by David Crow
I asked an older worker if this would be hard. He lit an unfiltered cigarette and said, “We have all day to empty this truck, and then the next day, we’ll fill it back up. Don’t make no difference to me. The days just run into each other until winter.”
He looked at least forty, but was probably in his thirties and acted like this was all he’d ever do for the rest of his life. It worried me that I might wind up the same way.
The new housing development was about sixty miles away, the supervisor said, and we’d have to drive slowly on the interstate because of the heavy load. It would take a couple of hours. The men walked over to the pickups parked ahead of the large sod truck, and as I turned to join them, the supervisor motioned me back.
“I want you to stay on top of the truck and make sure the sod doesn’t roll off,” he said. “If you see it slipping, tap the top of the cab, and we’ll stop. You have to catch it early because the sod is locked together, so if one piece comes off, it’ll take the rest with it, like a stack of falling dominoes.”
Nodding absentmindedly, I crawled on top of the turf. My job amounted to staring at sod. How hard could that be? This was my lucky day, getting to rest for two hours on soft grass. As the truck rolled down the interstate, I jostled along on what felt like a turf waterbed, and my eyelids grew heavy.
When the truck jolted to a stop, my eyes flew open, and it took a second for me to remember where I was. My body had melted into the soft sod. Two Maryland State Police cars were parked behind us, their lights flashing. Troopers stood at the side of the road talking to our supervisor.
Layers of sod covered the highway for what appeared to be miles. A trooper’s face appeared above the sod that was left. He pointed a thick finger at me. “Get down from there. How old are you, anyway?”
“Sixteen,” I said. Close enough.
He looked below him at my supervisor. “You’re going to get a hell of a fine for littering the highway,” he said, stepping down the ladder. “And not only does your guy look like he just woke up, he says he’s sixteen. You have to be at least eighteen to ride in an open truck.”
“You’re fired,” the supervisor yelled as l climbed off the truck. “How hard could it be to stay awake?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but the sod was so soft.” In my exhausted state, I could have fallen asleep standing up.
“Mr. Patton is a friend of your dad’s. Neither one of them is going to be happy about this. That’s the only reason you got this job.”
One of the workers slapped me on the back. “You’re the first guy who ever sodded an interstate,” he said. “We’ll be laughing about this forever.”
The men made me go to the housing development and lay the sod on the dirt yards. There wasn’t enough, of course, so we quit early. I climbed into one of the pickup trucks, and the men looked at me and laughed for most of the ride. They didn’t care. My mistake had made their day a littler shorter.
Back at the main office, the supervisor said the company was fined a thousand dollars and the driver was issued a large ticket for what I had done. “I’m really sorry,” I said, but he’d already walked away and didn’t hear me.
I took my time riding my bike, in no hurry to get home. It was a leadpipe cinch, as Dad would say, that Mr. Patton had called him. I parked my bike and walked up the stairs to see him waiting for me on the porch. He had his belt wrapped around his hand with the buckle dangling.
But I was done with that.
When he swung, I pushed his chest and blocked him from hitting me. I stood face-to-face with him, clenching my teeth, raising my hands into fists. He stepped closer, but I stood my ground without flinching.
“You’re never hitting me again without me fighting back. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit, I will stand up to you. If you kick me out, I’ll take a bus to Gallup. No more belt buckles or fists.”
I expected him to swing hard and not let up. But he didn’t. He had the same expression on his face he’d had when I was in the bathtub full of salt and blood the night Mr. Yazza shot me. I remembered what he said about me being willing to do anything to be my own man, and he admired that.
Still, he could have smashed me to the ground as he’d done to countless men, but he didn’t. He lowered his hand with the belt and stared at me.
Something passed through his eyes. He had a vacant look as if his mind were far away. Maybe he was thinking about the first time he stood up to his own father after years of being beaten with a wet rope until he collapsed. Maybe he’d been expecting this for a long time.
He dropped his head for a moment and then looked up and poked me in the chest. “I’m not finished with you. I’ve lined up a job where you’ll pump gas, change flats, and drive a tow truck seventy hours a week. Even you can’t screw this up.”
“Falling asleep wasn’t my fault. You have me working twelve-hour days after delivering newspapers. I’m exhausted all the time.”
“You still have plenty of energy to flap your gums about Fort Defiance, though, don’t you? You haven’t done a thing to succeed here. My father couldn’t read or write a single word. My mother made me work in the fields as a child and didn’t let me go to school. And I’ve done well for myself. If you’re too dumb or dyslexic or nearsighted or deaf to figure out how to learn, that’s not my problem. You’ve had it a lot easier than I did.”
I STARTED THE GAS STATION job the next day, but Dad didn’t speak to me for weeks. When we passed each other in the house, he shook his head and scrunched his face in disgust. At dinner, he wouldn’t eat with the rest of us, and I asked Mona why. “He doesn’t want to have to talk to you,” she said.
Toward the end of summer, I got home from the gas station after eleven o’clock, my shirt, pants, and underwear soaked in sweat. My eyes burned with fatigue. I smelled like gasoline, and my fingernails were caked with grease. My knees ached after running in the early morning, delivering newspapers, and then working twelve hours.
