Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  Passing the fitness test entitled Murphy to enroll in BUD/S Training. This program taught SEAL candidates to be men of character, to be in top physical condition, and to learn new tasks quickly. The course lasted for six months and taught physical conditioning, small-boat handling, diving physics, basic diving techniques, land warfare, weapons, demolitions, communications, and reconnaissance.

  For the first seven weeks the course concentrated on conditioning, with the fourth week aptly named “Hell Week,” which consisted of five and a half days of continuous training, with a maximum total of four hours sleep during that time. Hell Week was designed to prove to the candidates that it was possible for a man to do ten times the work that an average man would have thought possible.

  The second phase of training concentrated on diving; the third on weapons, demolition, and small-unit tactics. The final three weeks were basic parachute training.

  Murphy began his BUD/S Training during the winter. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. BUD/S Training in winter was tough because the Pacific Ocean was downright icy!

  Murphy only made it four and a half weeks into BUD/S Training. “I couldn’t psychologically handle being in and out of the fifty-degree water all day long,” he remembered sadly.

  He preferred to think about the aspects of the training in which he did well. He handled the obstacle course with no problem. He handled the boat landing in the pounding surf. The running and the swimming—both without trouble.

  “But the cold water affected me so much, I finally rang the bell, which signified that you are quitting BUD/S,” Murphy admitted.

  After dropping out of SEAL training, Murphy was commanded to go to his next duty assignment in Long Beach, California, aboard the USS Peleliu. The ship was named after the 1944 battle in which the First Marine Division, later relieved by the Army’s Eighty-first Infantry Division, cleared the Pacific island of Peleliu. The battle was supposed to last a couple of days, and ended up lasting longer than two months. It had the highest casualty rate of any battle in the Pacific Theater, higher than either Iwo Jima or Okinawa.

  The battle’s namesake was a huge eighteen-story-tall amphibious assault ship. She was in dry dock when Murphy was assigned to her, and stayed in dry dock for many months, while he worked aboard as a photographer.

  After what seemed like forever, the Peleliu finally went out to sea, but it didn’t stay out there for long. After two weeks the captain determined that work on the ship was incomplete. It returned to dock.

  “After a few weeks of being on the ship anchored to the dock, I decided to take drastic action,” he said. He grabbed his backpack and his Navy SEAL combat knife, which he bought off someone during BUD/S.

  “I jumped ship,” he admitted. He didn’t know why. “I got off work one morning and walked through the gate of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard with no intention of ever coming back. I went AWOL!”

  Murphy got on a bus for downtown Los Angeles. High and euphoric, Murphy removed his military ID card from his wallet. He cut it into little pieces. He threw the pieces out the window of the moving bus. Murphy looked back at the confetti wind with a sense of profound liberation.

  He was too high with adrenaline—or chemical imbalance, or whatever this new madness was—to look at reality. If he took off the delusion glasses, his reality was far more bleak.

  He was beginning a four-and-a-half-month stretch during which he would live as a transient, roaming free and broke along the West Coast between Santa Monica and San Francisco. Hunger would drive him to desperation, and to crime.

  He was only in San Francisco for a couple of days. For a fellow who was down on his luck, San Francisco could be an accommodating city. There were flophouses and soup kitchens.

  But Murphy was so out of it, he lacked the social skills to find those places. He slept on the coast in a foxhole he carved for himself out of the brush.

  The worst crime he committed during those lost months was in a campground on Half Moon Bay. In fact, it was so severe that it temporarily ended Murphy’s life as a transient.

  “I tried to kill a man,” Murphy explained. Again, the madness from the chemical imbalance in his brain made him do irrational and bad things—things clearly destructive to others, but self-destructive, too. Murphy said it felt like a drug, like he took too much of something and was wasted out of his mind.

  “There is a dreamlike state that I am in,” Murphy said. “Things slow down. Surreal. Unreal. That’s a fact!”

  Half Moon Bay is twenty-eight miles south of San Francisco, between forested hills along California’s most scenic coastline. It was beautiful, Murphy later said, but a place where “the winds of romance blew queerly.”

  The guy—his name was never known—propositioned Murphy sexually. Murphy wasn’t at all tempted. In fact, he was pissed off. So Murphy waited until the guy was asleep, attached a heavy lead weight to his combat knife case, and hit the guy in the head with it.

  “I hit him as hard as I could, but it was obviously not hard enough.”

  Instead of staying unconscious from the concussion of the blow, the guy woke up very startled and frightened. Murphy hit him again with the weighted case—this time in the center of his forehead. Once more, the guy withstood the blow better than Murphy would have thought possible. Murphy had given him his best shot, right between the eyes, and the guy was only stunned.

  “Then he begged me to stop, so I decided to let him live,” Murphy explained.

  That was as far as Murphy’s compassion went. He pulled his razor-sharp combat knife from its sheath and brandished it so that the guy was good-and-properly terrified.

  “I warned him if he went to the police, I would hunt him down and kill him.”

  Murphy hadn’t planned on the guy having a skull as thick as the hull of the Peleliu, and had already made plans for what to do with the corpse when the guy was dead.

