…bad day for a pump jockey; the beginning of the fall from grace and everything else…
By: Thomas Krawford
Tags: Queer, LGBTQ, Mental Health, Autism, Mental Illness

a picture of the author staring down the maul of a long metal hollow.

By Thomas E. Krawford Jr.

It was Sunday evening, December 20, 2020. The Custodian, Our Custodian; the same one we have come to know well enough across the preceding installments of this overall narrative experiment; was watching Van Ryan’s Express on Apple T.V. For our Custodian, that is not what is significant here. Nor is it of any importance that this motion picture was one of his recently deceased Father’s favorite films, recent in the sense that his estranged father had died on or about Labor Day of the past year before writing this text. What is significant is that Our Custodian did not remember buying this film!

Not at all. Did he wake up in the middle of the night, walking in his sleep as it were, but instead of going anywhere, open his iPhone, pay for, then download to the cloud, Van Ryan’s Express?

To this day, he has no recollection of buying the film, and yet, there it was; sometime in late September or early October when he discovered it; improbable, unlikely, and nevertheless, undeniably Van Ryan’s Express; one of his late Father’s favorite movies. It was on his Apple Id account of recent purchases, and he had no idea of how it got there.

To be brief, the movie, starring Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard, tells the World War Two adventure of how a captured U.S. Army Air Force colonel led a daring escape from an Italian prisoner of war camp; moving through German-occupied Italy at the time; with four hundred men in tow; having to at some point, take control of a train that, otherwise would’ve taken them to their most probable collective deaths; only to ultimately sacrifice his own life so that the men he led, could be free; or at the very least, have a chance at freedom.

In retrospect; considering how Our Custodian’s father was also a prisoner of war in the Korean Conflict; it may be easy to understand, from our perspective here in 2020 Ann Arbor, how this motion picture could’ve easily been one of his Father’s favorites; but what does all this have to do with a bad day for a pump jockey; an incident that happened, for our protagonist, many, many years before the writing of this narrative; as well as many years after his father escaped a POW camp somewhere in the frozen hills of 1950’s North Korea.

It has something to do with the concept of “getting away with something.”

It was a concept that lullabied our Custodian to sleep that first night he began writing this particular installment; even as his smart t.v. was smart enough to turn itself off long after he had both stopped writing and laid down to rest on that crazy bed of his; a futon piled on top of the remaining detritus of his circuitous path of seven or more years since earning his master’s degree in Communications and Theatre Arts, of course; with an emphasis in Oral Interpretation and Performance Studies.

Need we say anything more?

At any rate, Our Custodian carried that thought with him on through to the next day, the thought of getting away with something, as something both intriguing and frightening him.

It frightened him; as the shadows descended in the hallways on his floor, showing the floor officially closed due to university-wide holiday closing protocols well set up for custodial staff. The sudden stillness prompted him to put in for a vacation request for the following day; yet it also frightened him as he feared that his own base and basic human nature; like taking fifty returnables back, instead of the allotted forty; would get the better of him if he were not careful.

In other words, getting away with things scared the hell out of him; sometimes, that is, but it does for everybody at one point or another.

Yet, the thought also intrigued him; in so far as that Major Ryan, in the film, got away with a plan that potentially saved the lives of four hundred or so of the men he led; even at the cost of his own; while with Our Custodian friend, his current sense of guilt, came from a much deeper spring well; a sense of necessity and dread; one that goes all the way back to that day when Our Custodian, as a young man, saw Mark Thompkins casually driving Our Young Man’s car; parking it at his, then place of employment; the gas station where he worked; nonchalantly exiting the driver’s seat while flashing a well-placed knife in its leather scabbard; a site only Our Young Man could’ve seen; beckoning Our Young Man to get in; for he had a deal to propose; one that Thompkins must’ve felt at the time was something Our Young Friend back then, couldn’t or wouldn’t turn down; even though Thompkins had taken the car without Our Hapless Young Friend’s permission.

However, something happened in the mind of Our Young Man back then. It may have been the proverbial final limit, the last bullshit of way too much bullshit in those days of drugs and wannabe gangsters in a town like the Bloomfield Hills of 1979. Instead of climbing into the driver’s seat to hear whatever explanation Thompkins had prepared, Our Young Man began pummeling Thompkins even as he settled back in his seat, sure he had done nothing seriously wrong.

