People I know who’ve heard this story have told me that I should write about it. Lately, I came to think that maybe I should, since this is the 27th anniversary of the day it happened. This was the weirdest night of my life (mainly the early morning of September 29, 1982).
I think it’s been nagging at me to get this story out in the last year since the whole right-wing, racist teabagger-birther movement has seemingly sprouted up overnight. I think it can be hard for some people to understand where it came from. I don’t think it came from anywhere, since it was always here. I look back on that night and it helps me understand.
I want to warn you that this story has disturbed me for 27 years, and it might disturb you if you continue reading.
So, back in 1982, I was an itinerant musician who played in rock ‘n’ roll bands for a "living." I had been with a particularly strange outfit for a few months. The band was led by a female vocalist and her husband, the guitarist; they brought their two kids and dog on the road with them. The keyboardist was a young gay man who’d grown up in Wyoming, and who acted as if it was the first time he could ever act the way he felt. The bassist was a 17-year-old excommunicated Mormon who was struggling with her sexuality. The keyboard player thought he’d found a kindred spirit in her, and she thought he was a bumpkin.
We finished a long stint at a hotel in Harlingen, Texas, and our next gig was only a 4-nighter, so we had a few days in between. The bass player and I decided to go through Dallas and see the sights. On our last night before leaving, she decided she wanted to see a gay disco that the keyboardist had told her about, and I decided to see a baseball game, since we were camping in Arlington anyway.
I dropped her off at the disco, and drove to the ballpark. I figured it would be easy to get seats because it was the end of the season and Texas, as usual, was well out of the running. I didn’t know how easy: as I walked to the box office, I was handed a ticket by someone standing nearby. I figured a free ticket anywhere is better than one I had to pay for, so off I went. I handed my ticket to a series of ushers, who consistently directed me towards the infield, until I got to my seat along the center aisle in the field box behind the plate in the third row. These could have been George W. Bush's seats a few years later.
I’ve had good seats before, but never directly behind and so close to the plate that I could hear the batter, catcher, and umpire talking. And, they could clearly hear the people around me who knew the Ranger players well enough to have conversations.
The Rangers were playing their last series with the Oakland A’s. I got to see Ricky Henderson steal his 126th bass on his way to his record-setting season. I’ve seen some of the best, but I never saw even Lou Brock steal a base so effortlessly. It was a 2-1 count, everyone in the park knew what was coming, and there was a pitchout, but I swear Ricky was standing on the bag at second before the ball left the catcher’s hand.
After the game, I picked up the bass player and we headed for Arkansas. The agent had told us to drive at night and not worry about the time because "the club will be open." (!)
We drove along through the night and made it to Camden, our destination, at about 2 a.m. We were driving down a 4-lane divided road towards the club when, I saw a vehicle closing in on me. Being that we were in a van with California plates (and I was a long haired guy driving with a 17-year-old woman who pretty much looked 17), I was always a little leery of being followed by anyone, so I moved to the right lane. The vehicle turned out to be another van, travelling just a little faster than we, probably about 25-30 mph.
The van moved on past us on the very dark night. There were no streetlights; the only other light was from a car approaching from the other direction. The van was 3 or 4 car lengths ahead of us when it became apparent to us that the approaching vehicle was on the wrong side of the road, and traveling in the same lane as that van ahead of us. It occurred to the van driver at about the same time, but it was too late to do anything. The van’s stoplights went on for a moment, and then, WHAM!
I swerved, but I really didn’t have to. It was truly an amazing sight to see Newton’s law of conservation of momentum demonstrated in such a graphic way. The other vehicle was an exterminator’s pickup truck, probably weighed about the same as the van, and was going about the same speed. The two vehicles came to a full stop at the point of impact.
I got out of my van and got my flashlight and flares. I could hear the van driver calling out for help in a faint, crackling voice that sounded as if his lungs were filling with blood. He was smashed against the steering wheel, and a huge pile of camping and fishing gear was jammed up against him. At that moment, the bass player jumps into the driver’s seat of my van, shouts "there was a gas station back down the road. I’ll call for help." In a flash she was gone, and I was all alone in the dark with my rapidly dimming flashlight.
