Jassy Melson
10-02-2012, 10:03 AM
It was late summer of 1972, and the last breath of the hippie phenomenon was at its height in Walden County, east Tennessee.
Sandy Reester was thirty-one years of age and he detested long hair on boys and was horrified at girls who wore jeans. He thought the boys were homos and the girls were whores.
Sandy was the Walden County Park Superintendent, and he took his job seriously. He wore a uniform of khaki and black boots. He even wore a holster with a gun (and unlike Barney Fife's, the gun was loaded). Sandy was quite paranoid.; he was convinced there was a conspiracy out to get him. But if one were to ask him why there was a conspiracy against him and of what the conspiracy consisted, he would have been at a loss to say.
The Walden County business fathers had grown quite alarmed by the summer of '72 at the increase in the number of long-haired males and jean-clad females gathering together. They thought it was bad for business. So they had passed the word down the chain of command: “We've got to stop all this congregating of young people.”
The police took it seriously and began breaking up groups of young people (regardless of the length of their hair or their dress).
Sandy Reester especially looked upon it as a grave matter of the utmost importance. (Somewhere in the back of his mind he fantasized that the long-haired males and the jean-clad females were intent on subverting the younger generation of Walden County; to what, he had no idea—he just looked upon them as a threat).
Sandy had a lot of hangups. One was his twisted way of looking at people. He had an ideal in his mind of how a male and female should look. Most of all, they should be well-groomed. It was an affront to him to see uncouth-looking males and girls.
No doubt, Sandy's background was responsible for a lot of his hangups and twisted thinking.
He had joined the army when he was seventeen and had served thirteen years. Then for a year he had been the assistant park superintendent. Then the superintendent had resigned a few months previously and Sandy had taken over the park management.
His experience of dealing with people was limited. He refused to see that everyone looked different, that there was no ideal way for a person to look.
There was something else about Sandy. He just couldn't understand why females—especially attractive ones—would dress in jeans and be attracted to hippies. To Sandy's way of thinking, he labeled all long-haired males; that is, males with thick hair to their ears or longer as hippies, dirty and drug users. And as somehow less than human. That's a harsh thing to say about anyone, but it was the truth. Sandy viewed long-haired males as low-lives and less than human.
There are psychological terms for the kind of person Sandy Reester was. But this is not a psychological treatise, so I will leave that to the psychologists.
Sandy's first confrontation with the hippies occurred when he spotted two males standing in the parking lot of the county park. One of them had hair down to his shoulders and a beard; the other had hair down to his neck and a thick mustache. Sandy almost grew sick with disgust from looking at them. They were standing facing each other and conversing. Sandy saw this as a dangerous situation and a major showdown, and somehow as a test of his manhood.
Sandy drove up in his pickup truck with a gun rack above and behind the seat with a loaded double-barrel shotgun occupying the rack, and a Park Superintendent logo painted in big letters on a big shield on the truck doors.
Without preamble, he said gruffly but with a high trembling voice: “Okay. You're going to have to break it up.”
What Sandy was unaware of was that the two males were brothers and they were discussing the upcoming quarter at Walden State Junior College which they both attended.
The brothers ignored Sandy and continued talking.
This infuriated Sandy. He had a gigantic inferiority complex, and to be ignored was just about the ultimate insult for him.
He opened the truck door, ready for a confrontation, but the brothers had slowly walked away toward a car.
With trembling limbs and a thumping heart, Sandy watched them leave the parking lot.
It's just a good thing they left, he thought.
Sandy's second confrontation with long-haired males and blue-jean-clad girls was much more serious than the first one.
He was driving his pickup around the park when he spotted a group of young people gathered around a picnic table. Most of them were long-haired males or jean-clad females.
Sandy's blood began to boil. There must have been a dozen of the low-lives sitting on the table or slouching around, he thought.
His fighting spirit rose up. Something told him this was going to be a major confrontation.
He parked his pickup and got out and approached the young people. One of them nudged another and they both giggled.
To Sandy, this was the enemy. It didn't matter to him that some of the young people were simply waiting for the swimming area in the park to open. All Sandy's mind would let him see was a bunch of dirty hippie drug users, homos and whores.
“Okay,” Sandy announced, “you're going to need to break it up.”
Some of the young people giggled; some of them stared at him in disbelief; and some ignored him.
“Okay, you've got five minutes to disperse and clear out,” Sandy said.
