You didn’t need a crystal ball to tell you Rusty Archibald would end up a criminal. He was born with face of a delinquent. But when we met in the fourth grade we became instant friends. And I needed a friend. I was new to Canterbury Elementary, having just come from Fairfax, and I didn’t know anyone.
“Redistricting” was what they called it, a strange word that started circulating around Fairfax midway through third grade. The hulking brick fortress with the big “1919” carved in sandstone over its entrance could no longer hold all those kids. The plan was to move the district lines in and send all the kids who fell outside them to other elementary schools, schools like Canterbury, a mile east of my house. Just where the new lines might fall was the main topic of conversation on the playground. Who was getting shipped off to Canterbury and who wasn’t, that’s what everyone wanted to know. I didn’t pay much attention to the debate though, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. Until it did.
When the line came down I was on the wrong side of it, just barely. Renee Vaughn, the girl next door, would continue to go to Fairfax, I was going to Canterbury. How could this be? How could the Cleveland Heights School District so callously separate me from my friends? My parents didn’t have an answer, they just knew that now when I walked out the front door I’d be hanging a left instead of a right.
I remember that September as darker and colder than usual, though that may have just been my state of mind. I was never one of those kids who looked forward to getting back to school anyway. I spent most Septembers mourning the loss of Lake George, the place we spent our summers. Lake George was now five hundred miles away and I wouldn’t see it again for another ten months. It might as well have been ten years. As I walked to my new school I tried to distract myself from the tears I felt welling up just behind the eyes. I wanted to be back at the lake even though I’d have surely froze to death in our flimsy summer cottage, soon to be buried under six feet of snow.
The walk to Canterbury was more interesting than the one to Fairfax, mostly because more than half of it was on the cinder path, a pedestrian passage that ran the four blocks between South Taylor and Canterbury Road. There were no cars on it, just kids on foot and bicycle, the cinders crunching beneath their feet and tires. I didn’t know any of them though they all seemed to know one another. They walked in twos and threes, talking, laughing, showing off their new school clothes and lunch boxes festooned with TV characters from shows like “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and “Hogan’s Heroes.” I walked alone. And because I was a dawdler I really was alone by the time I came to that last section of the path, the one that ran between Kingston and Canterbury. Sometimes, as I made my way through that dark tunnel of trees, I could hear the school bell ringing in the distance and I knew the other kids would already be seated at their desks. A pang of anxiety would interrupt whatever daydream was running through my head. I’d better pick up the pace.
Rusty lived on Kingston, just a few doors down from the cinder path. We met in Mrs. Reese’s fourth grade class. Mrs. Reese was a sweet old woman who wore the kind of white blouses women wore in the 40’s. She reminded me of the sort character Teresa Wright used to play in those old movies: the plain, dutiful wife awaiting her husband’s return from the war, or perhaps from the torrid affair he was having with the real star of the picture. She was a dreadful bore.
It was late one afternoon, feeling groggy, barely able to keep my head up as Mrs. Reese droned on in that kindly voice of hers, that Rusty and I first noticed one another. It wasn’t much at first, a roll of the eyes, a little shrug. But it escalated. Eyes began to cross (it turned out we both had the unique ability to cross just one eye, which makes you look seriously retarded, as opposed to crossing two, which makes you look merely comical). Soon lips protruded, tongues lolled to the side and Rusty, who had vaguely simian features to begin with, began scratching himself under the armpits like a chimp. I responded with drool and my best attempt at a shriveled, palsied hand. Before long we could no longer contain the laughs. A cloud passed over Mrs. Reese’s relentlessly sunny face. First she tried ignoring us. When that didn’t work she took to seating us on opposite ends of the room. That only encouraged us to make even bigger, sillier gestures, which in turn got the attention of the entire class, and soon the whole room was giggling. Those clouds would pass over Mrs. Reese’s face more and more frequently as the year wore on. Any counter measures she devised to deal with our “shenanigans” were destined to fail—even sending us to the office had only temporary effect: within a day or two Rusty and I were back to making faces and cutting up. We had discovered the joy of misbehavior and we weren’t about to give it up. Finally, sometime around Christmas, she gave up and simply built our antics into her daily lesson plan.
We were even worse outside the classroom.
