Antoine, Eddie and Me: A Summer Tale

Look deep into the April face

A change is clearly taking place…

Lookin’ for the Summer

The eyes take on a certain gaze

And leave behind the Springtime days…

Go lookin’ for the Summer

The time has come when they must go

To play the passion out that haunts them so…

I’m still lookin’…

Lookin’ for the Summer

Chris Rea

Originally published on vandalnation.blogspot.com

6/6/2008 at 7:45 pm Eastern Daylight Time

The Blue Ridge Mountains, without preamble or warning, surrendered winter in a single grandiose weekend with all the stunning finality and drama of a late round Joe Louis left hook. The brisk Northern breezes gave way to the sudden springtime sunshine, baking the face and arms, an old friend come back to visit. And again, for at least one more year, reminding us that even in this seemingly endless and frigid season, with spring comes reason, floating gently upon a soft rhythm that is pleasing to the ear; an uncomplicated rhyme that’s easy to hear.

Most of my ring necks and stately wood ducks have yet to return, although I believe I’ve spotted Eddie the Alpha Duck. He has apparently scouted ahead in advance of his crew and has reestablished himself as the Duke of Duckdom, the Big Wheel water fowl on this little portion of the lake. He is truly a magnificent animal, his iridescent feathers of indigo blue and deep green shine like a bright neon light in the sparkling sunlight as he maneuvers effortlessly through the placid waters. He remains confident of his preeminent position, preening and emitting the occasional righteous squawk accompanied by an Oscar winning, wing fluttering warning at some perceived trespasser. He is, I fear, more form than substance; more noise than nobility. His message, however contrived, is always loud and clear; do not fuck with this duck.

In a Single Malt induced haze several summers ago, because of his aggressive and provocative nature, I named him Eddie after a long forgotten high school acquaintance named Eddie Yast, a hockey player at the neighboring South Lake High in the late ‘60’s. And it was through Eddie that I met and came to know, briefly, a very strange young man named Antoine Saggat. So listen. Let me tell you a story of a different time and place, the fabric of which has worn old and thin, an almost forgotten shadowy memory, nearly lost to us. Like the summer belongs to children, this was our season, a time that belonged to us when life was still all shiny and fresh and brimming with the excitement of inexperience and foolish youth; a story of a time when the music was transformative (before it’s icons cashed in to make Chevy commercials) and influenced the culture of an entire generation in a unique yet different way. It is story about Eddie and Antoine and that fateful early summer night long ago in 1968 when Eddie convinced Antoine to blow up the Draft Board building in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But wait… I’m getting ahead of the tale.

Actually, Eddie did play some hockey when he wasn’t suspended or in trouble with school authorities or some law enforcement agency or on the “lam.” (He remains the only individual I have ever known who, from time to time, was a lamister.) Eddie was of medium build, quick and menacing and intelligent in a wily, wounded wild animal sort of way. I am not sure if Turrets Syndrome was even a diagnosable disease 40 years ago, but I am convinced that he was the first person I have ever known who had it. Eddie’s vulgarity was as prolific as it was legendary, throwing “F” bombs, the “C” word and stringing together myriad other obscenities in a seemingly endless display of pornographic imagery that to this day still reverberates in my memory. He was the Picasso of profanity, a true genius in his medium, using coarse and offensive language the way an artist would work on a canvas in oils, acrylics or water colors.

In today’s government public school educational gulags, Eddie would have been pumped up with enough psychotropic drugs to give a respectably sized circus elephant hallucinations. Every psychologist and counselor in his school would have been assigned to him on a full time basis and of course gulag administrators would feel obligated to provide grief counselors for all those victims that Eddie so creatively threatened, beat up or scared nearly to death. But 40 or so years ago we were woefully ignorant of how uncaring and thoughtlessly callous our society really was and so, for the most part, they treated Eddie like a selfish, self absorbed reprobate, just another wise-ass punk, which of course was exactly what he was.

