Roy Exum
If Emilio had not suffered the nervous breakdown, and if he hadn’t had to be rushed to the psych ward at the nearest ‘full-service’ hospital while ranting and raving like some possessed maniac, I would have never gotten caught. But because two “Live Eye” camera crews taped his terrible screams from the inside of an ambulance, all happening way past midnight, maybe the pygmies on our dormitory floor wouldn’t have been so quick to rat me out.
“My sentence,” as it were, led me to a huge man who knew exactly how to handle the likes of me, and now, over 50 years later, I sense that Chaplain Park Tucker has had much to do with the way I turned out, even though it was for only six months.
As one who despises “Part One of Four” stories, I think the way you avoid leaving the reader “stranded until next week” is you write stories that can each stand on its individual merit.
Sure, I’ll mention an earlier story on the same topic and include the tie-in if the reader may have missed it. You can find stories from months before easily on the web. So, yes, this will be the first part of my “Park Tucker Series” and each will be available in the Chattanoogan.com archives and Google News’ memory.
Following my junior year in high school, my parents were so fed up with my antics, and the revelation I had already acquired a taste for real cold beer, that they shipped me and my attitude to a military-type boarding school in Georgia. Very quickly I found out I was “a natural” in such an element because the whole dorm floor was nothing but fellow incorrigibles.
All of us should have been starting our ‘senior year’ back home but the boarding school required we repeat our junior year. That way the bastion of turning-boys-into-men could cop an extra year of collecting board-and-tuition and all that goes with it, and at the same time the development sharks seem to visit every upcoming grad’s parents a lot.
I am not going to tell the name of this particular academic prison but, in the way the devil works, this was right up my alley and, brother, it was no time before my Christian vows were swapped by my efforts to get tossed out. It took from mid-August to late January until I could force “the warden” to muster me out but that admittedly hysterical story is for another day.
It has been proven one of the big problems for teenagers is boredom, so my tricks and pranks were the best in the league before came my Waterloo. On our floor was a Mexican kid whose English was scruffy at best but, far worse, he appeared to have little common sense, no athletic ability, and gullible was his mainstay. My confederates and I spent two weeks convincing him that, yes, ghosts are very real and not very nice.
We told him our legend of the Alamo massacre, and asked if he might be a descendant of Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Mexican president who “crushed Davy Crockett’s larynx with his bloody hands until he felt it crush! Whew, just picture it, as only a fertile teen-aged mind can do.
This is where I learned the more outrageous tale the easier it is to make the dumbbells believe. For instance, the next day at lunch, with me sitting as far away in the dining hall as I could, one of my boys let it slip that I was from Tennessee, too. “He won’t tell us much but did you know Davy Crockett was Mr. Exum’s half-brother?”
With the ominous caress of a Russian interrogator and the skill of a surgeon, we kept waxing the story and one Thursday night, several of us told Emilio there was this strange presence in the air, like somebody was watching us or something. “Do you feel the air is harder to breathe, Emilio? You’ve never seen a ghost in Mexico, have you? What do ghosts do when they come across the border at Juarez like many of the American ghosts are rumored to do?
Maybe this happens when your odometer clicks past age 70 but earlier this week I couldn’t sleep. As I pleaded for the Sandman’s second salvo, I can remember when Emilio’s ghost showed up. Just before 10 p.m. and “lights out,” Emilio dashed down the hall to brush his teeth. In that brief window, I crawled under his bed, determined to be agonizingly silent wearing a long-sleeved glow-in-the dark tee shirt with a bright red glove covering my hand.
I had a water bottle and a towel. As I could hear Emilio’s breath becoming even, I began to saturate that glove with ice cold water. (It is one thing to be dragged under the bed by an alien hand but a wet, ice cold hand puts the fear ratio off the charts.) At first I did a deep groan and could hear Emilio’s breath change its pattern. Three minutes later, I groaned a little louder but faster this time, and – so help me –my boy Emilio quit breathing. (Later he would tell us he was terrified but was too scared to put his leg on the floor and asked if I could hear his heart beating out of his chest.)
I waited almost another three minutes before – with a dazzling quickness – I reached with a piercing scream the cold red glove from beneath the bed, grabbing and pulling my victim to Hades itself. He fought the ice cold glove as I tried to get a grip anywhere on his body.
O lord have mercy … my 20 confederates who were lining the wall outside his room, gave it up. As Emilio unleashed a string of the very best cuss words in Spanish, I grabbed his ankle with that cold glove and my boy, whimpering like a hungry puppy collapsed on the floor. I came out from under the bed, tearing my glove off, and that didn’t faze him at all. “Hey, ya’ll come quick … we’ve gone too far. Emilio needs help now!”
Suddenly, no less than 10 hands, maybe it was more, raced him to the infirmary and, when the ambulance arrived, we were all there. The rest of the night no one laughed or, much less, said a word. Somebody had noticed some box springs on the fifth floor so our army broke his bed down, put the box springs on the floor instead of his metal bunk, in a way not even a mouse could get underneath, and mourned what we had done.
About 8 a.m. here by the Grace of God, Emilio showed up. He was actually laughing about being scared out of his wits, but we weren’t. It emerged I was the instigator and I admitted it was a practical joke that went sour. There were four men who listened, and I was instructed to come back at 3 p.m. acknowledging such reckless behavior could deserve a jail sentence.
It seems before our 3 o’clock meeting there was an initial vote to “pursue charges” but in a separate interview with Emilio, he assured the panel that practical jokes were a daily diversion for the incorrigibles. He also told them – unbeknownst to us until several months later -- that he cried because he didn’t fit in, had no friends, and wanted to go back home.
Unbeknownst to the panel, Emilio’s screams brought each and every one of us a reason to visit, to talk to this guy who found English so puzzling, and – you won’t believe this unless you’ve ever been teammates during a losing season – a quiet yet deep acceptance. It’s uncanny, but the next Monday morning, he knocked on my door with tears streaming down his face. “I went for a shower and when I next reached my room, my bed had been made, my laundry tucked, and my books for that day’s classes stacked on my desk. Ex, would you tell the others that I love them?”
The others? How about me!” I tried to joke before he said, “You already know.”
No, at age 16 I was too tough, too manly, too insensitive, too cool, too full of my own confidence I did not cry. Instead I wept. From that day forward, we never did anything nor went anywhere that Emilio wasn’t in the thickest of the crowd.
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This is the first of a series on prison chaplain Park Tucker. I do not know when my next chapter will appear in the few weeks to come, but by the time I am finished, this will show how just one person can change your life.
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Please know Emilio is not my classmate’s real name. For all I know, he may own a Mexican cartel.
Royexum@aol.com