Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy was a student in Dr. Reese’s Writing and Publishing class at FPC Yankton.

TEN-FOUR, WHAT’S YOUR TWENTY?

Nonfiction

Senior year in high school, and the Christmas party at my friend Jimmy’s house rocked. We smoked and swigged down Red Mountain wine, a dollar forty-nine a gallon -- a great buy for a cheap high. Jimmy’s parents were away on a ski trip, and he and his older sister were house-sitting. However, as word got out, it turned into more of a houseraiding for forty friends. Music cranked; the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Doors, and Jefferson Airplane tunes rattled the windows. We danced in the front room and made out in the back rooms.

Unfortunately, the neighbors in that upscale area didn’t appreciate the loud music after eleven o’clock at night. So guess what? A police cruiser decided to stop by and check things out. Luckily, my friends Ray, Bob, Dennis, and I were posted up on the party house’s large covered front porch, paired up with some local hotties. We saw the cop roll in and hit the brakes. Immediately, I cracked open the front door and sounded the alarm of law enforcement’s arrival at the curb. The partiers ran around and tried to clean up the place as fast as they could. Things were stashed and the booze found the fastest and most convenient hiding spots under furniture and the deep dark recesses of the nearest closets.

Headlights went out on the police car, and the driver’s door swung open. The cold winter rain lightly coated the street, and a big burly police officer stepped out, stood up, and started to walk quickly up the walkway. Apparently he didn’t like getting out of his comfortable ride to get rained on. He tugged and adjusted all his official policeman’s leather gear and with thumbs tucked inside the front of his trousers, barked out, “Who’s in charge of this little gettogether?”

Nobody on the porch around me volunteered a word, so he strolled up the front steps to the house. He then asked us if we could locate the owners of the house so he could talk to them. Still, nothing happened, we all played dumb. A bit perturbed, he knocked loudly on the front door and Jimmy opened the door and said, “Why, hello, officer, may I help you?” The smell of smoke wafted out onto the porch and the officer asked if he could step inside. He said there had been a complaint of excessive noise. And possible underage drinking.

Jimmy tried to play it cool but knew that the party had hit the wall. His parents were going to kick his ass sideways when they got back on Sunday night. “Sure, come on in,” said Jimmy, with fear in his eyes, not knowing the outcome. The policeman stepped into the house and again reached down and adjusted his squeaky leather gear before he disappeared into the living room. The last thing we heard was Jimmy being asked, “Are there any adults at this party?”

Ray and I decided to sneak down to the parked police car and look it over. Ray peeked through the cruiser’s side window and suddenly reached out and yanked on the door handle. The heavy door pivoted open and the car’s interior light suddenly came on. Surprise, an unlocked police car, and the shiny keys dangled out of the ignition. What’s going on here, a trap? We quickly looked for any backup police cars parked around the area; none were seen.

Ray, in one of his crazy and unpredictable moments, pulled the car door the rest of the way open. I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” Without any response, he jumped in, started the car and took off down into the subdivision. He sped off and vanished around the corner. Oh, not good. I hustled back to the porch and told my shocked friends that we had to get the hell out of there and fast.

The girls on the porch pleaded that all their coats and stuff were stowed inside the house so we all had to make our way into the house and into the middle of a mass interrogation. Once inside, the cop wouldn’t let us leave. He checked our IDs and asked a bunch of silly questions about

our high schools, and who our parents were -- a bunch of small talk.

In those laid-back days of the 60s and being raised in an old and a tight-knit community, everyone on the police force knew or probably grew up with our parents. That made encounters with the local police more civil than confrontational. The atmosphere had a comfortable feel to it, and the policeman simply told us to clean everything up, pour the booze that he knew we had hidden down the kitchen sink, and go home. While the police officer made his speech, our little group made a stealthy escape out the front door. In the middle of our exit, we bumped into a rain-soaked Ray as he staggered up the steps. “Ray, where’s the car?” I asked.

He just held a finger up to his lips and whispered, “Shhh.” I told him that the cop, still inside the house, told us to go home. Ray lived a few blocks away so he said, “Cool, I’m gone, see ya.”

But before we all could get off the porch and down the steps, the policeman came out onto the porch, saw that his car was gone and yelled, “Where’s my unit?” Dumb-ass Ray couldn’t leave it alone and blurted out, “What’s a unit?”

The cop shouted back, “My car, who saw what happened to my car?” The policeman frantically made calls over his hand-held radio and made his way down to the street, hoping to find his car somewhere in sight. No such luck. We bailed off the side stairs of the porch and vanished into the night.

