurried off toward the steps.

“What the fuck are you doing?” my roommate John asked.

John was one of several roommates I was living with at the time. John had orange hair and pasty skin. John was staring over at me, a 12-ounce bottle in his hand.

“We gotta go see if that kid’s OK,” I said. I stood frozen at the top of a flight of stairs.

“The fuck we do,” John said. “Get back over here, man. You’re liable to get yourself killed down there.”

I looked across the street at that kid, who was struggling to his feet. He made it two steps, maybe three, before collapsing to the sidewalk. The kid was beaten, and bloody, and you could tell by several abbreviated movements that critical ligaments were no longer making full connections.

“C’mon, man,” John said.

I did an about-face. I started back toward my seat. As if on cue, a flatbed truck came zipping around the intersection – a pair of shirtless silhouettes standing upright in the back. The driver stopped just short of where that poor kid still lay, struggling. One of the silhouettes leaned down, picked up a brick from the flatbed, then launched it at the back of that kid’s head, delivering what appeared to be a knockout blow.

The truck peeled off heading west along Maple, followed less than 30 seconds later by the sound of EMTs arriving on the scene. Drunken neighbors went filtering out into the street now.

“You see?” John said, patting me on the shoulder. “No matter how bad it might seem, you don’t ever get involved. Ever.”

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I still feel kind of bad.”

“Why?” John asked. “You don’t know who that kid was. You don’t know what he might’ve gotten himself into. In fact, you don’t know whether that kid just got exactly what he had coming to him, which is exactly why you do not get involved.”

I watched the kid get wheeled into an ambulance. It could’ve been me, according to John. Or maybe it didn’t have to be anyone. These ghetto streets weren’t made for martyrs.

***

During the first few weeks of that summer, John taught me how to work a job for a couple off-peak hours, then quit and suggest petty cash in lieu of paperwork. He taught me how to make a proper fist (I spent 18 years sandwiching my thumb inside four fingers), and he taught me about the Christian House – a nearby homeless shelter that offered cost-free meals three times a day.

The Christian House represented an ideal way to keep from starving. The only trade-off being that the bread was stale, and volunteers read from scripture at the beginning of each meal. “I was dying,” one guy sitting next to me insisted as we were eating one evening. “I’d been sleeping in this shed for damn near a month, without any food or water. Then one day, this asshole comes along and tosses me, for real. That same night a big ole’ snowstorm hit. That shit came piling down in droves, man. Real hard. Like so hard I got this frostbite all the way up on the foretips of my fingers.”

He lifted both hands, and then he wiggled his fingers, as if to show me it worked out.

“In the moments just before I was about to pass out, I looked down into this snowdrift, see. And I saw Jesus, and he was just staring right on up at me. There he was, man, plain as day. As soon as he appeared, I didn’t feel so cold no more. And when I looked back down the road, I could see this pair of headlights approachin’. Them headlights were attached to somethin’ big, man, a big ole’ fuckin’ truck, see. And so eventually, this truck driver, he slowed down to ask me if I needed a ride. Took me into town, man. Found me a warm bed. Saved my fuckin’ life, man. To this day, I truly believe that man to have been my savior. I ain’t never been the same since. Like, not ever. Never.”

It was still early June then, which meant dire straits for a poacher like me. What little scams I’d learned – counting cards, upselling beer for a dollar a can – required a constant flow of people, and there really weren’t any, at least during the week. I was sharing an apartment with 15 other tenants, and all of those tenants with the exception of me were weekenders. Come Sunday night, they would all drive back to Philadelphia. The loneliness didn’t affect me. I had become friends with Lou, the property manager, and I could always wander over to his place for some free beer and weed. Lou had introduced me to Vince – an African-American drug delaer from Bedford-Stuyesant. One night Vince told me the story of a rival drug dealer from Flatbush, Brooklyn. This dealer had beaten Vince’s brother for a bag of money and some coke. One week later, Vince and his crew had tracked that dealer down, jumped him from behind, forced him to the ground, and then hacked into his kneecaps with a machete. “You want to sever that motherfuckin’ ligament at just the right angle,” Vince assured me, demonstrating the downward motion with his arm. “Sometimes you even gotta step on that fucker’s hamstring for leverage, cause pulling a machete out of the flesh is a little bit like pulling a goddamn axe out of a tree.”

