Juvenile Crimes - Chapter 9

Ambition struck by the Thunderbolt (Part 1 of 3)

The interview continued…

“Here’s a question that I ask of all our potential candidates,” Blanchett said looking back up from the questionnaire on his desk. “Wes, why do you want to be a prosecutor?” Blanchett asked me.

“In large part because of my father. He’s worked the last eight years as a correctional officer in California, and he was a big push toward a career in law enforcement,” I started. “He is very adamant about me not becoming a criminal defense attorney, for whom he has nothing but contempt.”

They all smiled at that comment.

“But also, it comes from within. I’ve always wanted to do something meaningful and important with my life, not just end up in some corporate job helping a company sell soap or something boring like that. And I’ve always been very ambitious. Hell, by the time I was a freshman in high school, I thought I was going to be the President,” I quipped.

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Dickinson, North Dakota, Spring of 1984…

Under the mentoring eye of Frank Lewis, I began to flourish intellectually in junior high. I got very involved in student council activities, as well as every other extracurricular activity I could. Part of the reason was that I wanted to avoid my awkward home life and the newly blended family in which I was still adjusting. My brother had found his various bands of miscreants to hang out and party with, and while we shared a bedroom, the rest of our lives were divergent. Where I found my escape in school and related activities, Greg did his utmost to avoid school and all to do with it as much as he could.

By the time I reached the eighth grade, I was elected student council president. Mr. Lewis was a detail-oriented fellow, always keeping himself organized with little notes or “to do” lists on the back of old unused talent show tickets that he carried around in his pocket. I soon adopted the habit as I found myself needing to after taking on the leadership position, which had me managing and MC’ing most of the after-school functions, such as the occasional sock-hop, fund raisers, and the annual junior high talent show. I was also one of two yearbook photographers, played trombone in band and jazz band, played football, did drama club…you name it, I was likely doing it. And I excelled – Mr. Lewis tracked ‘merit points” and “demerits” - more so than any previous student council president.

By the end of my eighth-grade year, I clearly stood out from most of my classmates. The administration and teachers had noticed, too, as I was selected as the sole “Citizen of the Year” (it was normally a prize split between two top students). No question, I had been competing for the award all year, but I still was not informed of the decision until the final awards ceremony on the last day of the year.

Also honored at that event was the retiring superintendent of the school district. This distinguished gentleman took notice of me, and my ambition. After the ceremony, he went out of his way to talk to me about my future plans. To that point in my life, being the “smartest kid in class,” I thought I should become a doctor. Student government had opened my mind already to the idea of potentially getting into politics someday, but my course was still hazy. The superintendent helped me clear my focus by suggesting that I consider an appointment to the United States Air Force Academy. With that idea, my entire future began to take shape.

My family and I went on vacation to Colorado that summer, and the Air Force Academy was at the top of the list (at least for me) of where to go. After enduring a very crowded and long car ride to Colorado Springs, we arrived at the first major stop along my Destiny. I fell in love with everything about the Academy as soon as I laid eyes upon it. I soon noticed the honor code motto hung in bold letters above one walkway stating, “We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.” It resonated in me – I wanted to be that person, and I wanted to be surrounded with like-minded souls. I was a certified all-American true believer and I felt the Air Force Academy calling me toward my future Greatness.  

I went on to speak with admissions officials there and found out the process by which to obtain an appointment to the Academy. It requires either a principal or alternate nomination by a sitting U.S. congressman or senator, plus passing physical and medical tests in addition to top scores on college entrance exams. A principal nomination meant you were admitted, as each congressman and Senator had one selection each year for all five military academies. An alternate nomination puts you in a national selection pool from which the best applicants are then picked, which constitutes over half of each incoming class. Excelling at extra-curricular activities, too, also helped in the applicant selection process. Those admissions criteria became the outline of my academic agenda from that day forward.

I quickly developed a plan starting with accelerating my academic schedule. I wanted to put myself head and shoulders above my potential competition, so I decided to go to summer school. At the time, Dickinson had just started offering summer school for students to either get caught up from failed classes (they actually did that back then) or for brainiac types to take classes they otherwise would not be able to fit into their schedules. My plan was simple – take all the classes I could to accelerate my schedule, then graduate in three years instead of the normal four years. It had never been done before in Dickinson and I was making myself the first to do so.

