Later that night, the Old Man told me another sick discovery had been made; thankfully, he said, this one was not revealed to the students. That same morning, when the therapy lounge was opened by one of the psychiatrists, the words CRAZY COCKSUCKERS were scrawled in red spray paint across the wall in enormous letters. It was soon discovered that a back window had been easily removed to gain entrance. The Old Man never called the cops. He called his maintenance crew instead, had a meeting with his faculty, and decided to hire night staff, which he did, that week. They were - and probably still are - a motley cadre of men and women. He hires those who aren’t afraid to wield a club or shine a light in some punk’s face while telling him he’s trespassing and about to get his goddamn head split open. Two of them work at a time, from 11:00 p.m. to daybreak, patrolling the campus, setting up shop in the SOD office, where they drink coffee, read the tabloids, and pretend to be omnipotent overseers of some slumbering kingdom.
I couldn’t help but immediately loathe their presence, as their being hired put an abrupt end to my late night rendezvousing with Erin. On a positive note, I suppose, since the Old Man brought in his geriatric mob squad, there have been - as far as I know - only a few minor incidents since the shit and CRAZY COCKSUCKERS stunts. Except, of course, one dead Old Brookview girl found in the woods on a remote part of campus.
The school lines both sides of Wildwood Road for about a quarter mile. The five boys dormitories, as well as my father’s house, reside on the north side. This is a modest Cape with yellowish clapboard siding, burgundy shutters, and a front porch that was built one summer by the Old Man. This is the home in which I grew up, and now looks like something that came crashing out of my memory, landing miraculously upright and intact. It’s true I came of age in this house. I drank my first alcohol in its basement; smoked my first joint in its upstairs bathroom; stashed my fair share of contraband in my bedroom crawl space; but what I remember best is the sensation of being utterly surrounded at all hours by hordes of troubled teenagers.
The rest of the campus resides on the south side. This includes the five girls dorms, the dining hall and its attachment - which is the SOD office - the maintenance shed, the gymnasium, the pavilion, the main office and therapy lounge, the nurse’s office, schoolhouses, the Winnebago, and a baseball diamond, which sits on the southernmost tip of the campus proper, its backstop essentially a hundred or so feet behind the Pricilla House. At the moment, yellow police tape snakes around the backstop, dragging and twisting its way to some oaks on both sides, cordoning off the field as well as the seventy or so acres beyond.
The Hundred Acre School was a Christian summer camp from 1951 to 1963. After some highly publicized financial debacle, it closed, much to the delight of the mostly secular locals of Old Brookview. Almost immediately following the closing, a man named William Hannah purchased the land and planned on using it to simulate hunting excursions after stocking it with wildlife he said he knew how to procure. The town might’ve been intrigued by this, but they petitioned against Hannah and his inane money-making ploy. The land was then sold to the town and was all but abandoned for over eight years. Offers were made and propositions entertained. An entrepreneur from New York wanted to scoop up the property for a sportsplex, a dozen or so baseball and football fields for recreational league play. A shooting range was proposed by a local chapter of the NRA. A deal for a Herb’s Par Three, a small east coast chain of golf courses, nearly went through. The last venture to be turned down was concocted by Al Moakley, a local resident who expressed interest in buying the property with the intention of leveling the buildings to plant an enormous corn maze to which locals and outsiders alike would naturally flock in order to get lost for $15 a head. The fate of the property seemed elsewhere.
In the late summer of 1972, a young man and his pretty girlfriend, fresh out of Cornell’s grad school, pulled their Winnebago into Old Brookview when its transmission hacked its final breath along the interstate. With swells of that early 1970’s wanderlust in their system, the couple had been traveling through North America for a few months, crossing its highways and backroads, turning heads in small town diners in Kansas, making friends with their northern brethren in Saskatchewan, getting homesick in Detroit. That they ended up in Connecticut was fortuitous. It simply happened to be where their 1967 Winnebago, only five years old at the time - but sporting a mostly rebuilt engine - sputtered out and slowly died. It happened on I-95, about a quarter of a mile before the Old Brookview exit.
