Story #2: Larry
Over the next four years I was arrested 23 more times and sent up to reform school four more times. My last reform school stop was at St Croix Forestry Camp located about 20 miles east of a town called Sandstone deep in the woods of northern Minnesota. It was the last reform school stop on the train to prison, and exponentially scarier than Glen Lake.
I was delivered to the camp in a green unmarked van along with one other kid. Although I had managed to exit the nude mouse stage of my physiologic development, I was no budding Jack LaLaine. I was rail thin, frighteningly pale white, completely devoid of useful fighting skills, and petrified.
Plus, I was (and still am) a city kid. My world was contained in a small, two-mile square section of south Minneapolis. Fishing was something I tried once as a kid at Lake Calhoun in the city when I barely managed to catch a sun fish with a worm on a hook. To this day the idea of sitting in a boat with bugs flying around while sadistically threading a sticky, dirt-laden worm onto a hook leaves me cold. The only part I enjoyed was ensuring a perfect threading of the worm straight down its middle so its body covered the length of the hook perfectly (a premonition to my obsession with dishwasher organization?).
And now I found myself being hauled away from my little section of Minneapolis in a van 100 miles outside of Minneapolis and 20 miles deep into the woods.
The place had two buildings. One that housed the cafeteria and the "school."
I put "school" in parentheses because the couple of hours spent in "class" in the mornings were a joke, and the only teacher was an old guy with matted grey hair that looked like it had been slept on for weeks and whose eyebrows, nose, and ears had thick wads of long hairs that looked like the unattended patches of grass that sprout up in the cracks of a sidewalk.
Plus, he had a sense of humor of a 5-year-old, trying to convince me that it was critical to not let one of the millions of deer flies buzzing around outside (I do mean millions - living hell) get up in my nose at night or it would lay eggs inside my warm moist nasal tunnel and once hatched, they would burrow into my brain. Though I doubted such a thing, being a total city boy and naive as hell, there was a persistent nagging doubt.
The other building is this cement brick structure that had a common area and two dorms.
Inside the common area is the "office" where the camp "counselors" kept watch over us. I put counselors in quotations because the men were local guys whose only job was to keep us in line and to move us like cattle
We all slept in one of two dorms. Each big dorm room was lined with metal bunk beds in rows along each wall.
St Croix Forestry Camp was a Minnesota state-run reform school, and shortly after my arrival, I was delighted to learn that we inmates could buy and smoke cigarettes at a small canteen in the school. I personally preferred Kools, but the limited selection at the camp forced me to adapt to Marlboros.
Being able to buy and smoke cigarettes was a privilege, and the privilege could be revoked by the powers that be for any misbehavior, by anyone, especially with any attempt to run away or escape. It was common knowledge that any escape attempt, whether successful or not, would lead to one week of no cigarettes, for everyone.
Just like at Glen Lake, there was a communal TV room area where we all gathered for our daily soporific, and it was there that I spotted Larry, the biggest kid in the place, and the one that everyone feared. Larry came from an Indian reservation somewhere in Minnesota, and he was a tall, ferociously handsome man (he seemed like a man to me) with jet-black hair and eyes that exuded control, intelligence, and seriousness, which lit up with intensity when he spoke. Bottom line: you didn't want to fuck with Larry.
My relentless curiosity and gregarious nature steered my actions once again, and I started to insert myself into the ambiance of his presence, one step at a time. This ability to approach and insert my presence was a natural and unplanned way that I did things, and still do, but somewhere along the way I began to understand the process I inherently used, and I became more conscious and intentional about enacting the protocol. With Larry, I think I was kind of in a grey zone between just following my natural instincts and intentionally noticing and connecting with him.
Like Leroy, Larry ended up taking a liking to me.
Then, another side of me reared its head; my willingness, or more like critical need, to try and do anything, no matter the risks or consequences. As my psychologist noted rather matter of fact like during one of our weekly sessions after my release from Hazelden: "you're quite impulsive." No shit! 🙄
My impetuousness reared its ugly head again when I initiated a scheme to run away with another Indian kid named Eddie. Like Larry, Eddie was a tall young man, but thin, and he was quiet and gullible, and I managed to convince him that we could simply follow the Kettle River to freedom. The dorm building was just up a small hill from the river, and I figured that following it would lead us to a road or a town, and we could then hitchhike.