Dad sat in the living room watching the evening news in his boxer shorts. “Come in here,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” The TV blared so loud, I could barely hear him.
“My entire body hurts. I just want to go to sleep.”
He sat erect and squinted at me, mumbling something to himself. Pages of the newspaper lay scattered at his feet, and an empty whiskey glass sat on the TV tray in front of him.
“Get used to being tired and dirty,” he slurred. “Someday you’ll be toothless, bald, and old. But the worst part is, at work you’ll be reporting to a kid about your age now. You’re bad in school, you don’t have any mechanical skills, and you never go along with the program. You’re completely worthless. It makes my ass hurt to look at you.”
He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. Of all the mean things he’d ever said to me, nothing seemed truer. Other than manual labor, sports, and reading things teachers didn’t assign in school, I had little going for me, and time was running out.
HIGH SCHOOL CAME TO A merciful end on June 18, 1970. Initially, Walter Johnson was going to fail me. I needed a D average or better to graduate, but even with the B from Coach Ford in economics, my grades were too low. The coach visited all my teachers and the principal, telling them I was close to passing and it didn’t make sense to hold me back. Somehow, his magic worked, and they agreed to let me go.
“You’re the worst student I’ve ever known who doesn’t have a drug problem,” the counselor told me two days before graduation. An attractive woman in her thirties, she kept pushing her glasses up on her nose as she talked. “You have painfully few academic credentials. Giving you a high school diploma is a sin.”
I sat in front of her desk, glancing around her office. What was the point in unleashing this lecture when high school was over?
She tapped a pencil on an empty notepad and glared at me, waiting for my response.
“At least you’re getting rid of me. Isn’t that all you care about?”
“What did you get out of hig
h school besides running track?”
“The whole thing felt like a giant fart joke.” If she wanted to be nasty, I’d throw it right back at her.
“You should consider going into auto mechanics,” she said, as if all idiots should provide tune-ups for brilliant college-educated guidance counselors who were too important to get their hands dirty.
“You’re a real inspiration. I’d dedicate my first tune-up to you, except no male is less mechanical than me. I can damage a car in short order, though.” I burst out laughing, thinking about Query Man. “But I have no idea how to fix one.”
Sighing, she leaned her elbows on the desk. “So what are you going to do?”
“Come back to Walter Johnson in twenty years and show you my pay stub. It will be bigger than the combined salaries of everyone in this dump.”
She sat back in her chair and pursed her lips. My bravado hadn’t sounded convincing to me either.
“You didn’t get above a D minus in any of your academic subjects except economics. And you flunked math. If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Ford is your economics teacher as well as your coach. Without him, you wouldn’t have graduated.” She shuffled my file back together. “If you ever decide to take yourself seriously, the only school that will accept you is Montgomery Junior College. They’re required to take anyone with a diploma from a Montgomery County high school.”
“You’re kidding. They have to take me?” I stood and walked to the door. “I’m on my way to big-time success. Montgomery College, here I come!”
AFTER DINNER THAT NIGHT, I overheard Mona telling Dad I needed to find a new place to live before the end of the month. She didn’t have to worry. I was just as eager to leave.
Dad walked into my room while I was reading the Washington Post on my bed. “Mona thinks you won’t graduate. You failed math and didn’t exactly light the school up in any of your other subjects.”
“I’m getting my diploma. I found out today. Coach Ford vouched for me. I should be scared about going into the world, but I’m not. Being your son gives me an edge.”
He raised his brows. “An edge on what? You have fast feet and a fast mouth, but not much else. You’re on your own the way I was at age twelve when my father died. I’ve been hard on you, but you deserved it. Jesus, you’re a destructive son of a bitch.”
“You taught me well.” I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stood to stretch. “If I can survive you, Mom, and Mona, I can survive anything.”
Dad smiled. He’d taken that as a compliment. “You’re the best bullshit artist I know, and I’ve known some good ones. Hell, I’m a good one. I’ve seen your smarts in action. You can get people to do anything for you. That’s priceless. You would’ve had an easier time of talking yourself out of San Quentin than I did, and I did it with relative ease.”
“I’m not sure what to do next.” Though long before, I’d decided whatever I did wouldn’t land me in prison. I couldn’t think of a career that required the art of bullshit besides politics, but that was a useless profession. My thorough reading of the Washington Post each day convinced me of that.
“Life skills are more important than a formal education.” Dad put his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me with a soft smile. “A formal education will earn you a salary. Self-education will make you a fortune. You aren’t doing well on the formal education side of the ledger. You don’t seem to like working for other people, but you like to work. Read the great books, learn from the geniuses of the ages, and run your mouth right. It’s time for you to figure it out on your own.”
Dad meant well, at least as well as he could, given his warped sense of fatherhood. But what would I do in the world alone? My poor hearing, bad vision, and dyslexia presented more impediments than I admitted, even to myself. And academically, I was light years behind my peers.
Still, I somehow knew that despite my physical limitations and all the shit I’d been through—or maybe because of it—I could do better. I wouldn’t lay sod, pump gas, and deliver papers the rest my life. And I had no desire to find out if I could talk my way out of San Quentin.
