On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1966, I sat in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. William Bliss who lived in a grand old house on Kussuth Street in Lafayette, Indiana. I was alone with Mrs. and she wanted to know if I was the one who "did it." I told the truth. No, I had not done it. It was Jimmy who "did it." The gig was up. I was falling into deep shit. Jimmy Quick, no thanks to me, was to fall even deeper. There was no way out. The Blisses had the evidence.
I was fourteen. My parents, older brother, and younger sister lived at the end of a pleasant cul-de-sac on Mary Hill about a mile from the Blisses’ house. My dad worked across the Wabash River at Purdue in West Lafayette. That summer I was between the eighth and ninth grades at Tecumseh Junior High.
Mary Hill backed up to a working class neighborhood on 15th Street where the Selleck boys lived. From my house with a short jump over their fence, you were in their backyard. That's where we built a fort with cinder blocks, scrap plywood, and a tarp on the top. With an adjoining pup tent, there was plenty of room for six of us to sleep. But we didn't sleep much. Three or four nights a week we headquartered from there to prowl dark streets and alleys and perhaps toss metal garbage cans on the pavement. We ran like escape artists as house lights came on. We might tap on the bedroom windows of sleeping friends and invite them to join our midnight meanderings. But mainly we just walked around neighborhoods, owning the deserted hours under the starry Indiana sky.
A few times a friend would bring a beer or two swiped from a refrigerator, but there was never enough to feel it when split five or six ways. Back at the fort we chain-smoked Kools and I might read aloud a smutty novel as my pubescent peers stared enrapt through the thick, blue smoke. My friends called me "professor" because I was good at reading. Our conversations were peppered with cuss words and our topics ran from one cute girl to the next, girls none of us had any courage to call.
Jimmy Quick brought his sleeping bag a few times. But he was an odd and mostly solitary boy. He was known for talking tough and once challenged the legendary Matt Farrell to a fight at the fairgrounds. At school two boys might get into a heated argument and word would spread like wildfire that a fight would be had at the fairgrounds adjacent to Tecumseh. School would let out and some one hundred junior high kids would encircle the two which often included the undefeated Matt Farrell. The boys would throw vicious punches for half a minute until at last the loser's face ran blood and short-lived reputations were made.
One afternoon as appointed, the short and wiry Jimmy and the short and muscular Matt came face to face. I witnessed as Jimmy lurched toward Matt with his fists and arms flailing like a drowning swimmer. Matt reached back and punched Jimmy in the mouth, sending him to the ground and a face coated with dirt and blood. Jimmy got up, tilted out of balance, and screamed, "You're a coward! You're a coward, Farrell!" Matt, whom I liked, looked saddened. That was it. Jimmy walked away claiming victory then and in the days that followed. Win or lose - he clearly lost - he loved the attention.
That summer, Jimmy and I were sitting on his patio when his sister happened to bring out a copy of Mad Magazine. "Oh cool, I love Mad Magazine," I said.
Jimmy howled, "Oh my God! You LOVE Mad Magazine! You just LOVE Mad Magazine! Bohnhorst LOVES Mad Magazine!" He lost control. He couldn't stop laughing at me. "LOVE Mad Magazine! Oh my God!"
That day he would tell Billy Bliss, "Get this. Bohnhorst just LOVES Mad Magazine!" While Jimmy withdrew into odd cackles, Billy just sat there, couldn't grasp the humor. Nor could I. I guess Jimmy felt the concept of love to be a ridiculous and foreign thing.
I don't remember why I hung around with Jimmy. He could be sullen and was always awkward in the presence of adults. From out of the blue, he would laugh at the ordinary. Maybe he was a budding sociopath. But then again, I do recall an easier, gentler side. I don't know. Maybe he liked me, or better, tolerated me, because I was willing to be his friend. We found common ground in the ways boys find adventure.
Jimmy and I shared many pursuits that summer. One was to get a mini-bike running. We succeeded in roaring around neighborhoods before the mini-bike died a week later. We jumped onto the side ladders of freight cars as they slow-moved through town, then jumped off like fugitives once the train sped up. We started to build a raft to embark like Huckleberry Finns for a runaway trip down the Wabash. That project failed in less than a day.
But we did devise and follow through with a brilliant and foolproof scheme: we would invade the Blisses. That summer they installed a raised swimming pool in their backyard, equipped with an encircling redwood deck and a diving board, the envy of the neighborhood. Trouble was, our friend, the arrogant Billy, never invited Jimmy or me over for a swim. For a reason I can’t recall, we were on the outs with him that summer. Other friends were invited. Others were prized. We had been scorned. Well, by God, we would swim in his goddamn pool, invited or not.