In fairness, it should be noted that Eddie never really had much of a chance, right from the get-go. His twice divorced father paid Eddie’s mom (with whom Eddie lived) the princely sum (in 1968) of $1200.00 a month “stay away” money to live in a modest home and be supplied with all the vodka she could drink. And drink she did… 24/7. From the exterior the home was a well maintained 3 bedroom brick affair in a reasonably nice area, but the interior was a wreck, a complete shithole. Dirty dishes piled up 2 feet high in the kitchen, literally dozens of empty and discarded fifths of Smirnoff strewn about the house in virtually every room. Except Eddie’s bedroom, which was immaculate; bed fastidiously made with sharp military corners, carpet vacuumed, clothes hung in the closet, all perfectly aligned. “You have a personal maid or something,” I asked upon one of my rare visits. “Nope. My dad says a sloppy bedroom is a sign of weakness and a disorganized mind,” Eddie replied in a surprisingly lucid non-profane or confrontational manner. This was a somewhat puzzling revelation in that Eddie, to show his appreciation for all the profound patriarchal advice and financial support given by his dad, would routinely drive his old Plymouth every other week or so to his Pop’s condo 10 miles away and knock off a side-view mirror or an antenna from his father’s 225 Electra. His tool of choice for this hardware removal was a cut-down Dick McAuliffe Model Louisville Slugger. Once, en route to some party, I was an unsuspecting witness to one of Eddie’s outbursts. “Just gonna stop off at my dad’s for a second” he said. Out of the car, he grabbed the Louisville Slugger and got down to business, banging away at his father’s ride. “Fuck” (slash) “You” (slash) “You” (slash) “Fucking” (slash) “Prick.” Totally out of wind, Eddie hesitated momentarily, collecting his composure. Then in one final fiery outburst he attacked the deuce-and -a -quarter with a vengeance; “This and this and this you fucking prick,” And with one last gasp…”and this” and then, completely spent physically he gently laid the bat (a gift some years before from his father) in the backseat and said …”Fuck it, let’s go,” .

While Eddie clearly had some anger issues, he was also possessed of an oddly, seductive and persuasive charm often found in bi-polar and schizophrenic people and other fruitcakes with some form of mental aberration .With a canary-eating twinkle of the eye, he constantly appeared to be bemused at some private joke that he might let you in on if the mood struck him. He was also abrasive, irrational, disloyal to a fault, manipulative, capable of extreme violence without warning and, with the wary eye of an individual who believes in absolutely nothing, trusted absolutely no one. At the tender age of 17, I thought he was the most exciting guy I had ever known and, for that winter and spring of ’68, before his insanity completely outran him, he was exhilarating to be around.

Eddie was, in fact, as crazy as a shithouse rat and particularly crazy when it came to…well, virtually everything, really—but certainly when it came to the game of hockey, which he basically considered to be little more than the World Wrestling Association on ice, only with real chains and chairs. And with an added bonus of legally getting to carry your own personal weapon, in full view of spectators, school administrators and referees and use it for a variety of purposes, including whipping a rock-hard rubber disc at the head of an unknowing opponent (or teammate for that matter) with whom he may have had some sort of disagreement. Yes, Eddie had a profound love for the game of ice hockey.

Once in a tournament game at old Olympia, he and his teammate (and gullible old pal) Larry Robberts, in a totally unprovoked action, pulled bicycle chains (I am not making this up) out of their hockey pants before official even dropped the puck the for the opening face off at center ice. No one was seriously injured in the fracas, although the sharp edged bicycle chains were being waved overhead, lariat style, dangerously close to eyeballs and teeth. One unfortunate wingman, apparently unaware that opening face-offs included bicycle chains in the circle, sustained a gash on the forehead which by all accounts bled profusely, causing a hospital visit where he received 6 stitches.

Eddie, being Eddie, did what he always did when he was caught inciting havoc: he ran. Or, more accurately, he skated (he was quite a strong skater) with all the officials and opposing players in hot pursuit. When he was booted from the team for the third and final time Eddie laughed it off. Hockey, after all, without mischief was not much of a game. Larry, who also was booted and who actually wanted to play hockey was crestfallen, inconsolable, drawn into another complicated web of misfortune once again by his good buddy.

As you may have guessed, Larry was not exactly the brightest bulb on the chandelier and this certainly was not the first time he had been manipulated by Eddie. Larry, however, had several qualities that could recommend him. He was an affable young man, just over six feet, handsome in that large lipped, heavy browed knuckle-dragging Cro-Magnon fashion and what was seriously impressive about the lad, girls -- inexplicably-- simply fell all over him. A young fellow with a sharp eye could make a pretty good living just off old Larry’s leftovers.