CHAPTER 44
AFTER GRADUATION, I BOUGHT A rusted, badly faded purple ’65 Rambler for a hundred dollars and still felt ripped off. It leaked transmission fluid and belched oil worse than the Ford station wagon Dad gave Mom when we ditched her.
James’s mom offered me a room at their house for twenty-five dollars a week, including meals. With nowhere else to go, I took it. The summer crept by as I worked construction, laying the foundation of an apartment complex. In the intense heat and humidity, I pushed wheelbarrows of concrete and unloaded tons of brick and cinder blocks off trucks. It was nearly as hard as the work on the sod farm.
Many of the laborers staggered out of their cars just before the whistle blew at 7 a.m., looking haggard and hungover. Dad’s words haunted me—someday I’d be a bald, toothless old man reporting to kids half my age, performing manual labor that deadened the mind and used up the body.
When James took off for college at the beginning of August, his mother asked me to leave. She was tired of my filthy clothes and the grime I left in the bathtub. While driving back from my construction job, I saw a rundown brick building that had an apartment for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. After paying for the first month, I had just enough money to buy an air mattress, my only piece of furniture.
Every morning on the way to work, I stopped at a diner for breakfast. For eighty-nine cents, I’d get two eggs, toast with Smuckers strawberry jam, coffee, and water. That would often have to last me until late in the day. Food trucks came to the construction site at noon, and I’d sometimes have enough for a hot dog and drink. Caddying on the weekends, I’d get a free hot dog after every eighteen holes, so I worked two rounds whenever I could.
At breakfast one morning near the end of summer, I picked up a copy of the Montgomery County Sentinel and read that the fall semester at the junior college would begin in three days. According to the nasty guidance counselor, they’d have to accept me. And if I didn’t go to college then, I probably never would.
I quit my construction job that afternoon, caddied on Saturday and Sunday, and got up early Monday morning to purchase a money order from a 7-Eleven for tuition, thinking that’s all I’d need to enroll.
ARRIVING AT THE MONTGOMERY COLLEGE parking lot at about eight o’clock, I watched students hurrying to class carrying books and backpacks. I found the campus directory on the edge of the parking lot and decided to start at the top, in true Thurston Crow fashion. As Dad said, PhDs, doctors, and psychiatrists were easy to bullshit. Based on his record, it had to be true. If he could talk his way out of the Q, I could at least talk my way into a college that had to take me. He would have loved it.
I burst into Dr. Herm Davis’s office in the main administrative building, thinking he was the president, but it turned out he was the director of financial aid. At the desk inside the door sat a middle-aged woman wearing a red blouse, thick red lipstick, and too much mascara. She tilted her head down and stared at me over her glasses.
“I’m Gladys, Dr. Davis’s secretary,” she said. “State your business.”
“Is Dr. Davis in?” I asked.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but he’ll want to meet me.”
“Are you a student here?”
“Not yet, but I will be.”
She shook her head. “Generally, you can’t just stroll in here and expect Dr. Davis to see you. But you’re fortunate that he had an appointment cancel this morning, so he has a few free minutes now. Wait here.”
As she rose from her desk, Dr. Davis came bounding out of his office. The door was open, and he must have heard us. Dressed in a well-made tweed suit, he had a bushy mustache and a big, warm smile. “I’m Herm.” He clasped my hand. “How can I help you, young man?”
“I’m David Crow.” I held up my Walter Johnson High School diploma and a small mirror. I breathed on the glass. “The s
team on the mirror proves I’m alive,” I said. “And the diploma proves I’m a Montgomery County high school graduate. You have to accept me.”
“Is that right?” Dr. Davis let out a big laugh. “You’re a real character, aren’t you?” He put his hand on my back and led me into his office. “Come on in,” he said. “Have you filled out an application?”
“No. I thought you could do that when you showed up for class.”
“Gladys,” he called out, “please bring in an application. We’re going to launch this earnest young man’s academic career.”
He told me to have a seat, and I plopped down on his couch as he sat behind his large mahogany desk. Gladys came in and tossed an application on my lap.
I scanned the form. “Should I fill this out now?”
“What do you think?” she said. “Am I supposed to write what you want to get out of Montgomery College, or do you think you can handle that?”
Dr. Davis took a phone call but motioned for me to stay. Gladys went back to her desk, and I stared at the blank space where I was supposed to write a short essay. What should I say?
I took a pen off Dr. Davis’s desk and began writing. “Thank you, Montgomery College. Without you, I would probably be doing manual labor for the rest of my life.” I scratched that out. “I wish to go to Montgomery College to further my education.” I scratched that out too. “I wish to go to Montgomery College to obtain a higher education in the hope that this will be the start of a big career.” I couldn’t think of anything else.
When I handed Gladys my messy application, she wrinkled her nose in disgust and handed it back to me. “Would you be good enough to fill in your full name, address, and telephone number? Or is that too much trouble?”
After I scribbled down the information, she waited until Dr. Davis got off the phone and then told him the application was complete.