Gauthic Times: The Bill Gauthier Newsletter #121, or Chased From the Park

Hello, friends.

Happy Mother’s Day to those who celebrate!

Teacher’s Appreciation was this week and I’d be remiss if I didn’t give appreciation to the teachers I had who left an indelible mark on me and on the colleagues who are making a difference every day. In this time we’re in, though, teachers don’t feel appreciated. We don’t want to be forced to monthly meetings and PD days that mean nothing, just posturing because we had the audacity to unionize. We’re not interested in stand-up comics at these meetings to show your appreciation. We want help from assistants. We want better healthcare. We want parents to respect us when we say hard truths to their kids who aren’t performing and not to chalk it up to “normal teenage behavior,” which is bullshit at best and overindulgent at worst. We want our student loans forgiven or paid for by the state that mandates them. We want the same wages as other professionals. And we want time. Time to grade, time to plan, time to breathe.

But that’s fantasy. The people have spoken and they put in an enemy of education and intelligence and ethics who is dismantling education just as he is dismantling so many other things. And even if they didn’t, the general populace doesn’t give a shit. America has always been anti-intellectual and why should it stop now?

So for those who appreciate teachers, THANK YOU. I’d tell the others to go to Hell, but I’m afraid Hell is coming to us and by the time they realize it, it’ll be too late.

Welcome to the 121st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and being tired of being tired.

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Anyway, let’s go!

***

More internal working this week thinking about what to do next. The depression got pretty bad this week, along with other mood swings, and I realized part of it is because I’m not writing. Being between projects and unfocused has me out of sorts. But…

The first friend to read Project: Amusement Park got back to me saying, “Well, that’s your most epic novel yet. Very well done, my friend. I really enjoyed it. Creepy as fuck at times, lots of characters. Loved some, hated some…”

I asked, “Did I stick the landing?”

He wrote back, “I think you did.”

This is a friend but he’s also an avid reader who loves horror novels and is a creator himself so knows not to bullshit me because we’re friends. I think one more friend is reading it and so far, that’s all. I will likely be heading into third draft territory soon.

Remember that Superman drawing I shared a few weeks back? Well, I’ve been working on that one, too. I did some traditional inks with it but want to return and do more. I also brought it into Clip Studio Paint to fix some things and do some digital inking.

***

Introduction

I have told this story verbally many times. It’s a good one that I tell well. I thought about telling it via video but I don’t think it would do the story justice. If I were to attempt to do stand-up comedy (as several people I know have suggested I should), I might use this story in the act. As it is, I don’t know if my writing it will do well by it, but since I consider myself a writer (and if you’re reading this, chances are you are, too–SUCKER!! Um…uh…sorry), I figured I should try.

Let’s go to the park….

Chased From the Park

The early spring of 1988 held nothing special except everything. I didn’t realize at ten-years-old how good things were. They wouldn’t have felt like it to me then but now I remember a life that was pretty cool. I could play whenever I wanted (except for at school) and would lose myself for hours in the stories I told with action figures or played outside. I’d gotten into G.I. Joe the year or so before and enjoyed pretending to be one of the Joes. That’s what I was doing at Brooklawn Park that early spring day, one of the first warm days of the year when you knew winter was behind you and the hope for Summer Vacation on the near horizon.

I was at Brooklawn Park with my best friends, Scott and Eric. I had my toy machine gun and maybe a couple of toy handguns–Barettas, I believe–that all looked a little too accurate to the real things, the kind of toy gun they don’t make anymore because they don’t want innocent kids killed by trigger happy cops. Of course, this was before mass school shootings so I guess now it’s justified…but I digress. Scott, Eric, and I had decided to go to the park to play on The Mountain.

Let me pause the story here to fill in some history.