***

Alone and hungry, I would regularly break into the apartment upstairs, using a kitchen knife to slip the lock. On most occasions, I’d steal either a handful of loose change or a 5-oz box of macaroni and cheese. If I stole a box of macaroni and cheese, I would boil it on the stove in our apartment, then eat it raw out of the pot. If I stole a handful of change, I’d walk across the street to the Maple Deli, where I could usually afford either a pair of soft pretzels or a pack of Ramen noodles.

The first week in June, I landed a job as a cashier at Curley’s Fries. Curley’s was a popular boardwalk fry joint that employed a largely Mexican staff. Curley’s would pay me under the table (I had no photo ID), which meant that I would be capable of affording a cheeseburger or a bar of soap or a 12-pack of beer within a few days.

I was living with a group of jocks, the majority of whom had graduated from a rival high school back in Delaware County. John had emerged as the unofficial leader of the group, and it was John who had initially agreed to let me stay at the apartment. But it was also John who was charging me double what the other tenants were paying, a detail I did not become aware of until a few weeks down the line.

There were parties every Saturday, and by mid-June the apartment’s walls had gotten marked up and riddled with holes. The kitchen table had collapsed. There was a gaping tear along the living room ceiling. Fearing that we would get evicted, I started holding back rent. Money was tight, I reasoned, and if things eased up, I could still pay off the remaining balance before September. Shortly after, what little possessions I owned began disappearing from my bureau. One weekend, my portable radio went missing; the next weekend, a bag of cassettes. Battle lines were being drawn, and it did not take long before the majority of my roommates started walking away from me in mid-sentence. One of those roommates had even threatened to beat me up.

Toward the end of June, our landlord showed up with a pair of Class II police officers and ordered us to vacate the premises no later than July 5th. He posted an eviction notice on the apartment door. In response, my roommates planned one final blowout to coincide with the 4th of July. I packed my bags, and I left my belongings at a friend’s apartment on East 24th Street. I spent the first two weeks of July sleeping on the beach.

One night, I wound up walking the streets well past 2 am with a summer girl named Tonya. There were “too many drunk people lying about” for us to crash at Tonya’s apartment, so I decided to take her over to the ex-apartment on East Maple. The landlord couldn’t have completed all the necessary repairs, I figured, which meant the place would still be empty. What’s more, I knew three different ways to break into that apartment without a key.

When Tonya and I made a left onto Pacific Avenue two blocks south of Maple, a trio of drunk dudes fell in behind us.

“You lookin’ for somebody to walk you home?” one of the drunk dudes shouted to Tonya.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I responded.

“The fuck d’you say?” one of the drunk dudes shot back. He sprinted forward until he and I stood parallel. Then he elbowed Tonya out of the way. “The FUCK d’you say!?” he asked me a second time.

This dude had a shaved head, and he flicked his cigarette against my shirt. He made a proper fist, tight and white. He was backing me up now, against a storefront. I could feel my fight-or-flight response kick in. And that’s when something struck me … something strong and solid with the force of a wave. That something sent me stumbling. I landed on the sidewalk, where I curled into a ball.

“Are you FUCKIN’ with him?” I heard a gravelly voice demand from above. “I said, are you FUCKIN’ with him? Answer me, motherfucker. Are you or are you not FUCKIN’ with that white boy on the ground?”

It was Vince from Brooklyn. Vince had that dude jacked up against the storefront. The other two drunk dudes took off.

“Look at me,” Vince said, his tone more relaxed. “I want that you should look at me. Are you lookin’ at me?”

The drunk dude was looking at Vince.

“I want you to remember this face. D’you think you can remember this face?”

The drunk dude did believe that he could remember that face.

“I want you to remember this motherfucker too,” Vince said, forcing the drunk dude’s face down within a few inches of mine. “D’you think you can remember this motherfucker’s face?”

The drunk dude did believe that he could remember my face.

“You fuck with him,” Vince said, pointing to me with his index finger, “You fuck with me. We clear?”

They were.

“Now get the fuck out of here,” Vince tossed the drunk dude aside.

“Thanks, man,” I said. I was clapping gravel off both hands. “Seriously, thanks. Those guys would’ve killed me if it hadn’t been for you.”

