Albert, unforgotten
My boyhood best friend, murdered in Atlantic City long ago
Précis
In the most recent Sundman figures it out! post, “Mountain of Devils and Creation Science, part one: A peak[sic] at 2 novels in progress,” I wrote about forthcoming novel Mountain of Devils, prequel to my Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital. I promised that in my next post, part two, I would write about Creation Science, a novel that’s been simmering on my back burner since dinosaurs walked the earth.
But since (as will be revealed) so much of Creation Science concerns the enigma of the character known as Albert Joseph Compton, Jr, I think it meet to digress here to tell you about about the model for that character.
The name of the real-life model for the character Albert Joseph Compton, Jr., who is to Creation Science as Ismael is to Moby Dick.
Albert was my inseparable friend from the day we met sometime in 1960, when I was entering 4th grade and he was entering 3rd, through elementary school (after which I went off to Xavier High School in New York City and he moved with his family to southern New Jersey).
Even after Albert had moved away he was my closest friend for another two or three years, and though we naturally found other friends as we made our way though our very different high schools, we remained in regular contact.
But sometime during our college years, for reasons I never understood, Albert broke off all communication with me. He was murdered in a liquor store robbery in Atlantic City, New Jersey sometime around 1985 when he was in his early thirties, by which point he and I were long out of touch and he had become a mystery to me.
[Letter posted from Somers Point, NJ, June 17, 1968]
Dear John; I already wrote you a letter about how I dislocated and broke that same finger again and all I went through at the hospital and all that jazz but I never sent it. It's still sitting on the TV upon which Ted Kennedy is thanking all the people who went to Bobby's funeral and all that. He said that this was not the first tragedy that his family has endured but that they hope that it is the last. (You better believe that HE hopes it's last, because he's next in line for death!) Anyhow I'm writing this on my bed listening to Ethel now who says the same thing, except paraphrased. I busted my hand the day Bobby got shot. Exams are all over and so is school. I'm trying to get a job that's better than caddying (which blows). How are you? We are fine. Did you ever try Sport Cola? It's pretty good.
Chronology
As the 1950’s ended and the 60’s began, North Caldwell, New Jersey was rapidly suburbanizing. The Sundman family farm, with out two cows and eight sheep and sixty chickens and a dozen or so fruit trees was one of the four remaining farms in town, and our old farmhouse with the coal-furnace in the basement was already an anachronism. New houses were going up everywhere including in the field between the Moore’s house and Mrs. Wagner’s place just up the road from us. In the proverbial blink of an eye a new split-level house was there, and then there was a car with Arizona plates in the driveway.
The Compton family comprised three intriguing personalities and one inert lump of flavorless poi. Even though I was just a kid I could tell that Mrs. Compton was the driver in the family. She was friendly, curious, organized and smart. She was also a movie buff and a chain smoker. Albert was a short, skinny kid with thick glasses and a very pronounced stutter, and he too was really smart. His sister Barbara was five years older than Albert, four years older than me, and really smart. (I didn’t notice her much at first, but by the time I was 13 and she was 17 I was pretty much enthralled by her.) And Mr. Compton? He was Mr. Cellophane, hard to know he was even there.
Since Albert and I were in different grades we were never in the same classes, but outside of school we were usually together.
Albert’s stutter was severe, and of course that made him self-conscious in social settings, which he found many ways to avoid. But he rarely stuttered when speaking to his mother or his sister, and over time his stutter went away, or mostly went away, when he was talking with me.
When I was in eighth grade and Albert was in seventh, Mr. Compton died. To Albert his father’s death was almost a non-event, except that as a consequence his mother decided to move the family to Somer’s Point, near Atlantic City, a two-plus hour drive from North Caldwell. I believe she had a relative who lived in the area — and the two-bedroom apartment that became their new home was certainly more affordable than the house they had been renting.
In those days not only were cell phones decades in the future, but ‘long-distance’ phone calls were metered by the minute and they were not cheap. Rates were lower in the evening, and Sunday evening was the cheapest of all, so on some Sunday evenings Albert and I would talk briefly by phone. But even at Sunday evening rates phone calls were expensive, and I spoke to Albert only a few times each year.
Instead we wrote letters. Hundreds of them.
Where did you go surfing? Long Island? It better not have been Beach Haven, or I’ll get mad at you for not coming here, or at least calling me. Speaking of that, when are you coming down here? Or don’t you want to? Or do you hate my guts? Or don’t you want to see me any more because I’m fat? I AM NOT FAT! Boy, you’re a real wise guy*. Do you know what I like to do? Shoot people with a water pistol from a moving bike.
[*] Write about coming down (if you still want to) in your next letter.
Through high school each summer we would get together for a week or so at his family’s apartment or my family’s house. When we were 15 & 16 we took a two-day bicycle ride from North Caldwell to Beach Haven on our 3-speed bikes with sleeping bags tied the handlebars and a change of clothes and some sandwiches in baskets mounted on the rear axels. With no GPS and no compass and only some maps that soon proved mostly useless we somehow made it there, having spent the night in a cheap hotel room in Freehold after being chased from the cornfield we had camped out in by an army of red ants.
