Deader Yet: A Mike Dodge Story Within a Story Within a Story

“Yeah, I remember the little asshole.”

It wouldn’t have won me a Pulitzer or a National Book Award or even 112^th Place in the Bad Hemingway Contest, which ended in 2005.

But it was enough of an opener for the half-dozen or so writers left in the Press Room to turn from their late afternoon deadlines, and for a couple to grab a now-lukewarm Coke and join Rich Hawksley and I at the table.

This was a year after United Airlines stopped underwriting bad Hemingway, and the National Agricultural Federation Annual Policy and Bad Motivational Speakers Conference was in St. Louis. Tonight’s BMS was a cowboy humorist the Post-Dispatch had dubbed “the poor man’s Larry the Cable Guy,” and downtown St. Louis on a weeknight had the sophisticated metro élan of the original Larry the Cable Guy. It was a great night to ride the escalator to the lobby for some white-linen corporate expense abuse with a colleague on an Arby’s per diem, then haul my weary ass back up the moving stairway to Heaven and free HBO.

But first, a story.

A Saturday Night in 1981

“Hey, Mike?”

Those two words, delivered with convivial chill during morning deadline by Gilbert Thursby, never failed to get my duodenum gurgling. I wouldn’t realize it for nearly 35 years, but Gil was a walking audition for Mad Men. Immaculately orchestrated thatch of thick silver, impeccable suit from the Bell Bros. downtown where the local oil and egg execs and surgeons and the same three lawyers brought trou.

A cigarette permanently welded between his fingers , and yet through the blue haze, Gil always smelled like something masculinely floral you couldn’t get at Goldwyn’s Drugs or the K-Mart near the truck stop.

“Just got a call from the Hofmeisters,” Gil smiled with a quick puff. Name didn’t click. “Turns out the kid’s not dead after all.”

The name clicked.

“God,” I said.

“Ah, happens,” Gil murmured, waving recriminations away in a menthol cloud. “Folks aren’t upset or anything. Just want a correction. Obit came in yesterday morning?”

“Kittleson and Calhoun called it in. Or somebody claimed to be from Kittleson and Calhoun.”

Somewhere in the warehouse behind the pressroom there were eight to 100 palettes of Chesley Daily Tribune obit forms printed probably in 1929. Jason Kittleson or Rex Peabody from Chesley Mortuary once hand-delivered every death notice, but of late, they’d discovered the convenience of modern pushbutton telecoms.

“The guy knew the drill. The tone was perfect…” I paused. “God, I thought he was like an intern or a second-generation Kittleson or something. You think some kid had it out for Gary?” I paused again.

“Like I said, the parents aren’t blaming you or the paper,” Gil stressed. He smiled fondly, wreathed in tar and nicotine. “Teenagers. According to the dad, he wanted to get out of his drive-in shift to hang out with his buddies at the Oktoberfest. Really dumb plan, but admirable execution.”

“I’m going to kill the little bastard,” I growled.

“Little late for THAT,” Richie suggested from across the aisle.

**

Richie offered to commiserate over biscuits and gravy at the truck stop. I told him to order me double, with American fries, and I’d be there shortly.

“Gonna do it anyway, huh?” my buddy mused.

“My goof,” I shrugged. “Maybe I can make the little bastard feel like a piece of shit, too.”

“There’s that Lou Grant spirit.”

“So I’m really, really sorry I pulled such a dumb, irresponsible stunt,” Gary Hofmeister mumbled, clearly on-script under parental supervision but adding extra adverbs in a passive-aggressive adolescent code. “I’m very, very sorry if I caused you guys any inconvenience or embarrassment.”

Eat a shit sandwich, Gary. “We all make mistakes. Part of growing up.” At 16 and 23 respectively, it was a little like a kindergartner teaching potty to a toddler. “I really, REALLY appreciate your apology.”

Just that millisecond of silence on the other end made the biscuits and gravy slide down easier.

