by Sue Russell
While other adults thought they were a lonely old couple making up for not having children, there was more afoot. Even back in the early sixties, when Aileen was little, the Podlacks’ was the scene of a lot of crazy times and major partying. Had Aileen spent much time there, it would not have been a good influence, admits one ex-regular. He remembers Mrs P., though, as a ‘beer-buying, loving old granny’ who showed off her aged newspaper clippings and reminisced about her days as an actress. For the previous wave of youngsters, as for Aileen and her peers, much of the attraction of the Podlacks’ was having an adult who took little persuasion to go and purchase beer for minors.
By the time Aileen was on the scene, Dixie was generally believed to be having sex with Jimmy, a hippie who wore flowers in his hair, flounced around in big capes, and who people also thought was bisexual. When there was a party in the backwoods, Jimmy would often appear with Mrs Podlack, also done up in hippie attire, draped all over him.
Dixie did have a penchant for young boys and at least one teenager who made a pass at her had sex with her. (Which others thought very strange because of the age difference.) Dixie also had a longtime salesman boyfriend who came round when Mr Podlack was out of the way. By all accounts, together they’d get ‘drunker than hell’.
Dixie enjoyed teasing the youngsters with titillating tales, and sometimes accompanying gestures, describing, for instance, what she liked to do to men with whipped cream and cherries—and what she liked to have them do to her in return. The whipped cream story became a minor legend. But Dixie didn’t name names, so the kids could only speculate whether the incident involved Chief, Jimmy, or her boyfriend. She also talked brazenly and shockingly about oral and anal sex.
Aileen’s sexual liaison with Mr Podlack, who sometimes visited the forts, too, became common knowledge in the neighbourhood. She frequently rode in his pick-up truck purportedly to go and get beer, or just to have a ride. If anyone questioned her directly about it she generally said, ‘No way! You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Yet one day, Aileen announced to the entire school bus that she’d had sex with Mr Podlack.
And Dixie, while she spoke to Aileen and even went fishing with her, often ranted and raved publicly about Chief having sex with ‘the blonde bitch’.
‘Aileen could walk down to the end of the block and come back with twenty or forty bucks, and never reach Rochester Road,’ reports Jerry, who thought that was a neat trick.
Another of Mr Podlack’s eccentricities was that he didn’t believe in banks and kept his money in the house. And despite (or perhaps because of) his extreme frugality, he seemed to have plenty of it. So did Aileen, after seeing Podlack. And when she had money, she made no attempt to hide it. The point was to share it.
‘Look what I’ve got,’ she’d boast with a smile.
‘Well, where did you get it?’ the boys asked.
‘Somebody owed it to me.’
‘Well, what are you gonna buy?’
‘Oh, I was thinking about we’ll buy some beer and go have a party,’ she’d reply, perennially in pursuit of popularity.
Mr Podlack drank too, but he made plain his disgust with Dixie. Pulling into his driveway in his old Ford pick-up truck after a day on the job at General Motors, the insults would often start flying. ‘Fucking drunk again!’ Chief would shout. ‘I hope you didn’t drink mine!’
The couple had some terrible fights. Dixie often bore the marks of what could have been a beating, but would say she had fallen down the stairs or slipped or something. Sometimes, however, she came right out and said Chief had beaten her, but at least one regular visitor disputes that claim. At first he believed her stories: ‘But one time I saw her slip and fall on her butt and hurt her knee … the next day it was like, “Oh, he beat me up! Look what he did to me!” I said, “Well, I seen you fall! Remember that?”’
One night, long after Barry’s friend, John Majestic, had outgrown the scene at Podlacks’, he tooled down their street in his 1958 Chevy with its powerful spotlight, and as the blaze of light hit Podlack’s front porch it looked to him as if all hell broke loose. ‘Kids were like rats jumping off the porch. Beer bottles flew all over the place.’
He knew immediately that nothing had changed.
