A Vandal’s Smile
By: George Cowgill
Tags: Lsd, Straight Edge, Punk Rock, East Lake, Growing Up

April 2021

(In response to an essay I published ten months ago, a retired Circuit Judge spoke out in the news and called me a liar not once, but three times. That said, I need you all to understand something. Being called a liar, when I know what I’ve written is both accurate and honest, well that’s maybe the greatest compliment anyone can ever give me. Now, here’s some more honesty.)

Standing at the top of Thrill Hill was like looking down a mountain. The road that night vanished into a jet-black abyss, seemingly miles down, only to ramp up sharply in the streetlights, before levelling out as 86th Street South. Tonight would be my third and final time to take LSD, so imagine how all of that looked to a 13-year-old nobody on acid.

Every year, since its doors opened in 1957, the Banks High Senior Class would take to Thrill Hill, armed with cans of spray paint, to leave behind their final marks. East Lake tradition. I asked my Mom, Class of ’69, if she’d ever participated and she too quickly said “no,” then added that she once jumped Thrill Hill in a 1963 Impala. But knowing how my Mom drives, I’m not entirely sure it was on purpose (ha, jokes!)

So I was 13 years old. And on LSD…

It was a jet pack of us on skateboards, six to seven Wolves. And we’d dropped acid and taken off, sweaty and road worn and walking up East Lake’s steepest hills only to crash-dive down the other sides. Stan was the only one of us old enough to drive, not that it mattered, and he was a runaway and homeless, nevermind owning a car. The Electric Circus House was one road over from Thrill Hill and we went there as if we belonged. My head was a merry go round, so out of control and filled with hallucinations. We piled together on their sectional couch with our skateboards hidden under our feet. So many people coming and going, grown-ups it seemed, but everyone seems older when you’re in the 8th grade. My hair was long in the front and shaved short in the back, hanging wildly over my eyes. I was really into The Misfits then, if you wonder where that came from.

Not that I’m not still really into The Misfits now.

So I’m on LSD. And at the Electric Circus House…

Word on high (ha, jokes again!) was that we needed to leave. Electric Circus was a popular rock ‘n roll band with a sixties-Doors feel, and maybe a little punk rock snot too. They had long hair like hippies and dressed cool… cool like college indie kids… I mean this was 1986. A bunch of middle school idiots were not part of the recipe for looking cool and picking up girls. We needed to go.

Stan was the best skater out of all of us, but this wasn’t Tony Hawk tricks and jumps. This kind of skating was staying upright, staying alive and trying not to bleed too much. Pumping our legs on flat roads and bending our knees as we suicide-bombed the hills under Ruffner Mountain that welcome East Lake into the neighborhood of Roebuck.

So Stan was older, and a runaway…

Stan had wild, really wild, curly hair and a vandal’s smile. We were the same height, only I was lanky thin and had never stepped foot in a weight room before. He was a natural athlete, quick and muscled. The age difference between 13 and 17 is painful, and I was the youngest of the pack… too young to speak up and say I was scared of LSD, and unmarked pills, and crash bombing hills while my brain was dreaming in syrup.

The Riley’s house was close by and usually parent-empty. A Roebuck mansion, it sat on a large piece of land with its own parking lot in a surrounding fortress of trees. The two youngest Riley brothers were too kind to broken birds, and their parents, both doctors, were the biggest workaholics I have ever seen. So Stan easily and unknowingly lived in the walk-in attic that sat just to the top of the stairs. He had a mattress folded over against the wall, hidden behind stacks of boxes. Even if an adult did come upstairs (they never did) his nest would remain a secret.

So skating. On drugs. In Roebuck.

Of all nights endless this was the one. We sat in a circle in an empty church parking lot, talking our lives away and test-burning our hands with plastic lighters. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, sortof, because I was 13 and doing what it took to fit in. We tried to talk backwards, tried creating our own devil-worship vocabulary. And we skated and fell… over and over, and we laughed at the blood that ran from our knees and hands and elbows. Mixed with Alabama sweat it looked like pink water and it stained my skin, stained my jeans. Friends of ours, a distant older pack of Wolves, had wrecked a car really bad not too far away. The news came to us in our circle from a passerby because, in 1986, you had to fight for information.

The next morning, I skated home on no sleep, arriving luckily successfully alive. I went to bed in a dream and woke up that night, unsure which parts were real, and which were my comic-book imagination.

So Stan…

So Stan fed off the kindness of the Riley Brothers. And he lived in their attic…

And nothing is ever enough is it?

Jordan Riley first found out his house was on fire when my mom picked us up from school. The Riley Mansion was still in flames when we got there, and the fire, starting somewhere in the center of the house, had eaten the middle rooms completely, floor to roof gone. The Mansion now stood like mangled bookends with nothing but ash and trash in between… its wooden guts gnarled and hanging on display. Before the arson, Stan took all the jewelry and cash he could find, killed their dog Trixie, and fled in the Riley’s pumpkin-orange El Camino that they kept on hand as a utility vehicle.

There are so many cliches about punished good deeds… and we were all fucking kids, right? But this is real damage. This is theft and arson… and killing a dog. My best friend’s family had been displaced from their home, one his parents worked night and day to deserve. And if I were to summarize this in one word… what would it be? Trusting someone, and helping someone with the most essential of needs… food, shelter and so on… all for them to steal, kill and burn? Mind you, Stan didn’t just live in that attic nest for a few days. It was months on end. So, what’s a good word?