  “I was going to dump his body over a cliff along the coast,” he said.

  Instead of killing the guy, Murphy stole his Chevy Blazer, his wallet, and his money. Without stopping, Murphy drove to the San Francisco Bay Area airport.

  From there, he called his mother in Florida, and she wired him enough money for an airline ticket back home. After a few months in Florida, Murphy became fed up with the outlaw life, constantly looking over his shoulder, searching for military police (MPs) in the margins of his vision.

  “I had my brother and his wife drive me to the recruit training command navy base in Orlando, Florida.” Dean let him out at the front gate.

  Murphy walked up to the sentry and said, “I am Petty Officer Murphy and I am here to turn myself in for desertion.”

  He stayed in Orlando for a couple of weeks, where he was free to come and go, and was allowed to socialize with other deserters. Then they put him, unaccompanied, on an airplane to Los Angeles, where he called shore patrol at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and told them that he was at the airport. He was told to wait in front of the airport. He saw an official navy car pull up and inside was a pair of armed escorts.

  “You Petty Officer Murphy?” one asked.

  “I am.”

  Before many mildly interested witnesses in the hustling and bustling airport, Murphy was handcuffed behind his back.

  He was placed in the back of the navy car and was taken to the Long Beach Shore Patrol and kept in a holding cell for a couple of hours. He was next moved back to the USS Peleliu, still in dry dock, and back to his former workstation in the photo lab.

  “I was not confined while aboard the Peleliu,” Murphy said. He was even allowed to leave the ship and go on the base and return. This freedom lasted for about a week. Then he was court-martialed.

  As a result of that legal ceremony, Murphy was demoted from E5 to E1, given thirty days in the brig, and given a dishonorable discharge, the grounds being “bad conduct.”

  Murphy served his brig time in San Diego.

  “That was my first prolonged incarceration, and it was rough,” Mu
rphy said.

  The only good thing about the brig was the breakfasts. Those meals were huge and great, and in complete contrast to everything else about the place.

  Most days he and the other prisoners were taken from their cells and sent into the harbor onto one of the ships. Half the time they would scrape old paint; the other half they would be saddled with a brush, slapping on new paint.

  After his month in the brig, he was released into civilian life. Within twelve hours he was in St. Petersburg, staying with his brother until he could find a job and get a few paychecks under his belt. Actually, it was more like he was living next to Dean rather than with him. The building in Largo was not a duplex, but more of a quad-plex.

  The search for a job didn’t take long. Murphy had a skill, cutting hair, which was always in demand. Almost immediately he was hired by a barbershop in the Gateway Mall in northeast St. Pete. “It was a really good job,” he said. “Busy location, and what made it even better was I was paid in cash daily, with a seventy-five percent commission.”

  He only stayed with Dean and Dean’s then-wife, Brenda, for a couple of weeks. He moved out quickly. He didn’t move far, however. He ended up renting the apartment right next door to them.

  Chapter 13

  Paula

  Murphy remembered good times from that period. The brothers went out on Dean’s boat, nocturnal fishing trips on Tampa Bay. About six months after Murphy’s discharge, he met a lovely haircutter named Paula Cunningham (pseudonym), who would become his second wife. They met at Madeira Beach. As was Murphy’s pattern, he fell in love almost immediately.

  She and her family were vacationing. It was a holiday, but Murphy didn’t remember which one. He ran into Paula and her sister and her girlfriend and they asked him if he wanted to play a game with them, some board game or something, so he went with them.

  Brutus and Paula were married by a justice of the peace in St. Pete in 1987. The newlyweds decided to make a fresh start of it in a new town, where they would open their own hair salon and live happily ever after. They traveled around, scouting locations, visiting many towns and cities on a number of weekend trips. They visited Panama City, Tampa Bay, just looking around. Then they stopped in Tallahassee and Murphy had a real good feeling about it.

  “There was something in the air in Tallahassee,” he said. Smelled like home. The newlyweds found a place and moved to Tallahassee in late 1987. Just as planned they opened their own shop in early 1988—Clippercraft Haircutters. It was very romantic. Paula would cut hair in the chair right next to her husband’s.

  The place had seven workstations. They rented them out. They didn’t have employees, and they never had more than a few independent contractors at any given time. They had a tanning bed and a massage therapist. That is, they had a massage therapist until—fingers no doubt wandering—she fell in love with one of her customers and moved out of the state.

  “The environment was just short of upscale and very relaxed. We played Top Forty music on the radio all day,” he said.

  And that was the way it was. The Murphys were as happy as clams for just about seven years. Then the rent went up and up and up, $1,200 a month, until they were forced to change locations.

  Murphy was proud of the new Clippercraft Haircutters because he did all of the work himself. “I built the walls, and all that stuff,” he said.

  The space had been a skin care place, but he converted it. Took about a week. He was handy with tools, good with plumbing and electricity—and completely self-taught.

  The old shop was already gone, so there was no income. They needed to open the new joint quickly. Refurbishment time was at a premium.

  “When I look back, the new Clippercraft Haircutters was still a little rough around the edges when we opened for business,” Murphy said.

