KILL A KID, WATCH PORN, AND PEDDLE DRUGS IN MONTANA SCHOOLS

So, interest was expressed in what happened next after recovering from Lyme disease. I want to skip to the last chapter, but understanding benefits by starting at age seven, 1955, when I first arrived in Bearmouth, Montana. It was already winter and the half mile road to the bus was covered with deep snow. Being my first day, I walked past where the road turns over the Milwaukee tracks. Instead, I plod onward between the Northern Pacific and Milwaukee tracks until the snow was up to my armpits. Fearing I wouldn't make it, I fought my way back and spent the rest of the day with frostbit feet throbbing on the oven door. It was a month or two later at the Drummond elementary when seven of my classmates suddenly surrounded me at recess. Each one took turns punching and hitting me, sometimes in the face, sometimes knocking me into the snow. At the time, I'd never exchanged any words with these kids or knew their names, so hadn't a clue as to what it was about. I was by far the smallest kid in class and no challenge to anyone. After that I got beat a little bloody most every day under the principal's office window until one early spring day when the ground was bare I finally fought back. I knocked Bruce Culver on the ground and was fixin to teach him a lesson when the principal grabbed me by the coat and pulled me off. This was the only time during my entire four years at Drummond elementary the principal was seen by anybody to my knowledge. 

The following winter we'd moved to Three Forks, 1956. It was a ten block trek to the elementary school, not tough at all but when the temperature dropped below zero Fahrenheit as it often did, my face and limbs were numbed and in pain, my ears especially  despite a cap with flaps. The rest of the kids would be pouring out of busses and cars and converging to the big, heavy school doors. In the crowd, with my arms paralyzed by the cold and full of books and a lunchbox, it just wasn't possible let alone humane to doff the cap.  Those days were never missed by this huge, glaring principal standing at the top of a flight of stairs with his hands on the banister watching for me as I came in. He'd glower with the purest hatred and anger I'd ever seen and lay into me for not having my cap removed before entry. I assume he was further enraged every time I couldn't get that cap off in time, thinking it was done just to defy him, but the truth is it simply wasn't possible in the condition I was in, nor was it possible to walk to school without a good cap in that kind of weather.  

During an ultra cold spell the streets were deserted and stone silent except for those sounds not normally heard being greatly magnified by abnormally dense air. The crunch of snow was all you could hear. You were tucked deep inside the hood of a heavy coat so your snot wouldn't freeze. I was on the edge of the football field where the ground had been pounded rock hard even before being hardened even more by months of freezing. I see this kid coming towards me. He was big, junior high or even high school. I'd only seen him once before. He had approached near to the same spot a week or so earlier  and asked me some questions.  He was very friendly, so I had him pegged as a good hearted older fella who'd made friends with me. This time I ran towards him, not expecting anything unpleasant, so was taken completely off guard. When he lifted me off the ground I still thought he was just playing with me, but then he flipped me over and I see the ground speeding toward my face as it was catapulted with deadly intent into it. My next memory was standing about fifty feet away inside the field. I was entirely blind at first, but after a while could make out the north end of my school. With much difficulty I made it to the outside door of a latrine. I was struggling to see well enough to mop up the blood and then my memory went blank. I woke up in the car while mom was driving to the doctor. He used a scissors to straighten my nose and then I went out again. I woke up on the couch and was unconscious most of over a month. I woke up for brief periods to such grape juice through a straw forced into lips swollen shut. I found out almost forty years later the kid who made a definite attempt to kill a clueless eight year old was the principal's kid. 

When I returned the following year to the fourth grade at Drummond, I was frozen with fear and in a state of shock for some weeks, certain I was soon to be killed. I managed to avoid other kids during recesses, but was trapped on the bus where two pairs of brothers slapped and punched me constantly. One day I thought I'd try sitting towards the back where several high schoolers sat. They were complete strangers, but more mature and possibly I'd be able to get distance from the Parks and Manley brothers. I also sat on the right next to the window. As we were nearing my stop, a big ranch kid behind me tapped me on the right shoulder. I turned to see what he wanted. He was standing up and swung a large book like you would a baseball bat that met me square in the face. I was out the same instant. The force was enough to lift me out of the window seat into the aisle where I gradually woke up with my face in a large pool of blood. The silence was deafening as everyone sat frozen. We were stopped at Bearmouth and Durphee was holding the doors open, waiting for me to regain consciousness as if there were any realistic expectation I'd survived.  But I finally did struggle up, stumbling on with blood soaked books that I'd have to repurchase from the school. 

