Eight Feet Deep

Yes­ter­day I was think­ing wist­fully about my younger days when I was sta­tioned on the Mis­sis­sippi Gulf Coast. I got to think­ing par­tic­u­larly about this old guy I knew who owned a cou­ple of bars my friends and I would fre­quent. This old fel­low is surely dead by now, or so I’d think as this was 30-something years ago and at least he seemed to be some­what long in the tooth, but not want­ing to take chances I will just call him “Ben.”

Ben was by all accounts a bookie. This was back before the Mis­sis­sippi Sound was invaded by casi­nos. I say he was a bookie. I had no proof back then, just hearsay and cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence. The lat­ter came from my watch­ing these shady-looking guys walk­ing in and out of Ben’s office at all hours with rac­ing forms in their hands.

One time I remem­ber Ben hold­ing forth at the bar. I think one of his bar­tenders was off. He bragged to a bunch of us how the FBI had tried but failed to catch him although he didn’t elab­o­rate. It just so hap­pens that yes­ter­day while think­ing about this guy I came across some kind of legal case that involved him. The best I can tell it was some kind of for­fei­ture suit the FBI had against Ben in the early 1970s in which they had seized some kind of machines includ­ing those for pin­ball that had allegedly been used for gam­bling. The best I could tell through the legal-speak, the feds lost. I don’t know if that was what Ben was talk­ing about, but this unex­pected find cer­tainly seemed to pro­vide some ammu­ni­tion for his bluster.

Ben would not be the last out­law I knew. I shared a room once in a bar­racks there in Mis­sis­sippi with a guy who got busted for going out on an armed rob­bery spree one night with one of his friends. There were oth­ers I knew who took a walk on the crim­i­nal side.

For cer­tain out­laws, such as Ben and unlike my weirdo room­mate, it’s kind of easy to have an affin­ity. You grew up read­ing sto­ries like those about Robin Hood, you know, the benev­o­lent robber-type. Although unless you are anti-social, one doesn’t nor­mally think much of the out­laws who do enor­mous amounts of harm such as Bernie Mad­off or vio­lent creeps such as Char­lie Man­son. There are excep­tions though.

In ele­men­tary school one of my friends and I used to play “Bon­nie and Clyde.” I don’t think either one of us were actu­ally Bon­nie. I think had we thought it out a lit­tle bet­ter we would have actu­ally been play­ing “Clyde and Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.”

It took awhile to learn that Clyde Bar­row and Bon­nie Parker were also mur­der­ous, socio­pathic creeps although it was slow in com­ing to me. This was because where I grew up, in South­east Texas, some of the older folks still saw Bon­nie and Clyde some­what in terms of Depression-era Robin Hoods. Per­haps they were to some extent but the were still cold-blooded killers and bank robbers.

I sup­pose many mem­bers of soci­ety at large have a type of admi­ra­tion for cer­tain crooks, espe­cially those that show some sort of skill and intel­li­gence. What with the enter­tain­ment value that “dumb crim­i­nal” media have pre­sented in recent years, it seems the smart ones seem even less and less among us these days.

I’ve thought long and hard about crime and pun­ish­ment. I fig­ure that moral­ity has played some part in keep­ing me on the straight and nar­row, and out of the slammer. But too I would have to say that fear of impris­on­ment has like­wise done its share to deter me from a life of crime.

My title is really more a play on words of the old Willie Nel­son song (It’s always about Willie, for me, isn”t it?) “My Heroes Have Always Been Cow­boys.” But at least in some cir­cum­stances there is a lit­tle fire pop­ping through the smoke.