Kingdom of Fear (3 page)

(Lynn Goldsmith)

There are no jokes. Truth is the funniest joke of all.

—Muhammad Ali

My parents were decent people, and I was raised, like my friends, to believe that Police were our friends and protectors—the Badge was a symbol of extremely high authority, perhaps the highest of all. Nobody ever asked
why.
It was one of those unnatural questions that are better left alone. If you had to ask
that,
you were sure as hell Guilty of
something
and probably should have been put behind bars a long time ago. It was a no-win situation.

My first face-to-face confrontation with the FBI occurred when I was nine years old. Two grim-looking Agents came to our house and terrified my parents by saying that I was a “prime suspect” in the case of a Federal Mailbox being turned over in the path of a speeding bus. It was a Federal Offense, they said, and carried a five-year prison sentence.

“Oh no!” wailed my mother. “Not in prison! That’s insane! He’s only a child. How could he have known?”

“The warning is clearly printed on the Mailbox,” said the agent in the gray suit. “He’s old enough to read.”

“Not necessarily,” my father said sharply. “How do you know he’s not blind, or a moron?”

“Are you a moron, son?” the agent asked me. “Are you blind? Were you just
pretending
to read that newspaper when we came in?” He pointed to the
Louisville Courier-Journal
on the couch.

“That was only the sports section,” I told him. “I can’t read the other stuff.”

“See?” said my father. “I told you he was a moron.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the brown-suit agent replied. “Tampering with the U.S. Mail is a Federal offense punishable under Federal law. That Mailbox was badly damaged.”

Mailboxes were huge, back then. They were heavy green vaults that stood like Roman mile markers at corners on the neighborhood bus routes and were rarely, if ever, moved. I was barely tall enough to reach the Mail-drop slot, much less big enough to turn the bastard over and into the path of a bus. It was clearly impossible that I could have committed this crime without help, and that was what they wanted: names and addresses, along with a total confession. They already knew I was guilty, they said, because other culprits had squealed on me. My parents hung their heads, and I saw my mother weeping.

I had done it, of course, and I had done it with plenty of help. It was carefully plotted and planned, a deliberate ambush that we set up and executed with the fiendish skill that smart nine-year-old boys are capable of when they have too much time on their hands and a lust for revenge on a rude and stupid bus driver who got a kick out of closing his doors and pulling away just as we staggered to the top of the hill and begged him to let us climb on. . . . He was new on the job, probably a brain-damaged substitute, filling in for our regular driver, who was friendly and kind and always willing to wait a few seconds for children rushing to school. Every kid in the neighborhood agreed that this new swine of a driver was a sadist who deserved to be punished, and the Hawks A.C. were the ones to do it. We saw it more as a duty than a prank. It was a brazen Insult to the honor of the whole neighborhood.

We would need ropes and pulleys and certainly no witnesses to do the job properly. We had to tilt the iron monster so far over that it was
perfectly balanced to fall instantly, just as the fool zoomed into the bus stop at his usual arrogant speed. All that kept the box more or less upright was my grip on a long “invisible” string that we had carefully stretched all the way from the corner and across about 50 feet of grass lawn to where we crouched out of sight in some bushes.

The rig worked perfectly. The bastard was right on schedule and going too fast to stop when he saw the thing falling in front of him. . . . The collision made a horrible noise, like a bomb going off or a freight train exploding in Germany. That is how I remember it, at least. It was the worst noise I’d ever heard. People ran screaming out of their houses like chickens gone crazy with fear. They howled at one another as the driver stumbled out of his bus and collapsed in a heap on the grass. . . . The bus was empty of passengers, as usual at the far end of the line. The man was not injured, but he went into a foaming rage when he spotted us fleeing down the hill and into a nearby alley. He knew in a flash who had done it, and so did most of the neighbors.

“Why deny it, Hunter?” said one of the FBI agents. “We know
exactly
what happened up there on that corner on Saturday. Your buddies already confessed, son. They
squealed
on you. We know you did it, so don’t lie to us now and make things worse for yourself. A nice kid like you shouldn’t have to go to Federal prison.” He smiled again and winked at my father, who responded with a snarl: “Tell the Truth, damn it! Don’t lie to these men. They have
witnesses!”
The FBI agents nodded grimly at each other and moved as if to take me into custody.

It was a magic moment in my life, a defining instant for me or any other nine-year-old boy growing up in the 1940s after World War II—and I clearly recall thinking:
Well, this is it. These are G-Men. . . .

WHACK! Like a flash of nearby lightning that lights up the sky for three or four terrifying split seconds before you hear the thunder—a matter of
zepto-seconds
in real time—but when you are a nine-year-old boy with two (2) full-grown FBI agents about to seize you and clap you in Federal prison, a few quiet zepto-seconds can seem like the rest of your life. . . . And that’s how it felt to me that day, and in grim retrospect, I was right. They had me, dead to rights. I was Guilty. Why deny it? Confess Now, and throw myself on their mercy, or—

What? What if I
didn’t
confess? That was the question. And I was a curious boy, so I decided, as it were, to roll the dice and ask
them
a question.

“Who?” I said. “What witnesses?”

It was not a hell of a lot to ask, under those circumstances—and I really did want to know exactly who among my best friends and blood brothers in the dreaded Hawks A.C. had cracked under pressure and betrayed me to these thugs, these pompous brutes and toadies with badges & plastic cards in their wallets that said they worked for J. Edgar Hoover and that they had the Right, and even the duty, to put me in jail, because they’d heard a “Rumor in the neighborhood” that some of my boys had gone belly up and rolled on me.
What?
No. Impossible.