The guy who'd nearly killed me was a big farm oaf name of Randy Weaver. Let me emphasize that all my family members firmly believe I am crazy, believing that I believe that the FBI's Ruby Ridge Randy Weaver had carried out this assault. No, this was a rich kid from the Weaver Ranch, still big today though I don't know what became of Randy. I heard he'd become an alcoholic and lost his share of the ranch. That Randy Weaver decided I must die and after that whipped up the two Manley brothers with the idea that together they could kill me once and for all. A date was agreed on and for the intervening two weeks Randy encouraged them and taunted me constantly. The day must not end until I was dead. By this time I'd lost fear of anything, especially death, and just figured I'd go out having done my best.  It turned out that fear hadn't been entirely beaten out of them and it took only a few quick punches to strike terror into the heart of this Donald kid who was about twice my size. Scotty had me on my back when he noticed Donald's ass hi tailin' it over the NP tracks. Even though I was helpless laying in five inches of snow, Scotty panicked and got up to run after Donald. Suddenly emboldened, I grabbed Scotty by an ankle. He fell in the snow and I got on top. 

The rest is history, but I wanted you to fully understand why almost 40 years later I took the teacher at Poplar schools seriously when she said she was afraid my son was going to be killed. He wasn't getting beaten up as badly as I'd been, but was running the gauntlet every recess and it was apparent to some people, including his mother who was a teacher observing these events, that it would get deadly all too soon. My son truly had a heart of gold, but he was typical Asperger's, socially withdrawn and non lingual. As usual, the pounding was the reflection of hateful attitudes from staff members who had for some reasons interpreted his quiet behavior as a form of willful disregard. That is why among other reasons, I abandoned my first ever decent job and took us back to my birthplace, Missoula. Missoula is geographically beautiful, but there were never decent jobs there. The University of Montana is there, but it's a liberal arts institution sporting a watered down curriculum. The town had too many alcoholics, crack heads, and child molesters. The only other good thing about it was that I figured my son would be safe there until he graduated from high school. It turned out I snagged a job as network technician at the Big Sky High School where my son was enrolled. As an MCSE at the time (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) with twenty years intensive experience my minimum fair salary should have been $60,000. $10,000 was sending a message that you and yours deserved no better than dog poop for supper, but there was nothing else in sight and I liked kids and could be close to my son until he graduated. 

So, I found the Big Sky High School computer network to be in sad shape. Netware updates were over three years old and other maintenance tasks required over an hour for each of 400+ computers. That would have meant well over  a year of effort, but I would catch empty classrooms and launch all tasks  on all machines at once, leaving about two thirds of the day to field the daily flood of ad hoc requests.  It took about three months to bring all the machines up to snuff this way and earn the respect of building staff. One such task was setting up a share on the building trade teacher's computer so that all the student's could use the classroom software exercises at the same time. That's what the software was intended to do. Having done that, I mentioned it to the network administrator, let's use the pseudonym Stinkkin. He jumped up while others were watching, "Clean it up, Foos, I don't care how you do it, but clean it up." I did many such ad hoc tasks each day for teachers and administrators and even managed to inquire of about a third of the teachers or administrators in person to ensure everything was okay for them. But I wasn't there the day Stinkkin and his entourage of net techs assigned to other MCPS schools descended on the Small Engines classroom, ceremoniously ripping RJ45 network jacks out of student machines while Stinkkin ceremoniously scrubbed off each porn video or picture after making sure the "team" as he called them got a good look. 

From there the Stinkk ignited a whispering campaign about the entire district being able to watch hard core porn distributed from a Microsoft share on bad Mr. Burtch's Big Sky computer. In the all Friday afternoon meetings headed by the Stinkk he made comments about the need to avoid Microsoft shares as they were often used to distribute porn. There was one mention of Mr. Burtch specifically, him being a guy you wanted to avoid. Meanwhile, a recent addition to the team became the life of the party by bragging about his large stash of hard porn, some of it he claimed being professionally adapted for use in public schools. One would guess his own Middle School perhaps? He called himself the dirtiest old man in public schools, kind of like a cross between Larry Flynt and the Pied Piper. He quickly rose as Stinkk's right hand man and social director of the MCPS network technician collective. He founded a weekly camaraderie session in addition to Stinkk's where the faithful gathered at one of any local smorgasbords to listen to Roger thrill them with tales of his pornographic exploits between gulps of grease. I found out later this was meant to spawn a market for computers he wanted to sell. Indeed, he actually sold a computer stuffed with porn to a pair of middle school parents. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. It sounds other wordly, but it's true.  