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Don’t go on to make the assumption that I was just another nerdy student, however. I may have been chubby with Coke-bottle bottom glasses and looked the part, but there was still part of the wild child residing in me. It would be let out on occasion. While my academic drive and career was almost entirely on my own, I had plenty of help in exploring the other side. My brother and his buddies were constantly pushing the party envelope and usually getting away with it. My parents had maintained their involvement with the Beginning Experience support crowd, and they often went on weekend retreats, leaving my brother and I alone in the house. Greg was quick to have his party buddies fill the space. My extended family – cousins and uncles – were still the same hard partying people. Peer pressure started to pull me toward the party side, but I maintained my academic discipline.

While I was attending my first summer school between my eighth grade and freshman year, my friend Jim went to a private driving school. In North Dakota at the time, you could get a driver’s license, unrestricted, at the tender age of 14, after completing a certified driving instruction course. Not only did Jim pass and get his driver’s license, his parents also made the colossal mistake of buying him a car. Now we had wheels! Tear-assing around the small city and surrounding countryside in his Chevy Citation then became our new pastime. Jim was the only freshman to drive or have his own car, so his popularity took off and our group of buddies grew. It didn’t take long before we found a few spots outside of town to serve us as target shooting locations, which was another favorite pastime. We both grew up around guns and had a few of our own by that age (I had a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun), which was very common for the place and time. (We weren’t the type of assholes to go around shooting highway signs and the like – we brought our targets with us. Usually.)

My other best friend, Jack, introduced me to our high school’s equivalent of a debate team called student congress. As the name suggested, the speaking competition took place in a mock congress consisting of a House of Representatives (because of the large number of students each school brought, there were actually two Houses, an upper and lower, based on skill level), and a Senate consisting of the top two speakers from each school. The Rules of Parliamentary Procedure were followed to keep a structure and serve as a foundation for the rules of the competition. The speeches were judged by adult teachers and volunteers, points were kept, and individual and team prizes were awarded at the end of each session. We had a really good speaking team, too - our school had won the last year’s State Student Congress Championship before I started. I excelled at it immediately and we went on to win the State championship every year I was there.

My intention to also keep up on the athletic side got brutally sidetracked early. I started football practice in August (1984) and the weekend before the school year got under way, I suffered a nasty football career-ending injury. It happened on our first padded-up full-contact scrimmage game. I was playing defensive tackle, lined up across from the offensive center. The ball snapped and as I pushed between the center and the offensive guard, the quarterback handed off the ball to their running back. The running back charged right for me, spearing his helmet in my upper left chest/shoulder at the exact same time as the linebacker behind me came charging at the running back, nailing my left shoulder going the opposite direction. The result was a dislocated shoulder (but it popped back in right away) with a break along the growth line at the base of the ball joint.

The first two weeks of my freshman year were hazy from the Percocet pain killers I was on, but I could still feel the hostile looks and unwarranted animosity I received in the classes into which I had advanced. Particularly among the juniors for some odd reason. The seniors tended to look at the baby-faced freshman “me” as an interesting oddity, whereas a lot of the juniors showed outward disdain and hostility toward me as if I were some sort of threat. It was a reaction to me as being too young for the group or class, like I didn’t belong there, that I would feel again in a few years going to college at a looking-younger-than age of seventeen, and to a lesser extent starting law school at age twenty-two. It felt very much like being looked down upon, being judged inadequate, even though my mere presence demonstrated that I had earned my place.

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A few weeks after I got out of the sling for my shoulder injury, I got my first job bussing tables for the minimum wage of $3.35 per hour at a low-end steakhouse. The job became my other reason to escape home life. My co-workers were mostly high school and college kids and they all liked to party. It didn’t take long before Jim and I had regular party buddies who generally knew where the party was on any particular weekend night. I made the money to buy our party supplies and Jim had the car, so all we ever needed to find was the buyer for our booze and the party was on! And that problem was easily solved, too. In addition to a couple of older (early twenties!) co-workers I sometimes hit up to buy booze for us, I also had an older cousin who I will call Mark who had just started college at Dickinson State. Mark had a fake ID, as well as older college buddies, making him a very reliable booze buyer as long as we could find him before he was off to some party or other adventure.