I think the word is betrayal.

There was no closure a month later when a state trooper pulled Stan over in North Georgia, driving a stolen El Camino without a license. There was no closure when the car was returned and none when Stan was sent to a juvenile detention center. There’s no closure because this was so far away from the end of the story… this essay alone goes on for 1014 more words.

Wolves, we tried to act so tough… all of us. Such punk rock fuck you attitude, and smashing bottles in empty parking lots. Too loud music from Black Sabbath, or Black Flag. Long hair, chain wallets, skateboards and cut-up jean jackets covered in black marker-drawn skulls. Is the picture painted?

Yet Stan got out a year later. And started coming back around. And he brought with him a thousand apologies. A sheepish, sad smile. His wild curly hair now gone, cut institution short. We had no idea what parent or adult he had in his life, or if he had one at all, and no one ever asked. Adults back then… they were obstacles. And you don’t talk about obstacles unless they’re in your way.

So Stan came back. Still a runaway, or a runaway again? And he’s apologized profusely.

Oh, so sorry for everything, it didn’t take long for him to fit back in. His hair grew back out and he bounced around, sleeping on couches and backseats, all before moving right back in to the same walk-in attic at the newly rebuilt Riley Mansion. Fortunately for him that room had survived his previous counts of arson. But, as they say, “good fortune finds fools often,” unless I just made that up myself.

And a 1988 summer came, and I’d survived my freshmen year of Banks High. Wolves packed up five to a car and made the trek to Panama City Beach. This was my first obstacle-free trip, and now I’m 14 and straightedge, swearing off LSD and weed and unmarked pills. But my friends… well they can do what they want… so they did… and I was right there, along for the ride.

Stan, now 18, tagged along, and bounced from cheap hotel room to cheap motel room amongst the packs of Wolves scattered up and down the Strip. Skinny white legs in baggy swim trunks and Converse high tops. A sleeveless DRI shirt and no one knew what that meant. Walking the gravel next to gridlock cruise traffic. Looking at pretty girls in bikini tops and too short jean shorts. Standing out like sore thumbs. Not cool, or pretty, and not even trying… just East Lake Trash that liked to laugh at everything.

And on the last night, at a motel best described as “an ideal overdose location,” Stan’s schizophrenia unveiled itself upon us again, only now he’d waited until it was just the two of us and another boy, one too stoned too drunk too far gone. And a young girl. And Stan attacked the young girl. I was so scared, and so alone with his dark side, and 14 to 18 is a lifetime apart, I told you this. But I am my father’s son… and we have a deficient chemical in our bloodstream that causes us to jump headfirst into the trouble of others.

So Stan attacked this girl. And I intervened.

We locked up like dogs, me dodging his punches and pushing my shoulder out to protect my face. Reacting in fear, not just for me, but fear of not being able to help a strange girl, crying bleeding in her bikini top and jeans shorts. And I couldn’t fight then, not that I know how to now, but I pinned him with what someday would be referred to as an arm bar. And I held him there, immobile, for minutes on end. His screaming was inhuman, more of a howl, and constant. And I held on until the howling stopped.

When I let go, oh so out of breath, Stan ran off, disappearing into the void that falls between a Florida night sky and the Gulf of Mexico. Not gone for good, no… but gone for now, and at the time that was enough. Yet still, even this close to the end of what you’re reading, this was not closure. (363 more words)

I saw him again as soon I got back to Birmingham, taking right back to his hideaway in the Riley Mansion walk-in attic. And he pulled me aside, and he thanked me for being there in that crummy Florida motel room. Thanked me for stopping him from hurting that girl. And how would 14-year-old you reply? Because 14-year-old me… I just stood there silent and dumb, and nodded.

A week later Stan gathered up all the jewelry and cash he could find in the Riley Mansion, and a gun, and fled in Dr Riley’s ’87 Jaguar. Good thing they had not replaced the family pet yet… or well…

And two weeks later he was pulled over in North Carolina driving a stolen Jaguar without a license. And 18 now… this time would not end in a juvenile detention center.

So long Stan.

I saw him one last time a good two years later. Skating over the Sloss Furnace bridge, the flat stretch of 1stAvenue North that goes on for forever. His wild curly hair bounced with every push off the pavement, he skated so fast. And I was stuffed in the backseat of a car with three other derelicts, heading to some punk show at Dr Jekyll’s on Morris Avenue. And that’s it. That’s all I know. Even now, Stan has no internet presence, no “mutual friends” and no prison record I could find.

He’s just out there… a lifelong runaway.

Maybe.

I drive that Sloss Furnace bridge almost every day… early mornings from my house in Crestwood to Station 21 in Titusville, and the next day going home. And the wrong song will come on the radio or the wrong thoughts will take over my mind and I’ll see Stan… see him skating into the void between an Alabama sky and the buildings downtown. No lesson learned, no empathy no sympathy no cautionary tale, just a forever runaway living in the crawlspace of my memory.

And man, that Sloss Furnace Bridge goes on for forever.

“Nothing but the blue sky in his eyes. Still, compared to those a stone’s throw away from here, our lives have been relatively easy.” — Jason Isbell