(&framesX)
D   A   T   E   S    
j         o      u    r  n al... 

 billy Percival used to launch 30 gallon oil drums from the lot behind the WCD Garage and Citgo gas station where he was a mechanic, only twenty yards from the old fire station in Northboro.  He would place one of the four foot tall by two foot round steel drums open end down and fill it with oxy-acetylene.  Then, from the safe end of a trail of gasoline, he'd touch it off.  I only saw him do it once, but he was infamous for doing this and other things that got people very annoyed.  It seemed Billy was always on some sort of probation with people.  He'd been fired at least once from the gas station before I'd gone to work there, and one of the owners, Arnold Desrosiers, a stocky, rugged, no-nonsense man, was often on the verge of firing Billy again.  The sawed-off shotgun Billy kept in his tool chest almost did it once. 

In a conversation with Arnold, I inadvertantly revealed the gun, since I had assumed everybody knew.  I mean, he used to show it off, for crying out loud!  Actually, everybody would have known if they were paying attention, but people preferred to remain unaware of Billy's activities, if they could.  There were always a lot of heads in the sand around the issue of Billy; his gleeful lawlessness triggered some deeply buried fears in people.  He liked to break the rules, and he especially liked to push authority figures to their limits. 

Arnold marched out of his office to confront Billy about the gun.  Nobody liked confronting Billy; some people called him crazy for the extremes to which he could take his rage.  I worried for Arnold, but he was a tough old bird, not unaccustomed to addressing Billy's abberrant behavior.  As Billy's luck would have it, the toolbox, which was always open while Billy was working, was closed-up tight when Arnold approached.  I remember feeling grateful later because, had the gun been in plain view, the outcome would almost certainly have been unfortunate.  I don't recall clearly the exchange, but I know Arnold demanded to see the gun, and I don't think Billy opened the toolbox for him.  Instead they arrived at an uneasy settlement in which Billy—while denying the sawed-off was in there—assured Arnold it would soon be gone.  Arnold accepted this because I don't think he was eager to take posession of an illegal weapon, which had likely been a significant element in some of Billy's unsavory activities. 

"

 they claim there's things that say it wasn't suicide," Billy explained to his lawyer over the phone.  "...like the way the blood spattered..."  Another man's wife had killed herself in his bedroom.  A year had passed since my high school days working at the garage with Billy, and I was working as a dispatcher for the police department in the old fire station, which abutted the infamous oil drum launch site.  Billy was talking on the phone everyone was forbidden to use, a seperate line which had been installed for one of the businesses in town exclusively for their alarm system, which used an auto-dialer to call the police.  Low-tech stuff, but it was a small town, and only 1978.  All the other lines in the police station were recorded, so Billy's attorney made arrangements to call-in on that unrecorded line, and I was told by the sergeant on duty to expect Attorney Angelini's call.  I learned something about cops and the value of a competent attorney that night. 

The phone was mounted about knee-high on the wall beside the dispatcher's desk, and Billy was crouched behind my chair, between me and the teletype machine.  I heard everything Billy said, and I wondered if he remembered the sawed-off and how I could not keep my mouth shut, and I wondered if he was editing his conversation accordingly.  He didn't sound guilty to me, but maybe that was his intention. 

I have always had a willingness to understand deviant behavior.  For some unknown reason, I have never wanted—or needed—to dismiss my curiosity about anything based on a value judgement, and Billy was of great curiosity to me.  He had no good looks and was often vulgar, but he was never boring.  His capacity to entertain, charm, persuade, and amuse was as remarkable as his reputation for breathtaking cruelty and brutality.  Indeed, if you believed the stories told about him, he could venture to both extremes as if there were no difference between them.  The police attitude toward Billy, overt contempt, was simply a focused expression of the community's vague distaste for him.  But I have always wondered if his so-called defective character pre-existed our flawed perceptions, or was merely a product of them. 

 billy was about 10 years older than me, tall but not lanky, with a big crooked nose, and missing a couple front teeth.  His hands were perpetually stained with grease and oil, and his speech was unrefined and loud.  So I was surprised one day in 1975 to see him reading a worn paperback edition of The Grapes of Wrath.  Billy turned people's prejudices to his own use, repelling those who could not, or would not, look beyond his facade of crass villainy.  In theatre this is a desirable achievment, but in real life, it often leads to tragic injustice.  I think Billy lived his life as theatre; to him life itself was the show.  He was a brilliant director, though I am not certain because I, like most who knew him, did not attend very many of his shows.  And I think he would have considered a tragic outcome an even greater success than a stage-bow among roses. 