“What do you mean?” one guy with hair down past his ears asked politely. “Five minutes to break up what?”
The guy's politeness caught Sandy by surprise. He decided to explain. “What do you think the public thinks? You all laying around here. The public—what do you--”
A guy with red hair down to his shoulders erupted in anger, and in a loud voice he interrupted Sandy and proclaimed: “Man, we are the public. What do you mean, what does the public think? You're looking at the public right now.”
For some reason, this set Sandy off. He suddenly reached for his pistol, pulled it out of the holster and held it up.
“I'm not going to argue with you,” he announced. “You've got less than five minutes now to break it up and clear out.”
The red-haired guy made a motion to move toward Sandy, but a winsome, ethereal-looking girl of about eighteen in a granny dress, held his arm back. “Let it go, Red,” she said.
“What!” Red exclaimed.
“Let it go,” she repeated. “It's not worth it. Can't you see that he's out of it.”
If Sandy had understood what the girl meant by “he's out of it,” he would have probably grown angrier than he was. But he was unfamiliar with the term.
“Let's go,” the girl calmly said.
Red finally allowed himself to be tugged away by the girl, but he gave Sandy a look that said “Watch out for me from now on.”
The group of young people began breaking up into smaller groups and walking away. But this wasn't enough for Sandy. He wanted to really break them up and drive them out of the park. He saw it as the only way to show them who was boss. So he spent the next hour running around in his pickup, breaking up the young people into smaller and smaller groups. To Sandy's way of thinking, he had met the enemy and had defeated them. He had shown them who was boss, and that they were not allowed to congregate in public in the park...
Time passed, and then something happened that made Sandy's patience grow thinner. About two weeks after he had broken up the group of youth, he noticed some of them coming back to the park and congregating again.
He patience was at an end. He took the shotgun off the rack in the pickup and opened the door and got out. He walked toward a group of a half dozen long-haired young people.. He held the shotgun in both hands and said, “I've told you all once to break it up and clear out. I'm not going to tell you again.”
Some of the youth laughed, and some ignored him.
Suddenly he pulled one of the triggers on the double-barrel and a blast shot up in the air.
“Break it up and get out,” he said in a high-pitched excited voice.
The young people were scared out of their wits. They quickly dispersed.
The only result of the incident was that most of the youth who had been coming to the park, whether to swim or not, stopped coming.
The word quickly spread among them that Sandy Reester was crazy. Eventually, the only people who came to the park were younger kids and older grown-ups.
So time went on, and the years went by...
Sandy Reester remained the park superintendent.
There had been no backlash in the county about Sandy taking his pistol out, or firing his shotgun. The congregation of the hippies had been foiled, that's all the county business fathers were concerned about. They assumed that Sandy had done a good job of breaking up the threat as they saw it in the county that the hippies represented.
So time went on...
It was now the late winter of 2009. Sandy Reester was sixty-eight years-old, and he was still the park superintendent. He had convinced the county business “movers and shakers” that he should continue as superintendent, and that he was still of sound mind and body; enough to be park superintendent anyway. Or maybe it was because no one else wanted the job. The hippies had seemed to have faded out and away years ago.
But then a frightening phenomenon began occurring. Styles changed, and boys and men began to wear their hair longer again. It seemed that the hippie phenomenon was once again rearing its head. The county business movers and shakers began to get nervous again.
Then, on March 11, 2009, a man named Arthur Bridge called Sandy Reester on the phone and requested that one of the open park sheds be reserved for a reunion of the Bridge family and a homecoming April 1. Sandy didn't hesitate to give his okay. It would be good publicity for the county park.
What Sandy didn't know was that the man who called was “Red” Bridge; the same Red whom Sandy had pulled a gun on thirty-seven years before. By word of mouth, Red, or Arthur as was his real name, had let it be known all over the county that a long-hair and blue-jean reunion would be held in an open shed in Walden County Park on April 1, 2009.
All the old hippies in the county grew excited. They hadn't heard such good news since Marshal Tucker had played in Knoxville in 1972.
Most of them got ready to have a swinging good old time.
Of course, Sandy wasn't ready for it. When an influx of long gray-haired men (some of them with long beards) and women in their late fifties wearing jeans and granny dresses converged on Walden County Park, he was shocked and horrified. The way most of the crowd looked and the way they were dressed was enough to distress, even sicken him.
In addition to all the old hippies, a gang of about thirty bikers had come to the park to join in the festivities.
