Andy

Andy was a strange one from day one. Day one being a day in 1961 or so, first grade. Kennedy wouldn't get killed until next year, second grade.

We were playing outside at recess, some of us in a little sandpile. As I remember it wasn't something put there for the kiddies to play with, like a sandbox, but just a pile of sand. Maybe left there from a construction project.

Anyway some of us kids were playing in it, funny the things you remember a dozen lustrum later, there was a Pepsi bottle there, some of the kids built hills and tunnels, I remember some of them pushing the Pepsi bottle through a tunnel in the sand like a train going through a tunnel.

This was 1961 or so, the Pepsi bottle was worth a couple of cents, you had to take the empties back when you bought new ones or they'd charge you two cents per bottle. People drinking a soda (we called everything a coke) while driving would sometimes toss the empty out the window and it would end up beside the road, unbroken if it didn't land somewhere hard like the road. People would go along and pick them up and take them to a store and get the two cents apiece for them. Kept the roadsides pretty well free of coke bottles. Didn't do much for beer bottles, and later beer cans mostly. But the pop bottles got cleaned up pretty well. In Truman Capote's famous book there's a bit about the killers and a couple of hitchhikers doing that.

I was just watching, don't remember if Andy was or if he was more actively involved. Anyway after that went on for a few days he decided to ask the principal if we could have more sand, there being just that little pile, and the principal - old school fatherly type - said he would see what he could do.

Later, back in the classroom Andy announced to the class that he had "asked for a request of sand". We were six years old but he was pretty uppity with his vocabulary. Maybe more than me but I didn't talk much so...

Anyway we got the sand. And had fun playing in the sand as six-year-olds will do. Andy and I would be, six years later, tagged for the H class as they called it, that being a cherry-picked group of twenty students expected to perform better than average. Of a fairly consistent group - at most two would depart in any given year, to be replaced by two others - at least a couple dozen of us were together from the seventh grade onward, allowing for different electives in ninth through tenth.

Andy and I were in the same home room most of the first six years as they had begun the segregation earlier. I remember in the third grade he once offered the useful information - unrelated to the subject at hand, or marginally so - that the Aztecs used to cut the hearts out of sacrificial victims.

We were in the third grade and I doubt if most of our classmates had any idea what he was talking about. But that was Andy.

Andy being Andy was something we got used to, and if he got a little weirder every year it didn't stand out. High school brought drugs and there was a good bit of weirdness. The drugs probably made some of us weirder, it's hard to say in Andy's case. In retrospect it seems he had a progressive mental deterioration and it wasn't until he went off the deep end as they say that it got our attention, too late.

His father was an alcoholic and died young, possibly before we started school. Whether that could affect him the way a mother's alcohol consumption would is unknown. There are suggestions that it can. As far as I know his mother was at least not a drunk and whether she drank alcohol while pregnant I don't know. I do know that all three of her children were off-kilter and two died young. The one who didn't die was a stoner, but never acted crazy as far as I know. Maybe being a stoner saved him from early death. Nice kid, personable, as Andy said he didn't believe Chuck (his stoner brother) had ever read a book. Could be, supposedly a fair percentage of people haven't. Reading didn't help Andy.

Anyway Andy got worse and worse and after we graduated from high school he got a recommendation from a classmate to a prestigious college in nearby Memphis.

If you know anything about Memphis you're saying something like prestigious university? In Memphis?

It was a small Presbyterian private college and we had a couple of classmates from a prestigious (meaning they had a lot of money and were members of the local big club) and one of them had their parents (who gave the college a lot of money regularly) write a letter for him.

My pal Dan went to another college to get a degree in physics. Most of the kids came home for the summer and Dan and I palled around a good bit, and he told me Andy had been kicked out of the prestigious college in Memphis. Apparently he became violent (something I had never witnessed while we were in school) and wouldn't be going back. I don't know why he was less crazy around me. I didn't see him as often as most others in our circle did, and my personality is less inclined to gratuitious confrontation so maybe the occasion for him to go bonkers around me didn't occur before they came to take him away.

Andy and I had never associated much outside of school but he called me a few times and asked me to go somewhere, to a play in Memphis, a concert, just going to bars (Memphis had the drinking age at 18 then) and I noticed a bit of extra weird but wasn't alarmed. He drank a lot, and smoked a lot of pot. This was the time of fifteen dollar lids, and I always had one or two extras due to the a side business.

Anyway, unbeknownst to me, he was becoming a serious problem for his family. Finally one day he assaulted his sister and got a bow and arrow and threatened to kill her and their mother. They left the house and called the police. What the police were doing that night that they couldn't go get him right away...