Perhaps Larry’s most intriguing quality was (from my standpoint coming from an all boy Catholic Prep School) …he got laid on a regular basis. And not by some dirty-legged East-Side skanks either. By real girls. Cool girls. Pretty blondes. Stunning brunettes. All high-assed and long-lashed, smelling sweetly of citrus and cinnamon. Girls so attractive that even the idea of conversing with them would catapult me into spasms of fright so overwhelming that I would nearly shit in my hat or blubber nonsensically, a hopeless Gomer Pyle attempting to explain the theory of relativity to a physicist. The idea that a guy my age could be a PLAYBOY and could command women to do his bidding for his own personal gratification was an epiphany, a fantastically novel revelation that could deliver me from all that religiously induced guilt and testosterone build-up that plagued me on a daily basis. Crack Larry’s “Secret,” unlock the mystery that was female, and the world would be my oyster; life would take on an entirely unfamiliar yet gratifyingly agreeable dimension. Daydreams of adoring, pouty-faced, scantily clad chicks lounging about, visions of velvet smoking jackets in studies with mahogany covered walls, Meerschaum pipes and drinking Cold Duck out of long stem glasses occupied my every waking moment. (At that age, Cold Duck was universally believed to be the finest wine on the planet; my how relentlessly ignorant we truly were.) While I was wasting my time working on those lame cornball pick-up lines to use on these little snotty chicks at those ridiculous “Sock-Hops,” humiliated and reduced to some groveling dimwitted Don Juan, a pathetic back-seat beggar in my mom’s Mustang, this guy, without even trying, was literally bursting at the seams with a superabundance of split-tail.

When asked the secret of his success, Larry, never known for his loquaciousness, would just shrug his husky shoulders, unconsciously lay his thick fingers over his crotch and wrinkle his massive brow, creating the impression that the effort expended in even this minimally introspective thought process was stretching the synapses in his brain to the breaking point, giving him a headache. “Dunno,” he would mumble thickly, sounding like a mildly retarded James Dean. “I’m just here...then they come here and …” slowly the thought would float away and he would abandon his hopelessly inept attempt at explanation. One might well have asked a honey bee to explain the pollination process. His secret, whatever it might have been or from what source it originated, much to my disappointment, in the end, would never be revealed.

After serving his school suspension for the “Bicycle Chain Affair” (as it came to be known) and with no hockey practice and time on his hands, Eddie was at loose ends, which was always a dangerous place for him to occupy. As it turned out, a young, well meaning and hopelessly naive high school counselor got Eddie a job as a cook at a “Clock” restaurant where the counselor dined frequently and knew the proprietor. The job was a condition of his return to school, where all Eddie’s friends were killing time. Under the theory that Jesus made everyone good at something, it was not surprising that Eddie, too, had a special gift. As it turned out, Eddie was a terrific short order cook, having picked up the skill working in his uncle’s restaurant for a few summers. Never one for real work, Eddie maintained that the real reason he actually took the job with his uncle was to case the operation to see if an opportunity existed to rob the place. But Eddie’s uncle or aunt, aware of his rakish quasi-criminality, always opened and closed and deposited the cash receipts nightly and even Eddie would stop short of strong arm robbery of a relative… if he could easily be identified.

Over the next several weeks Eddie excelled in his new position. Glowing progress reports were forthcoming from the various shift managers for whom Eddie worked. They reported on his dedication, reliability, trustworthiness and respectful demeanor. In short, all the character traits for which Eddie was not known. Now, anybody who was even slightly acquainted with Eddie’s background and warped view of society should have known something was up. Anyone, that is, who wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aide and buying into all the bleeding heart collectivist commie claptrap would know, would have to know, that something was terribly, terribly, amiss.