“Tell me about it,” Vince said. There was a vein pulsing along the side of his neck. “I didn’t even realize that that was you until I got all up in that motherfucker’s grill.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Nope,” Vince told me. “I wouldn’t kid about no shit like that.”

“So why intervene?” I said.

“I turned the corner and saw three wetback motherfuckers about to roll some skinny-ass white dude,” Vince said. “What the fuck was I supposed to do?”

Day 107

***

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: The Things We Think (& Do Not Say)

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By Bob Hill

Twenty years ago in the side bedroom of a second-story shack on the 100 block of East Maple, two drunk kids set to wrestling at each other in the dark – he in a second-hand pair of Umbros, she in a pink-cotton halter and button-fly skirt.

The room was damp and quiet. The walls were white and bare. And the gaping void between filled up with shadows from each passing car.

The windowsills ran vile, a stagnant film of dust and paint. There were twin beds on both sides, pushed up against the walls. The buttons from the mattress pierced her back at jagged angles, carving tiny cuts into the left side of her shoulder.

He pushed the halter up above her chest. She pushed the Umbros down below his thighs.

He used his foot to push her skirt down, heard it jangle, and then crash.

Her neck, it smelled like nicotine. His breath, it reeked like booze.

They’d been seeing each other for three weeks now, and he’d been homeless nearly all that time. The first and only date they’d shared was a last-minute trip to see The Cutting Edge. He would always remember that she insisted on paying because he had no money to his name. She would always remember dropping him off outside a party, how he never thought to ask her in.

There came a pounding at the door now, followed by a turning of the knob. The two of them ignored the noise, descended deep into each other’s arms. His hands, they felt like meat hooks, and she kept digging in behind. She was clinging tight and desperate, latching on in desperation.

He lunged forward with an awkward shift, fell inside her with a sigh.

She braced herself against the storm, gripped a pillow to her side.

His hair was whipping fast now, loose strands brushing across her face, and through her mouth. She kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling, cracked and spotty, full of mold.

She handed him a cigarette, then lit one for herself. He pinched the filter like a bedbug, blew the smoke out with a shrug. He studied how she took each puff, measured how she held each drag. She eased her head onto a pillow, ashed her smoke onto the ground. He waited till she looked away before repeating the same move.

When the rod burned down to cotton, she cast her butt into a can. Then she set her frame against his arm, took note of his last drag.

She had a thousand misconceptions about who he was and where he’d been.

He feared how things might change after reality set in.

Day 104

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: 10 Pounds’ Worth of Potatoes (Inside a 5-Lb Sack)

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By Bob Hill

A week after I left home, my parents put the word out they had taken the spare house key from its usual spot. They had fastened all the windows. They had secured all points of entry.

It was an absurd stance to take, especially given I knew of at least three alternate ways to access the house, and none of them required a key. As a child, I was often reprimanded for slipping the clasp on our front window, then reaching through to unfasten the front door. I never had a house key. I never needed one.

To that end I had a close friend drive me over to my parents’ house one mid-May morning – a morning when I knew my mother, my father and my younger sister would be out. I requested that this friend park his car around the corner, allowing me to make my approach across back fences. I used a pocket knife to slip the lock on our back door, then shuffled upstairs to my bedroom, where I found two stacks of laundry folded neatly on my bureau.

I remember streaks of daylight breaking through the pastel curtains. I remember awkward silence mixed with pangs of guilt. I remember bagging clothes, then running out the basement door. I remember how that door slammed shut, then locked itself behind me. I remember my father intercepting me a few days later on a crosstown walk from Ridley Park to Springfield. I remember he was driving south along 420 when I noticed him pass by. He broke full-bore into a U-turn, swerving round to block my path.

“Get in,” my father said. He pushed the passenger-side door open.

“No,” I said back.

“Get in,” my father said, looking everywhere but at me. “I just want to talk, that’s all.”

“Well, then talk,” I said. “But I’m not getting in that car.”

My father considered this for a moment. “What if I pull into that vacant lot?” he suggested, gesturing with his chin. “That way I can turn off the car, and you can get out whenever you want.”

“OK,” I said. “Pull around. I’ll meet you there.”

And so for the ensuing four minutes, my father and I sat in a vacant parking lot along a shady patch of Route 420, both of us staring forward at reflections on the dash. He offered me no quarter, and I offered him none back. We just sat. And stared. And then we sat and stared some more.