Scott and Eric were brothers. Scott was a year older than me and the apple of his mother’s eye. Scott was pudgy, with a little piggy nose, hound dog eyes, and jowls at the ripe old age of 11. He had brown hair and eyes (maybe cut into a mullet then, I know both those boys had that look back then)(I have never had a mullet…my mother, and then I, always had good taste) and thought he controlled everything. Eric was a year younger than me, scrawny, and had blond hair and blue eyes. When I think back I always remember him wearing red pants that stopped at the shin with a white Celtics tee shirt, doing weird dances and having lots of energy. Whereas Scott was his mother’s world, Eric was often treated as an afterthought.

The three of us has grown up together. They lived down the street from me and their mother and my mother were stay-at-home mothers with children the same age. My mother, who would talk to anybody about anything no doubt started talking to their mother and they became friends. If I were to ever write a true memoir or autobiography, Scott and Eric (and their family) would feature prominently in the early years. Their mother would take my mother and I with her and the boys to see rereleased Disney movies in those days before the videocassette was a thing. Eric and I had started really hanging around when I was in second or third grade, him becoming my best friend. I could make him laugh easily and was fun. I had a crazy imagination and wasn’t afraid to use it. He had an imagination, too, but it was never really allowed to flourish. Their mother once warned my mother, “Billy has an overactive imagination and it may not be good for him.” I think about that every time I publish a story or a book, or every time I help a student in the creative vocational-technical program that I teach in.

Lastly, I mentioned we went to the park to play on The Mountain. I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It’s a small city on the south coast of the state that’s known for its fishing. Once upon a time, New Bedford was the place to be for whaling. Just ask Herman Melville, who took off from here for his research to write Moby-Dick. It was also a pivotal stop on the Underground Railroad and was the city where Frederick Douglass came upon escaping slavery. He would move on as his fame grew but New Bedford was where it started. Most people only really know New Bedford these days for unsolved serial killings along the local highway, 195, and the Big Dan rape case, which inspired the movie The Accused, with which Jodie Foster won an Oscar. Brooklawn Park is the park in the city’s north end (a few miles away from Big Dan’s) and I grew up a few streets parallel to the park. On the east side of the park, facing Acushnet Avenue, there is a big hill with a rock front that resembled to us kids a mountain, hence the hill was known as The Mountain. We’d sled there. We’d play there. We’d explore and hang out there. It was cool and dangerous and of course it beckoned little boys.

This infodump absolutely plays into the story, so let’s go back to the spring of 1988 on The Mountain at Brooklawn Park.

We were playing G.I. Joe and having fun. Mostly. I had a dollar in my pocket from allowance and I figured on the way home we could stop at the corner store and I’d pick up my usual: a Sprite and two pretzel sticks. A dollar well-spent. I seem to remember Scott and I had begun arguing because I’d had a good idea for something but he didn’t like it. Scott often didn’t like my ideas because he was boring thought they were realistic enough. We’d argue and Eric was caught in the middle.

Then we heard it.

From the north, near the duckpond a short distance from the hill, three figures approached. Boys, like us. I can’t remember entirely what the boys flanking the middle one looked like but I can distinctly remember the middle one, even from the distance of the duck pond, where he was tiniest. The middle boy wore acid washed jeans and a denim jacket with the fluffy collar that were the rage in the 1980s. I feel like he wore a white tee shirt underneath and wore white high tops. His light brown hair was fluffed out in a mullet. I would soon learn that his icy blue eyes had a feral quality to them, perhaps they were set too close together with his sharp, upturned nose in between them.

It took a moment before the voice of one of the boys–his voice–called towards us again.

“Hey!” he called. “Get off our mountain!”

“Did he just say…?” Eric said.

“‘Get off our mountain,” I said.

“Let’s go,” said Scott.

“No.” I turned toward them. “We were here first and there’s plenty of room for the six of us.”

Logic spoken by a ten-year-old in a world that has none, as he would soon discover.

To be continued….

***

I’m sorry to end the story there, But I see I’ve now written over 1,200 words for this short essay and thought that it might be best to finish the story next week.

***

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