(“Mark” is an entirely fictional character intended to stand in as the figurative garbage dump for several real people who are related to me in a close enough capacity to warrant making this character a cousin. “Mark” will appear as a recurring character in my works as the words and acts represented by “Mark” had significant impacts at different points in my story. I have to have this character to properly tell my tales. I chose to invent this character in order to provide anonymity and privacy to the various people this character replaces, and for storytelling continuity. “Mark” is not intended to depict any actual individual or person, living or dead. If someone from my past wants to claim they are “Mark” for whatever reason, they do so at their own risk.)

A sort of routine developed during that first semester of high school. I worked hard at school and in the extracurriculars (“hard” is what other people considered it – for me school was easy, it just demanded time be put into it). I also worked several weeknights and at least one weekend night, partying on the weekends after work. Jim and I, and sometimes one of our other party buddies, would go cruising down Main Street in Dickinson, which was a very common pastime for young party animals looking for the place to go. We did a lot of stupid high school shit along the way, and mostly got away with it. On the family front, my brother was always pushing the envelope with my parents by skipping school or having various brushes with the law. Me? I was the academic superstar, so I managed to get by without much scrutiny. What could my folks say to me, that I was going to mess up my life? I was the example to follow for most people, and a little partying was mostly viewed as harmlessly blowing off some steam, a stress relief.

What kind of stupid shit did we do? The types of things that asshole high school kids did in North Dakota at the time. Like moving traffic barricades to the wrong side of a street under construction. Things like shooting inflatable balloons or a small advertising blimp hanging over a used car lot with a pellet gun (late at night, of course). Like playing a modified form of joust with shopping carts in a mall parking lot. It was more like just ramming a shopping cart into a concrete support base for a light pole at 45 or 50 miles-per-hours by me holding on to it out the passenger side window as Jim raced toward the concrete base, veering off at the last second as I released the cart (those damn things were tough, too – we could barely even dent them!). At Halloween, a favorite activity of many adventurous youths was the pumpkin roll, where we would go around stealing jack-o-lanterns and pumpkins off of people’s porches, take them to the top of the highest street hill in town (called water tower hill because of the huge water tower at the top), and then roll them all down the hill to try for the best splatter. During the very cold winter, we would go out on frozen Lake Paterson with Jim’s Chevy Citation, get up to 50 to 60 MPH, then spin the wheel and hit the parking brake, resulting in us “spinning shitties” several times on the ice.

The one time I got in any trouble was after a water balloon fight later that spring. We were tossing water balloons around with some other friends and had a few left in the car. On our way home, I lobbed one over the top of the car at an oncoming pickup. I honestly didn’t think it would hit but it turns out my timing was excellent as it smacked the front headlight and popped, spraying water on the pickup’s windshield. Well, the redneck driving the pickup wasn’t very amused (he later claimed he thought it was a booze bottle). He slammed on his brakes and spun his truck around in pursuit of us. Jim floored the gas to get away, and the chase was on! After a couple of miles and turns in the road, we came screeching around a 25 MPH corner at 45 MPH, with a police car sitting right there, clocking us on his radar gun. The pickup in pursuit had just cleared the corner when the cop’s lightbar and sirens flared to life, bringing both vehicles to a quick stop. After explaining everything to the cop, Jim was cited for violating the “basic rule of safety” and got a hefty fine. The cop missed the two full cans of beer when he searched the car or it would have been worse.

I was cited for disorderly conduct, which required my second appearance in a juvenile court. That appearance was even less formal than the vandalism episode. My mother and I met with the Juvenile Court Judge in a conference room setting. It was more like a meeting than a hearing. After I explained the circumstances, and my academic record, achievements, and goals, the Judge seemed almost amused with the situation. He asked me if I thought I could stay out of trouble, to which I of course said “Yes, absolutely!” And that was it. Not even a slap on the wrist. Nonetheless, I got the message to walk the line a bit tighter.

Life continued along in that same routine throughout my first semester of high school. It all started to change at the beginning of my second semester.