  But it wasn’t the interior decoration that hurt business as much as the location. Sure, the rent was cheaper, and it was another little space in another little shopping plaza.

  “But cheaper didn’t mean better,” Murphy said. Their steady customers weren’t willing to go the extra distance to the new place. Plus, starting on moving day, there was a massive road construction project right outside, making access to the shop ridiculously complicated. Customers had to drive through rutted dirt to enter the new plaza’s parking lot.

  “We lost a hell of a lot of business,” Murphy said.

  If Murphy had it to do over again, he would have stayed at the first site. Better to have high rent and a thriving business, he realized in retrospect.

  It was around the time that the Murphys were struggling at their salon’s second location that he began to express himself artistically. After Trevor, his son, was born, Murphy made paper airplanes. Then he graduated to cardboard and wood. He started experimenting with materials and found that he loved working with copper. He sculpted in metal, soldering and welding copper pipes into objets. Of course, not everyone appreciated Murphy’s talent. Some only saw a weirdo collecting and mangling scrap metal.

  He would find pieces of copper; he’d take copper tubing and flatten it out. He would hammer and propane it together; the next thing you knew, he had made a train! Encouraged by his early success, Murphy became more “progressive.”

  To maximize his ability to work in this medium, Murphy took a night class in gas welding at Lively Vo-Tech in Tallahassee. The “Vo” stood for Vocational. Whatever it was you wanted to be, they could teach you. Want to learn to fly? Step right up. Massage therapy, turn right. Beauty parlor skills, turn left. Murphy was there to learn to weld better.

  And he did learn, and Murphy’s pieces of art grew, both in complexity and in size. His larger sculptures were made of steel, copper, and brass. He made sculptures that were all steel, all copper, or all brass—or any combination of the three.

  It got to the point where making sculptures was all he wanted to do. Night after night, sometimes all night, he would weld. Whenever he had a day off from the salon, which was great, it gave him an opportunity to weld some more.

  Most of the metals he used were scrap or junk. He would go to the scrap yard every couple of weeks or so and buy scrap metal by the pound. He would bring the metal to his workshop, where he had a wide variety of bending, cutting, and welding tools.

  “Eventually I made a room about five hundred square feet in our hair salon, which I used as a gallery for my works of art, my metal sculptures.”

  To advertise his gallery, he put a sign, BRUTUS’S BONEYARD, in the hair salon’s front window, with a picture of one of his favorite metal sculptures: a skeleton made of pipes holding a spear.

  Not all of his work was macabre. He made airplanes, trains, ships, automobiles, and whimsical fantasy creatures. He made an alligator and a flying machine. His all-time favorite sculpture was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Egyptian pharaoh made of steel.

  Because of the floundering business at the hair salon, and perhaps a little because of all the time he was putting into a not-for-profit pursuit, Murphy was forced to take a second job, cutting hair at the Regis Hairstylists in Governor’s Square Mall in Tallahassee.

  Because Regis had such a great location compared to his own place, he moved all of his customers there and developed a clientele. There was always an influx of new customers, because it was in a mall and because Regis had a nationally recognized name.

  Paula tried to make it on her own cutting hair at Clippercraft Haircutters, but there just wasn’t enough money. So not long after her husband began working at Regis, the Murphys closed up Clippercraft for good.

  Chapter 14

  C-section

  For seven years the Murphys lived and worked together. Considering how much time they spent together, they hardly ever got on each other’s nerves. They always remembered to take time for themselves. Paula went to the gym every day, and—when he wasn’t working on sculptures—Murphy enjoyed long walks and bike rides. As the marriage progressed, Murphy spent less and less time getting fresh air, and more time on his wel
ding “obsession.”

  The best things that the marriage gave him were “two wonderful children”: Trevor and Darcie. One of the greatest moments in his life—maybe the greatest—came in 1989 when he watched Trevor being born.

  “Trevor was born by Caesarean section and I watched the entire procedure,” he said. The most fascinating part was when the doctor removed his wife’s uterus and set it down outside the body so he could sew it up and put it back.

  The moment his son was born was “one of the most emotional times” of his life. It was incredible that he could feel so much love for someone, for another human being, whom he’d seen only for a moment.

  He felt the same way in 1993 when his daughter was born. Although the same doctor delivered both of his children, Darcie was born of natural childbirth, so Murphy did not get to see his wife’s internal reproductive system for a second time.

  According to Murphy, he always got along well with his children. He is eager to let the world know: “I never spanked or whipped my children. I don’t believe in it.”

  He says he never “hit or slapped” Paula, either. Not that he was a perfect husband with no temper. “I admit that I was physical with her a few times. The first time was only a few months after we were married. I know that, at that time, I frightened Paula very much. What I did was throw her on the bed. Then I put my hand tightly over her mouth and told her to keep her mouth shut.” There were a couple of other times during the marriage when he did the same thing to her. That was the extent of the physical abuse he dished out. He didn’t really hurt her, but he was aware that he scared the “wits out of Paula” each time he did it. After each time he felt awful, but he didn’t remember ever apologizing. Years later, when their marriage was over, Paula told Murphy about how scared she became when he got physical with her, how she even “feared for her life.”