Eventually, my father insisted that I come back to the house. I, in turn, insisted there was nothing left to say. I looked out the window, asked my father to let my mother know I was getting by OK. Then I opened the side door, and – for the first time in my life – I turned my back upon my father. For the first time in his life, he simply let me go.

***

Come Memorial Day weekend, I made the full-time move to Wildwood, New Jersey. My parents, meanwhile, had taken to contacting as many of my friends’ parents as possible, desperate for any update on my whereabouts. Their general plea was for my safety, my father maintaining he had reason to believe I’d gotten mixed up in drugs. When none of my friends stepped forward to volunteer information, my parents cast a wider net, placing calls to several people I hadn’t spoken to since high school. They called my friend Michelle. They called some dude I used to drink with. They even called some girl I’d shared a tryst with during Senior Week.

Fearful that my choices had begun impacting others, I called my parents from a pay phone and arranged for them to come visit me in Wildwood. The afternoon they arrived, I hurried down from a 2nd-floor apartment I had been living in and met them on the street. There were several people inside the apartment on that afternoon – drunks and cokeheads. I was doing my best to keep my parents from wandering in upon that scene.

My parents bought me lunch around the corner. Our conversation was awkward. My parents made it clear they disagreed with what I was doing, and I made it clear that their opinion held no sway. Once lunch was over, the three of us wandered back to my apartment. Out front, I introduced my parents to one of my drunk roommates, who kept repeating the phrase, “So you two are Bob’s parents,” over and over and over again.

Before my mother left that afternoon, she handed me a piece of paper with a phone number written on it. The number belonged to my cousin Dave, who was staying at a nearby house in Sea Isle, New Jersey. Dave was four years older than me, and he occupied the big-brother function in my life that my real-life big brother had not filled. Dave was intelligent, non-judgmental. Back in high school, he introduced me to Tolkien and Vonnegut; JIm Morrison and Roger Waters. Dave took me to see my first concert, and then, a year later, he took me to see my second. He taught me how to play pinball and poker, checkers and chess. He was the only one of my relatives who did not approach me like a chore.

I called my cousin from a pay phone a few days later.

One ring. Two ring. Three ring. Four.

“Hello,” an unfamiliar voice said.

“Dave?”

“No, no. This is Kevin. Who’s this?”

“Kevin, it’s Bud.” a family nickname.

“Buuuuuuuuuuuuuud,” Kevin said. “What’s up, man?”

“Not much. I’m actually calling from a pay phone over in Wildwood right now, so I was wondering if my cousin Dave might be around.”

“Yeah, man. He’s right here. Hold on.”

“Hello,” my cousin Dave said.

“Hey, man. What’s up? It’s Bud.”

“What’s up?” my cousin Dave said. “Nothing’s up. What’s up with you?”

“Me? Well, nothing, actually.”

“Uh-huh,” Dave said. “So what are you calling me for?”

“Well, my mom gave me this number,” I said, “and she told me that you wanted me to call.”

“I said that?” Dave said.

“Well, yeah,” I told Dave. “I mean, that’s what she told me.”

“I don’t think so,” Dave said.

“Oh. Well, maybe she just figured since the two of us were both down the shore for the sum — ”

“No,” my cousin Dave said.

“No what?” I said. I was confused. “Is there something wrong here?”

“Something wrong with me?” my cousin Dave said.

“I don’t know, something.”

“There might be something wrong with you,” my cousin Dave said, “but there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Something wrong with me like what?” I said.

“Something like 10 pounds’ worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack,” my cousin Dave said.

“Huh?” I said back.

“You heard me. Nothing more than 10 pounds’ worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking abou — ”

What followed was the sound of change dropping. The phone had swallowed my deposit. I gathered another handful of quarters, redialed the same number.

“Hello,” my cousin Dave said.

“Hey, man. I think we must’ve gotten disconnected.”

“We didn’t get disconnected,” my cousin Dave said. “I hung up on you.”

And then again, as if to demonstrate his point, my cousin disconnected the call, leaving me alone at the corner of Glenwood and Pacific, staring at my reflection in the keypad.

“Ten pounds worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack,” I murmured.

Nothing more than 10 pounds worth of potatoes inside a 5-lb sack.