**

I’d taken 2-to-5 at the Chesley Oktoberfest tenderloin booth. I’d once suggested beating the suckers just a little flatter and throwing on some red cabbage and a lemon slice, but my Kiwanians deemed schnitzel a bit daunting for the great-grandkids of German immigrants grooving on oompah and chicken-dancing in leather pants.

As for me, I’d already chased my B&G with some fry bread and chili in front of Bell Bros., and when I clocked out, there’d be a couple bratwurst with my name seared into their casings. It was Saturday night in small-town Indiana, I was an overweight college boy in a low-pay gray-collar gig, and I’d felt the first Amityville Horror had said everything there was to say on the subject, even with the third enthralling installment of Friday the 13^th bringing up the rear. Bring the oompah, bring the noise.

“I’d have taken the little jerk behind the woodshed,” Eldon from the Thirsty Lion grunted, slapping a sizzling fritter onto a past-due bun. Eldon was almost always proposing mayhem toward others, but as the new kid in the booth, it was kinda validating to have the locals turn on each other for me. “Buck fifty, kid,” he barked at a teen who ‘til that moment had been trying to impress his girl. “Hey, kid, they don’t teach you to tell a nickel from a quarter! I said, a dollar and fifty cents.” The couple fled.

“Say, Eldon,” Jason Kittleson called casually. “I’ve cremated three of these things already. Think maybe the grease is bad. You’re the restaurateur – why don’t I take the counter for a while?”

“You couldn’t make toast – lemme in there,” the restaurateur muttered, elbowing the lanky undertaker aside. Kittleson grinned as he joined me – he was a cheerful sort for somebody who dealt daily in death. “Eldon takes the German thing a little far sometimes. Think maybe Dad winged him at Normandy – might explain his disposition.” He peered out over the bustling Center Street as accordions and brass blazed on next to the library. “Say, heard we both caught a live one today.”

Hoped vainly it wouldn’t come up. “Yeah, I know – I could kick myself.”

“Nah. Not the first time, won’t be the last – you ask that that editor of yours, and he might have a few embarrassing stories to share.”

“I think I probably won’t,” I suggested, as I turned to the lederhosen-ed fire chief and his double-fisted order. Jason processed his payment like he was transacting a graveside honorarium.  

“I’m surprised YOU’RE not a little pi--, ticked off about this,” I said as the chief trundled back off toward the stage. Jason smirked.

“Welll, to be frank, I’ve buried all four of the boy’s grandparents over the past three years, last one a few months back. Point, I suppose, is that there’s no economic or personal sense to raising a row about a tasteless teen prank. I can’t imagine The Moonglow keeping him on after this, and he probably won’t be able to get another job beyond a paper route. Oh, wait.” He laughed, and I couldn’t help but join him.

“Probably have let him go soon, anyway. I don’t know how they’ve kept open THIS long. One of the last drive-ins around these parts, and you been out there on a Saturday night lately? A scattering of high school kids with overactive hormones and weird out-of-towners who think it’s some kind of cool touristy ‘thing.’ County assessor told me there’s no way they can be turning a decent buck, but they wouldn’t budge when the Farm N Freight distribution facility folks came sniffing around – not even that big undeveloped thicket behind the place. Said they didn’t want to snarl up the weekend movie traffic by having something go in next door.

“And you know what? Though I probably haven’t seen a good movie since True Grit, I’d kinda hate to see them level the place. So many Saturday nights for so many folks in town. Kind of a reminder of better times.” 

“When I was a kid in Terre Haute, my folks would take us to the North or the Corral almost every weekend summers,” I recalled. “They were world-class cheapskates, but admission was cheaper than the downtown theaters. We’d play on the swings ‘til the previews started, and Mom would smuggle a big grocery sack full of popcorn in in the trunk. To this day, the sound of crunching gavel makes me salivate for popcorn and overcooked hotdogs.”

The mortician chuckled.