The part that really blew my circuits was when I was called into a meeting with Assistant Principal Brian Fortmann and the Stinkk, aka Art the Fartt. This was called because of the Stinkk's concern about pornography traffic from the Big Sky High School building.  This caught me off guard even though it was obvious to me that the Fartt had planted the porn on Dave Burtch's staff computer. I'm sure the Stinkk had never realized that I was by then very familiar with all 400 computers in the building and knew for a fact that none of them had ever been used to view or access porn. But there was one exception, the Netware server assigned for maintenance to the Fartt alone, who was receiving frequent kudos for selfless devotion manifested by overtime maintaining dozens of servers in district school buildings, but Big Sky high requiring especially frequent attention. I didn't say anything during that meeting, but was well aware that there was a ton of porn on the server. It didn't consist of images or videos, but of cookie files for web sites where such things were viewed. Netware does a funny thing, too, because it appends the Netware username to the cookie so you know who was viewing the porn. Funny to see that about six teacher names among hundreds of cookies because there was zero possibility any of them could have been in the Big Sky High attic day or night. Only a dozen or so sites could be attributed to any except for one, that being Marti Leibenguth, who had a great many. I only searched for cookies with the text "sex" in them, though, so there were at least six times as many as I caught. Every one was a variation on "Barely Legal Teen Lesbian." Initially, I gasped because the big Stinkk had a teen daughter attending Big Sky High. Sort of gives a new meaning to the term Big Sky I suppose.  Let me emphasize my disclaimer, that I didn't actually see the Fartt whacking off in the guise of the girl's PE teacher as he watched juvenile porn in the dark recesses of the Big Sky High attic. Whoever it was called herself Bambi on some of the sites that had accounts on them with username bambi@mcps.k12.mt.us.  So, it could have been me since I had administrative rights on the server. Oh, but I still didn't have a high enough status to log in as a teacher. Only the Stinkk had that right as I understood it. He no doubt would claim that he didn't, that Marti Leibenguth must have sat many hours in the Big Sky loft in the dark with her legs in the air simulating raw sex with her barely legal students. That might inspire the Superintendent to cut him another commendation while the board was voting her a raise to $250,000/year. We got the power. You need the power. Keep those checks comin, loser.  

This is only one example of what the Stinkk and his entourage of net techs or "team" as he called them put me through week by week for five years. I hate to bore you by wagging on, so you're welcome to fill in the blanks. One day, after classes were over and teacher's gone from the building, only me and Brian Fortmann were there. the Fartt stomped in with a huff followed by his entourage. Art was screaming about there being a breach in the Internet, there was a huge drain on network resources, making sure everyone was within earshot. Which of 400, I asked. Since everyone had turned off their computer and gone home, it would have been impossible to tell, but then I spied one alone left on in a business classroom just as the parade was walking by, so I called them all in to see what it was. So, yeah, on this machine was tiny program that intermittently polled a CNN server for recent news articles. This would be no more burdensome to the network than another hair on a dog. But the funniest part was that the Stinkk had blocked this site all year. The business teachers implored me several times to ask him to unblock it, but I refused because this had happened numerous times before and he never would unblock a site. So, that's what I said to him then, "You had this blocked all year, if it was a problem why would you unblock it?" The team just stood there looking stupid, but it was so plain to anyone that it was the Fartt in the silence of night who had deliberately unblocked the site and likely had installed the polling service as well since the teacher had no reason to leave one machine on. 