The couple pushed their smoking vehicle in the searing early morning sun, arriving safely at Shaded Corners Professional Complex, which was, and still is, a community of local small town businesses - doctor’s offices, attorneys, accountants, massage therapists, and at one point, a Native spiritual healer, Wandering Wolf, who later scandalized the town when it was discovered he had impregnated two teenage girls inside of a few weeks. Rumor has it he was run out of town after being threatened at knifepoint by the father of one of the teens.
The sign at the end of the off ramp to Old Brookview says Welcome to Old Brookview, Connecticut’s Best Kept Secret. The couple, not particularly intent on cutting their journey short due to a bum engine, which included the transmission, starter, and fuel line, found, after hitching a ride into town and poking around a bit, that they immediately agreed with this sentiment. So they decided to stay for a while in the small shoreline town. The girl, Virginia Gardner, was, by all accounts and photos, a slim, freckled blonde with bright eyes and a blinding smile. She came from the tiny town of Lincoln, New Hampshire, so she was happy to be back in New England, only a few hours away from her parents and older sister. She was twenty-eight around this time.
The man, Rollie Loveland, was scholarly looking and serious, even back then. With his long mane of hair and his wild, untamed beard, the Old Man resembled a sort of roguish intellectual with abstruse theories he hadn’t the patience to ever explain to anyone. His hair has since thinned into smooth wisps of graying silk, and he’s kept the beard all these years, which he calls the one relic of his halcyon days. He comes from East Hanover, New Jersey, so for him, too, their east coast drifting was a welcomed homecoming. At just twenty-four, he was several years younger than my mother.
The Tit for Tat Diner, apparently called Tits by most residents, was looking for a waitress and dishwasher. So my parents, just barely a year away from being married, took the jobs and lived out of their Winnebago, which they had towed to the back of the restaurant by the owner, who took an instant shine to the couple - especially my mother.
James Roarick III was, and still is, the wealthiest man in Old Brookview. His name alone connotes almost legendary shrewdness. Roarick’s story is well known around town. An irascible yet charismatic man with large appetites, he most likely created his own mythology over a strategic series of deliberate catharses to just the right person at just the right time. Like his father before him, who suffered a fatal heart attack while on a business venture in the Netherlands, Roarick has a talent for making a buck, particularly in real estate. He and his younger brother inherited a small fortune by J.R. Jr., whose own wealth and professional savvy garnered him a modest portfolio - modest only when compared to what his oldest son would achieve.
James’ brother, rumored to never have had the stomach for canny business dealings, took his share of the inheritance and headed out west to a Montana cattle ranch. The boys’ mother had run off when they were babies, so J.R. III - which he began calling himself after his father’s death - a recent Air Force graduate and still in his early twenties when officially parentless, was left to his own devices.
Roarick’s personal life was always a source of local intrigue. A deeply private man, he would become known as much for the cryptic ways in which he spoke of his wife and only child, Austin, as he would his business ventures. Gretchen Roarick, according to those who knew her, spent more than half the ye
ar in Nassau, where the family owned a home. When she was in Old Brookview, flitting about in her convertible or chauffeured sedan, marching down Main Street with her pearls swinging to the rhythm of her shopping bags, she was as easily spotted as any idiosyncratic snob might be who lives among mostly grounded people. Considerably younger than J.R. III, Mrs. Roarick had little interest in standing by her husband’s side as he amassed his fortune. Nor did she wish to devote herself to philanthropy or motherhood.
Austin was only a couple of years older than me. My memories of him are limited. He always seemed to be starting and stopping school at odd times, in the throes of a long New England winter, or days after our annual benchmark tests, which were always in the first week of April. One day, he would be skulking through the halls of Old Brookview Middle School or Franklin Duval High School, sneering, mumbling to himself, aloof from his peers, and always absurdly dressed in a sport jacket and pleated pants, and then he’d be gone the next, plucked out of not only the school, but the town, and sent to some elite and expensive prep school in Pennsylvania or upstate New York. Rumors would always accompany these sudden acts of disappearing and reappearing. Trouble with the law. Drugs. Vandalism. But no one ever seemed to know for sure. As far as we were concerned, Austin, like his mother, was something of a gray ghost in Old Brookview. Transient. Elusive. Always a source of interest to locals.