Some of the crowd mingled in and around the open shed; some went down to the big lake nearby and watched the ducks swim and the herons fly. Some were overcome upon seeing each other for the first time in decades. Some laid out big bowls of food on the tables under the shed. And some stared at Sandy...
Red Bridge stood on a table and hollered for quiet. The crowd gradually quietened. Sandy noted that Red was bald on top and had let his reddish gray hair on the sides of his head grow down to his shoulders. He had a gray reddish beard. He wore boots, faded jeans, and a wrinkled untucked blue denim shirt.
Sandy had a vague feeling he had seen Red before. But he couldn't place him.
“Let me have your attention span for just a minute,” Red spoke loudly. “There's someone on the fringes of our crowd who's a close observer. He's been one for thirty-seven years. In fact, I met him thirty-seven years ago—at the point of his gun.” The crowd laughed, and Sandy began to grow distinctly uncomfortable.
And then he suddenly recognized Red and he remembered the incident with the gun.
“Surely you remember me, Rooster Reester,” Red spoke to Sandy. Then he addressed the crowd: “May I introduce you to the one, the only, the park superintendent of Walden County: Rooster Reester.”
He pointed at Sandy, and the crowd turned around to look at him and many of them laughed.
Sandy turned crimson as a tomato. He was the only person who looked out of place. He still wore his khaki uniform with a logo on the shoulder and one on his left breast. He also still wore a holster with a loaded gun. (Some of the county business fathers frowned upon a sixty-eight-year-old wearing a holster and a gun in the county park, but some of them reminded the objectors of what a good job Sandy had done in cleaning the park of low-life and hippies and making the park safe for the public, and that he was still of sound mind and body. The objectors were finally won over, and Sandy kept his holster and pistol, as well as his shotgun in the rack in the rear of his new pickup.
“I'm sure all of us are appreciative of Park Superintendent Rooster's efforts in running off all the hippies,” Red said. “Let's see, it first happened thirty-seven years ago—in 1972, didn't it, Rooster. He finally had to run the hippies off with a gun, didn't you, Rooster. So we're also here to celebrate Sandy Reester—alias Rooster Reester—being still among the living.”
Then Red said something that sliced through Sandy like a cold sharp blade: “Although we're not sure—given the size of the crowd and the disposition of some of these old long-haired and blue-jean-clad rascals—of the length of time old Rooster Reester might have left to inhabit this sphere of existence.”
Some of the crowd—the bikers especially, laughed a mean laugh. The bikers were grouped together and Sandy noticed that they were giving him some unpleasant looks. He actually grew scared, but there was no way he was going to show fear to these low lives. With considerable effort he kept his face impassive.
“Well, that's just about all I've got to say,” Red said. “Enjoy yourselves.”
Sandy noticed the bikers sauntering toward him, but he didn't start to get frightened till he saw that they were encircling and surrounding him.
His hand made a reflex motion down to his holster. A heavyset woman in her early thirties wearing faded ragged jeans, a denim jacket and sharp-pointed boots, said to him: “You pull that gun out and I'll kick your nuts off.”
Sandy didn't hear her or maybe he refused to hear her. His hand unsnapped the holster.
Her leg suddenly snaked out and she kicked Sandy squarely in his crotch with a sharp-pointed boot.
Sandy went down like a sack of potatoes. He groaned and gasped and gingerly cupped his crotch.
Red had noticed the bikers surrounding Sandy. And then he saw a flurry of movement. He hurriedly walked down and joined the bikers and watched.
“Hey Rooster,” a soft slow voice said behind Sandy. “This is for you.”
Sandy felt a hard kick in his rear. By the force of the blow, he knew it was a boot that kicked him. Sandy fell down on his belly.
The bikers commenced to kick Sandy with their boots. They kicked his butt, his crotch, ribs, and his head.
Red stood and watched impassively. “You reap what you sow, Rooster,” he murmured.
Some of the crowd had noticed the bikers all bunched around Sandy, and some of them had walked over to see what was up. They, like Red, stood and watched as Sandy got the crap beat out of him.
All Sandy could do was hold his arms over his head and curl up like a baby.
“If you don't stop, you're going to kill me,” he gasped.
“Oh no,” one of the bikers said. “We're not going to kill you. We're just going to give you a memory you'll never forget.”
Sandy felt someone fumbling at his holster. He tried to stop them, but he was helpless. He felt as if his arm was broken.