Many times I tried to explain what he was doing to the principal or the assistant principal, but they would cite pressing needs and never give me enough time. Finally, I'd taken so much viciously rude and sexually charged banter from Stinkk's protege that I knew in my gut I'd kill him. The Lyme disease was hitting my nerves extra hard at the time and numerous cysts in my kidneys spitting out stones so all it took was one more sneering brag about his great kiddie porn and I knew that I would have killed him on the spot and maybe even went for his daddy next. I tried to issue some warning, but the administrators responded by having a meeting in Fortmann's office where  I was threatened with criminal charges for making threats. So, to stay out of prison I had to forfeit my imminent vestment in a Montana state pension and resign. With new time on my hands I started attending a church called Flintnet and fishing and hunting for mushrooms, both of which were great around Missoula in the spring. I was at the Frenchtown fishing hole access to the Clark Fork when a guy in a very flashy, dashy expensive pickup drove up. It surprised me that he had no apparent reason to approach me and no fishing pole or bag. Then out of the blue he starts talking about how as a manager he smoked crack daily for the prior five years at a Missoula job site along with many other employees. Perplexed and disbelieving, I asked what upper management thought about it. He said they were all fine with it, it's just how the place was, but he'd bought a farm up Nine Mile with his earnings and moved on. I struggled for words, wondering what his motive was, then recalled one of those alleged conspiracy theories about two FBI agents using a middleman to peddle crack by driving around in a flashy pickup and approaching people out of the blue. Indeed, I'd been personally threatened by one of them several years earlier. They were behind the murders of Indians on the reservation, so I inched my ass closer to my jalopy and got the hell out of there. The guy was about five seven and 150 pounds with a reddish beard and long, red hair. It would have been an easy job for the DEA to track him down based on my description. 

It looked like a variation on the Truman show to me, so I started thinking who knew I'd be at that fishing hole. The only ones were a Flintnet bible study group. They were all way too ordinary to be involved in something like that but one, some guy claiming to be from Billings. He gave no credible reason why anyone would move from Billings to Missoula out of the blue or how he managed to fall in love with Jeannie, our church musician. He stood out like a sore thumb at services. He showed zero enthusiasm or participation in any Christian purpose  while being solely focused on gluing himself to Jeannie. Did he have some connection to a crack cocaine racket? He would hang out in the kitchen while we did Bible studies then dive into the barbecue. While I was mulling all this over, Jeannie and Alice and Alan and I decided to drive to a big revival down in Boise. The road was well paved and plenty wide, but wound tightly against the Snake River which was raging in early June, 2004. On the way, we were overtaken at 70mph by a spanking new dual wheeled utility truck driving clearly over 100mph. No one in their right mind would be driving like that, and nobody could have had any trouble missing our Ford Explorer. But he didn't. He missed the back bumper on the left by less than an inch where only a slight impact would have overturned the Ford and sent us twisting as we plunged into a raging, red, watery hell. There's more to tell, but it didn't look like an accident to me. Alan was barely able to steer us away from the river. The collision took out the left doors and windows filling the inside with shattered glass. After veering away from the Snake thank God, Alan's brand new Explorer plowed into rocks and trees, destroying the front wheel. Once again, I suspected Lover Boy. 

So, it was only a few weeks after this incident that I was munching burgers with Lover Boy after a Bible study and he brought up that he had come from Billings for the great job as a tele surveyor. I was just waiting to hear it. He was the mole assigned to lure me into that crack racket. I said I had nothing better to do so would go down and apply. Curiosity was the only reason I signed on. My suspicions grew after hearing the guy had come over 300 miles to work part time at $5/hr and marry a musician twenty years his senior. Subsequently at RDD I endured several months of subtle coercion to smoke crack during breaks or crank as well it turned out. When you didn't go along with these suggestions you'd be set up for a shakeup, falsely accused of this or that. Several high schoolers were targeted but none guessed why. Essentially, if they could lure a high school or college kid into using crack, those were favored and retained after the next hiring initiative. It wan't too hard to shake off resistors earning $5/hr. If you really want to know, the business is called RDD (Research Data Design) located on Palmer Drive, a loop devoted to a cluster of government buildings such as the VA, driver's license bureau, social security, county government and other such stuff, so it very much appeared to be the retail side of the business spawned by President Reagan and Oliver North. I can state with certainty that this was a well oiled, intensive drug racket with the surveys being only cover. There were more than a few indications it was federally operated and sanctioned. The major contractor was  WAMU Bank in Miami, well known as a major launderer of cocaine money. The CEO at that time also lived in Miami yet there was no RDD business operations there. Would you be surprised to find out he was a Columbian native? Of course, after my attempts to get the DEA interested, the CEO was been replaced by a righteous white man. I kept my mouth shut at the time, though. The head manager, Nick, one of a team of undernourished, obnoxious, juvenile punks, was a dead ringer for the guy thought to have slashed the throats of two elderly Florence hairdressers and a customer over a drug deal not long ago. And that, my friends, is why Alan doesn't live here anymore, but call me Al, please.