On our way over to Ray’s house, he said that he had something to show us and for us to follow him. He said he had a surprise for us. The girls didn’t want to wander around in the drizzly dark, and one whined about having to pee, so we continued on a direct route to Ray’s house. Making lots of racket, we stumbled into Ray’s backyard where his mom intercepted us at the back door. She let us in and listened to our story of Jimmy’s party being busted by the police.

Still, behind his mom’s back, Ray insisted that he had

something to show us but the girls didn’t want any part of an excursion out into the dark. Ray’s mom welcomed the girls and said they could hang out, brew some coffee, and watch TV until us macho guys returned from our mysterious field trip.

We quietly followed Ray the two blocks over to Westlake, a small lake about a quarter mile square and ten feet deep in the middle. There, a hundred feet into the water from the small boat launch ramp we saw a pair of car tail lights still glowing in the dark. They stuck into the air two feet above the rippled water. The car had gone over an underwater ledge and nosedived into deeper water. Bubbles swirled around the sides of the car while it slowly settled towards the muddy bottom. Electrical circuits must have finally shorted out because the tail lights suddenly went dark. Only the distant streetlights’ reflection off the car’s shiny chrome bumper gave a clue of what lurked offshore.

He said that after he pulled onto the launch ramp he opened the door, put it into drive and let it go. But it went farther out into the water than he planned, but didn’t it look cool? No time to answer as spotlights started to sweep around the neighborhood and more police cars arrived in a hurry to look for the lost squad car.

We eased away from the scene of the crime. I left the others and snuck back to where I had parked my car, down the street from Jimmy’s party. I wasn’t blitzed anymore and figured I could drive; the excitement of the drowned car had sobered me right up. I drove over to Ray’s and gave the girls a ride home. Our Christmas party had died in a watery grave.

The next morning, police showed up at some of the partygoers’ houses and took them down to the police station to question them. I slipped through the net of the investigation by being at work early that next morning. Somebody, a little tattletale, mentioned to the chief of police that Ray had something to do with the disappearing vehicle, but Ray stood his ground and wouldn’t admit to anything. Ray got away with it and became a legend amongst his

friends for such a stunt.

Flash forward, thirty years later, as Ray sat in a bar and nursed a tall cold one. He started up a conversation with the guy next to him. The man said that he retired from a local police department and now taught criminal justice at the nearby junior college. Ray asked him his name, and after he answered, Ray recognized the man’s name, and told him in a teasing tone, “I know something you don’t know.”

“Really,” the ex-policeman said, “what could that be?”

Ray responded, “If I tell you an old secret, do you promise not to react . . . badly?”

“I don’t know; go ahead, shoot; we’ll play it by ear,” the man sitting on the adjacent bar stool replied.

Ray informed him that he was the guilty party who took off in his police car that rainy December night and parked it in Westlake. The guy went ballistic and grabbed at Ray, but Ray pushed him away and told him, “Chill out! A teenage prank that went bad thirty years ago should be laughed at, not fought over.” The ex-cop calmed down, Ray bought him a drink, and they finally both laughed at all the stupid details of the incident.

He then described the fallout that he had to endure from his fellow officers the rest of his career on the police force. He constantly got ribbed with life jackets, swim fins, or snorkels being placed on the driver’s seat of his squad car when he went on duty. Or when he would answer calls from the dispatcher and they would acknowledge back, “Tenfour, what’s your twenty, glub-glub-glub,” like they were talking to somebody underwater.

NEVER GIVE UP

Nonfiction

In 1964, when I was fifteen and a half years old, I bought my first car for a hundred bucks: a 1933 Chevy five-window coupe. I had discovered it parked behind a Flying A gas station in Gilroy, CA, fifty miles from my home in Santa Cruz.

My mom dropped me off on that special day when I had planned to pick up the car and drive it back home. She stayed and helped me check out the condition of the car and elected to follow me. Being fifteen and a half years old allowed me to possess what in those days was called a learner’s permit. That little piece of paper let me drive a car, and made me feel like a real big shot. Yeah, Mr. Cool all right, but I still couldn’t carry any unlicensed passengers until I had an official driver’s license when I turned sixteen and passed the driver’s test.