Though an air of mystery surrounded Austin, he did manage to become known by his peers for a bizarre yet somewhat impressive feat. He’d obsess over a particular classmate for one reason or another - maybe their appearance, their mannerisms, their reputation - and commemorate them by authoring a singular alliterative phrase of graphic prose that would fill pages upon pages of his notebook that he’d show off like it was some miraculous artistic effort. It was a strange exercise, revealing an eerie discipline that most adolescents, ill-equipped to articulate such strangeness, would simply shrug over, albeit a bit wide-eyed and suspicious.
Edie Carlson, a frumpy, lonely girl rumored to have had sex with her first cousin, was possibly one of Austin’s most conspicuous targets; thus, “Cousin-humping Carlson bore an inbred baby,” consuming a novella’s worth of pages, nearly became a mantra one year until it was shut down by the administration. What ended up being as memorable as Austin’s writings was the nickname this odd literary tic bestowed upon him. Repeat Offender. Given his predilection for repetition, not to mention his constant treks to the principal’s office, Repeat Offender seemed befitting.
James Roarick III’s professional exploits had become legendary by the time he was just shy of his twenty-fourth birthday. With the help of a team of attorneys, he supposedly strong-armed the owner of the local movie theatre out of business before scooping up the gorgeous Mock Tudor style building on the front street. He did some light renovations, renamed the place Roarick Art Cinemas, and opened its doors a few weeks later. This became standard for J.R III. He was a hustler, never beneath threatening anyone in his way. By the time he was in his early thirties, he owned most of Old Brookview’s businesses: Page Turners, the town’s bookstore, Tits, which became Louden’s Diner, renamed after his black lab, the professional building, the movie theatre, four gas stations, several apartments and houses in and around town, and Tiny’s Drugstore, given its name after his own ironic military moniker; J.R. III, at well over six feet tall with a broad, barrel chest and powerful limbs, is a hulking figure who can palm the average man’s head while towering over him.
Most importantly - especially for my father and his soon-to-be bride - J.R. III owned a hundred acres off of Wildwood Road, a rustic area that runs along the interstate, and yet is remote from the rest of the town. Roarick is rumored to have acquired the property in one of his infamous cutthroat deals, which supposedly involved him dangling a man from his boat when they went yachting to discuss the abandoned land.
Roarick sat on the property for nearly three years, no doubt contemplating his options. The obvious must’ve occurred to him: level it, including every outbuilding, and install a few housing developments, boasting high-end homes with three car garages, cathedral ceilings, and master suites. This would’ve been a lucrative venture. And J.R. III could’ve gotten around the permits he would need to pull, as well as the obscene amount of capital he’d have to come up with to get the project off the ground. Instead, he became inspired by two bright-eyed Cornell grads who were squandering their talents by slinging home fries and scrubbing pots and pans in his diner.
My parents were not too proud to work manual labor jobs, even with the ink barely dry on their graduate degrees. Years later, Rollie told me that working at the diner was one of the happiest times of his life. This was the early 1970s when it was easier to be a nomad. It was pre-internet and pre-cell phone. The romance of America might’ve been blunted by recent political assassinations and the looming catastrophe of Vietnam, but not snuffed out completely. My parents deliberately gave themselves the time to read and think and grow not only their ideals, but the love they shared with one another.
Roarick, who owned the diner, could be found there daily. The place functioned as his ersatz office. His business meetings were held at a reserved table by a window, away from other patrons. They were public displays of clandestine affairs. It became typical for Old Brookview residents to witness J.R. III storm out of the diner in a huff of impatience after gathering his briefcase and throwing a handful of bills on the table. When he wasn’t meeting with attorneys or investors, he was often seen at his spot, poring over a scattered mess of paperwork while nursing a cup of coffee into which he’d occasionally drop a bit of brandy.