His pistol was pulled out of his holster. “Don't worry,” a voice said. “We're not going to shoot you. We're just going to hide your gun so you can't find it.”
Sandy tried to move his head to see what was being done with his gun, but he couldn't move it. It hurt too much. For all he knew, they had broken his neck.
The person who had taken Sandy's gun carried it down to the lake and threw it in the water.
All this time, Red had remained impassive and unmoved. In the back of his mind, he couldn't help but think that Sandy was getting just what he deserved.
The kicking eventually stopped. Sandy looked like a big rag doll curled up. One of the kickers walked to Sandy's pickup and opened the door and got the shotgun and carried it to the water and threw it in the lake.
“Okay, I think we're through with you,” one of the bikers said to Sandy. “I just want you to remember this: If you tell what was done to you, or who did it, a few of us may be taken in for questioning, but the rest will finish the job on you. And it'll be done here in the park. Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you understand that if you tell on us, that's it for you?”
Sandy slowly nodded his head. The pain almost made him cry out.
A few of the bikers picked Sandy up and carried him to his truck. He groaned in pain the whole way. They opened the door and deposited him onto the seat.
Through his pain, Sandy looked up at the gun rack and he was suddenly filled with a sense of dismay and a strange loneliness when he saw that the shotgun was gone.
The kickers then rejoined the crowd.
Sandy was afraid to move. He was scared that the kickers would come back and finish the job of kicking and stomping him to death. But he was also frightened that if he moved he might puncture a lung. Some of his ribs felt broken. So he lay unmoving on the seat till he heard the cars and trucks and cycles start up. Because of his pain, it seemed to take forever for the vehicles to fade away in the distance.
He checked his left arm out. Other than being very sore and bruised, it seemed to be okay. He lifted it up slowly and gingerly and laid it on the truck horn. He then pressed it down. The horn blared, and he kept the blaring up. Eventually someone will come, he thought to himself.
After what seemed an eternity but was actually only about ten minutes, a passerby came up to the pickup, took one look at Sandy, and then called on his cell phone.
By the time the 911 medical truck had arrived, Sandy had passed out...
When he awoke he was in a hospital bed.
His body, from his feet to his head was one big aching sore. He had been given pain medication, but he was still hurting.
A policeman came in and began asking him questions: “What happened?”
Sandy answered, “I got into a fight with somebody.”
“Who? Someone you know?”
“No. Nobody I knew.”
“What started the fight?”
“We had a disagreement.”
“What kind of disagreement?”
Sandy realized the questioning would go on and on if he didn't put a stop to it, so he ignored the question.
“I didn't know the guy. He was tall and stocky—about six foot four and about two forty.”
“Was he alone? Your injuries are multiple. It looks like a gang got hold of you.”
“There was just one.”
“And you don't know who he was?”
“I'd never seen him before.”
“I need a fuller description. What color hair did he have?”
“Brown, and he had gray eyes. He didn't have any tattoos. He was an ordinary-looking person—except for his size.”
“If we catch up with him, do you want to press charges?”
“No.”
“You don't?”
“No. We—uh--we both started it. I don't want to—uh--press charges.”
The policeman looked into Sandy's bleary eyes for a moment, and then he said as he stood: “Okay. This isn't much to go on, but we might find him.”
“I don't want to press charges,” Sandy repeated...
As soon as he was released from the hospital, Sandy resigned as park superintendent. On the form of resignation he wrote under Reason for Resignation: “Personal Reasons.”
He had to move from the house in the park that the county provided for the park superintendent. He rented a small house in Temperance, and began receiving social security and a disability pension from the Veterans Administration.
Sandy spent most of his time watching porn movies and drinking.
He lived for a few more years—three, to be exact. He died in the early fall of 2012 at age seventy-one. The cause of death was determined to be heart disease.
There were a lot of people at Sandy's receiving of friends and at his funeral service. A number of eulogies were given in Sandy's honor, thanking him for his excellent service as park superintendent for thirty-seven years.
The ultimate honor was paid to him by the county when it changed the name of the park to Walden County—Sandy Reester—Park. A small plaque was placed at the entrance of the park with Sandy's name engraved on it.
People in general spoke good of Sandy. It was remembered by the business movers and shakers in Walden County how Sandy had kept the park clean and safe for the public by running out all the riff raff.
There was only one negative phrase said about Sandy, and it was spoken by a man in his late fifties with grayish red hair down to his shoulders.