Day 99

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©Copyright Bob Hill

Moving On: I’m 18 (& I Don’t Know What I Want)

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By Bob HillLibrary of Congress

I showed up drunk for my first day of college. I showed up barely coherent, waving like a buoy, reeking like a bad sock that had been bathed in turpentine.

After 18 years spent sweating it out in Delaware County, just waiting for the moment when I could break out, bust out, explode across the cosmos, there I sat, half-baked on a set of bleachers, hunkered deep inside a low-budget gym, watching some dude named Bird lead a “WE ARE …” chant as he charged across mid-court, unfurling an industrial-sized banner.

I was there to be acclimated, indoctrinated, to pledge allegiance to the drag. Only I had no interest in being acclimated, or indoctrinated, or even cheering on some dude named Bird. In fact, the only thing I did have interest in at that particular moment was sleep … sleep, and the fleeting hope that when I awoke, all of this would somehow vanish, clearing a path for me to continue along my way.

Delaware County is not a place where fertile dreams are given to flower.

All of which explains why I had spent the bulk of that past summer running … running and sometimes even praying that something somewhere might come along and lift me out of this grind. I was young, and I was poor, and I was devoid of any means or transportation, which meant the furthest I could go was a close friend’s beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey, where there was enough free liquor to see me through until the fall.

The night before college orientation I wound up at a friend’s house, drunk and belligerent, pleading with that friend’s older sister to give me a ride to the PA Turnpike. Once there, I planned on hitchhiking clear across to the Ohio state line. Was I a bit over the moon with drama? Yes, I was a bit over the moon with drama. But I was also deadly serious. In the end, my midnight ride would never come to pass. Instead, I would simply drink my way to morning, at which point my mother would drop me off at the local Penn State campus.

***

Within weeks of orientation, I fell in with a small group of burnouts whose lack of interest paralleled mine. Every morning, the lot of us would ditch class, and wander over to the Commons Building, where we would panhandle loose change until we had accumulated enough to afford a case of beer.

The defining moment of my freshman year occurred during the height of February. Driving cold had forced the students indoors, and a few of us had taken to spending the afternoons watching movies in one of the library’s AV rooms.

One morning, I arrived on campus earlier than usual, hungover and unkempt. I commandeered the audio-visual room, where I lay down to take a nap. When I came to—face down in a pile of denim—I could hear a voice, a rhetorical voice, the kind of voice that one might associate with a lecture. My eyes were shut, but my bearings were intact, which is how I knew that I was still lying in the center of the AV room. I rolled over, interrupting a class in mid-session. A dozen students sat huddled around me in a horseshoe curve. A lone moderator stood at the fore. I sat up. I gathered my belongings. I made a beeline for the door.

***

A week after the spring semester ended, my father and I got into a vicious argument. We had been fighting almost daily—loud and vile, tooth and bone. It was during one of these arguments, at a point when the two of us very nearly came to blows, that my father opened the front door and invited me to leave. And so I did.

I left behind a rambling letter that placed the brunt of the ordeal on me. This was my father’s house, I reasoned, and so long as I was living in it, I had to abide by his rules. Skipping town was a good move, the right move, a move I should have made immediately after I had graduated high school. The only thing that had held me back was my own fear, a fear of failure, a fear of my father, a fear of ignorance, a fear of working papers, a fear of being out there, on the road, alone, without proper means or understanding; a fear of all the cautionary tales I had been fed over the years; a fear of how cold and cruel and stark-raving mad the world at large could become. This was a fear that had been instilled in me since early childhood, reinforced by my parents and my teachers and my peers. Everyone was so afraid for me, but what did they know, really? None of them had ever pursued a life outside of that whiny and pedestrian and wholly unremarkable little town.

***

One week later, I fell asleep alongside a set of railroad tracks, using an Acme bag as my bedroll. I remember lying there, stubborn weeds poking at my sides. I remember thinking if I could just lay low until the break of day, I might be able to keep walking without substantial risk of being arrested, or molested, or even robbed. I also remember looking up into the sky, and thinking I was about to enter yet another weird stage in my young life. This would be the first time that I could dictate my own choices. I remember thinking that the most liberating thing about entering any new stage, whether it be a new relationship, a new job, a change of address, or even a school transfer, is that a person has the opportunity to start over, to go clear, to wipe away all of the shame that has built up over the years.