A Saturday Night in 1961

When I was 17 (Jason Kittleson began), me and my pals decided we just HAD to go see Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Pretty tame stuff you look at the trash they got out now, but it was a small town -- some of the religious folks had been after The Moonglow since it’d opened in ’54, lot of the local construction folks were ticked the Enrights had hired out-of-town contractors to build the thing, and a lot of parents were dead-set against their kids seeing the kind of “lurid” garbage they showed.

Terry Watters’ folks were Southern Baptists, and he didn’t even want to be seen with us that night. Not to mention Terry was one body over the Moonglow’s maximum per-car occupancy limit. So I cleared out the trunk of the Thunderbird and left it unlatched so he could just hide out ‘til we made it through the gate. Thing is, Terry was a friend of a friend’s buddy, so we didn’t really know each other that well.

That afternoon, I’d had a few errands to run for Dad, and I was running a little late. When I got finally got in, Mom and Dad were getting ready for a lodge dinner in Columbus. I was getting antsy – the folks were running late, too, and I was afraid they’d catch Terry sneaking into the trunk. But they finally loaded into the Bel Air and hit the road for the Eagles, you know, next to The Crump Theater. And then I waited the next half-hour for Terry to show. When he didn’t, I picked the rest of the guys up, gave Howard Cleary heck for his pal probably losing us a good spot.

Movie itself was no great shakes, and about halfway through, one of the fellows wound up throwing up all over the back seat. Howard knew a kid in the concession stand who dug around in the ‘cellar’ and found us some stuff to clean up enough for a very unpleasant trip back to my house to finish the job.

The folks didn’t get home ‘til about midnight, Dad was fit to be tied. While they were at the banquet, somebody’d tried to rob the Bel Air. Trunk was popped – somebody’d pried it open and busted the latch, and left it sitting there wide open on the street. Nothing stolen, and the insurance took care of the repairs, but Dad went on and on about “rampant crime and juvenile delinquency” in the bustling metropolis of Columbus, Indiana.

It was about two weeks before I caught up with Terry, and it all came out. Since he didn’t want to miss out on the movie, he told his folks some cockamamie tale about a double-header down at the Chesley Creek ballpark, and came over to the house a half-hour early. I wasn’t home yet, and he mistakenly crawled into the Bel Air’s trunk – you remember how big those old boats used to be, and wound up grabbing a few winks. Time he woke up, my folks were pulling in at the Elks. Terry thought he should stay quiet ‘til we called the coast clear, but when nobody did after about 10 minutes, he started banging on the backseat and the trunk. Guess he panicked, ‘cause he broke the emergency release. Terry figures he better just hotfoot it out of there before somebody calls the cops on him or he has to explain to my folks why he’d stowed away for an evening of bad chicken and worse speeches. He’d finally called one of his cousins with the Columbus Street Department to catch a ride home.

After midnight?, I asked him. What route did you take? By way of CincinnatI?

Well, Terry told me, I was a block from The Crump, and they were playing Curse of The Werewolf, so I figured since I was going to be in dutch, anyway…

**

“What’s the old saying?” Kittleson mused, handing his apron off to Jim the Hoosierland Title guy. “In for a penny, in for a pound? Especially when Terry figured he wasn’t going back to the movies any time soon.”

I nodded to the third shifters and followed the undertaker onto the now-packed Center Street.

“You weigh the costs against the benefits,” Kittleson concluded above the Bavarian racket. “Do I make a federal case out of some damn fool kid getting one over on me? As for the dignity of Kittleson and Calhoun, Dad once told me, ‘A doctor makes a mistake, people die. We make one, somebody probably didn’t.’ End of story.”

A Monday Night in 2007

“For me, anyway,” I chagrinned as I scooped the check from under Rich Hawksley’s outstretched fingers and waved away Tim’s tip offer. “It was a good lesson in due diligence and a cautionary tale for the Little Leaguers.”

