Early Lessons on the Homefront

I was three years old when I met Charlie Mason. It was early evening, down near the corner of Gulley Road and Fairway Street, several houses beyond the point my parents told me not to go. He was a dark-haired boy, about five years old, with a voice and a smile that made me want to be his friend. And he wanted to be my friend. He told me so. He told me his name and asked me mine. Then he said, “Roger, you and I are going to be good friends!”

We had just moved to South Gulley Road (or just “Gulley,” as we called it) a few months earlier on February 13th, my third birthday. Gulley was a two-lane street, the dividing line between Dearborn and Inkster. We lived on the Dearborn side, in a new home in a new subdivision. The first day I entered our new house my big sister Michael took me by the hand and led me up and down the hallway showing me the bathroom, the linen closet, and the room where my brother Stephen and I would sleep. It was a simple three-bedroom ranch house with a large basement and a big back yard. I don’t remember anything else until that first warm pleasant evening I met Charlie. He was the first sociopath I ever met.

“Roger, you and I are going to be really good friends,” he repeated. This was great. I knew the word “friend” but I don’t think I’d had one before. A friend was someone who wasn’t your brother or sister, who smiled at you, and played with you.

“But there’s just one thing I want you to do for me,” Charlie said. I beamed at him waiting for his next words. “I want you to bend over and stretch your arms way back between your knees.” It didn't seem unreasonable. He’s my friend.

I bent down and reached my little arms between my knees and waited. “Will he spank me?” I wondered. He grabbed my hands and pulled them hard.

My parents say that a neighbor found me stumbling slowly back toward my house. I don’t remember that. I think I was crying, and I do remember being rushed to the hospital. “Rushed to the hospital” was a new phrase for me, one to be repeated many times during my youth along with “take him to Oakwood,” the name of the hospital where I was born. I remember throwing up five times on the way to Oakwood. I remember doctors and bright lights and throwing up more.

I don’t remember much after that. I don’t think my parents called the police. I’m not sure whether they really grasped what happened to me. Maybe they thought it was simple kid roughhousing. I mean, I don’t remember Charlie or the Mason family being called to task for my concussion. It wouldn’t have mattered. The Masons, as I learned over the next few years, were a bad family. Sometime during the days following this event, our neighbor across the back yard, fence, Mr. Kotlarczyk, gave my dad and me some stern words of advice—“keep away from Charlie Mason.”

Next: My neighborhood