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The moment I first saw Tami I was hit by the Thunderbolt! I fell in love with her, hard. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Standing at 5’6”, Tami had a perfectly carved 34-20-35 body. She had shoulder length blonde hair that complemented her olive toned skin. Her face had a quality that seemed noble to me, a look that belong to a Greek statue, despite her German heritage. And those eyes, those beautiful deep green eyes...Tami's eyes were like headlights on a Mercedes, they shined. More than that, her eyes smiled. Her eyes were green crystals that radiated love, hope, beauty. They were piercing and reflective. Tami's eyes were like a reflection of the best parts of my soul. Those eyes could turn the hardest man into a blubbering ball of tears. They were the most perfect bedroom eyes I had ever seen. I could lose myself forever in those eyes...

And if the eyes aren't enough, look at that ass! Tami was blessed by the most perfectly sexy beautiful butt that God, Darwin, or the Universe had ever deigned to sculpt upon a woman’s form. It was beyond perfect – it was Magnificent! She had an incredibly narrow twenty-inch waistline that accentuated her flawlessly curved thirty-five-inch hips (I measured her once for a wedding dress). All of her pants looked like they were custom fit to her ass, which held up her pants and left a gap of a few inches around her waist (later proving very fortuitous for two horny teenagers in love). All male heads followed her when she walked by, and contrary to her protestations, she knew it. But she didn't like it. She didn't appreciate over hearing comments like, “she's got two great legs that really make an ass of themselves,” or being called “N/A” by her male classmates, short for “nicest ass.” Or any other sexist comment. Tami was a fierce defender of equality of the sexes, fanatically anti-chauvinist. She was no piece of meat and would never tolerate being treated like one.

I first got to know Tami in a class we had together. She always introduced herself as “Tami with an ‘I.’” She was fiercely independent, and I liked that immediately. It fit with my own independent streak. Her personality was intriguing to me and every bit as interesting and enticing as her physical self was. I liked seeing how she didn't form up in any high school cliques, that she treated everyone with respect and courtesy, and she saw no one as below her. It didn’t matter to me that she was two years older than me or that she seemed completely out of my league. When I first saw her time stopped, and all I wanted was her. I had to have her, to be a part of her life and to have her in my life. I knew from the first that I would at least die trying.

Tami also had a sparkly, feisty personality, and she wasn’t afraid to let it show. She was playful and joked around with her classmates on occasion, but she would get easily offended (or play up “being offended”) whenever someone made any sort of sexist joke. Her reactions were often funny to her antagonists, which usually led to more jokes and more comical reactions from Tami. She wasn’t above slugging a guy in the arm when teased but she also had a vast assortment of goofy looks she could distort her face into that often just provoked more laughs. Instead of swearing or otherwise cursing in response to an offensive comment or hearing a swear word, she would reply, “Oh, garbage,” or just “nonsense.” Tami portrayed herself always as a “good Catholic girl” who was “better than that,” but she did not come off as condescending or with an air of superiority. Instead, she came off as sure of herself and where she stood.

To me, Tami was absolutely perfect…even with her scars. Tami had two pronounced scars just above and below her right eye that were partially obscured by her eyebrow and the natural lines of her face, particularly when she smiled or laughed. I quickly realized that it was her scars that had really separated her from the crowd, in all the best ways.

On one of the first days of the class, a senior (I’ll call him “Henry”) was messing with Tami and said, “Hey Tami, do you know why a man can never really trust a woman? How can we trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t fucking DIE!” Tami gave him a good-natured wack in the gut with a “nonsense” response and walked away. Henry and I had several classes and extracurriculars together, including student congress and as school newspaper photographers, and we had already become friends. It didn’t take long for me to gather more information about Tami as she had been loose friends with Henry since beginning grade school.

Henry was a good source of information because he didn’t realize my intentions toward Tami. And to the extent he did, Henry wouldn’t take my intention to date Tami seriously because of the age difference. While older guys dated younger girls in high school all the time, it was just unheard of for a younger guy to date an older girl. He didn’t know how determined I was to break that stereotype.

Henry happened to be a keyboard player in a pretty good local band. After seeing him perform one weekend, I complemented Henry on his “smokin’ the keys” on their cover of Bon Jovi’s “Runaway.”

“You think I’m good? Thanks. Yeah, I’m okay. But if you want to hear someone really talented, you should hear Tami play,” Henry told me. “She took lessons for twelve years, until she got better than her teacher. No kidding, Tami is a concert-level piano player. She’s a damn virtuosa.”

“Naw, really?” I replied. “I never would have guessed.”