It’s amazing the amount of murder and mayhem that runs through the mind of a 10-year old boy. Cars explode, planes crash, G.I. Joes, when not themselves being killed, are busy annihilating everything in their paths, especially one’s sister’s Ken dolls (Barbie always got a pass—G.I. Joe may have been a vicious sociopath but he was not without a code of honor). Rusty and I went to great lengths to translate our violent fantasies into elaborate scenarios: airplanes performed death spirals from the attic window; Hot Wheels tracks were painstakingly set up on table tops and on landings, their steep ramps ending abruptly in oblivion. G.I. Joes were subjected to all manner of torture and death. A favorite, “Death by Elevator,” featured Joe unwittingly stepping into an elevator shaft (the laundry chute) and plunging twenty stories (G.I. Joe stories) to the basement floor, his futile cries—“Ahhhhhhhh!!!”—echoing the whole way down. There was “Death by Ant,” in which Joe was buried up to his neck in the backyard and his head slathered with honey. Minutes later the ants would arrive (we got that one from a Tarzan movie). Our crowning glory though was “Death by Deep Freeze,” which involved submerging Joe in an ice bucket, filling it with water, and sticking it in the freezer. A few hours later he would emerge encased in a block of ice. My mother didn’t buy Rusty’s explanation that it was part of a science assignment, but even she, a Unitarian who disapproved of torture on principle, was impressed by the sight of G.I. Joe staring out of his icy sarcophagus. That is until she became fed up with having to reach around him every time she wanted the fish sticks.
We tried to avoid actually destroying our G.I Joes. After all, we wanted them to live to die another day. Sometimes it was unavoidable though, as when, while chipping away at an ice block, I accidentally drove the ice pick through his chest, severing the elastic band that held him together and causing his head and limbs to fly off in different directions. Protocol called for cremation (and lots of airplane glue), which was carried out in a secret ceremony behind the shed, far from the prying eyes of neighborhood busybodies.
Due to some bureaucratic oversight, in fifth grade Rusty and I were once again assigned to the same class. Perhaps Mrs. Reese failed to impress upon the administration just what a mistake that would be, or maybe she was too polite to say anything about “The Rusty and Paul Problem,” but it was passed on to Mrs. Fisk who, though younger and more progressive than her predecessor, found her attempts to channel our “negative energy” into more constructive pursuits largely unsuccessful. Even after the mistake was corrected in the sixth grade—I was sent to Mr. Stein’s class, Rusty to Mrs. McHale’s—it was too late, our hurricane of havoc could not be slowed, let alone stopped.
The highpoint of “The Shenanigan Years” was our visit to Cedar Point, the largest amusement park in Ohio. It was Pipe Fitter’s Union day and Rusty’s father, a plumber, treated us and Rusty’s brother and sister to an afternoon of rides and junk food. Entering the park, Rusty and I paused to take it all in: the crowds, the rides, the milkshakes and cotton candy. The opportunities for mayhem were endless.
After being kicked off the bumper cars for disobeying The Counter-Clockwise Rule (“all cars must move in the same counter-clockwise direction, so as to avoid head on collisions”—avoid head on collisions? Isn’t that the point of bumper cars?) we moved on to other outlets. We found our niche in the so called “family-friendly” rides: the ferris wheel, the kiddie teacups, the ski lift that snaked its way through the park. We took particular pride in the way we took these seemingly benign amusements and turned them into weapons of mass annoyance. The ski lift for example was perfect for dumping milkshakes and spit-covered Atomic Fireballs on the pedestrians below. “Hey you kids!” and “Come back here!” —music to our ears—echoed through the park that day. Our greatest achievement though was to transform “Turnpike,” less a ride than a quiet oasis from the adrenaline-fueled amusements favored by teens, into an instrument of irritation. I’d say the irony of it appealed to us but irony was a concept we were still too young to grasp. We weren’t after concepts, we were looking for trouble.
Turnpike was designed to show kids what it was like to drive a car like a grown up. Not a race car or a getaway car, but a responsible adult car. Each was gas-powered and just large enough to hold one or two children (or possibly one child and a smallish adult). The driver maneuvered it along a concrete track that meandered over a half mile of fake hills and trees, simulating a leisurely drive in the country. The car’s tires straddled a curb that ran down the center of the track and prevented the driver from steering it off the road. Each car had a gas pedal and a brake and went about as fast as a slow sixth grader could run.