The man had read the funeral notice written about Sandy Reester in the county newspaper. He had chuckled wryly and murmured “What goes around...”
Sandy Reester was thirty-one years of age and he detested long hair on boys and was horrified at girls who wore jeans. He thought the boys were homos and the girls were whores.
Sandy was the Walden County Park Superintendent, and he took his job seriously. He wore a uniform of khaki and black boots. He even wore a holster with a gun (and unlike Barney Fife's, the gun was loaded). Sandy was quite paranoid.; he was convinced there was a conspiracy out to get him. But if one were to ask him why there was a conspiracy against him and of what the conspiracy consisted, he would have been at a loss to say.
The Walden County business fathers had grown quite alarmed by the summer of '72 at the increase in the number of long-haired males and jean-clad females gathering together. They thought it was bad for business. So they had passed the word down the chain of command: “We've got to stop all this congregating of young people.”
The police took it seriously and began breaking up groups of young people (regardless of the length of their hair or their dress).
Sandy Reester especially looked upon it as a grave matter of the utmost importance. (Somewhere in the back of his mind he fantasized that the long-haired males and the jean-clad females were intent on subverting the younger generation of Walden County; to what, he had no idea—he just looked upon them as a threat).
Sandy had a lot of hangups. One was his twisted way of looking at people. He had an ideal in his mind of how a male and female should look. Most of all, they should be well-groomed. It was an affront to him to see uncouth-looking males and girls.
No doubt, Sandy's background was responsible for a lot of his hangups and twisted thinking.
He had joined the army when he was seventeen and had served thirteen years. Then for a year he had been the assistant park superintendent. Then the superintendent had resigned a few months previously and Sandy had taken over the park management.
His experience of dealing with people was limited. He refused to see that everyone looked different, that there was no ideal way for a person to look.
There was something else about Sandy. He just couldn't understand why females—especially attractive ones—would dress in jeans and be attracted to hippies. To Sandy's way of thinking, he labeled all long-haired males; that is, males with thick hair to their ears or longer as hippies, dirty and drug users. And as somehow less than human. That's a harsh thing to say about anyone, but it was the truth. Sandy viewed long-haired males as low-lives and less than human.
There are psychological terms for the kind of person Sandy Reester was. But this is not a psychological treatise, so I will leave that to the psychologists.
Sandy's first confrontation with the hippies occurred when he spotted two males standing in the parking lot of the county park. One of them had hair down to his shoulders and a beard; the other had hair down to his neck and a thick mustache. Sandy almost grew sick with disgust from looking at them. They were standing facing each other and conversing. Sandy saw this as a dangerous situation and a major showdown, and somehow as a test of his manhood.
Sandy drove up in his pickup truck with a gun rack above and behind the seat with a loaded double-barrel shotgun occupying the rack, and a Park Superintendent logo painted in big letters on a big shield on the truck doors.
Without preamble, he said gruffly but with a high trembling voice: “Okay. You're going to have to break it up.”
What Sandy was unaware of was that the two males were brothers and they were discussing the upcoming quarter at Walden State Junior College which they both attended.
The brothers ignored Sandy and continued talking.
This infuriated Sandy. He had a gigantic inferiority complex, and to be ignored was just about the ultimate insult for him.
He opened the truck door, ready for a confrontation, but the brothers had slowly walked away toward a car.
With trembling limbs and a thumping heart, Sandy watched them leave the parking lot.
It's just a good thing they left, he thought.
Sandy's second confrontation with long-haired males and blue-jean-clad girls was much more serious than the first one.
He was driving his pickup around the park when he spotted a group of young people gathered around a picnic table. Most of them were long-haired males or jean-clad females.
Sandy's blood began to boil. There must have been a dozen of the low-lives sitting on the table or slouching around, he thought.
His fighting spirit rose up. Something told him this was going to be a major confrontation.
He parked his pickup and got out and approached the young people. One of them nudged another and they both giggled.
To Sandy, this was the enemy. It didn't matter to him that some of the young people were simply waiting for the swimming area in the park to open. All Sandy's mind would let him see was a bunch of dirty hippie drug users, homos and whores.
“Okay,” Sandy announced, “you're going to need to break it up.”
Some of the young people giggled; some of them stared at him in disbelief; and some ignored him.
“Okay, you've got five minutes to disperse and clear out,” Sandy said.
“What do you mean?” one guy with hair down past his ears asked politely. “Five minutes to break up what?”