Well, there was the killing. And they were all at the crime scene even though it happened outside the city limits and so I happened to drive down the street by Andy's house at exactly the wrong time.

Andy was out in the front yard, wearing a white shirt, and waved me down. I went in and he produced a bottle of Rebel Yell and we had a couple of drinks. And then the cops go the homicide squared away and came to see about Andy.

The decision had been made by some or other to commit him. The cops came, Andy answered the door. Told them he had a guest and he would tell me to leave. Came back to the room and told me, I left and started home. Didn't quite make it, blue lights behind me before I hit the city limits. Didn't even ask for my driver's license, just get out, put your hands on the car, frisk, get in.

No cuffs, just go in there and sit down.

Sit there two, three hours, cop comes in.

Sits down and puts his feet up on the table, wearing those boots cops wear, Wellingtons or whatever. Small town cops are a mixed bag, but they're all pretty sorry. Still remember this dude, J.T. Dempsey, hadn't been a cop that long. There were only about twenty cops and at any time less than half were old-timers, as in having been there ten years or more. Lot of guys got hired, sent to the cop academy at Clarendon, maybe leave after a year or two for better pay somewhere else. Or just don't work out, which covers a multitude of sins and accounts for quite of the ones that quit.

Dempsey had only been around a year or so, seems now he worked at one of the factories before. Or maybe that was someone else. I didn't keep track of the cops, just avoided them. Anyway he pulled the cop act on this twenty year old kid.

Wants to now what drugs we were using. How many bowls did you smoke? (I probably had never smoked a bowl and didn't know anyone who had, we all smoked joints) and what other drugs were you taking? This went on and I said if you want to ask me questions arrest me and I'll call my lawyer. They hadn't cuffed me or Mirandized me but this was 1977 or so and things were sloppier then.

They didn't, after a while the guy switched off the tough act and said he was trying to get information that would be helpful to the shrink. Whether he did it on his own (I suspect he did) or was told to, the tough guy act didn't make me feel cooperative. And with a couple shots of whiskey in me I figured if they thought I was smoking pot they wouldn't give me a sobriety test and stick me with a DWI. Not that I hadn't had a couple of hours to sober up. Anyway that was that. Several people saw me get hauled in, late as it was, and I had some explaining to do but it blew over. If only some folks had known what I was up to...

Andy went into the Medical Industry (Mental division) and never left except for a brief prison term. A crazy person assaults an law enforcement officer he goes to prison. And when he gets out he goes back to the nuthouse. Died at thirty, at thirty I had done a hitch in the Air Force and went back to my former job at a bank long enough to get an Associates Degree at the local community college and move to Jonesboro to attend ASU to finish. Kept up my former shenanigans but it was getting kind of risky and I shut it down and went straight. Or less crooked.

I didn't know then what happened with mentally ill people other than them being drugged and locked up when necessary, but with what I learned about psych drugs later his early demise didn't surprise me. And the drugs these days are some kind of destructive, those who get into that meat grinder seldom live to tell the tale. And who believes them if they do? They're crazy aren't they?

Probably Andy was a hopeless case from birth, some people are. But trying to cure him, if that's what they thought the were doing, likely only made him worse.

J.T. quit being a cop before long, various rumors about why. Went to work doing something or other. I took a job with a small software developer and made big bucks and didn't really miss the extracurricular income from the past. It was the '80s and there were lucrative side gigs for the guys who knew how. Got together with a couple of guys and had a nice little operation, selling and servicing computers, built some home-grown specialized accounting systems that sold well. Now everybody uses Quickbooks or whatever. Those were the days.

The killing? There were some guys in a car, one of them shot another and killed him dead. That's where all he cops were. I worked at a local bank then (had to explain to my boss why I got hauled in) and some time later, probably a year or less, the feller what shot the dude he was in the car with was tried for some form or other of murder. Probably second-degree by the time the prosecutor figured out what he wanted to do, and a young woman who worked at the bank was on the jury. Found him guilty but gave him three years. She said the jurors agreed he didn't mean to do it and they shouldn't be too hard on him.

Okey-dokey. A young guy about my age, an occasional member of one or more of whatever groups I was running with, smoked a joint with him now and then. He said he didn't worry much about getting busted - a serious thing then, even a joint - because he wasn't a dealer. He had a guy that was hitch a ride with him one day, guy had a pound on him, a local sheriff's duty making his bones got lucky that day, arrested them. The dealer said it wasn't his and the poor fellow got nailed, eight years with four suspended.

He'd been better off killing someone if he could work up a good sob story.