It was the job of the carny to make sure the riders boarded at staggered intervals so they wouldn’t bunch up. He would hold a car several minutes to allow the rider in front of it to get far ahead. This gave each driver the illusion that he had the road to himself. Rusty and I would comb the crowd for a “mark” and then one of us (usually me) would get right in front of him in the line and the other just behind him. Then, at some point in the ride, when we were out of view of the carny, I would stop and pretend my car had broken down. When our victim arrived he’d say something like “What’s the problem?” or “Having car trouble?” That’s when Rusty would come up and ram him from behind. The cars didn’t move fast enough to cause any damage but then the point was to inflict annoyance, not bodily harm. “Hey, cut it out!” the kid would say. He’d blow his horn and eventually I would start up and continue on for a few yards, stop, and Rusty would rear-end him again. We would go on like that for more or less the whole course. The only risk was that the kid would complain to the carny at the end of the ride. But by then we’d have slipped away. Besides, nobody likes a tattletale, least of all a carny.
The last time we staged an ambush Turnpike Rusty upped the ante—Rusty was always upping the ante—by choosing an adult as our victim. This time he took the lead car and slipped in behind a slightly drunk (and apparently childless) plumber. Rusty stopped his car just around the first bend and then I came up, rather hesitantly (the guy was big) and hit him in the rear. We did this several times before the guy threatened to get out of his car and throttle us. That’s when Rusty—I couldn’t believe this—jumped out of his car and started to run. Was he actually going to leave his car idling there in the middle of the track? Yes. The drunken plumber, who had gotten out of his car and was swaying and swearing and shaking his fist at Rusty—now a mere speck on the horizon—turned to me with murder in his eyes. I was up and out of there so fast the fiberglass trees flew by in a green blur. I caught up with Rusty around the fake gas station and we made a bee line for the edge of the course, where we hopped the fence and disappeared into the crowd.
My parents would never call Rusty—or anyone—a “bad influence.” They were liberals and liberals don’t engage in that sort of social profiling. Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, they loved them all, including blue collar white folks with bad teeth and juvenile delinquent sons like Mr. and Mrs. Archibald. My mother even managed a weak smile when Mrs. Archibald, in a voice turned to sandpaper by years of unfiltered cigarette smoke, said “What these boys need is a good whoopin’!” The Archibald s were from the wrong side of the tracks, metaphorically speaking of course (the only track in Cleveland Heights was the one that ran around the Heights High athletic field). Rusty’s dad was union, my dad was management, they were Catholics, we were Unitarians, they supported Nixon and the war in Vietnam, my parents went to peace rallies and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy. Mom and Dad made the mistake of inviting the Archibalds over for cocktails one time. Rusty and I were upstairs killing our G.I. Joes but from time to time we’d peak downstairs to see how things were going. They weren’t going well. Mr. Archibald had put away a lot of Carling Black Label (it was on special at Heinen’s) and with each can had sunk deeper and deeper into smoldering silence. Mom tried mightily to fill every painful millisecond with nervous laughter and pleasantries, but Mrs. Archibald was content to sit there letting her eyes do all the talking and her eyes said “You think you’re better than me, don’t you, you fucking stuck up bitch?” The unspoken hostility between our parents wasn’t so unspoken after Mrs. Archibald said she believed the reason her Rusty kept getting in trouble at school was because I was a bad influence on him. That’s when the cracks in my mother’s equanimity began to show. Dad could see she was preparing to say something in response, something that wasn’t terribly liberal, and stepped in to declare an end to cocktail hour.
After the disastrous cocktail party our parents unofficially forbade us to associate with one another. Not that it did any good, like modern day Capulets and Montagues, our love of petty crime was too powerful to be squelched by misguided parents. Our pursuit of mayhem would continue, albeit in secret. The ban became official after Detective Ron Salzer, the Cleveland Heights Police Department’s Finest Narc, dragged Rusty and me to the station on “suspicion of illicit acts.” The moment he laid eyes on us at the Severance Mall his finely honed law enforcement instincts said “troublemakers.” What gave us away? It must have been the bell bottoms. Only our bell bottoms didn’t have bells because they’d been lopped off when our mothers hemmed them (mothers always hem pants way too high). Still, they had the color and pattern of a well known brand of bell bottoms so everybody knew they were bell bottoms even without the bells. Sixth graders in bell bottoms, that could only mean criminal activity, the detective concluded. He was right about that, of course, but his timing was off. Had he grabbed us a half hour later he probably would have found stolen goods on Rusty (Rusty never left a store without stuffing something in his pockets) but at that point we were merely looking for trouble, we hadn’t yet found it. It must have been a slow day on the mean, tree-lined streets of Cleveland Heights for Detective Salzer to go to all the trouble of bringing us to the station’s interrogation room and spending a good hour trying to make us confess to something—drugs, murder, spitting—anything would suffice. Due, I can only guess, to budget cuts, Detective Salzer was without a partner, which meant he had no good cop to play to his bad cop. So we heard lots of stories about how we were going to be gang raped by “big blackies” at the juvenile detention hall. He succeeded in scaring the shit out of me but Rusty was his usual cool self. “We were out shopping for Mother’s Day presents, officer. Since when is that a crime?” The cop wasn’t buying it but I sensed in him a kind of grudging admiration for Rusty’s technique. He smiled and gave Rusty a look that said “You’re good, kid, I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in years to come.”