What was amiss was that Eddie would routinely piss in the pickles and spit in the various dishes he would create with such reportable diligence and ingenuity. In a master stroke of debauchery, his “piece-de-resistance,” he cut his soups with dishwater and disguised the taste by added extra spices. What Eddie enjoyed the most was the more he screwed with their food, the more the patrons raved about all his dishes, especially his “Soup de Jour.” While he was an equal opportunity food saboteur, he always made a prodigious effort whenever whipping up a “Blue Plate” special for one of his “special” friends, namely the shift managers who had so lauded his performance or the counselor who got him the job in the first place. Whenever Eddie would doctor-up the entrees for one of his special buddies he would give one of the busboys a quarter to play A-3, his favorite jukebox tune (in those days they had juke boxes in every joint.) It was a Motown (what else) cover of “If I were A Carpenter” and Eddie would peer with the intensity of a poet into the winter darkness out the huge window facing Mack Avenue and watch the snowflakes fall, as big as silver dollars, and listen to Smokey’s soulful rendition:

“If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady

Would you marry me anyway

Would you have my baby…

If a tinker were my trade

Would you still find me

Carrying the parts I made

Followin’ close-up behind me…”

And while he may have pissed and spat in their food, one could never say that Eddie didn’t take care of his friends. Such was the essence, the soul of the boy. He was truly bad to the very bone.

The counselor, obviously unaware of his prodigy’s real performance on the job and believing Eddie to be making tremendous progress, was proud of his apparent success in turning around the life of a young man and decided to expand his fledgling “School/Work” program. As history would illustrate, hubris led him to make his fatal mistake.

As the story goes, another of his “problem” kids was one Antoine Saggat, a 19 year-old glue sniffing high school junior who had elevated underachievement to a noble art form. Antoine had shoved so many toxic chemicals into his body in the previous 5 years he would have been eligible for an EPA Super Fund clean up grant. Another irretrievable loser, Antoine also came from an ill-fated background. His mom was a tiny, sometime employed hatchet-faced woman, mean as a snake. She had the annoying habit in conversation of finishing the last several words of each and every one of your sentences, speaking along with you. The poor woman was a true religious whackjob who attended mass daily and had more Blessed Virgin candle altars scattered throughout the house than an East Side Italian family expecting the Pope for dinner. His dad was a hapless traveling sewing machine peddler, a perennial steak-knife set winner in the Singer Company sales contests, whose territory covered a piece of geography ranging from southeast Michigan all the way up to South Dakota. On one road trip made during the dismal depths of a Midwest winter, upon arriving in some small town in Wisconsin en route to Pierre and having sold not a single machine, gave away his sample unit and just kept on moving, following the sun in a westerly direction. It was as if he were just chucking all the bad Samsonite he’d been dragging around his whole unhappy life; just put it down and moved on. If one could encounter this much crushing heartache by the time you hit Racine, how much more could one man take by the time he stumbled into Pierre? As the story goes, his freedom secured, he was never heard from again.

Basking in his first success, the foolish young counselor implored the restaurant owner to take on another young man. The owner was ecstatic; of course he would take on a second project, even if Antoine had absolutely no marketable skills. They agreed that every man had to start somewhere and the jumping off point for Antoine would be bussing tables. From there he would begin his meteoric ascent up the Hospitality Service ladder to the kitchen where he would graduate to the lofty position of 2nd dishwasher. After that, his future life plan clearly delineated, for Antoine, the sky would be the limit. They also agreed that if he was half as talented as Eddie, he would be quite a find. The restaurant owner thought he was fortunate indeed to have this young counselor supplying him with cheap, hardworking, first class, white American labor, what with all these crazy Negroes burning down our cities and the hippie scum agitators infesting the entire nation like vermin. Yes, the restaurant owner could count his blessings. It really was great to be an American.

Antoine was desperate to remain in high school as a 19 year-old senior, even at a marginal level to avoid the draft. In dire need of some form of cash flow to feed his ever burgeoning glue habit and in trouble again with the authorities for using gasoline to light another low-life miscreant’s head on fire in a drug misunderstanding, Antoine sucked it up and reluctantly accepted the position.

Although Antoine had sampled the full range and variety of mind expanding pharmaceuticals that the ‘60’s had to offer, his drug of choice was still Testers glue, used primarily by young American dweebs to build plastic model cars and airplanes. Antoine developed his glue habit at the gentle age of 13, and his addiction was, in and of itself, the stuff from which legends are made. In a moderately stressful day, Antoine was known to inhale upwards of 6 jumbo tubes of Testers, sniffing the sticky substance from an ever present plain brown lunch bag which he carried around constantly. In order to divert teacher attention from the real purpose of the lunch bag, the sack also contained several pieces of half rotten fruit and a sandwich that was made in 1965. No matter. Antoine, thin as a reed, seldom ate any real food, subsisting solely on Frito’s, Black Crows and Mellow Yellow.