“Yeah, man, she’s for real. Probably the best pianist in town, maybe even the whole State.”

I couldn’t wait to see and hear her play. More than that, I wanted to get to know HER, all of her, in every way possible.

Although now lusted after by many, Tami had no interest in dating any of her peers. Henry told me the reason but it became obvious to me anyway – Tami had suffered years of cruelty, real meanness, as a child growing up with most of them because of her scars. Tami had endured being called “ugly” and “scar face” and other loathsome things in grade school and beyond, and while she tried as a “good Catholic girl” to forgive them, she could never forget. Even though such taunts hurt her deeply, she channeled that pain into empathy for others and an openness to people who were not perceived as “regular” -type people. She had developed a huge but unseen soft spot for misfits and strays. And there was my opening…

Before I could ask her out and have any hope of getting a positive response, she had to first get to know me, like me and be comfortable around me. That all came together naturally through time spent with her in class, and soon thereafter, outside of class. Her soft spot for misfits helped me as I was the obvious misfit among my peers. I was the young guy, the ambitious one who jumped ahead in classes, and that was interesting to her. I had also been getting myself into better shape, both in preparation for the rigors of the Air Force Academy and to be more attractive to her (fat-shaming from extended family members played its part but nothing motivates a man to lose weight more than the desire to get a girl). I always put my best face on around her – she had no clue about the party side of my life - and within the first month or so, Tami and I had become friends. We bonded over our mutual dislike of “plastic” people, the fakes who go through life wearing frosting faces and designer clothes while looking down their noses at their lessers, or the meat-headed jocks expecting cheerleader-type fealty for their fleeting accomplishments in sportsball whatever. Tami was all about real people being real, actually caring about others and doing the right thing.

The more I learned about her, the deeper I fell. My biggest fear became the notion of Tami getting a boyfriend before I could properly woo her to me. My next biggest fear was that she would find out about the party side of me and be turned off completely. All it would have taken at that point would have been to see me at a party drinking and smoking a Swisher Sweet cigar and I would have been tossed into the gutter in her mind. But that never happened.

What developed happened part by chance and part by design. After the school year came to a close, I again enrolled in summer school after getting my driver’s license via private driving school (as Jim had done the year before). As luck would have it, Tami was leading a girls’ basketball camp at the high school that took place at about the same time. We ran into each other every morning and again at noon, so our conversations continued on a daily basis. We had fun around each other, and she took a genuine, albeit “non-sexual,” interest in me. It wasn’t long until I “caught” her “spying” on me. Dickinson was a small town and got boring easily. Tami and her best friend (I’ll call her “Sandy”) liked to drive around town when they were bored. They started incidentally running into me away from the school setting. After the third time I saw them in Tami’s car, I followed them until they pulled over in a parking lot. I pulled up alongside her car.

“I got you! You’re busted,” I said.

“For what?” Tami replied.

“For following me around town, that’s what,” I said.

“You wish. I’m not following you. We’re just driving around and saw you is all,” she claimed.

“Yeah, maybe the first time. Since then, you’ve been tracking me,” I teased.

“Yeah, right! You wish!” she laughed.

“Whatever. I’m sure I’ll see you again a little later...”

“Ahh, garbage. You were following me,” she accused.

“Sure I did, to right here…see you soon!” I smiled and waived as I drove off.

What followed became a game of sorts – we played cat and mouse games around town through the end of that summer. She would try to “spy” on me without getting caught but I would usually catch her right away. We played it the opposite way, too, where I would be sniffing around for her car without getting seen - but I made sure to always get caught! Along the way, we ended up hanging out with each other more and got to know each other as “just friends.”

After I returned from my annual summer visit to my father’s house (he was now living outside Sacramento in Woodland, California), our game of cat and mouse picked back up. After running into her one night, we went for a walk. She told me about one of my fears almost happening. After a lot of pressure, she went on a date with one of the seniors who had just graduated and happened to be one of our mutual friends from class. Luckily, he overplayed his hand.

“Oh God, he was like an octopus! He kissed me and immediately started groping me all over,” she explained.

“So what’d you do?” I asked.

“I pushed him off of me and smacked him in the face, that’s what!” she said with her characteristic feistiness.

I beamed inwardly. So much for the competition. That was not a mistake I would ever make…

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