And he was good. In fact, the only time I can recall Rusty being anything but cool in the pocket was a couple years before that—I think we were in the fourth grade—when his mother brought us to the public pool at Cain Park. It was strange, the whole ride over Rusty was whiny and anxious, very unlike him, complaining he didn’t want to swim, that he WOULD NOT swim, no matter what his mother said. She had to literally drag him from the car to the boys locker room and when he stood at the door and refused to enter she threatened to go in with him. “I’ll undress you myself if I have to, Russell! What do you think the other boys will think of that?”
He was down to his briefs when I noticed the leg. A mass of burns covered his entire thigh and ran down to the middle of his calf. The flesh was marbled and shiny, with ripples and webs spread out across it. It looked like the top of a lemon meringue pie, the kind where they’ve toasted the meringue with a torch so it’s crispy and brown in some parts and white and gooey in others. He wasn’t crying exactly but his cheeks were wet—he kept wiping them with his towel. I asked him how his leg got that way, I shouldn’t have but I had to. He wouldn’t look at me and I could barely hear him but he said it had happened when he was seven. He was down in the basement, in the laundry room, and he’d found a book of matches—Mrs. Archibald was a heavy smoker and I remember seeing matchbooks all over their house the few times I’d visited. He was striking matches and tossing them onto the concrete floor when one started a fire in a pile of laundry. Knowing he’d be in big trouble if his parents found out he’d been playing with matches, he tried putting it out by stamping on it. But that only spread the fire and soon the left leg of his pants was engulfed in flames. Mr. Archibald l was the first to hear the screams and rushed downstairs, where he saw his son trying desperately to put out his burning leg. Rusty said his dad attempted to beat the flames out with his hands and when that didn’t work he tried pulling Rusty’s pants off. But Rusty was wearing his cowboy gun belt over his regular belt, which made it almost impossible for his dad to unbuckle them. Instead, he lifted the boy up and carried him over to the big laundry sink, dropped him into it and turned the faucet on full blast. You often hear that when people go through horrific accidents they blank out the details, but Rusty remembered all of them, even the hissing sound his leg made when the cold water poured over it.
Rusty’s mom’s voice was echoing down the tunnel that led from the locker room to the pool. “Russell! You get out here right now or I’ll come in there and get you myself!” As we approached the tunnel exit I did my usual sucking in my gut; I’d been teased about my “baby fat” and thought that if I could just hold my breath until I got into the water no one would notice it. There was no way for Rusty to hide his leg though. He wiped the tears off his cheeks just before we walked out into the sunlight but I could see his eyes were red and wet. But even with all those kids staring at him he didn’t cry. Rusty never let anyone see him cry.
What ultimately separated us was adolescence. When we got to Roxboro Junior High we started hanging out with different people. I fell in with a bunch of pretentious hippies who considered smoking pot in their basement rec rooms a courageous act of civil disobedience (with each toke we brought Nixon’s fascist regime ever closer to collapse). Rusty’s friends, a collection of petty criminals, were bound more by, well, petty crime. We dropped acid and listened to Jimi Hendrix, they dropped acid and broke into houses.
There was one occasion though, in the ninth grade, when Rusty and I briefly rekindled our friendship. It was a Thursday night and I was up in Rusty’s neighborhood—on the cinder path in fact—walking home after copping acid from Bernie Gutterman, which I planned to drop with one of my hippie friends the next night. I was between Princeton and Queenston when I noticed someone shadowing me. I’d heard about kids getting robbed along the cinder path at night so I picked up the pace. When the shadow also picked up its pace I knew it was time to make a run for it. I figured if I could just get to Princeton, which was well lit, my would-be mugger would back off. I ran as fast as I could but my pursuer was closing fast, almost as fast as my heart was beating.
“Paul! It’s me!”
I slowed, then stopped, breathing hard. “Rusty? Jesus, you scared the shit out of me! I thought I was going to have to sprint all the way to Princeton!”