While the other boys on this Friday night were encamped and smoking cigarettes over at the Sellecks’ fort, Jimmy and I stayed back and pitched a tent in my backyard. My parents permitted all this "sleeping out", I suppose, as a normal inclination of their young teenager. But they never could have imagined what Jimmy and I had in mind that night.
The Blisses lived next door to Lafayette’s mayor, John Gettings, the Gettings’ house also a stately home on that block of Kussuth Street. Our reconnaissance indicated the Gettings were out of town, at least they had been for several days prior to our planned trespass. As luck would have it, the Gettings kids had set up a pup tent in their backyard. This would give us cover and headquarters while we prepped for our assault on the Bliss pool next door.
Here was our plan of attack:
1. Depart the tent in my backyard at 1:00 a.m. and walk to Kussuth Street.
2. Jump the Gettings’ back fence and enter the pup tent in their backyard at 1:15.
3. Strip down to our underpants and wait in the tent for 45 minutes to ensure the Blisses were asleep.
4. At 2:00, jump the fence over to the Blisses’ backyard.
5. Swim for 15 minutes.
6. Return to the Gettings tent, dry off with the towels we brought, and get dressed.
7. Wait in the tent for 15 minutes to ensure the coast was clear.
8. Walk back to my house and arrive by 3:00 a.m.
Things didn’t go quite as scheduled. Fourteen year-olds in general, and Jimmy Quick in particular, lack a penchant for patience. So instead of leaving my backyard at 1:00 a.m., we left at 11:30. Jimmy was in hyper-kinetic mode, as though we were about to commit the crime of the century. He jabbered and gyrated along the dark back streets en route even though I kept reminding him to whisper and keep his cool.
The Bliss and Gettings houses were both dark and quiet. It was clear the Gettings were still away as there were no cars in their driveway or garage. We scampered into the Gettings’ empty pup tent and removed our shorts, t-shirts, shoes and socks. We had brought a flashlight that lit up our tight, two-man space and a couple of boys naked down to their skivvies. It was another warm, still, humid Indiana night, but Jimmy seemed to shiver with adrenaline. We had scheduled a forty-five minute pause before our invasion but Jimmy would have none of it. “Come on! Fuck! Let’s go! Let’s go! Goddammit!” he demanded.
What was the point of waiting? The coast was clear. The neighborhood was asleep. A short wooden fence separated the properties and in a second we were in the Blisses’ backyard and up on the raised deck that surrounded the pool. We eased into the cool water and remained true to our vow of silence. I swam the length underwater and when I came up for air, I felt a winning satisfaction. Victory was ours. I noticed Jimmy holding onto the side across from me. He was not a good swimmer.
Again I swam and rode across the bottom before coming up on the deeper end. But when I emerged, Jimmy was dog paddling wildly towards me, cackling in his way, and choking on inhaled water. Our vow of silence was in supreme violation.
“I did it!” he laughed.
“Keep it down!” I pleaded. “What the fuck did you do?”
And in his commotion of splashing and gasping, Jimmy proclaimed, “I took a shit! I took a shit! I took a fucking shit!”
I shot out of the water like a rocket. Jimmy climbed out and stood next to me, his shaking body bent over, his face contorted in the moonlight into something like silent, triumphant hysteria. I scanned the Bliss house and all remained dark and quiet. It was time to get the hell out of there.
Jimmy and I dried off next door. Our plan hadn’t accounted for the wet underpants, so we tossed them into the corner of the tent. We got dressed and moved quietly back into the streets. We got back to my house before 1:00, crawled into our sleeping bags, and fell right asleep. I hadn’t been disgusted exactly by Jimmy doing what Jimmy did. It was kind of funny at the time. That’s who Jimmy was and that’s a thing Jimmy would do - like picking a fight with the toughest kid in school, receiving a bloody beatdown, and then declaring victory. Par for the weird course he was on.
So it was that our phone rang the next morning. My mother called me and said that Billy’s mother, Mrs. Bliss, wanted to talk to me. Without breath, I took the receiver. Mrs. Bliss said I should come right over if I knew what was good for me. I must have turned white. Biking over to Kussuth Street, my heart raced and bounced with cracks in the pavement. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss had always liked me, I thought, but now I would be reduced to a cockroach.