After I got this old car to our garage, I planned to strip all of the old running gear out of it and beef it up into a real hot rod: a wild high-horsepower street machine. Remember, those were the days of twenty-five cents a gallon gasoline and muscle cars. Before then, that over-the-hill buggy sat quietly behind a gas station and looked pretty sad. The original brownish paint was nearly worn down to bare metal, and the old dry, cracked tires hugged onto their rusty wire-spoke rims, but the engine cranked over and started: a good sign.

The owner of the car and I met, money changed hands, papers were signed, and the car then belonged to me. I put more air in the tires, gassed up the tank and filled up the radiator; it had no radiator cap so I stuffed a red shop rag into the radiator’s filler located at the top of the car’s grille. Then I checked the oil and threw in a quart of fresh Pennzoil 30w to top it off.

Eager to get started, I hopped in and sat down on the

bare springs of a seat that had only dust for upholstery, turned the key, and let the engine purr for a minute or two to get warmed up. Then I took it for a test drive around the block, but not before I removed my Levi’s jacket and lay it down over the springs for padding. The test drive went well, everything checked out OK. As I came back around towards the gas station, I waved at my mom to pull out and follow me. We were on our way.

However, up ahead, that old car and I faced a monumental challenge. We needed to travel up and over the three thousand feet summit of Mount Madonna, a route called Hecker Pass, which was noted for being treacherous even for an experienced driver. It was six miles of a steep, twisting two-lane road up a forested mountain, followed by a rapid drop-off down the other side into the flat land of agricultural fields near Watsonville.

I learned to drive by using a stick shift and clutch so the three-speed on the floor, with its two-feet long shifter wasn’t a problem. The cloth roof panel rotted away years ago. I had an open sunroof with free air conditioning, a bonus, and at no extra charge. The little in-line six-cylinder engine chugged up the few miles to the top of the mountain pass.

During the laborious climb I stayed well to the right at the passing lanes and smiled at the speedsters as they zipped past. I received some friendly honks and waves, accented with a highway salute or two from the shorttempered drivers who didn’t appreciate my unintentional road hogging.

I pulled over at the summit into a large parking area to check things out one more time. Good to be extra cautious before I took this rickety car that hadn’t seen the open road in a while through the downhill part of the grade. I was a little concerned, but not afraid of what lurked ahead; the ignorance of my youth outweighed any fear. My mom parked beside me at the summit and reminded me to keep it in first or second gear all the way down the hill and not ride the brakes, and wished me luck.

No traffic on the road behind me, so I eased out of the

parking area and onto the road, shifted up into second gear, and started the three-mile slalom of meandering pavement down the hill. The first mile proved to be uneventful; then the fun began when the radiator boiled over. The blast of hot water launched the red shop rag up and into the airstream and back over the car; hot rusty water poured down into the open roof. The rusty water immediately rained down on my head, streaked my white t-shirt, and covered the windshield. That eruption blinded my forward vision so I quickly leaned my head out the side window to keep an eye on the road ahead. Hot water and steam trailed back across the worn-out paint job and swirled around the open window. It scalded and streaked my sunburned, freckled face, but I needed to stay focused on the road. I was in a tough spot, but what could possibly be done, nowhere to pull over; I had to hang on until I could stop or until I reached the valley floor a couple of miles away.

The engine over-revved and second gear barely held down the speed as the hill steepened. I pushed on the brake pedal harder and harder but the speed increased. I was in trouble. I frantically hung on to the slippery radiator slimecovered steering wheel with a death grip. I reached thirty miles an hour, well beyond this old jalopy’s ability on that twisting course, and for me, its green driver, way out of my comfort zone.

Then the brakes really started to fade, old mechanical brakes, just cables and rods, no hydraulics. I searched for and found the emergency brake between the seats and gave it a tug, all the way to the top of its travel, no help there, not even a hint of any braking. My situation rapidly deteriorated but I didn’t freak out.

The right side of the grade, my downhill side, dropped off steeply, hundreds of feet into a deep canyon. I forced myself to ignore the abyss and took my attention away from the edge, looking straight ahead at the task at hand: the narrow and winding road.

Before I knew it, the brakes had become totally useless.

I hoped that I could still maneuver this old Chevy down the grade without any additional problems.

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the transmission, with an explosive bang, popped out of gear. Old transmissions like the one in that old Chevy have straight gears; we gearheads called them crash boxes, no synchros. Once it pops out of gear, it’s nearly impossible to get it re-engaged at high RPMs. However, I still attempted to get it back into gear and pushed the shifter on the floor with all the strength my right leg could muster up, over and up to the right, but no luck. After grinding away for thirty leg-numbing seconds, I continued my focus on the rollercoaster ride, on which I was merely a passenger.