The guy's politeness caught Sandy by surprise. He decided to explain. “What do you think the public thinks? You all laying around here. The public—what do you--”
A guy with red hair down to his shoulders erupted in anger, and in a loud voice he interrupted Sandy and proclaimed: “Man, we are the public. What do you mean, what does the public think? You're looking at the public right now.”
For some reason, this set Sandy off. He suddenly reached for his pistol, pulled it out of the holster and held it up.
“I'm not going to argue with you,” he announced. “You've got less than five minutes now to break it up and clear out.”
The red-haired guy made a motion to move toward Sandy, but a winsome, ethereal-looking girl of about eighteen in a granny dress, held his arm back. “Let it go, Red,” she said.
“What!” Red exclaimed.
“Let it go,” she repeated. “It's not worth it. Can't you see that he's out of it.”
If Sandy had understood what the girl meant by “he's out of it,” he would have probably grown angrier than he was. But he was unfamiliar with the term.
“Let's go,” the girl calmly said.
Red finally allowed himself to be tugged away by the girl, but he gave Sandy a look that said “Watch out for me from now on.”
The group of young people began breaking up into smaller groups and walking away. But this wasn't enough for Sandy. He wanted to really break them up and drive them out of the park. He saw it as the only way to show them who was boss. So he spent the next hour running around in his pickup, breaking up the young people into smaller and smaller groups. To Sandy's way of thinking, he had met the enemy and had defeated them. He had shown them who was boss, and that they were not allowed to congregate in public in the park...
Time passed, and then something happened that made Sandy's patience grow thinner. About two weeks after he had broken up the group of youth, he noticed some of them coming back to the park and congregating again.
He patience was at an end. He took the shotgun off the rack in the pickup and opened the door and got out. He walked toward a group of a half dozen long-haired young people.. He held the shotgun in both hands and said, “I've told you all once to break it up and clear out. I'm not going to tell you again.”
Some of the youth laughed, and some ignored him.
Suddenly he pulled one of the triggers on the double-barrel and a blast shot up in the air.
“Break it up and get out,” he said in a high-pitched excited voice.
The young people were scared out of their wits. They quickly dispersed.
The only result of the incident was that most of the youth who had been coming to the park, whether to swim or not, stopped coming.
The word quickly spread among them that Sandy Reester was crazy. Eventually, the only people who came to the park were younger kids and older grown-ups.
So time went on, and the years went by...
Sandy Reester remained the park superintendent.
There had been no backlash in the county about Sandy taking his pistol out, or firing his shotgun. The congregation of the hippies had been foiled, that's all the county business fathers were concerned about. They assumed that Sandy had done a good job of breaking up the threat as they saw it in the county that the hippies represented.
So time went on...
It was now the late winter of 2009. Sandy Reester was sixty-eight years-old, and he was still the park superintendent. He had convinced the county business “movers and shakers” that he should continue as superintendent, and that he was still of sound mind and body; enough to be park superintendent anyway. Or maybe it was because no one else wanted the job. The hippies had seemed to have faded out and away years ago.
But then a frightening phenomenon began occurring. Styles changed, and boys and men began to wear their hair longer again. It seemed that the hippie phenomenon was once again rearing its head. The county business movers and shakers began to get nervous again.
Then, on March 11, 2009, a man named Arthur Bridge called Sandy Reester on the phone and requested that one of the open park sheds be reserved for a reunion of the Bridge family and a homecoming April 1. Sandy didn't hesitate to give his okay. It would be good publicity for the county park.
What Sandy didn't know was that the man who called was “Red” Bridge; the same Red whom Sandy had pulled a gun on thirty-seven years before. By word of mouth, Red, or Arthur as was his real name, had let it be known all over the county that a long-hair and blue-jean reunion would be held in an open shed in Walden County Park on April 1, 2009.
All the old hippies in the county grew excited. They hadn't heard such good news since Marshal Tucker had played in Knoxville in 1972.
Most of them got ready to have a swinging good old time.
Of course, Sandy wasn't ready for it. When an influx of long gray-haired men (some of them with long beards) and women in their late fifties wearing jeans and granny dresses converged on Walden County Park, he was shocked and horrified. The way most of the crowd looked and the way they were dressed was enough to distress, even sicken him.
In addition to all the old hippies, a gang of about thirty bikers had come to the park to join in the festivities.
