Maybe there aren't a million stories in Podunk City, but as Joe Friday used to say before he doctored up “the facts, ma'am,” names surely must be changed to protect my own ass from the good, the bad, and the ignorant.
Fifty years ago in the '70s, John moved to town. He was part of two families that came and moved in together. They challenged the prevailing Podunk idea of appropriate moral behavior. Both families had children, and at some point the couples agreed to switch things up, check out the pasture on the other side of the marital fence. That worked out great for one pair, but went nowhere for the other. So John became his own “Nowhere man.” He was all of a sudden a free agent, a man who needed a new plan. He was always an idea man looking for backers. The younger kids went with their mom and his old friend, her new man. The older ones stayed with John and learned how to look out for themselves.
He took odd jobs, nothing steady, and returned to New York a few times. He was an electrician by trade. But the trips stopped after awhile, and rumor had it both the state and feds were after him for unpaid taxes. One day he was visited by two men in black suits, handcuffed, and taken away in a federal vehicle. The older kids stayed with their mom and John's girlfriend who would soon become his third wife. He returned within a year, and I never heard what happened, but John was a free man.
People talk in small towns, and some folks called John a con artist. Some simply saw him as an opportunist. There was no question that he was a survivor, someone determined to get by in this capitalist life without signing on to be a wage slave. And he was a charmer. Those who painted him as a sneaky money-grubber found it hard to explain his generosity. John would give you the shirt off his back that most likely someone else had given to him. He really was just trying to get by and get along. He suffered off and on from depression. Often he'd disappear for days on end, then show up a week later all cheery again. Or he'd go on a bender. Of course that cure only worked in the short-term. Those sprees were often followed by the dark days. I know that country. I've seen it and experienced it. It's not a fun place to be, but it is what it is and I liked his philosophy. When he was up, he was way up, Mr. happy-go-lucky, everybody's friend, but when he was down, it was the bottomless pit. And since he knew that drinking only made things worse (as fun as it was) John swore off the booze for long stretches, months at a time.
In the late 70s a California kid whose wealthy dad had bought a prime spot above Hole-in-the-Wall Lodge for his seasonal/recreational cabin decided to stay on in Montana, become a mountain man, a hunter and fisherman. He got a job tending bar at one of the two bars in town, and when one of the owners died in a car wreck driving home one night in a ground fog so thick he couldn't see the reflectors and got rear-ended by his friend who he'd been serving till he closed the bar, this California kid became an instant bar owner before he was twenty when his daddy bought him the deceased bar owner's share.
The kid loved being a bar owner, so his partner handed over the reins and became a silent co-owner. The bar became the kid's turf. He ran the show. And what a show it was in the late 70s and early 80s. Anyway, one night after this Cali-kid had gotten comfortable in his new role as a seasoned bar owner, John dropped in having fallen off the wagon and proceeded to crank up his super-drunk clown routine, amped up too loud, goofing around, pester-crazy and bugging the shit out of anyone who'd let him. So this new 22 year old bar owner who also happened to be named John decided he needed to handle this situation and walked up to silly-drunk, obnoxiously loud Old-John and told him to knock it off or he’d throw him out. Of course you know goofy-drunk Joe mocked him and refused to go, so California Joe nailed him three times in the face, the third punch landing when John was halfway to the floor. Given a quart or so of whiskey in him and giving away 20some years, John went down like a demolition, almost broke his ankle.
After I'd heard about the incident, I went to see how he was doing on the weekend and ran into a couple of railroaders I knew who decided to go with me. Hank and Robby were a pair to draw to, a couple of Flat Bush boys known far and wide for their exploits regarding sex and drugs and more than a few altercations. John hollered to come on in when we knocked. He was on the couch, his eyes were swollen shut, and his ankle, elevated on a pillow on the coffee table, resembled a purple football. When we asked him what happened, John smiled, said he couldn't really remember, but he figured that maybe the kid was pissed because John had the same name. We laughed at his joke. He made light of it, as if he deserved what he got. It sure didn't look that way. And after hearing the story from others who were there, all my friends pretty much came to the conclusion that the punk-son-of-a-bitch took advantage of blind-drunk Joe, the way bullies do when they see an opportunity and want to show the world how tough they are. I remember Robby laughing and saying, “Karma's a bitch, man! One good turn deserves another!” and I could see the wheels turning in Hank's head. His expression was sort of a smile when he responded to Robby, “Yeah, I guess one John's pleasure is another John's pain,” but his eyes didn't smile. I wondered what he thought, and if he might do something about the incident or say something to the kid to provoke a fight. Hank never tipped his hand until he was ready.
One of Cali-John-the-kid's bar buddies was Big Bill, an old logger who'd turn into a mean drunk after so many drinks, a bully drunk, the way a lot of guys get. Anyway, just to illustrate how much fun Little John and Big Bill could be when they put their heads together, there was this mean, barking dog across the street from Bill's place, and nobody liked the dog except his owner, TV Mike, who had trained the fucking-crazy dog to guard his property. So one night after Cali-John and Bill had been drinking all night, they came up with the idea to dognap and kill that worthless mutt. They broke into TV Mike's house when he wasn't home, baited and took the dog, then killed it. That's the kind of good, clean fun those boys could cook up on a drunken roll.
Anyway, a week or so after Johnny the Kid put a head on our pal, Old John, Hank dropped into the bar one quiet night when Big Bill was in there alone and halfway into his cups. Hank bought a couple rounds before he proceeded to goad Bill into a fight which wasn't too hard. Hank invited Bill to step outside and teach him a lesson in manners and respecting his elders. Thoroughly pissed, Bill lunged after Hank into the street where Hank pounded the shit out of him. Hank was a good ten to fifteen years younger, mostly sober, and nobody to fuck with at any time, particularly when he’d set his mind to sending a message . He gave Bill the kind of whupping he believed young Cali-John would understand. It seemed like a comparable way of evening the score and providing a community service. Hank was an intelligent outlaw, even a scientist of sorts, out to prove his social retribution hypothesis: for every action, there is an opposite and (for the most part) equal reaction. Some may have seen it as a vigilante move, but Hank was no Joe Friday, no stickler for the letter of the law. He was more of a Butch Cassidy man, that amiable outlaw willing to help out when he could. He believed that the administration of justice was often best handled privately. It a personal and philosophical thing with him, a kind of Flat Bush/Butte justice.
Hank was not a man to quote John Donne, but Donne’s poem, “No Man is an Island,” comes to my mind when I think about Hank and his view of life:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
. . . any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. No man is an island. Hank lived by the concepts of brotherhood and fair play. Hemingway and Martin Luther King, Jr both knew that injustice for any “one” meant injustice for all. A piece of us dies when the bell tolls. We are all diminished by the abuse of one of us. Maybe Donne's language or poem was a bit highfalutin for most folks in a little two-bar town like Podunk, but we all knew the price of ignoring bullies. Hank, like Gary Cooper in the role of the sheriff in High Noon, picked up the tab on that one, did a community service, and then in his Paul Newman, Butch Cassidy / Cool Hand Luke charming way, winked and flashed that boyish grin, said, “this one’s on me, my treat.”