“Plus, the Trib instituted a new verification obituary procedure,” my former colleague beamed, scooping the last creme from his brulee. “I suggested they call it the Dodge Protocol.”

I discreetly flipped him off as I extracted the work VISA.

“What happened to the kid?” Tim inquired. “You said it was the end of the story for you.”

I shrugged. “I mean, I THOUGHT about it once in a while. There was something so well-executed but so pathetically lame-brained about the little asshole’s prank. How could Gary possibly expect to keep his job at the drive-in without massive fallout from his parents? And that phone apology he gave me? I knew his folks were standing right there as Gary offered his snarky contrition, but not a word or a prompt from them? The more I chewed it over the years, the more it all seemed contrived.

“But who’d benefit? What was the actual outcome of Gary’s stunt? He lost his job at The Moonglow in the most public, high-profile manner possible. You know, I was a doorman at the mall cinema most of my sophomore through senior years at Indiana State. Free movies, free concessions – it was a suh-weet gig for a teenager. So I got to wondering, just once in a while, if there was a reason he blew this job for such a stupid reason, and if maybe his dad, who’d spent a lot of time recently at Kittleson and Calhoun’s funeral home, hadn’t come up with this plan to safely ‘extract’ him from the situation.”

Tim leaned in. “What situation?”

“You ever heard of the Cornbread Mafia?” Richie asked.

**

Columbus Republic, August 13, 1990

Southern Indiana operation linked to ‘Cornbread Mafia’

By Philip Goodrich

CHESLEY, Indiana -- Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Illinois State Police narcotics detectives last night converged on a Chesley drive-in theater that reportedly had served as a key marijuana production, processing, and distribution point for the Kentucky-based ‘Cornbread Mafia’ for nearly a decade.

DEA agents report uncovering nearly three acres of cannabis production concealed by the woodlands to the south of The Moonglow drive-in.  

Federal prosecutors coined the term "Cornbread Mafia" in June 1989 following the result of 70 men for organizing a well-financed pot trafficking ring extending to some 30 farms in 10 states from the Southeast into the Midwest. In 1979, amid increased pressure from Indiana law enforcement authorities and flagging revenues for the 35-year-old Greenway County drive-in, Moonglow owners Bill and Connie Enright allegedly entered into an agreement with the Central Kentucky organization.

The Enrights had continued to operate the once-popular regional drive-in on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, focusing drug operations during the rest of the week while using the outdoor theater as a distribution point under cover of customer traffic.

**

“The Enrights had an ideal setup,” I said. “Kittleson was sort of right – The Moonglow was a reminder of a different time. The Atomic Age, the Cold War, irradiated dinosaurs and tarantulas and scantily clad Amazons, third grade duck-and-cover drills.

“One of the things that had always struck me about The Moonglow was the snack bar. Tiny thing compared to the drive-ins I’d frequented as a kid, just a tad larger than the projection booth. You couldn’t shut the screen door if you had a decent Labor Day Weekend crowd. But they had a cellar? A modest backroom storage area would seem, at least to me, to make more sense.

“So I get that you probably had to hire special folks to mount those gigantic screens and wire the audio systems. But not to throw a bone to some of the local businesses? Maybe because Bill and Connie Enright’s drive-in blueprint included something they didn’t care to advertise in 1955, at the height of the postwar panic. There was a Fort Wayne realtor, J.L. Haverstock, who made a sideline out of building family fallout shelters at the time, and I wondered if our young Atomic Age entrepreneurs didn’t see the value of building a safe space for customers in case the Soviets launched a big one during It Came From Outer Space, or maybe a safe rent-a-space should things heat up.

“Once the Bay of Pigs fizzled and the writing seemed to be on the Wall, they converted the space for storage. And then as the drive-in started to die off, they saw new opportunities. Opportunities future entrepreneurs might have if State Sen. Hofmeister’s pot legalization bill goes through.”

“It was quite a story,” Richie nodded with a tinge of regret.

“But not ours.”