“You’d have never made it, man,” he said with a laugh.
We exchanged pleasantries, bitched about teachers and homework, talked a little about girls. He asked me what I was doing there and I told him. He said he didn’t have a high regard for Bernie’s product but asked to see it. Reluctantly, I pulled the small wax paper envelope out of my pocket and handed it to him. He took the two stamp-sized pieces of paper out of it and inspected them closely. “I take it back, this looks like good shit.” He slid them back into the envelope. “Two?”
I told him I was planning to do it the next night with a friend. “They’re showing 2001 over at the Heights Art,” I said.
“2001? Shit, remember when we saw that back in fourth grade? I think it was your birthday.” I think he was right about that. “Hey, let me buy a hit off you, man, I wanna go too.” I told him I only had the two. “C’mon man,” he said. “It’ll be like old times.”
I thought about what to say to get out of it—I’d already promised my friend Berry, we were planning to meet up with some friends afterward, etc.—but when Rusty wanted something it was hard to say no. Besides, the more I thought about it the more appealing a reunion sounded. Despite our divergent paths, a best friend is still a best friend. I could do acid with Berry some other time. “Four bucks,” I said.
“Four bucks? A hit?” (that was a lot for acid). He fished around in his pocket, and came up with two dollars. “All I got. Can I owe you?”
We were approaching Princeton and I was telling him we should plan on meeting in the parking lot behind the theater the next night when he stopped and said “I’ve got a better idea.” Then, without saying a word, he placed his hit of acid on his tongue.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“C’mon man, do it.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“I’ve got a Spanish test tomorrow.”
“Fuck Spanish.”
We spent most of that night running around town. And I mean literally running. I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast in my life. We started out just walking but midway down Monmouth the acid kicked in and without thinking about it we broke into a trot. Suddenly, Rusty stopped and cocked his head. “What’s that sound?” he said. I didn’t hear anything. Then I did, a weird buzzing in the background (acid has a way of making you hear things your brain normally tunes out—high frequencies, low frequencies, background noises). What was it? “Sounds like ‘ming-a-nee-mung,’” Rusty said. And so it did. It wasn’t consistent though; sometimes there was nothing, then it would start up, build in intensity, then go quiet again. “Traffic?” Yes, that’s what it was. Far off, probably the light at Fairmount and Lee, a good mile or so away. It was the sound of cars starting up, running through their gears, then fading into the distance. I don’t know why it sounded like “ming-a-nee-mung” but it did, at least to two teenagers on acid. Instantly, Rusty and I were sprinting down the street, making the “ming-a-nee-mung” sound and pantomiming the pushing and pulling of giant gearshifts.
Without planning to we headed for Roxboro. A mile or so away though we had a close call with a cop. We saw his headlights several blocks away and somehow knew it was a cop (again, it’s that heightened senses thing). He got close enough that he saw us too—a couple of teenagers running around at two in the morning was sure to set off alarm bells—because after we dove under a hedge he slowed to a stop and shined his spotlight into the bushes. “You there,” he said over his loudspeaker. “Come out with your hands up!” We didn’t move. He made a few half-hearted threats but obviously wasn’t interested in leaving the warmth of his patrol car. After a while he shut off his spotlight and drove away. We stuck to side streets after that.
On arrival at the school Rusty proposed we break into the principal’s office. I don’t know what he planned to do in there—probably destroy his records, which, as you might imagine, weren’t exactly exemplary—but after trying to pry open the window he decided the job was too difficult (you knew it was too difficult if Rusty couldn’t do it). We sat on the front steps and discussed our options. It was decided that the shop was our best bet since, aside from the science lab and the gym, it was the only class room that contained anything of value. It was also conveniently located in the basement, which meant its windows were accessible from ground level—no having to boost each other up to one of those high first floor windows.
We approached the shop window from the side, in a crouch, but when we got close Rusty froze. “There’s someone in there,” he whispered. We crept close enough to see the window was slightly ajar. Rusty, now on his stomach, moved closer. He lay there peering inside for what felt like ages, though it was probably just a couple minutes. “You hear that?” (I didn’t) “Someone’s back by the storage room.” Suddenly he ducked his head down. “They’re coming.” I could hear it now, someone was moving furniture around in there. Rusty peered in again. “Jocks,” he said. I couldn’t see how he could see anyone in there, let alone that they were jocks. “They’re pushing a desk up to the window.” You could hear them sliding it across the floor but it was too dark for me to see who was doing the sliding. Then a face appeared at the window. Rusty pressed himself against the wall just to the left of the window. The sash slid open wide. Whoever it was, he was preparing to make his escape.