Although in the middle ‘60’s sniffing was not illegal, Antoine had purchased so many tubes of Tester’s from various area hobby shops over the years that the shop owners, in a cursory effort to cover their asses, had begun to require him to purchase a model of some description along with the tubes of glue. This ridiculous rule was implemented, ostensibly, to ensure that he was actually using the glue to construct model airplanes, destroyers and little hotrods. It is impossible to believe, however, that any adult, not sniffing glue themselves, could mistake Antoine’s intentions, as his very appearance, (red-eyed, pale and as hyper as a speed freak doing shots of Espresso at Starbucks) belied his true purpose. Unfortunately for Antoine, on his best days, he did not have the ability to concentrate or focus long enough to follow the opening credits of “Gilligan’s Island,” much less actually construct something with more than 5 parts. Which was probably why his bedroom was literally filled from floor to ceiling with unopened boxes of plastic models. While the glue purchase by itself was not exorbitant (about 65 cents per for the family size tube) 6 tubes per Diem was nearly $4.00 daily. Throw in even the least expensive model at $2.50 per day and Antoine’s weekly glue tab came to just under $48.00per week, not even taking into consideration his weekend marijuana and LSD expense. This, as some of us can recall, was a fairly serious piece cabbage back in the day. The opportunities to steal from his mother’s purse or cookie jar or shake down some punk freshman for  chump change were becoming less frequent as he was still on probation and being closely scrutinized as a result of that unfortunate head incineration incident. He had previously tried selling various drugs (mostly marijuana) with little success. Not that Antoine was a bad drug salesman. Antoine, unfortunately, had the one bad habit one apparently cannot overcome in the drug selling business: he got high on his own supply. Like a farmer eating his seed corn, there was never enough product leftover to even cover his initial investment. Without a regular independent source of income, Antoine could not come close to meeting his chemical financial obligations. It was almost enough pressure to make a man switch to heroin.

Antoine’s urgency for money was like the Federal Government: constant, carnivorous and insatiable. His drug habit simply grew with the amount of revenue that came across his palm every week. A month after Antoine accepted the Clock “posting” and was bringing home a fairly regular paycheck, he would have to borrow money to put gas in his 15 year old Ford Galaxy convertible. “You just got fucking paid,” Eddie would complain when Antoine would inevitably hit him up for a few bucks. “No,” Antoine would shake his head solemnly, “the hobby shop got paid.” Irritated, Eddie would scream “you fucking start the fucking week broke, you work all fucking week then spend all your fucking cash on glue and LSD and at the end of the week you’re dead broke again, you piece of dogshit.” “Yes,” Antoine would nod his head gravely, “it’s a vicious cycle.”

The chance meeting of Eddie and Antoine at the Clock was a pre-ordained event of fate, a Karmic collision of convergent destinies, an incredibly unlucky roll of the cosmic dice. It was the perfect recipe for a perfect storm. The seemingly smallest of events in life have a way of creating large and unmanageable scenarios. In this world there is no coincidence, only a series of separate and apparently unconnected events that lead ultimately to an inevitable conclusion. A bird flaps its wings in Africa and a week later an airliner with 300 people burns on the tarmac at Miami International. Go figure. One needs only to follow what appears to be a random chain of events.

As the story goes, the chain of events began with an unrelated first link when that unlucky hockey player took a bicycle chain to the melon from Eddie at Olympia some six weeks before Antoine took the job at the Clock. The hockey player was a cousin of the unfortunate young man who was victimized by Antoine in the cranial combustion donnybrook. Because there is no room for coincidence in this story, and as fate would have it, Antoine had advanced $70.00 worth of drugs to the poor unfortunate several days prior, with the explicit understanding (or as explicit as Antoine could possibly be given his permanent self-medicated condition) that the money would be forthcoming several days hence. The young man who accepted the drug consignment (and who had already consumed the entire stash) was planning to get the money from his cousin, the luckless hockey player, who, at that very moment of the evening assignation with Antoine, was in the emergency room receiving 6 stitches to the head and was unable to supply the needed funds. Antoine, in desperate need of cash became enraged and taking his fiery revenge, tempted the stars which, unfortunately for him, were in a perfectly ill-omened alignment. Thus the series of events coupling the two was put into motion and the circle of chance completed. In the universal scheme of things there really was never any prospect of any other outcome; it was in the lap of the Gods all along.