The goal now, so far as I could tell, would be to gather momentum, not moss.

Day 91

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©Copyright Bob Hill

Prologue: Confessions of a Teenage Cliff Diver

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By Bob Hill

It is late now, 3 AM. And the coastal wind is whipping hard, creating a persistent clang as it zips through flagpole banners down below.

I am drunk, and disorderly, which explains why I am not only willing, but somehow eager, to follow through on pot-addled promises made from ground level less than 15 minutes prior.

There is no time for backing out, at least not at this point. The water is gushing from hydro jets all around me—funneling toward a drop point, where it slowly washes over the edge before disappearing into the void.

This is Raging Waters, circa 1992. And this is me, teetering high atop the Cliff Dive—a high-octane water slide that eases riders down a narrow canal before dropping them, feet first, into a five-story free fall at speeds of 45 MPH.

It isn’t the 50-foot drop that scares me. Nor is it the fact that I’m extremely drunk, and more than a little high. It isn’t the fact that there aren’t any EMTs—or even part-time safety personnel—capable of administering first aid in the event of an accident. No, sir. At this particular moment, the only thing that really scares me is the fact that I’m not positioned feet first, or even face first. On the contrary, I am positioned back up, legs akimbo, the sixth and final passenger in a five-man kayak boat.

Unlike the others, when one is the sixth and final passenger in a five-man kayak boat, he is instructed to let go of the restraints, give the backstop a slight push, and—at the exact instant when he can actually see the earth falling out from under him—repeat the words, “Make sure you bail out the second we hit the water,” over and over and over again until the kayak touches down.

It is upon this final point that I failed.

***

I wrote the preceding paragraphs almost 20 years ago, way back in the summer of 1992. I was 18 at the time—young, stupid, impulsive, and highly impressionable, living with two girls I barely knew in a drywall shack on the east end of 26th Street. I experienced a lot of things that summer, most of them good, some of them bad. When it was over, and I mean really over, I found some time to put my thoughts down on paper.

The more I wrote about that summer, the more I felt like the tone was self-indulgent, that there was either no real substance to what I’d been saying, or that I hadn’t chosen the proper medium to say it. Either way, I couldn’t seem to get past it. So I put away those pages, and I committed to drinking my way throughout a long and a lonely Wildwood winter.

I had nothing but time on my hands, time and a steady unemployment check meant to keep me afloat. Unemployment was, is, and always will be a consistent way of life for Wildwood’s year-round population (The off-season unemployment rate generally lingers somewhere between 23-25%). Local taxpayers work their asses off six months out of the year, then spend the subsequent six months lounging around on said ass.

So be it.

Above all, I learned two things by way of those early years in Wildwood:

  1. When the work is there, you work hard and you work right, and you do not stop until the work is done.
  2. When the work is not there, you’re more than entitled to fill the down time with consumption.

In other words: “Work hard. Play hard.” It’s the official motto of the Camborne School of Mines. And—for many years—it essentially summed up the way I lived.

But time moves forward, and the balance of work and play either becomes horribly skewed or you never really evolve from that freeloading asshole you were back in high school … a dynamic which may make you a big hit down at the local tap room, but does not bode well in terms of aspiration over the long haul.

***

By the time I hit 26, it no longer made sense for me to be working on the Wildwood Boardwalk. So I moved to Philadelphia, where I got a 9-to-5. From that point on, I had resigned to only drinking on weekends. I made this transition accordion-style—jamming seven nights’ worth of bingeing into several two-and-a-half-day loads. Come Friday at 5 PM, I blazed a white-hot trail out of the office. By Sunday evening, I felt more like a rocket, experiencing subtle-to-severe turbulence upon re-entering the atmosphere. During the weekdays, I was largely stationed at my desk, pretending to be the same corporate somebody everyone else in that office kept pretending to be. We all dressed alike, and talked alike, and even combed our hair alike. In fact, it was altogether stunning how wonderfully alike the lot of us were. The idea being that as a result of entering the corporate sphere, I learned to compartmentalize certain aspects of my life. Every weekend, when the majority of employees went traipsing off to their broken marriages, or their mistresses, or their porn-fetish PCs, I went out to get my drink on. Alcohol was my vice. It was the only worthwhile dalliance that my lifestyle would allow.