Although it was possible to live in Aileen’s subdivision and avoid the drug scene, at times it seemed that drugs and alcohol were all-pervasive. The infestation of illegal substances really took hold there after servicemen first began returning from Vietnam. It began with pot-smoking, spreading to LSD and downers. Heroin was still inner-city fare, and cocaine was off on the horizon.
By the time Aileen and Keith came of age, however, the scene was more hard-core. Neighbourhood crimes centred on car-theft rings, burgling houses, stealing stereos and TVs (a speciality of Keith and his friend Don), gun-running, and, of course, drug dealing. The latter involved cocaine, heroin, LSD, mescaline and large shipments of pot. Aileen, with money in her pocket and an appetite to buy, was spoiled for choice.
Just as the boys with drugs traditionally got the girls, so Aileen with drugs usually landed herself some fair-weather friends.
Keith, who both used and dealt drugs, was into the heavy heroin scenario, using needles, junkie works and spoons. Others, like Aileen, stuck with peyote from out West, mushrooms, Seconals, Tuinals, mescaline capsules and tablets (sometimes consumed in a local spot nicknamed Mescaline Mountain), and an eclectic menu of other so-called party pills.
Drugs were the pivot around which this social clique’s life revolved. The uppermost thoughts in their minds were not about their futures, but when could they next get high? A normal weekend night would likely be spent lying round a campfire, stoned out of their minds, ‘totally ripped’.
On one occasion, Aileen, Jerry, Keith, and a couple of other boys took hallucinogens together and just spent the whole night walking through the woods. They must have wandered 25 miles, ending up in Dodge Park near Utica, their minds spilling over with psychedelic imagery. Drifting by the big Ford plant, cutting across the grass, the merry band of revellers wove in and out of the floodlights just as the sprinkler system spurted into action, soaking them through. Oblivious to their wet clothes, they rambled on, laughing, finally finding their way home the next morning.
Whenever someone’s parents left town, it was immediately the signal for a party, the rowdier the better. With no adult supervision, these affairs inevitably got out of hand, as did one at Jerry Moss’s house. A boy called Danny, rejected by the girl he was wild about—and also high and drunk—pulled one of Jerry’s mom’s butcher knives on the object of his desire, threatening to cut her. Jerry intervened, chasing him out of the house, only to have Danny return and put his fist through the window.
‘He came crying to me, dripping blood all over my mom’s house, so I said, “Come on, idiot!”—I probably wasn’t that nice—and threw him in my car and took him to the hospital and kicked him out at the emergency room.’
This same Danny was a participant in a dangerous game of cowboys and Indians in the woods with real live guns and once came back with a .30-30 bullet in his shoulder. Kids grew up feeling they had to be tough and macho to survive. That was the system, even in school. Certain hallways, they instinctively knew better than to walk down unless they wanted to be knocked, pushed, and shoved. ‘We did violent things, but we didn’t hurt anybody,’ Jerry claims.
Aileen hung out with this crowd, until she angered someone and was told to get the hell out. Then she’d wander off on her own. She was regularly thrown out of parties because she was vulgar, belligerent, and would try to start a fight.
‘I think Aileen liked to cause trouble,’ says Jerry Moss. ‘I don’t think she liked to get right down dirty into the fighting part. She liked to argue and start something. She wasn’t afraid to call somebody a name or say, “Get the hell away from me.”’
It fell to Keith or Lori to try to calm her down, and Keith stuck up for his sister a lot. ‘Lori would be out
there trying to help and Keith would send her away,’ Jerry recalls. ‘There was a bond between them, most definitely. You couldn’t miss it.’
‘She’ll be all right. I’ll take care of her,’ Keith would say, putting his arm around Aileen as she wrapped hers tightly around him. ‘We’ve got to stick together,’ he’d whisper to his misfit sister.
In the subdivision, ethics between best friends were shaky, and nobody was to be trusted except immediate family. ‘Everybody shit on everybody,’ Jerry observed. ‘Relatives, friends, girlfriends. They were all two-timing. The whole neighbourhood was back-stabbers and two-timers.’