 donnie Wilcox was a tall blond seventeen year old who needed the attention of someone like me, and of course he got it.  My wave of adolescent hormones was near to breaking on the shore, and Donnie's upswell was just cresting.  My only control at the time lay in convincing myself that everyone—especially one as sexy as Donnie—would be appalled by my touch.  But between this fatherless boy and me.. well, you could smell the semen in the air.  His single-parent mother was an armor-plated man-hater (or so I thought) and I trembled every moment I was with him for fear she'd find out what I was thinking, and gut me like a chicken.  I know he wanted me to take him, and all but told me so outright, but my formidible inhibitions kept him innocent of my caress.  I wanted him so bad I could taste it, but I was so repressed, I could never have put any part of him in my mouth. 

This I never knew until the morning Donnie called me, a little upset and sad; that Billy Percival was Donnie's uncle.  And the call Donnie made was to tell me his uncle had been murdered the night before.  "I'll be right there," I said into the phone, and sleepy-eyed, I drove to pick him up.  He stood outside his house wearing worn-out faded jeans and a Queen T-shirt.  He looked like he'd been crying, and he did a little, after he got in.  This boy had a lot to cry about, and only some of it was for Billy.  Mostly it was for the mean tragedies and losses in Donnies own life that had all occurred before that sunny day he told me Billy had been killed. 

Mine was a Renault LeCar, and no matter where I placed my gaze inside that tiny car, my eyes beheld some part of this 6 foot teenage beauty.  And he had a scent, a pheremone of virile youth, that made me love to simply breath the air near him.  Eventually, Donnie and I went to the drive thru at Burger King, and I remember like yesterday, his right thigh, warm against the side of my left hand as I slipped the shift into neutral, and my entire consciousness focused on that spot.  I sweated. 

Donnie told me of a dark scene only hours earlier, somewhere on Route 128 where Billy had been thrown onto the road, we guessed from the back of a van, and had been run over more than once; a murder thinly veiled as a hit and run.  I assured him—and half believed it, too—that forensic tests, combined with diligent investigation, would lead to Billy's killer.  But this seventeen year old in my car that day had long since discarded the kind of innocence I clung to so naively.  "There's not going to be any investigation," said Donnie, in an almost gentle way.  And I, who played the role of Donnie's wise mentor, was humbled by his bitter wisdom. 

He talked of where Billy had been lately, and how the suicide at his house was never proved to be anything else.  Billy was never charged with anything.  The police could not convince a prosecutor, but they did convince Billy to go away.  This tousled-haired blond boy, who should not have to know these things, told me of a night a year before, when the Massachusetts State Police took Billy away and beat him, and broke his knee, his jaw, and all his teeth.  Donnie said the state police told Billy to leave the state and never come back, or he would die. 

 billy Percival lived near the precipice to keep the chasm in sight and to maintain an appreciation for the real lay of this land, unlike us flatlanders who are seduced by the illusion that life is level.  He lived his life like a rock climber with no safety lines in order to maintain a sharp awareness of what life really is: A free-fall with no up, no down, no bad, no good; where love is not passion's pounding heart, or April weddings, or patriotic heroism; where love is all of life—all light and darkness, everything physical and spiritual, and every moment of time, and timelessness too.  Most of us forget the truth much too early in our youth, eventually restricting our existences to our flatland lives, which we divide up neatly and focus on intently, while we turn our backs on most of life—on most of love. 

 sharper than the whoosh-sound of too much charcoal starter fluid, but softer than the crack of guns or cannon, like a loud but muffled thud!, the 30 gallon drum flew up, and up, drawing a wispy trail of thin smoke behind it, turning ever so gently as it shot high and fast into the sky above our peaceful little New England town.  It was almost sideways when it reached its apogee, where it stopped for an instant, undecided in mid-air, and hovered weightless before it surrendered to its inevitable return to earth.  It crashed with a great clang, like a sour church bell, and bounced once, creating a hefty gouge in the rocky dirt, and leaving the drum's lip on its open end depressed 6 inches.

After the launch, Billy had such a grin, it transformed his homely face, and it makes me chuckle even now.  This was no monster, no evil man, no cold or pathologic killer.  My early death would not be so bad, if but I could live as unrestrained as he, the oil drum pilot, flying.. flying, and laughing all the way.


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