***

In the Summer of 2006, I made the move from Philadelphia to New York City, which meant I was no longer reporting to an office. Working offsite meant I was losing a certain social component. For a while, I thought I could compensate by meeting new people in the local bars and coffeehouses. But the more I pursued that line of thinking, the more it reinforced the notion that I was no longer in my mid-20s. Before long, the entire charade began to feel desperate, as if I was inching closer and closer to becoming that old guy along the end of the bar.

I was 35 years old then, and I had downshifted into going out for drinks once or maybe twice per month. As a result, I had developed an urge for staying out as long as I could … or as long as it took, for lack of any better way of putting it. My advice to other would-be alcoholics: Do not try this. You wind up looking just as lonely as you are. Come 4 AM, the last thing any eligible chick wants is to get it on with the drunk loner in the corner … that same guy who has been ogling her for well over a half hour.

Invariably, once I drank myself past the point of oblivion, I’d just keep on going, until a point when either the liquor or the late hour led me to ruin. A couple of years back, an Upper East Side bartender found me on the verge of collapse, leaning on a keg in a basement stockroom after last call. A year prior to that, I got bitch-slapped by a bouncer after trying to hit on his girlfriend. And, really, those were only minor calamities in comparison to some of my all-time greatest gaffes.

A few months back, just before I called it quits, I woke up naked in a pitch-black room about an hour before dawn. This was on the tail end of a 36-hr bender that included more nonsense than I care to disclose. But the reason I bring it up is that I remember feeling lost … like, literally, hopelessly lost. More lost than I think I’ve ever been. I felt anxious, and cold, and scared, and I feared what might lie ahead once the lingering effects of all that alcohol wore off.

There was a warm body lying next to me. I leaned in close, breathing quietly until I could remember a name. A minute later, that body got up and turned on a light. And for the next hour, the two of us sat bolt upright in bed, helping each other piece together the circumstances that had brought us to that point.

I remember the girl asking me what I was thinking. And I remember telling her: “Right now, I’m thinking that if anyone had told me when I went out [in Brooklyn] on Friday night, that I’d wind up in a basement somewhere in the heart of Virginia 36 hours later, I would’ve told them they were crazy.”

It was true. Only the joke would’ve been on me, because I wasn’t in Virginia. I was on the southern fork of Long Island, in the downstairs guestroom of a couple whose daughter I’d met out on the streets of Manhattan, well past 5 AM the previous morning. We had been drinking, and drugging, and who-knows-what-else-ing for a full 24 hours.

A couple of days after that incident—once both my brain and my body had settled back into the atmosphere—I began digging through my closet, searching for that unfinished essay I’d abandoned two decades prior. I’d spent the entire ride home from Long Island feeling as if I’d been barreling off the same cliff for the past 20 years. A nick here, a graze there, and yet, nothing quite so critical that it could keep me out of the game.

All of which brings me back to that windy August night way back in the Summer of ’92.

After I let go of the restraints, our five-man kayak drifted slowly toward the precipice, where it teetered for a few seconds before plummeting in a whirlwind blur of terminal velocity and sand. I felt so overwhelmed I completely neglected to abandon ship. And so the five-man kayak went skimming, skimming clear across the pool, at which point I braced myself—the lone passenger who had failed to bail out upon impact. At the last possible moment I jumped … straight left, not right. The momentum sent me sledding into a wall of concrete.

I somehow managed to limp away, despite a fast-forming bruise that ran the entire length of my backside. For a good three weeks after, I wore that bruise like a badge of honor, regaling others with the tale of how we’d broken into the water park, how we’d tamed the mighty Cliff Dive.

Looking back, I have a different perspective. While I’m not familiar enough with the physics involved to determine whether that kayak could’ve just as easily capsized, dumping the lot of us out like a crate full of eggs, I can tell you that I think myself quite an asshole for the arrogance. I mean, consider the margin of error involved; all the various ways in which we could’ve wound up dead, dismembered, or permanently discombobulated.

No, sir. I simply cannot abide it. Not at this juncture, that’s for sure.

But so now there you have it, what happened at the top of that slide, and what happened at the bottom. What follows is the eight-year history of what took place in between.

Day 68

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©Copyright Bob Hill