So, Antoine and Eddie became fast friends at the Clock, their lives inextricably intertwined. Within a few weeks Eddie had the older Antoine under his spell and the two were thick as thieves. Eddie, bored with school and seeing no end of his education in sight, decided to drop out. Antoine followed in suit and life was moving along swimmingly until Eddie received his notice from his draft board. Eddie, who was now 18 and eligible for the draft, having lost his “school deferment,” had ignored the three previous letters he had received from his draft board. This one was the big one; a final notice demanding his appearance for his physical or suffer the consequences of being a Federal Government fugitive. Eddie became enraged and went on a culinary sabotage rampage the likes of which no restaurant of any description had ever seen or will ever see again. He spat and peed until he was dehydrated. He developed unspeakable new and improved methods of dining desecration, sparing no patron his righteous wrath. All the while Antoine looked on with awe. Never had he seen anyone in his pathetic life that was so driven. Here was a man with a purpose; a true trailblazing anarchist one could follow anywhere. Antoine had found his Hero.

Eddie continued to duck his draft notice and, as his rage grew toward the draft board, he knew he had to take action. The service, he knew, was certainly no place for him. Now, as some of us nearing 60 will remember, the regular army of the middle and late ‘60’s was not the volunteer gung-ho “Be All You Can Be” organization filled with rosy-faced All American Pat Boone types. It was more of a “Stay Alive As Long As You Can” outfit, and it was not the ideal place to be. At least in the Marines the troops signed up to be an elite Jarhead, and the guy in the foxhole next to you took a certain modicum of pride in being a Marine. The regular army (not a volunteer arrangement in those days) was largely comprised of a variety of misfits and malcontents, most of whom did not want to be there. If you can imagine wandering through a rain forest with a bunch of wired-up hallucinating hoodlums at your rear who you didn’t know and who would shoot your white butt just because they could, looking for camouflaged encampments filled with well-armed wild-ass Asians you can kind of get the flavor of that whole wretched scene. Talk about Esprit-de-corps all you want; there was a reason that the average life expectancy of a 2nd Lieutenant in Vietnam was just over 23 minutes. Living in a jungle with little to do, fragging (of officers and enlisted men) was the pastime equivalent of bowling when you were in-country.

Slowly Eddie began to formulate a plan. When Antoine told Eddie that he had a friend, a “vet” who claimed to have Special Forces training, an idea crystallized deep inside Eddie’s fertile mind. This veteran, Stoney, so named because he was a first class stoner who existed on a steady diet of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Tylenol 3’s, claimed he had actually worked with explosives. In truth, Stoney was a first class section 8 and wasn’t in the army long enough to get his parking validated, washing out of boot camp because even the Drill Instructor at Ft. Bragg could not get Stoney to make his bed. Apparently Stoney had read a book or two on the making of explosives using a variety of chemicals, including fertilizer. His favorite explosive device, however, was the always dependable Molotov Cocktail, fashioned out of a super-sized Coke bottle, which he reminded Antoine he had employed with remarkable success several years before at a South Lake Homecoming game while Stoney was still a sometime student.

Eddie now put his action-plan in place. He convincingly reminded Antoine that it was only a matter of time before he, too, would be served his induction notice. During an all weekend LSD marathon, Eddie laid out the plan. The only way to ensure their freedom, Eddie insisted, was to destroy all record of their draft registration. This of course meant destroying the entire building in one Herculean Dresden-like firestorm. But even if the records were not destroyed, Eddie reasoned, they would be making a statement—(striking a blow) for the movement. Antoine, who was as political as a bag of hammers, probably didn’t know who the President was and his awareness of current events stopped at knowing what hobby shop had the best buy on Tester’s glue. But something in Eddie’s argument stirred Antoine’s soul, creating the watershed moment in his heretofore wasted existence, instilling in him for the first time in his life the sense that he could be part of something larger than himself. Probably the 8 jumbo tabs of California Sunshine he ingested in that 48 hour period had something to do with it as well, but Antoine, without reservation or hesitation was onboard. He would begin work immediately with Stoney to develop the appropriate ordinance and in doing so would scream his statement for the struggle. Antoine was down for the righteous cause, to give power back to the people. Or whatever.