His head was halfway out the window when Rusty leaned in close, less than a foot from the guy’s ear, as if to tell him a secret. “Hey,” he said, barely above a whisper. The guy’s eyes went wide, then disappeared back into the darkness. There was a loud crash and my guess is he probably fell off the desk and knocked over a bunch of chairs. There was quite a commotion going on in there now—grunting, cursing, chairs and desks banging around. Then it was quiet. Rusty giggled. He stuck his head into the open window. “I see you Cutting!” he shouted. “Don’t try to hide from me!” He giggled again and gave me a conspiratorial wink. After a few moments there was some shuffling and the face reappeared in the window. Yep, it was Mack Cutting.
“You scared the shit out of me, Archibald! What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Tripping my ass off,” Rusty said. “You?”
Mack didn’t say anything, he didn’t approve of drugs.
“You’re stealing shit, aren’t you?”
Mack shrugged. “Trying. Storage room’s padlocked.”
“What kind of lock?”
“I don’t know, a Master?’
“Key or combination?”
“Key.”
“You’ll need two bobby pins.”
Obviously bobby pins weren’t something Mack normally carried.
“How’d you get in the window?” Rusty said.
“It was unlocked.”
Rusty peered into the darkness beyond Mack’s shoulder. “Who’s in there with you?”
Mack took an unconvincing stab at puzzlement (there’s a reason you don’t find many jocks in Drama Club).
“I said, who the fuck is in there with you?”
“Mark Miller.”
“Miller!” Rusty called into the darkness. “Get out here!”
Mark Miller, the Roxboro Rockets nose tackle, stepped out of the shadows. “What’s that in your hand?” Rusty said. Normally these guys wouldn’t give Rusty the time of day—they only talked to cheerleaders and fellow jocks—but Rusty had them over a barrel. Rusty, who stood five-seven in cowboy boots, wouldn’t have been scared of them anyway. In all the years I’d known him I’d never seen him back down from a fight.
“What’s that in your hand?” Rusty repeated.
“A soldering iron. We found it on Mr. Engel’s desk.”
“Let me see it.” Mark reluctantly passed the soldering iron out the window. Rusty looked it over. Standard issue, every boy in shop class got one.
Rusty’s head suddenly snapped to attention. “Cop’s coming!” he said. Mac and Mark fled back into the darkness—more crashing furniture.
I flattened myself against the ground, turning my head first to the left then right. I couldn’t see anyone but then Rusty always had a sixth sense about cops. He giggled and, though it was too dark for me to see it, I knew he had that mischievous grin on his face, the one I’d first seen in Mrs. Reese’s class. He was just fucking with the jocks. “Amateurs,” he said, shaking his head. “C’mon, let’s get outta here.” Halfway down Clarendon Road he tossed the soldering iron into someone’s front yard.
I flunked my Spanish test the next morning. I might have flunked it anyway, though probably not quite as decisively if I hadn’t been out running around town on acid the night before. Ninth grade was not a good year for me. Things improved though over the next couple years. I stopped smoking pot and doing acid and my grades turned around. Hard to believe I could go from complete fuck-up to honor student in just a couple years but I did. I don’t know why exactly, it just seemed like it was time to move on to other things.
Rusty moved on to other things too. He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and the following year he was busted for breaking into Mike’s Ranch Wear. He cut a hole in the roof and lowered himself down on a repelling line. When the cops searched his bedroom they found a closet full of cowboy boots and embroidered shirts. The whole school talked about it. It was a pretty daring caper even if it was for just a bunch of cowboy duds. He did a few months in the juvey hall, which was a pretty rough place back then, rough as any prison. Before long Rusty graduated to one of those too. Last I heard he was doing seven years in Mansfield for armed robbery. I’m sure Mrs. Reese wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
Author’s note: I debated whether to make this the last story of “Child” or the first story of “Punk” because it starts in one and ends in the other. The decision to go with the former was pretty arbitrary. I also debated whether or not to use Rusty’s real last name and decided–reluctantly–against it. It’s too bad, “Archibald” isn’t nearly as good as the real thing (though it does have the same number of syllables). And though there’s no doubt my old friends from Canterbury and Roxboro will know exactly who I’m talking about, I think it’s best Rusty’s true identity remain anonymous to the rest of the world. After all, he could be on death row. Or–God forbid–CEO of a large investment bank.