Or not
likely,
anyway. Hell, Nobody squealed on the Hawks A.C., or not on its President, anyway. Not on Me. So I asked again: “Witnesses? What Witnesses?”

And that was all it took, as I recall. We observed a moment of silence, as my old friend Edward Bennett Williams would say. Nobody spoke—especially not me—and when my father finally broke the eerie silence, there was
doubt
in his voice. “I think my son has a point, officer. Just exactly who
have
you talked to? I was about to ask that myself.”

“Not Duke!” I shouted. “He went to Lexington with his father! And not
Ching!
And not
Jay!—”

“Shut up,” said my father. “Be quiet and let
me
handle this, you fool.”

And
that’s what
happened,
folks. We never saw those FBI agents again. Never. And I learned a powerful lesson: Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything—especially not if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime. Maybe he has no evidence. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe. The Law can be hazy on these things. . . . But it is definitely worth a roll.

In any case, nobody was arrested for that alleged incident. The FBI agents went away, the U.S. Mailbox was put back up on its heavy iron legs, and we never saw that drunken swine of a substitute bus driver again.

(HST archives)

That story has no moral—at least not for smart people—but it taught me many useful things that shaped my life in many fateful ways. One of them was knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent. . . . Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.

In the case of the fallen mailbox, for instance, I learned that the FBI was not
unbeatable,
and that is a very important lesson to learn at the age of nine in America. Without it, I would be an entirely different man today, a product of an utterly different environment. I would not be talking to you this way, or sitting alone at this goddamn typewriter at 4:23
A.M
. with an empty drink beside me and an unlit cigarette in my mouth and a naked woman singing “Porgy & Bess” on TV across the room.

On one wall I see an eight-foot, two-handled logging saw with 200 big teeth and
CONFESSIONS OF THE BEST PIECE OF ASS IN THE WORLD
scrawled in gold letters across the long rusty saw blade. . . . At one end of it hangs a petrified elk’s leg and a finely painted wooden bird from Russia that allegedly signifies peace, happiness & prosperity for all who walk under it.

That strange-looking bird has hung there for 15 extremely active years, no doubt for sentimental reasons, and this is the first time I have thought about adding up the score. Has this graven image from ancient Russian folk art been a
good
influence on my life? Or a bad one? Should I pass it on to my son and my grandson? Or should I take it out in the yard and execute it like a traitorous whore?

That is the Real question. Should the bird live and be worshiped for generations to come? Or should it die violently for bringing me bad luck?

The ramifications of that question are intimidating. Is it wise to add up the Score right now? What if I come out a Loser? Ye gods, let’s be careful about this. Have we wandered into dangerous territory?

Indeed. At this point in my life I don’t need a rush to judgment, whatever it is. Only a superstitious
native
would believe that kind of bullshit, anyway.

. . .

Suddenly I heard Anita screeching from the office, as if a fire had erupted somewhere on the other side of the house. Wonderful, I thought. I am a lucky man to get a break like this. Bring it on. Attack it
now.
I reached for a red 20-pound fire extinguisher near the door, thinking finally to have some real fun.

Ah, but it was not to be. Anita came rushing around the corner with a computer printout in her hands. “The President is threatening to seize the Saudi Arabian oil fields if they don’t help us wipe out the Evil of Terrorism—seize them by military force.” The look on her face was stricken, as if World War IV had just started. “This is insane!” she wailed. “We can’t just go over there and invade Saudi Arabia.”

I put my arm around her and flipped the dial to CNN, which was showing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld waving his cast at the camera like a clenched fist as he denounced the rumor as “nonsense” and once again threatened to “track down and eliminate” these “irresponsible leaks” to the press from somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. He wanted to Punish somebody immediately.
Of Course
the United States would not declare war on a close Arab ally like the Saudis. That would be insane.

“Not necessarily,” I said, “at least not until it turns into a disastrous botch and Bush gets burned at the stake in Washington. Sane is rich and powerful; Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are Free, the poor are put in cages.”
Res Ipsa Loquitur,
Amen, Mahalo. . . .

. . .

Okay, and so much for
that,
eh? No more of these crude hashish ravings. What if the bird says I am wrong and have been wrong all my life?

Certainly I would not be entirely comfortable sitting here by myself and preparing, once again, to make terminal judgments on the President of the United States of America on the brink of a formal war with a whole world of Muslims. . . . No. That would make me a traitor and a dangerous Security Risk, a Terrorist, a monster in the eyes of the Law.

Well, shucks. What can I say? We are coming to a big fork in the road for this country, another ominous polarization between right and wrong, another political mandate to decide
“Which side are you on?”. . .
Maybe a bumper sticker that asks
ARE YOU SANE OR INSANE?

I have confronted that question on a daily basis all my life, as if it were just another form to fill out, and on most days I have checked off the
SANE
box—if only because I am not dead or in prison or miserable in my life.

. . .

There is no shortage of dangerous gibberish in the classrooms and courts of this nation. Weird myths and queer legends are coins of the realm in our culture, like passwords or keys to survival. Not even a monster with rabies would send his child off to school with a heart full of hate for Santa Claus or Jesus or the Tooth Fairy. That would not be fair to the child. He (or she) would be shunned & despised like a Leper by his classmates & even his teachers, and he will not come home with good report cards. He will soon turn to wearing black raincoats & making ominous jokes about Pipe Bombs.