I pressed on and freewheeled down that grade and started to get a little scared. On the only short straightaway my mom raced up alongside me. She gave me a quick look, signaled something I couldn’t make out, and then another car came around an uphill curve and into the straightaway towards us. My mom quickly backed off, and pulled back behind me on our side of the road. I found out later that she was trying to get in front of me and slow me down with her car.

My mom used to drive a logging truck in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during World War II, when she was sixteen, and was a pretty experienced and fearless driver. If anybody could have pulled off a trick like that, it would have been my mom.

I figured out that I was totally at the mercy of gravity. No brakes, no transmission, and an overheated, steaming, and almost dry radiator. Besides, this old buggy obviously had no power steering, just steering by Armstrong tires. When I tried to hold the car on the road as I whipped around some really sharp curves, I drifted up onto the shoulder, up against the drop-off on my right side; good thing the shoulder had a two-feet high dirt and gravel berm. Those wild maneuvers threw gravel like a rooster tail into the air from a fast-turning ski boat.

The airborne stones made a heck of a racket as they

bounced and ricocheted off the metal fenders, running boards, and undercarriage. The gravel whistled through the air like buckshot, scattering in all directions. The ground squirrels that sunned themselves on the top of the berm or sniffed around the roadside for a snack or two ducked and ran over the edge for cover.

An awful thought crossed my mind: what would I do if I came around a blind curve and suddenly closed in on a slower or stopped vehicle, or the scene of an accident? I would have no choice but to either ram into it or steer over the cliff and hope for the best. At that point, I would be in a hell of a mess, with no acceptable options for my survival. Something crossed my mind, but only for a second or two: I could jump, yeah, that might work. When I looked down at the road whizzing by, I scrapped that thought in an instant. There was absolutely nothing at my disposal to slow me down, at least not until I reached the flat farmland below, about a mile more down the asphalt ribbon through the trees.

Would I be able to get out of this sticky predicament alive and uninjured? I drove on, no guardrails to save me from disaster and no seatbelts in this old ride. Luckily, as my speed increased to over forty miles an hour the curves started to soften a bit; there were just a couple of curves left before a long straightaway led to the safety of the farmland in the distance.

The speed increased enough to where the front end started to wobble. I doubted that the tired old running gear that had sat idle for years behind the gas station would hold up much longer under the added speed and stress that the road handed out that afternoon.

The final downhill stretch appeared as I exited the last long curve. I had miraculously made it through the worst of the downhill slalom, and there was no traffic ahead, just some slow trucks leaving a smoky plume of exhaust, creeping up the grade in the opposite direction. Speed picked up rapidly during that final downhill straightaway to nearly sixty miles an hour as the front end shook and shimmied like a belly dancer.

When I finally reached the flatlands, excess speed bled off slowly, and my breathing and heart rate slowed down. The wobbles from the suspension stopped, and I felt in some sort of control. I released a deserved sigh of relief. I had no rearview mirror so I twisted my head around to look back and saw my mom giving me thumbs up, and then she pulled the palm of her hand across her forehead as she relayed a speechless message to me: “That was a tough one.”

I coasted for a mile over a fairly level stretch of the country highway. By then I was doing only twenty miles an hour, so I tested the brakes and stomped down hard; miraculously, they came back to life. They didn’t lock up, but at least they started to take hold. I did a little fancy footwork on the pedals and double-clutched the transmission into third gear, then coaxed it back down into second.

A mile farther ahead was a small country store with a large parking lot that wrapped around it on all sides. I cautiously headed in and came to a slow, gravel-crunching stop. Whew, what an experience. I got out and hopped off the running board and stood up next to my car, trying to look cool. I noticed that my legs trembled, the adrenaline had worn off, and the life and death struggle that I had faced on the way down the hill gave me a silent but visible reality check.

My mom pulled in alongside me and we looked at each other in amazement, saying nothing. We both knew what I had gotten away with. Calm, but a bit shaken, I walked over to a water hose coiled up on the ground, cranked on the water, bent over and allowed the water to run over my head as I washed all the radiator crud out of my hair and off my face. I gulped down a big, cool slug of water, then filled the gasping radiator of that old warrior of a car. Mom got out of her car, held her hand up, and told me to stay put as she turned and disappeared into the market. A minute later she came out and handed me a bag of potato chips, a package of Twinkies, and an ice-cold beer, a root beer that is. She told me to relax and eat something before we headed for home.