Some of the girls were almost as rowdy as the boys, getting into fights and turning the air blue with their language. At the time, Jerry was involved with a tougher greaser chick from Detroit, who wore a black leather jacket and a ‘Fuck you, I’ll kick your ass!’ attitude. He once saw her slap a couple of guys in the face and say, ‘Come on. You want to fight with me? I’ll fight with you.’
He found that exciting, even though he knew she had at least one other boyfriend. What he didn’t know was that Keith was one of them.
‘She was a little whore. She was whoring around with my best friend! I caught them that day. I almost ran Keith over. I was really very, very pissed. They had to jump out of the way of the car. I hit Keith with the door and we immediately started fighting in the ditch. And we were best friends. After that I still married her.’
Jerry (who was soon divorced) quickly forgave Keith. They patched things up while sitting in someone’s yard, ‘probably doing some acid’.
For formal socialising, Troy had a couple of teen clubs; one at a local church and one at the school. There were teen dances, but they were tame. Youngsters would go for a while, but only as a prelude to something wilder.
The biggest neighbourhood hot spot, in fact the only place in town, was ‘the pits’: huge, sprawling gravel pits filled with water so they looked like lakes, rimmed with abandoned cars and junk. They were frequented by motorcycle gangs, and by school kids skipping class. On Senior Skip Day, Aileen’s entire school congregated there for a big party and beer bash, and sometimes everyone slept out there. It was private property, but the rules were rarely enforced unless things got out of hand, in which case the police arrived and chased everyone off.
The gravel pits were also the scene of some nasty fights among motorcyle gangs like the Renegades and others from Detroit, in which youths were cut up and beaten with motorcycle chains. The kids from the subdivision stayed clear of those, watching the action from a safe vantage point.
Kids from other neighbourhoods knew better than to straggle into their turf and respected the boundaries—they’d be chased out if they didn’t. And so it was with the pits. They claimed the territory for their own and turned it into a mini-society. Where outsiders didn’t care and littered the place, the local kids picked up trash and cleaned up the forts, even sweeping the floors.
The forts, which were scattered in the wooded area around the pits, were the scene of much of the social interaction: drinking, smoking (some of it pot), and lots of making out. There was little philosophising or discussion of putting the world to rights. The male inhabitants’ desires were simple. ‘Smokin’ dope and trying to get one of the best-looking girls to make out with you.’
With acid rock, then known as psychedelic rock—Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, Moody Blues, J. Geils, Savoy Brown—wailing in the background on someone’s hot stereo, the kids played kissing games, seeing who could make out the longest. Keith, who had become a handsome young man with fine, longish, Beatles-style, blond hair, and Jerry would sit either side of Sally. Each would take a turn at kissing her to see who could beat the record. Lori and the other girls all joined in the kissing contests with other guys.
Aileen sat across the fire. Watching. The only one there with nobody to kiss. The Cigarette Pig. Sometimes she just stayed and watched. Sometimes she got up and left. While many of these same boys had sex with her, when they were with their friends everything changed. Nobody wanted to make out with her, ever.
‘I guess it would be a double standard,’ Jerry Moss admits, with a shrug. ‘But nobody cared about feelings then.’
One summer, Jerry worked at Clark gas station on the midnight shift. At fifteen, he was left in charge of the place all night, but the pumps were self-service and all that Jerry, or the other guys on the roster, had to do was collect money in the register and drop anything over twenty dollars in a drop slot.
A gang of kids would often convene around the station and filter across to the house next door (which would later be occupied by local musicians, Bob Seger and the Seger System). With its assortment of young male inhabitants in their late teens and early twenties, it became a frequent party house. In those days, drugs were an integral part of the attraction there as everywhere else.
Aileen was a regular at the party house and often took guys across the street into a field. She never came out and admitted to being paid for sex, not among those in her own subdivision, but everyone knew where she got her money.
Kids from other neighbourhoods were always around picking up the Cigarette Bandit for a blow job. And subtlety and finesse were soon foreign to Aileen who solicited openly, approaching a man at a party and offering, ‘I’ll suck your dick right off.’