I tossed out the flares and went back to the wreck. I went over to the pickup truck. There was a guy in the driver’s seat. He had no shirt, and he wasn’t moving. I called out to him and got no response.
It was probably the wrong thing to do, but I decided to lift up his head. When I did, I could see his eyeballs had already rolled back. Then I noticed there was no steering wheel; there was just a steering column, and it was firmly planted within the driver’s sternum. It was especially strange, because there was no blood visible at all around the column. I was sure it was somewhere, though, and I knew there was nothing I could do for that guy. Also, his face looked all beaten, but the windshield hadn’t broken away, and there were no other obvious things that would have hit him.
I went back to the van. The driver was still calling for help. I got the sliding door on the right side open, but all I could see was the side of the pile of camping equipment. It wasn’t moving, and for the time being, neither was the driver. I tried to be as calm as I could, and told the driver help was coming.
It did finally come. The police and fire department showed up, and the firemen skillfully cut the driver out of the van with the Jaws of Life. The bass player came back and the police took our statements. We were about to go, when one of the policemen got up into the back of the pickup and started shining his light into the bushes. He was saying "it has to be over here." Then he jumped down and went into the bushes. He came out shouting "I found it!"
What he had found was the giant plastic cartoon termite that had been on top of the truck. He done got hisself a souvenir. I knew it was time to go. We asked about the club, and the police said it was the next turn, and "the club will be open."
It was open. We walked into this giant place with seating for several hundred, many pool tables, and a very substantial stage that even had a curtain. All the other band members were there (including the lead singer’s 15-year-old-daughter who was well on her way to blazing her career path as a barfly). We quickly went to them, and all of us said almost simultaneously, "you’ll never believe what just happened."
We told our story. Then they told us theirs. A man had been sitting at the bar minding his own business, when another guy, who was about seven feet tall and dressed in camouflage walked up to him, picked him up by his neck, slammed him into the wall, and started beating him. All the time, the man asked Camo Guy "what did I do?" No one seemed to know what he’d done, but no one felt compelled to intervene. After the beating, the man, looking quite badly beaten around his head, shouted that he was going home to get his gun and would come back to kill Camo Guy. Then he got into his exterminator’s truck (outfitted with the company’s signature plastic cartoon termite) and left.
After a while, and after the initial anxiety wore down, we all realized that we had witnessed both ends of a fairly complicated and seriously unfortunate set of events. We also realized we were in a very strange place, and it would probably be best just to do our gig and get out as quickly as possible. We mostly just stayed on the stage during breaks, played our midnight to 5 (or 6) a.m. gig, and got the Hell out of there.
I visited with the van driver’s family in the hospital. It was rather strange, since the family was black, and I got the distinct impression that I was violating some sort of code of etiquette by talking to them at all. On my way back to the band "motel" I went the wrong way on a road, and ended up heading out of town. A car had been behind me, and I realized I was being followed when I went into a driveway to turn around, and so did that car. I had been hearing there was a "new South," exemplified by a young progressive guy named Bill Clinton who'd been Governor of Arkansas. I was not convinced: he wasn't governor then, and my experiences struck me as more like the "Old South" I'd read about in history books and Faulkner novels and seen in Tennessee Williams plays.
I had numerous other incidents of weirdness during that week despite my best efforts to avoid them. I was invited to a party, and accepted not wanting to offend (you never know where Camo Guy might be, and what might set him off). There I was invited to drink moonshine (bleah), and learned how the moonshiners had begun to switch to growing marijuana because the moonshine business was dying out, and the revenue agents didn't care about pot. I also learned that the good ole boys hated niggers, because that's what they told me, over and over.
But that first night beat them all, especially after I went up to the bartender to tell him what I’d just witnessed, and described the exterminator truck. I will never forget those words out of that bartender’s mouth for as long as I live:
"Oh, that was Joe Pinkerton. He was an asshole anyway."
I want to thank you for reading. It feels good to finally get it out.