​​THANK GOD FOR DEAD MEN or WALK A MILE IN MY SHOES

I arrived in Bellingham to hide out for what turned out to be five years. The doctors in Montana had refused diagnostics for Lyme carditis which in combination with the drugs they were pushing at me had nearly killed me dead. Their insistence that I was suffering from bipolar disorder had shot down my prestige and my government job work records were ripped off by my coworkers. I was fired four times within a year while under heavy fire from the local evangelists who'd been told by God to assure me that I was going to Hell. This was due to a notion that I'd disgraced my good Christian wife by knocking up one of my coworkers. In the desperate condition I was in, I could only accept that I would indeed go to Hell very soon. But when I finally had the near death experience, the real deal, go to heaven and back kind, I'd actually gone to the wrong place. So, figuring God was maybe on my side after all, I let the relatives and various other cannibals pack off my house and other belongings. We then spun the compass, ending up in Bellingham since the ocean was on one side and Canada wouldn't let us in. 

Anyway, despite being barely able to stand or think from almost twenty years of spirochetes rotting body and brain, there were still two toddlers and a disabled wife to feed without any income. So, I suited up in hopes of selling light bulbs to businesses on the Bellingham drag. I was waiting for the manager at a hardware store when a hippie walked by. It was near freezing and very wet out, his feet bare and with lots of sores. I glanced at my very expensive pair of leather boots. They were the only shoes left after the vultures got done picking my bones back in Montana, but when the hippie dude came walking back, I couldn't resist. I followed him down the hill and through an alley into a gravel parking lot where there was a van and four other hippies hanging around. 

I walked up just as shoeless got there and turned around. I pointed at his toots and then my boots and said, "Hey, would you like to have mine?" His jaw dropped and he said, oh, yeah. The others were jumping and yelling things like, "Hey, what the hell is going on?" I said, ok then, and yanked off one boot, then the other, then tossed them over at his feet. Then I said, "Hey, take the socks, too." After that, I started trekking back up the alley. I had to go back to the store to get my bazooka case with the long bulbs in it I'd hoped to sell. Anyway, it looked like a bazooka case and I could've passed for a gangland assassin. The dudes in the hardware store had seen all this, so I figured I might as well demonstrate the bulbs in bare feet. Anyway, it was the only sale I ever made in that business. 
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to buy a new pair of shoes after buying groceries. I was saved by the bell when a local church friend and also rich golfer dropped dead after his last round. Our desperate poverty had been well noted, so she generously gave me one of his Hawaiian sports shirts, sixty bucks, and seven pairs of barely worn shoes. I also got a job through local Christian businessmen where I could dress up fancy as an insurance salesman but all the prospective clients I could find were already spoken for by my manager who was also dragging in barrels of cash from two investment schemes paraded in front of well heeled Christians in the community. These were clearly inspired by the Holy Spirit and for the special benefit of God's faithful. One of those consisted of two hydroelectric plants. Having had eight years of hard core university math and life sciences, I was promised a nice cash reward to produce a technical analysis of the hydro plants that would inflame the minds of investors with the prospect of huge profits.     

Indeed, though still as impaired as I was broke,  this was the kind of problem that only a handful of the living could tackle. I worked it out to a 98% probability that the plants would produce a certain profit, except that there was no profit.  Of course, there was no cash reward for me, either. About that time, the feds busted the other investment, one called GD & L Containers. The IRS recovered $354 million in 1983 dollars from that one. They would have never been smart enough to figure out the hydroelectric plants, though it was the same bogus business plan. Nor, of course, did I get any kind of public or church relief save food stamps. A neighbor reminded me, not that I'd asked for anything, that without the generous contribution from the dead golfer and church brother, we'd really be up the creek. Which we were, since Sudden Valley Creek ran through our back yard. So, after nearly forty years, I thought it only right to thank God again for that dead guy.  I don't know where I'd be today if it hadn't been for him.