The challenge? It was the middle of winter in northern Minnesota, the snow was almost waist-high deep, it was cold as hell, and being a city boy, I had no idea how to manage in nature, especially in the winter and in the woods.
Eddie committed to my plan: the guards walked through the dorms every few hours in the middle of the night aiming their flashlights at us tucked into our bunk beds, and around 2 am after their rounds we donned our boots, snow pants, and parkas and snuck out the window of the dorms bathroom, and headed off into the dark snowy wilderness of northern Minnesota.
Unlike the reform school grounds, where the snow was shoveled and not deep, the snow in the woods along the river came up to our waists, which meant that each step required one to pull one leg out of the deep snow, fling it forward, implant the leg into the snow, and repeat with the next leg.
Within one city block, our bodies were covered in a torrential downpour of sweat, we were breathing so hard that our mouths were puffing out plumes of humidified air like the smoke stack of a train, and our hearts were pounding against the back of our chests like cops pounding on the door of a place about to be raided.
But we trudged on, in the dark woods, listening to - no kidding - the wolves howling in the middle of the night. The wolf thing was something I had not anticipated, and despite the heat and sweat from grinding through the snow, my blood ran cold.
After what seemed like hours and miles (though more likely one to two miles and one to two hours), we were wiped out and decided to walk on the river where the snow didn't seem as deep. Eddie ventured out first, and immediately broke through the ice and landed waist deep in the freezing water. I helped pull him up onto the bank where he flopped down on his back and started bawling like a baby.
Then I heard the sound of a snowmobile. I was relieved, because I knew we were fucked anyway, and Eddie was a basket case. Within minutes, the guard came barreling up dressed in his parka with his fur rimmed hood and brandishing a firearm holstered around his waist. He grabbed me by the parka, shoved me on the snowmobile, did the same with Eddie, and I had my very first snowmobile ride back.
There were no consequences to me or Eddie individually for trying to run away, at least from the people who ran the camp. The real, and devastating, consequence was the loss of cigarette privileges for one week for the whole camp. No one could buy or smoke cigarettes for a whole week. We both walked back into the dorm feeling like colony lepers, as the quiet stares of contempt from our fellow inmates serving as Tarot cards of a future violent fate.
The violence usually took place in the dorm in the middle of the night when a cadre of enforcers would go to a bunk and accomplish their mission without the guards hearing a thing. My destiny that night awaited me in my bottom bunk bed.
Just before lights out, Larry came over to my bunk and summoned me to follow him into the bathroom. My legs were shaking like twigs in a windstorm, but I managed to tremble my way in behind him. Larry grabbed a white towel, put it in the sink, turned on the water, got it completely soaked, wrung it out good and tight and grabbed my shirt just below my chin, pulled me in within shooting range, and stared right into my eyes with those eyes of his and snarled "you ever gonna try and run away again you little shit?"
With a face filled with the terror of someone watching an exorcism, I shook my head vigorously back and forth while squeaking out the words "no, I promise, I swear to God Larry, I won't." Then he took the towel in his right hand and proceeded to whip my face back and forth, over and over, with the wet end of the towel until he was satisfied that I had learned my lesson. My cheeks were bright red, and they stung like hell, but it was a small price to avoid being beaten to a pulp.
Nothing happened to Eddie or me that night, perhaps because the guards were on red alert for trouble. I felt relief for both of us, but the relief was short-lived. After breakfast we were waking back to the dorm and as I entered the foyer (below) where we hung our winter gear, Larry grabbed my arm and pulled me into the next room. I stood there watching as Eddie walked in and was knocked to the ground by a gang of inmates who then picked him up and, while holding his arms behind his back, proceeded to take turns pummeling his face and body with their fists.
The very same guard who picked us up in the woods walked in on the violent movie scene and went ballistic. He grabbed each of the perpetrators, slammed them down on the ground and backhanded the one across the face who was administering the punishment. Eddie was beaten to near unconsciousness, and was taken to the hospital, and we never saw him again.
Larry saved me, from myself, big time.