Mrs. Bliss sat me down in their ornate dining room and joined me after equipping herself with coffee, cigarettes, and ashtray. She was subdued, not outwardly angry, and started by saying how sad she was that Billy and I had drifted apart as friends. She said she had always liked me. The table was set and she delivered the goods: The family always slept with their windows wide open on those warm summer nights, she told me, and you can hear every crackle in that still, damp air. They first heard Jimmy and me when we were talking in the Gettings tent before the swim. She and Mr. Bliss kept the lights off, crept out to their second-floor screened-in porch overlooking the backyard, and heard every word we said, heard us splashing around, heard us as we dried off and dressed. Mrs. Bliss said she was disappointed in me, especially disappointed with my filthy language. “I’m sure your mother has never heard you use words like that,” she said. That was true - my mother hadn’t. So, she wanted to know, was I the one who had, well, you know, done it? She wasn’t surprised to hear my answer. Jimmy did it. She grew dark. She said she always wondered about that boy.
Mrs. Bliss then made me an offer: if Jimmy and I came back later that day at five o’clock, Mr. Bliss would like to have a meeting with Jimmy and me. We would have to admit to trespassing, Jimmy would have to admit that he did it, and we would have to apologize to them. If we failed to comply, she would call our parents and relate the whole sordid story. Besides, Mrs. Bliss claimed, her husband had tape recorded the whole episode including every last cuss word.
I biked over to Jimmy’s who had gone home earlier that morning. He was outraged. He was incensed with me. How could I admit that it was us, he demanded. How could I be so fucking stupid! Dumb ass, he called me. He paced back and forth on his patio, shaking his head and penetrating me with the stare of a cornered rat. Back and forth he paced. But they had us and he knew it. It was the humiliation of facing Billy Bliss’s parents versus the consequences of his parents finding out. Jimmy finally relented. I called Mrs. Bliss and told her we would be there at five o’clock.
At the appointed time, I was surprised that it was Billy who opened the door for Jimmy and me. With his obvious smirk and overly polite greeting, I could tell he was savoring every moment. Billy was such a little saint in his parents’ eyes. They seemed to know nothing of his bullying and lying and manipulations. First you were his best friend and then you were an outcast.
Jimmy and I sat on the living room couch as directed, Mrs. Bliss took a chair to the side, and Billy stood away by a wall and watched. Mr. Bliss walked in, a short, stocky, and balding man. He stood before us and commanded the room. First, and not unkindly, he addressed me: “Tom, I’m disappointed in you. You had always been a good friend of Billy’s. What I want to know is, why? Why would you come onto our property in the middle of the night?”
I was prepared for the question. “I guess we were jealous of Billy having a new pool, Mr. Bliss,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Jealous? All you had to do was ask, and you’d be welcome to come over,” he said. I looked over at Billy and that smirk still glued on his face. Mr. Bliss said these words so matter-of-factly and so warmly, I felt this meeting would end up just fine. And that was all the man had to say to me.
But when he turned his gaze upon Jimmy, a storm came roaring. “And you, Jimmy! What do you have to say?” he implored. Jimmy had been slumped there on the couch, chin on chest. Now he turned his head to the side and closed his eyes.
“Sit up! Look at me!” he thundered. Jimmy shifted his weight and barely looked up.
“SIT UP!” Jimmy sat up.
“I have a really nice swimming pool, here, Jimmy. Brand new! Crystal clear! Do you know why it’s clean now, Jimmy? Do you? LOOK AT ME!” Jimmy trembled and barely offered a glance. He shook his head no.
“Okay, I’ll tell you why I have a clean swimming pool! After your little visit last night, with THE FILTHIEST LANGUAGE I’VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE...Where did you ever learn to talk like that? Did you grow up in a sewer? LOOK AT ME!” Jimmy glanced up at him again. “After your little visit, we inspected the swimming pool this morning for damage. And do you know what we saw lying on the bottom? DO YOU? Of course you do! ONE ENORMOUS TURD floating at the bottom of my pool. Billy volunteered to fish it out with a net. DISGUSTING! How big was it, Billy?”
We all looked over at Billy who held his forefingers about ten inches apart.
“SEE?” roared Mr. Bliss. “Enormous! You should have been the one to clean that up, Jimmy! Because I know it was you! Admit you did it, Jimmy!”
Jimmy sank lower into his slump and stared down with half-open eyes. Seconds passed.
“ADMIT IT!” shouted Mr. Bliss. Jimmy allowed a slight and stark nod.