As the story goes, Antoine and Stoney began work in earnest on the appropriate hardware to pull off the master stroke. Because Stoney was relegated to living in a tiny shed behind his mothers garage, the real science was done in the fruit cellar of Antoine’s mom’s basement, where even there, several candle altars had to be repositioned. As it turned out, Stoney was not as proficient as advertised with respect to fertilizer-fueled bombs and several failed attempts using miniature prototypes resulted in a semi-catastrophic blow-out that knocked out Antoine’s mom’s water heater, flooding the entire basement, taking out all the repositioned Virgin Mary Altars, which created a spiritual blow-back from which Mrs. Antoine never recovered.

Eventually Antoine and Stoney, because they could not find a stable combination of fertilizer and combustible chemicals in a single experiment and had exhausted all known areas to blow up, settled on the Molotov Cocktail approach which was simple and had proved so successful at the Homecoming when Stoney was a perennial underclassman at South Lake. After several successful trials the two geniuses informed Eddie that they were ready to deliver the decisive blow. At the same time Eddie, after much diligent research, determined that the downtown Detroit draft board offices were too heavily protected and elected the easiest target of opportunity to be the draft board offices in Ann Arbor. And so, as the story goes, the date for Eddie’s earth shaking event was set for early June, 1968.

On that warm and humid June night, the cicadas singing their soft summer song, Eddie, Antoine and Stoney piled into Antoine’s old Ford and made their way to the draft board building in Ann Arbor, seven large Coke bottle Molotov Cocktails riding precariously in the back seat. Eddie, sans souci, driving, the balmy night air blowing in through the open convertible. Life, as they say, was good. The 45 minute trip to Ann Arbor was filled with smoking dope, bottles of long neck Stroh’s and the sounds of Terry Knight’s “Season of the Witch,” on the eight track. Although their plan was not completely developed, their prospect of success was fortified by chemicals and alcohol. Besides, the promise of another wasted night hanging out in Angel Park on the Detroit River sharing a few bottles of Boones Farm Apple wine with the Hippie Scum would be the equivalent of screwing the pooch. The collective decision by this brain trust was to move forward; destiny was calling.

Arriving in a parking lot near the draft board building in Ann Arbor, Eddie parked the Galaxy at a safe distance, directing the two air-brained anarchists to the target site. Grabbing the jumbo Coke bottle Molotov cocktails, the two proceeded to the spot where Eddie had determined they could safely deliver the ordinance. Stoney, who had mixed the Blue Bombers with Stroh’s and Tester’s (always a lethal combination), missed the designated spot, settling on an area that looked fairly close to the building. Placing the gasoline filled Coke bottles at their feet, they each grabbed a bottle, Antoine doing the lighting honors, his zippo trembling with anticipation in his hand.

His large Coke bottle lit, Stoney hefted it above his head, throwing it like a German hand grenade. His depth perception chemically challenged, he threw it 15 yards off the mark, hitting a WWII monument near a huge Elm tree. Due to the super-size bottle with which the boys had not trained, the home-made bomb detonated against the monument and the Elm tree with a violent burst of explosive flame, startling even the anesthetized Stoney, and downright scaring the shit out of Antoine who was in the process of throwing his own bottle, hesitating at the top of his arc like Louis Tiant throwing a change-up. As he hesitated due to the unexpected fire-bomb, the large Coke bottle poised high above his head, a trickle of gasoline leaked downward landing directly upon his head and, ironically, igniting his long blonde locks in a fiery chemical reaction which enveloped his entire head in flames. In a panic, Antoine dropped his Molotov cocktail, thereby breaking the other bottles that lay on the ground creating another terrifically huge blast that enshrouded both of them in a blazing maelstrom. Thinking that the first off-the-mark bomb was a direct hit and did some serious damage to the building, and their legs on fire, the two hot-footed it (literally) back to Eddie and the waiting get-away convertible.

