When I was a young guy, my brother had a 1964 Ford Galaxy 500 just like the one pictured above... only his was a golden/brown color (of course, I am biased towards the color, red). A BEAUTIFUL car... the damn thing had a 390 cu. in. engine... and was so fast that the from time to time, the car would have to slow down so its paint job could catch up with it. That is one of the most amazing vehicles from my younger memories. My brother was one those "IT" people, whereas I was always on the fringe of any of the cliques of kids in high school. More often than not, I was excluded instead of being included... but that was ok.
But I could go riding with my brother in that car, and we would get all kinds of attention. I always imagined that the girls we would meet were talking to US, when in reality, they were talking to him and his nerdy, goofy brother was just there...
Still, when he would say, "let's go riding...", I was always game and ready to go. Our journeys would take us all over the place around here. Maybe it would be a late afternoon run over to Rosedale to go see the Mississippi River... or to Merigold...
One of the places in town that was "off-limits" was 'Bob's Drive In.'
Not Bob's Drive In, but...
... it could have been. It had the long awning much like this one... and you could park underneath if it happened to be raining... but if you wanted to be cool, you would park just out from underneath it... you could be 'seen' better that way.
They had the BESTEST chili-cheese burgers, onion rings and cherry cokes...
AUGH!!!!!!
Sooo... this one Saturday afternoon, my brother finds me and says, "let go for a ride..."
I knew that probably meant we would go to "Bob's," get a couple of those burgers up there, and have a great deal of fun...
The car hop came... took our order... brought us our food... and we were in paradise... and I was sitting on the passenger's side of that cool looking Ford up there...
At some point, my brother started the engine... we weren't finished with our food yet... and I asked, 'where are we going?'
"We are going to back up some so we can watch
that fight over there..."
That alone shows you what a geek I was... I was so busy eating that I didn't realize that a fist fight was brewing just a few cars away from us... the kinds of things that Mom wanted us to avoid...
... so we back up a bit... and we have a front row seat... this fellow in blue jeans and a white T-shirt is cussing this guy inside a pick up truck up one side and down the other... waving his arms... yelling... stuff like that. I couldn't hear what the fellow in the truck was saying, but at some point, the fellow on the outside grabs the door handle... jerks the door open... and reaches in to grab the occupant... and...
POW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Have you ever been a witness to... or involved in anything like this? In the movies, they tend to portray some of this stuff in slow-motion... and it was... it was moving so slow... maybe to give that fellow as long to live as it could...
After the sound of the shot, this fellow stumbled back and started a turn to his right... and was facing our vehicle... and there was a little red dot on the front of his shirt... centered right in the middle of that fellow's chest.
... and I said to my brother...
"he's dead..."
I was in the ninth grade at the time... I didn't know shit about shit... but I knew this guy was dead. He stumbled towards us... fell up against the car next to us... spun and staggered out into the gravel parking lot where he collapsed... and bled out what little Life he had left onto the ground.
The bullet must have severed the aorta... or hit one of the major chambers of the heart... I didn't know that someone could have that much blood in them... I didn't know that someone could bleed that much... horror movies don't have the effect on me that this event did...
The next thing I know is that cars are screaming and rushing out of the parking lot... everyone wanting to get the Hell away from there... We got home... I ran to my Mother and hugged her so tight and was crying... and she was asking John what had happened to me... when we really both lost as to what we had just witnessed...
I better understood then what Mom had tried to save us from... how she was trying to protect us...
I lost a great deal of innocence that day...
~Jim~
This is a follow-up to the first time I wrote this... it had never dawned on me to talk to my brother about what he saw that day... a write-up of that conversation follows:
ReplyDeleteI realized that I had never really sat down with my brother and discussed this event... I did so today at lunch. He started in on his story... and I let him tell it through... and then I started asking questions. The one that I really wanted to know was:
#1 How did you know that there was a fight brewing?
He said that he saw the pick up pull in, and the car in which the other fellow was riding, came in right behind him... and that fellow got out and approached the pick up.
Our stories meshed up with the event starting at the door of the pick up truck... his recollection ends at the fellow turning after having been shot... and John described the fellow's face exactly as I had...
Since he was driving, he turned his attention to starting the vehicle and getting us out of there... while I watched the collapse and bleeding...
John said to me, "you know... it's funny... I remember when we got home you were still holding your hamburger...'
In doing the math, I figured out that I was 14...
augh...
~shoes~