Roarick, nearly a decade older than my mother, called her Ginny, which, according to my father, no one had ever called her before. Roarick also told her she reminded him of Mia Farrow, only a prettier version. And he left her twenty dollar tips for refilling his coffee or fetching him a corn muffin. The Old Man was never put off by any of this; J.R. III knew Ginny was spoken for, and his advances were therefore nothing more than playful gestures.
“He was interested in us equally,” my father has told me. “He was curious about our studies and our travels and our domicile on wheels. He jokingly referred to it as our green monstrosity.”
It was this very monstrosity, this 1967 lime-green Winnebago, that was the catalyst in establishing what would prove to be an alliance for all parties. Roarick would tease my mother about the place she called home. How did she live in such tight quarters with Rollie? Sleeping, eating, bathing. Not to mention the wormy-looking heap didn’t even run, so how did she and the Old Man get around? Errands, shopping, outings. He was genuinely intrigued, he told her. So one morning, after humoring another series of comments and inquiries over the vehicle, my parents invited Roarick for a personal tour of their humble abode.
J.R. III was polite as they pointed out where they ate, slept, read, played cards, used the bathroom. Ducking and sliding his large frame at every tight space, Roarick took the short tour with gasps of awed wonderment at their ability to live so free and Spartan-like. Noticing an impressive collection of books on some shelves above the tiny dinette, Roarick, himself a voracious reader, inspected the types of literary fodder his employees took to. He was taken with the results, which were mostly ponderous textbooks on philosophy, education, and psychology. Between my parents, they had a veritable library crammed into the vehicle. There were texts on Plato and John Locke and Descartes and moral philosophy and critical thinking; there were those on behavior and classroom management; child and adolescent psychology; assessment; curriculum; human exceptionalities; and children with mild to severe disabilities.
Roarick must have sensed his employees were bookish, but he knew little else about them - their background, their pursuits, and their design for their futures. Roarick asked them about their studies at Cornell. He asked about their internships and their aspirations. They told him where and ho
w they had met, which was at a Don McLean concert at the university. This was during their first year at Cornell, and, as my father tells the story, which he has on numerous occasions, McLean, supposedly, performed his famed paean “American Pie” for the first time that evening, nearly one year before it would be released to the public.
“So,” Roarick must’ve said, taking in the couple’s history as well as obvious expertise, “what’s it all mean? What are you going to do with it?”
The truth was, according to the Old Man, he and my mother had talked only a few times about opening their own school. Mostly, though, it was a pipedream, steeped in the earnest if somewhat idealistic notion that they could pool their passion and knowledge and change a small corner of the world. My father figured he’d teach - probably high school, and definitely to a special ed. population - while my mother seemed interested in being a child psychologist.
Sensing who they were talking to, a powerful man with money and connections, they took on the roles of two visionaries. According to Rollie, it was my mother who steered the conversation, presenting to Roarick copious ideas about a very unique type of boarding school. One that would be a therapeutic as well as educational milieu. One that would serve adolescents who were less than successful in a mainstream school setting. It would employ a full staff of licensed psychiatrists, teachers - who would also be dorm staff - and administrators, who would be general overseers and case managers. And it would capitalize on and combine the talents and expertise of two Cornell grads, who had earned respective degrees in psychology and education.
Much of this, according to Rollie, was extemporized. The heart of the idea was genuine, but most of the specifics were born at that moment. My mother’s muse was nothing more than possibility. She recognized Roarick as a man who could make things happen. According to my father, she was anything but a sycophant. “She simply played the situation beautifully,” he’s bragged to me through the years. Though she couldn’t have known that at the time. Most likely, she expected nothing from this man, who probably negotiated multimillion-dollar deals over breakfast; it was too fantastical to concede that he would ever get involved with two ivy-league drifters who worked in his diner for minimum wage. My father tells me his role was to go along with everything my mother said, agreeing with this or that, backing her up, adding in a detail or two. Roarick, listening, simply nodded his head in approval over the couple’s lofty design, complimented them on their Winnebago, and saw himself out.
Everybody’s Out There Page 4