Eddie, attempting to view the attack in the darkness from a safe distance, saw the first and then the second larger explosion and in the ensuing confusion assumed that they had scored two direct hits. Suddenly, from the general direction of the conflagration, Eddie watched as Antoine and Stoney came screaming out of the darkness, partially on fire. Eddie’s Turrets raced into overdrive as a string of obscenities flew out of his mouth in a virtual rhapsody of profanity. “What the fuck, you stupid motherfucking assholes, Jesus Christ on a bicycle…” Eddie quickly grabbed the musty old blanket from the backseat that they used to cover the now exploded jumbo Coke bottles and raced over to Antoine, covering what was left of his hair, smothering the fire. All three quickly jumped into the car and raced off into the moonless night.

Outside of his burned hair and singed jeans, Antoine was, remarkably unscathed. Stoney sat in the backseat in a stupor, mumbling cryptically to himself nearly catatonic from fear, clearly not the foxhole veteran he had previously claimed to be. “Some big-time fucking bomb expert, you fucking jackoff,” Eddie lamented, looking at the damage to his pathetic platoon. Antoine, unaware that the blast, while apparently destructive, did virtually no damage to anything, spoke up. “No shit,” he croaked, the gasoline fumes still hanging heavily in his throat. “We hit it on the money…we blew the bastard up.” Eddie, believing that the two fires he witnessed were actually the building on fire and still seeing the flames as they drove away shook his head “We gotta get out of town… now.”

So, as the story goes, Eddie, after helping himself to the cash drawer that night at the Clock restaurant, once again took it on the lam and split for parts unknown. Stoney simply retreated to his shed behind his mom’s house to await the authorities for what he was convinced would be the inevitable pinch. This, of course, never occurred. In point of fact, the entire ill fated fiasco barely rated a mention in the local Ann Arbor newspaper, much less The Detroit News or Free Press. It was believed to be the prank of some misguided youngsters; the youthful indiscretion of some delinquent vandals. The very idea that this could have possibly been the terrorist act of some villainous anarchist was never even seriously contemplated.

And Antoine…Antoine hurriedly packed his things that night and took the Windsor Tunnel to Canada, where he was quite at home. As it turned out, Antoine was never in any jeopardy with regard to his draft status. For one thing, he had never actually registered for the draft (a small detail that, as a result of his Testers induced separate reality, he had apparently overlooked) because he was not even an American citizen. Antoine Saggat, drug dealer, black sheep, prodigal son and hellion was born in Ontario and never having been naturalized, was a Canadian citizen. This, when one reflects upon it, may have been the simple answer to the genesis of his enigmatic personality all along; he was a fucking Canuck. As the story goes, like his vagabond father, he was never heard from again.

Once, about 15 years ago on my way back to Florida at a quick lunch meeting with some clients at an Atlanta airport Bennigan’s, I thought I recognized Eddie cooking in the open kitchen area. He looked older and drawn, but he caught my eye with that wise-guy private smile, staring for a long moment. When the waitress came by for our lunch orders, I remember I was preparing to order the onion soup and sandwich when some indefinable sense drew my eye back toward the kitchen area where the cook whose strong resemblance to Eddie was peering at me with a strange intensity. “I think I’ll just have a light beer,” I said closing the menu. “In a bottle…and sweetheart…let me open it at the table, OK?’ One can never be too careful.

Now some readers of this tome may question the veracity of this narrative. While many of the details and particulars have been obfuscated through time, recollection and research, the basic facts of the story actually did occur those many years ago Although many readers may recognize some of the characters in this historical yarn, the names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike. And anyway, what is real truth-- or what passes for truth today? When it comes to fidelity and accuracy I personally agree with Mark Twain who said “…the truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” And for those of you cynical cyberland snotty sons-a-bitches who think you have identified the truth, or something akin to it, call me—no—better yet, call Mike Wallace. I think you might have a pretty good “60 Minutes” story.

In the meantime, I’ll catch y’all next time.

Freddie Van

(a veraciously unimpeachable child of god)

Oil Beach Scene - Brutta Matta