“You take my car without my permission and then show up, flashing a knife at me,” Our Young Pump Jockey thundered as he rained both his fists down upon his unsuspecting and potential lover’s head and face, only then realizing Thompkins was not alone. He had brought with him a guy; someone, Our Friend, had never met before, “With another man, in my seat‼?” he may have said to himself, “I don’t know who the hell he thinks he is.”

“Get the hell out of my car, both of you, now,” he demanded out loud, all the while not realizing that everyone at work, his co-workers, his boss, and owners, had seen everything, or at least everything they thought they saw.

After Thompkins and whomever that guy was, had shuffled away, his friends at work came up to him to try and figure out just what had happened.

“That was my brother,” Our Guy said; knowing it was a lie, but also knowing he could not tell them the truth; not at that time; but what was the truth, for then in the late winter of 1979; and even for now, in the early winter of 2020?

For now, here in 2020, Our Custodian must admit his bisexuality freely. He also must acknowledge that his bisexuality puts him squarely on the fence of not being gay enough for a few and way too gay for others, both then and now. Yet far from being the strength LGTBQ identity is today, strength was not synonymous with anything Queer-related back then.

In the Bloomfield Hills of 1979, being outwardly gay or bisexual was simply out of the question. Back then, when a man showed up at your place of work with another man sitting next to him in the passenger seat of Your car; a car that was where it was when you got to work, and people you knew back then knew you had parked it there; and how the very same car they had seen you park, no less than a few hours beforehand; had somehow disappeared during the early course of your shift.

You have very few choices about how to respond when those two vastly different worlds; the world of a straight gas pump jockey and the world of a would-be slut to a drug store cowboy; wannabe gangster; collide and had to look like a brother-to-brother conflict and nothing else.

Otherwise, calamity could result. If the truth came out, and full-ride scholarships, provincially offered at the time by schools such as Ferris State College, could go away. Hence the phrase: getting away with something. In Our Young Man’s situation in the Bloomfield Hills of 1979, getting away with something meant many things. From our perspective, here in 2020 of Ann Arbor, Michigan, however, we must ask ourselves, as the title suggests: is this the beginning of a long fall from grace, indeed, a bad day for a pump jockey?

So, what else was he thinking when he first told his friends at work that Thompkins was his brother, alluding to more of a family dispute scenario than anything else. What if Our Young Man back then did not know how he could explain his actions; how could he justify any association with someone peddling drugs in high schools and at parties in the first place? How could he explain how such a person ever got the keys to his car; account for anything such a person did while driving his car; or confirm whether Thompkins used his car to buy or sell drugs. At the time, he had to assume the worse; but what was he going to do?

Fall, and that is what he did.

At the end of the day, what else could he do when he wanted that full athletic scholarship to attend Ferris State the following Fall, even though he may have had the wrong reasons for wanting to go to college?

The wrong reasons? Yes.

We can assume that people want to go to college to start that journey to make their mark in the world. Sometimes the journey is long; sometimes, it is exceptionally long. In Our Young Black Man’s case, however, we cannot say that making his mark in the world was the first thing on his mind back then. Or can we? What if we look at his story as an escape narrative, but escape from what and to what end? Certainly not exactly like Major Ryan's character in the motion picture Van Ryan’s Express, but like Major Ryan, any thought of freedom is always worth whatever fall it takes; to achieve that end.

Our Young Man will finally tell his employers the truth in our next installment, and he will lose his job. He will keep his scholarship but narrowly graduate high school. He will wreck his car; not knowing where it had been; not wanting whatever consequences to ruin his life or the lives of his sister and her friends, who were all implicated and associated with Mark Thompkins. At least, that is what he told himself.

We will see how things deteriorated, primarily in his home, sliding down from his senior prom night to that meeting between himself, his mother, and a psychiatric social worker assigned to their case. Finally, we will see Our Young Man at Ferris State College; and it is from there we will see how he finally got away with something; how he got away with getting lost; all the way down from grace to confusion; finally to a ditch across from 1451 East Big Beaver Road; the location of the Clawson-Troy Elks Club at the time, the South Eastern Michigan of 1981.

See you there.

The same picture as before, except now, it shimmers as if seen through water.

(continued)