Some of the crowd mingled in and around the open shed; some went down to the big lake nearby and watched the ducks swim and the herons fly. Some were overcome upon seeing each other for the first time in decades. Some laid out big bowls of food on the tables under the shed. And some stared at Sandy...
Red Bridge stood on a table and hollered for quiet. The crowd gradually quietened. Sandy noted that Red was bald on top and had let his reddish gray hair on the sides of his head grow down to his shoulders. He had a gray reddish beard. He wore boots, faded jeans, and a wrinkled untucked blue denim shirt.
Sandy had a vague feeling he had seen Red before. But he couldn't place him.
“Let me have your attention span for just a minute,” Red spoke loudly. “There's someone on the fringes of our crowd who's a close observer. He's been one for thirty-seven years. In fact, I met him thirty-seven years ago—at the point of his gun.” The crowd laughed, and Sandy began to grow distinctly uncomfortable.
And then he suddenly recognized Red and he remembered the incident with the gun.
“Surely you remember me, Rooster Reester,” Red spoke to Sandy. Then he addressed the crowd: “May I introduce you to the one, the only, the park superintendent of Walden County: Rooster Reester.”
He pointed at Sandy, and the crowd turned around to look at him and many of them laughed.
Sandy turned crimson as a tomato. He was the only person who looked out of place. He still wore his khaki uniform with a logo on the shoulder and one on his left breast. He also still wore a holster with a loaded gun. (Some of the county business fathers frowned upon a sixty-eight-year-old wearing a holster and a gun in the county park, but some of them reminded the objectors of what a good job Sandy had done in cleaning the park of low-life and hippies and making the park safe for the public, and that he was still of sound mind and body. The objectors were finally won over, and Sandy kept his holster and pistol, as well as his shotgun in the rack in the rear of his new pickup.
“I'm sure all of us are appreciative of Park Superintendent Rooster's efforts in running off all the hippies,” Red said. “Let's see, it first happened thirty-seven years ago—in 1972, didn't it, Rooster. He finally had to run the hippies off with a gun, didn't you, Rooster. So we're also here to celebrate Sandy Reester—alias Rooster Reester—being still among the living.”
Then Red said something that sliced through Sandy like a cold sharp blade: “Although we're not sure—given the size of the crowd and the disposition of some of these old long-haired and blue-jean-clad rascals—of the length of time old Rooster Reester might have left to inhabit this sphere of existence.”
Some of the crowd—the bikers especially, laughed a mean laugh. The bikers were grouped together and Sandy noticed that they were giving him some unpleasant looks. He actually grew scared, but there was no way he was going to show fear to these low lives. With considerable effort he kept his face impassive.
“Well, that's just about all I've got to say,” Red said. “Enjoy yourselves.”
Sandy noticed the bikers sauntering toward him, but he didn't start to get frightened till he saw that they were encircling and surrounding him.
His hand made a reflex motion down to his holster. A heavyset woman in her early thirties wearing faded ragged jeans, a denim jacket and sharp-pointed boots, said to him: “You pull that gun out and I'll kick your nuts off.”
Sandy didn't hear her or maybe he refused to hear her. His hand unsnapped the holster.
Her leg suddenly snaked out and she kicked Sandy squarely in his crotch with a sharp-pointed boot.
Sandy went down like a sack of potatoes. He groaned and gasped and gingerly cupped his crotch.
Red had noticed the bikers surrounding Sandy. And then he saw a flurry of movement. He hurriedly walked down and joined the bikers and watched.
“Hey Rooster,” a soft slow voice said behind Sandy. “This is for you.”
Sandy felt a hard kick in his rear. By the force of the blow, he knew it was a boot that kicked him. Sandy fell down on his belly.
The bikers commenced to kick Sandy with their boots. They kicked his butt, his crotch, ribs, and his head.
Red stood and watched impassively. “You reap what you sow, Rooster,” he murmured.
Some of the crowd had noticed the bikers all bunched around Sandy, and some of them had walked over to see what was up. They, like Red, stood and watched as Sandy got the crap beat out of him.
All Sandy could do was hold his arms over his head and curl up like a baby.
“If you don't stop, you're going to kill me,” he gasped.
“Oh no,” one of the bikers said. “We're not going to kill you. We're just going to give you a memory you'll never forget.”
Sandy felt someone fumbling at his holster. He tried to stop them, but he was helpless. He felt as if his arm was broken.
His pistol was pulled out of his holster. “Don't worry,” a voice said. “We're not going to shoot you. We're just going to hide your gun so you can't find it.”