Wild affairs, with each bedroom soon occupied by couples making out, the parties often turned rowdy, with drunken and stoned kids tearing up the place, tipping furniture over, fighting, breaking windows and destroying property.
Clearly the pits were the safest places for such mayhem since there was less to damage. In theory. One huge party took place in a two-storey fort a dozen youngsters had built from wood they’d stolen from a construction site. By the end of that wild night, the fort was wrecked, torn down to the ground by the traffic and the fights. No matter. When the police found one of these products of stolen property, they tore them down anyway. The kids merely moved on and started building somewhere else.
Kids were left on lookout to tip everyone off when cruising cops were nearby. Parents’ stores of liquor, sometimes half-gallons of something sickening like cooking sherry, were purloined and brought along. ‘We’re gonna have a big blast tonight!’ the message went out. And the word spread to other subdivisions.
One pit party was so huge that hundreds came: car headlights and tail-lights and people sitting up on car hoods and standing shoulder to shoulder, as far as the eye could see. Silhouettes lit by the flames of two or three big bonfires. Whooping and hollering you could hear for miles around.
That night there were so many bodies that when cops rode in from Troy, Rochester, Clauson, Oakland County and the State Police, and surrounded the place, nobody realised until the uniforms were in their midst. Those who’d come by car were trapped, but people scattered in all directions, scurrying to escape the strong arms of the law. Jerry and Keith swam across the lake and got away. Lori and Aileen also made it to safety; one advantage of being pedestrians.
Occasionally, a parent would straggle down to the notorious pits, hoping to retrieve a wayward child. One neighbourhood father, Mr Small, was always complaining about the older kids smoking in front of his younger sons and often tried to break up parties. Unintimidated, the young men shouted, ‘You’d better get the hell out of here before we carry you out!’
That didn’t stop Small wrecking one underground fort that Aileen stayed in for a while. He stamped on top of it, trying to cave it in, and Jerry and Rob got out just in time. A couple of days later they sought sweet revenge. It was a balmy summer night close to 4 July, and they took some zig-zag firecrackers, jimmied their way into Small’s front door, set them on the couch and lit them. Just as they were beating a hasty retreat, Small saw them. He jumped in his car and followed them to Clark station.
‘Come here, Jerry, I want to talk to you,’ he said, calm and cool as a cucumber.
‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ Jerry retorted.
‘I w
ant to talk to you,’ Small said, without a trace of anger. As Jerry gave in and walked up to him, he pulled a .22 pistol and held it to Jerry’s head, right there at Clark station.
‘Do you think you’re smart? Do you think you’re funny?’ he snarled. ‘I’m gonna blow your head off.’
Meanwhile Rob had called the police who came speeding up and pulled guns on Mr Small. The tables were turned, and the indignant adult was suddenly in the hot seat. He was far from the only adult to be pushed to the limit.
Once, when her father was away, Lori got a taste of what her parents had gone through with Aileen, who showed up at the house after running away from a juvenile hall. Aileen’s drug use had escalated considerably, although she didn’t like marijuana and she didn’t do uppers because they made her feel ‘nuts’. ‘She had to have something to calm her down,’ Lori recalls. ‘Aileen’s thing was downers.’ For a while that meant ‘reds’ (barbiturates), Quaaludes, or whatever kinds of downers she could get her hands on to get wasted at weekends. She also took some prescribed but nameless ‘nerve pills’ and drank vast quantities of alcohol, at who knew what long-term cost to her body.
Lori wasn’t a paragon of virtue; she was doing drugs too. But she found that with these drug cocktails inside her, Aileen’s temper became downright impossible to deal with. In desperation, she once sent Aileen off to get a pizza from a few blocks away, then quickly called the police and asked them to pick her up. She was afraid of what Aileen might do if she found out who was behind the tip-off, but she felt she had no choice.
‘She just made me so mad I just couldn’t take it, and I thought she needed help again,’ Lori recalls. ‘I don’t know if she was on mescaline or what, but she was scratching at the windows saying, “Lori, don’t let them take me!” She was crying and screaming and just flipping out. And oh God, it hurt … but I knew she needed to go back.’