“Well, we couldn’t just wait around for you to come back and clean up your mess, now could we. So poor Billy volunteered to fetch it out. Do you think he enjoyed that? DISGUSTING! Do you have anything to say to Billy for cleaning up after you?”
Jimmy closed his downcast eyes. He whispered something unheard.
“WHAT!!!” demanded Mr. Bliss.
“Sorry,” whispered Jimmy.
“All right, young man, you should be. Now, I have just one more question,” Mr. Bliss said. His volume dropped and a kind of plea was heard. He took a few steps toward Jimmy and looked down at him. “Why, Jimmy? Why would you ever do something like that? Help me understand. Why would you want to foul our property with your filth? That’s what I really want to know.”
It’s hard to say, but I suppose at this point most children would have started to cry. But I had never seen Jimmy cry before and he didn’t cry then. Jimmy in silence sat for several long moments. What could he say? He shrugged his shoulders. Mr. Bliss could have stood over Jimmy all night pelting him with abuse and impossible questions, but it was no use. Jimmy could feel no shame.
“All right,” Mr. Bliss said. “Go home. And, Jimmy, if you ever come back to my property, not only will I call your parents about what you did, I will call the police.”
We had met our obligations, Jimmy and I. We had arrived at the scheduled time and given our required admissions and apologies. Once outside and walking our bikes down the sidewalk, Jimmy’s cockiness snapped back fast. “What a bunch of assholes,” Jimmy laughed, unfazed. He hopped on his bike and pedaled homeward as though in his mind he had just defeated Matt Farrell.
On my ride home, I felt tremendous relief, of course. There would be the continued tension with Billy Bliss and the short-term damage his gossip would cause. His gossip always caused me short-term damage. I mostly was in the clear. And for now, I was on time for our six o’clock dinner, my parents none the wiser. But when I walked in the front door, my father greeted me with these words: “Son, I just got a phone call from Mayor Gettings. He’s coming over this evening to talk to us. What’s this all about?”
Just when you think you’re out of the woods. I told him the tale without a crucial detail. The matter of a certain bowel movement was left in the vault. My father wasn’t a strict disciplinarian or an intimidating presence. He listened like a juror to his son, the defendant, and said simply, “We’ll see what the man has to say.”
The mayor arrived at seven o’clock and was invited to join Dad and me on the back patio. Mr. Gettings was a friendly sort, graciously accepted a glass of iced tea, and got right to the point. He shared that he and his family had returned from a vacation that afternoon after which his ten year-old son had discovered two pairs of wet underpants in his pup tent. This mystified the mayor but noticed the Blisses out back adding chemicals to their swimming pool. He asked them if they had any idea how the wet underwear had come to reside in the pup tent. It was then that the mayor got the detailed description of events the previous night. The Blisses had told the mayor that if Jimmy and I fessed up and apologized, they would not inform our families.
The mayor, I suppose, was a conscientious sort who felt that, in spite of side agreements, it was proper for parents to learn if their children trespassed into other people’s yards at all hours of the night. It was thus that Mayor Gettings was motivated to sit down with my father and me. “And not only that,” the mayor added, “either Tom or the other boy defecated in the pool.”
Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
Yes, yes, that was the case, explained the mayor, and he went on to sermonize about the value of selecting the right friends and the need to respect other people’s property and he didn’t think it was his place to talk about how un-Christian vulgar language was… he would leave that to family. As I said, the mayor was a friendly and diplomatic sort, and before he departed twenty after he arrived, we shook hands. He said he was glad to see that I appeared to learn important lessons from my poor choices.
Dad and I went back to the patio and sat down. For a long while he looked off into the distance shaking his head. But then, he ruptured. My father blew a gasket. He howled and howled and sobbed with laughs. He grabbed his handkerchief to dry his eyes. “He crapped in the pool!” he cried. “Great God Almighty, the boy crapped in the goddamn pool! Oh, my soul… oh, my soul.” I had never seen such a thing, my howling father, his red face, and his handkerchief. And with this, his treasured tale, Dad would regale others for years to come.
I continued that summer to sleep out with the Sellecks and other neighborhood boys. We roamed Lafayette’s dark streets in the wee hours and smoked Kools. To my surprise, the trespassing story and Jimmy’s infamous turd never came back to haunt us. I guess if others found out, they didn’t much care. I never again became good friends with Billy and never again swam in his pool. After a while, Jimmy and I went our separate ways. His family moved away from Lafayette about a year later and I never heard from him again.
Mr. Gettings never did make a call on Jimmy’s parents. Perhaps the crude nature of Jimmy’s delinquency was more than the mayor could handle.