Sandy tried to move his head to see what was being done with his gun, but he couldn't move it. It hurt too much. For all he knew, they had broken his neck.
The person who had taken Sandy's gun carried it down to the lake and threw it in the water.
All this time, Red had remained impassive and unmoved. In the back of his mind, he couldn't help but think that Sandy was getting just what he deserved.
The kicking eventually stopped. Sandy looked like a big rag doll curled up. One of the kickers walked to Sandy's pickup and opened the door and got the shotgun and carried it to the water and threw it in the lake.
“Okay, I think we're through with you,” one of the bikers said to Sandy. “I just want you to remember this: If you tell what was done to you, or who did it, a few of us may be taken in for questioning, but the rest will finish the job on you. And it'll be done here in the park. Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you understand that if you tell on us, that's it for you?”
Sandy slowly nodded his head. The pain almost made him cry out.
A few of the bikers picked Sandy up and carried him to his truck. He groaned in pain the whole way. They opened the door and deposited him onto the seat.
Through his pain, Sandy looked up at the gun rack and he was suddenly filled with a sense of dismay and a strange loneliness when he saw that the shotgun was gone.
The kickers then rejoined the crowd.
Sandy was afraid to move. He was scared that the kickers would come back and finish the job of kicking and stomping him to death. But he was also frightened that if he moved he might puncture a lung. Some of his ribs felt broken. So he lay unmoving on the seat till he heard the cars and trucks and cycles start up. Because of his pain, it seemed to take forever for the vehicles to fade away in the distance.
He checked his left arm out. Other than being very sore and bruised, it seemed to be okay. He lifted it up slowly and gingerly and laid it on the truck horn. He then pressed it down. The horn blared, and he kept the blaring up. Eventually someone will come, he thought to himself.
After what seemed an eternity but was actually only about ten minutes, a passerby came up to the pickup, took one look at Sandy, and then called on his cell phone.
By the time the 911 medical truck had arrived, Sandy had passed out...
When he awoke he was in a hospital bed.
His body, from his feet to his head was one big aching sore. He had been given pain medication, but he was still hurting.
A policeman came in and began asking him questions: “What happened?”
Sandy answered, “I got into a fight with somebody.”
“Who? Someone you know?”
“No. Nobody I knew.”
“What started the fight?”
“We had a disagreement.”
“What kind of disagreement?”
Sandy realized the questioning would go on and on if he didn't put a stop to it, so he ignored the question.
“I didn't know the guy. He was tall and stocky—about six foot four and about two forty.”
“Was he alone? Your injuries are multiple. It looks like a gang got hold of you.”
“There was just one.”
“And you don't know who he was?”
“I'd never seen him before.”
“I need a fuller description. What color hair did he have?”
“Brown, and he had gray eyes. He didn't have any tattoos. He was an ordinary-looking person—except for his size.”
“If we catch up with him, do you want to press charges?”
“No.”
“You don't?”
“No. We—uh--we both started it. I don't want to—uh--press charges.”
The policeman looked into Sandy's bleary eyes for a moment, and then he said as he stood: “Okay. This isn't much to go on, but we might find him.”
“I don't want to press charges,” Sandy repeated...
As soon as he was released from the hospital, Sandy resigned as park superintendent. On the form of resignation he wrote under Reason for Resignation: “Personal Reasons.”
He had to move from the house in the park that the county provided for the park superintendent. He rented a small house in Temperance, and began receiving social security and a disability pension from the Veterans Administration.
Sandy spent most of his time watching porn movies and drinking.
He lived for a few more years—three, to be exact. He died in the early fall of 2012 at age seventy-one. The cause of death was determined to be heart disease.
There were a lot of people at Sandy's receiving of friends and at his funeral service. A number of eulogies were given in Sandy's honor, thanking him for his excellent service as park superintendent for thirty-seven years.
The ultimate honor was paid to him by the county when it changed the name of the park to Walden County—Sandy Reester—Park. A small plaque was placed at the entrance of the park with Sandy's name engraved on it.
People in general spoke good of Sandy. It was remembered by the business movers and shakers in Walden County how Sandy had kept the park clean and safe for the public by running out all the riff raff.
There was only one negative phrase said about Sandy, and it was spoken by a man in his late fifties with grayish red hair down to his shoulders.
The man had read the funeral notice written about Sandy Reester in the county newspaper. He had chuckled wryly and murmured “What goes around...”