I went to Hamilton College in upstate New York; a year later Albert went to University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. We still wrote, but not as obsessively as we had done years earlier. I visited him at Penn in his freshman year. Barbara came to say hello; she was a student at Moore College of art, and she was more sexy and more cool than ever. She was casual and friendly and a genius with pen and ink and self-deprecating and gorgeous. A goddess, basically. But other than seeing Barbara that trip wasn’t much fun. I remember noticing that Albert, who had always been short and slight, had grown taller.
The last time I saw Albert was two years later, when I was twenty. I was again on vacation with my family in Beach Haven; he was in in Somers Point, an hour away, working that summer as a lifeguard in Atlantic City. We agreed to meet at some ice cream joint halfway between.
I barely recognized him. He was now almost 6 feet tall (I was 6’3”) and he was built like Arnold (I was skinny). He was a member of the Penn rowing team and his back was about a yard thick, nothing but muscle. He seemed depressed. I remember him saying that he was the only white guy on the beach, and that everybody hated him, even the people he had just saved from drowning. He talked about maybe getting an MBA at Wharton after finishing college, or maybe just dropping out. At one point he softly sang a few bar from Randy Newman’s “I think it’s going to rain today”:
Tin can lying at my feet Think I'll kick it down the street That's the way to treat a friend
After that encounter he never answered my letters or took a phone call. It was the last time I ever saw him.
After college I went into the Peace Corps in Senegal, then I studied agricultural economics at Purdue, and somehow by 1990 or so I wound up managing a 50-person group of engineers and technical writers — half in Massachusetts, half in Silicon Valley — at Sun Microsystems. One night, while working in my office in Billerica around 8 PM — fifteen years since our last meeting — I decided to see what Albert was up to. So I called his mother — I still remembered the number.
After a little bit of chit-chat I said “So tell me, where is Albert? How do I get in touch with that guy?”
There was a long pause.
“Oh. You didn’t know. Albert was shot about five years ago.”
We talked just a little bit more — I was really shaken up — and she gave me Barbara’s number. I called Barbara up a day later and she told me a bit more. Albert had dropped out of college. He was working as a clerk in an Atlantic City liquor store and was murdered in a robbery. The murderer was caught and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. End of story.
After that I never spoke with Barbara or Mrs. Compton again. I’ve made a few feeble attempts to locate Barbara, but there are lots of people with her name, and besides, what would be the point?
I know a kid that has a Sting Ray with a gear shift and I ride him on the handlebars to play tennis (did I tell you I play tennis real good?) all the time. He joined this pool and wants me to come to it as a guest but I can’t until I get the tape and crap off my hand and it’s real hot and I’m trying and I can’t even take a shower (because I’m not supposed to get the tape wet until I’m well) or anything. I can’t even go swimming and the water’s good and this other kid has asked me to go surfing 40 million times. Damn it! (the surf’s 3 1/2 feet too). By the time my stupid hand gets better the summer will probably be over and it will rain all the time and the water will be hot and full of seaweed and jellyfish and sharks and to hell with the doctor I’m going anyway. You can come down anytime you want. Bring your surfboard if you want.
Albert and Ande (& Mike)
To bring Albert into focus, let’s do a compare/contrast with some others.
Albert and Ande were my two best friends all during elementary school years. Ande was a year older than me, a classmate of my brother Mike. With Ande & Mike I did things like make rockets out of empty CO2 cartridges fueled by match-heads and purloined gunpowder, and we would go hiking and camping & sleeping in the woods, and we’d steal girlie magazines from a dilapidated building where some local farmhands sometimes hung out. Our favorite song was “On the Trail of the Buffalo,” which we found exquisitely ridiculous.
There our pleasures ended And our troubles all began A lightening storm did hit us It made the cattle ran!
We were knuckleheads, and happy to be so.
With Albert it was different. He and I would read Hardy Boy novels and monster movie magazines, and play board games and listen to records and talk with his mother about books and movies and politics and history and philosophy. Albert liked thinking.
His favorite record was Bob Luman’s “Let’s think about Life”:
Let's think about living Let's think about life Let's forget about the whining and the crying and the shooting and the dying and the fella with the switchblade knife Let's think about living Let's think about life
Albert was a focused kid. He didn’t read one or two Hardy Boy books, he read 46 of them. When he got into collecting stamps, he really got into collecting stamps.
From the day I met him, when he was about 8 years old, Albert was obsessed with questions like whether the Slavic peoples originated in Scandinavia and whatever happened to Lyndon Johnson’s disreputable friend Bobby Baker. Forty years before the Internet, how the heck did an eight year old kid even hear about such things? Who knows? He was one of a kind.
If you look at this paper real close you can see the marks that the pen made when I was writing the last sheet. I’m reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s all about this guy who gets lost in the woods and the only way he can get back is to go through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The trip through Hell is the most famous. You must have heard of Dante’s Inferno. (He was Italian (Florentine) and he called his three books Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio, (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven or Paradise)). School’s all over! (Like hooray!)
I used to do sleepovers at Albert’s house and (with Mike, always) at Ande’s. But only once did the four of us try hanging out together. It was completely un-fun and we never attempted it again.
McCrory’s and The Boxes
Albert’s father, the man with no discernible personality, was manager of the McCrory’s store in Orange, NJ. (Before that he had managed a McCrory’s in Tucson.)
Probably because of the McCrory’s connection, Albert had a big supply of toys suitable for much younger children. Things like little plastic soldiers (and cowboys and Indians) and Lincoln Logs and wind-up cars. They filled a few cardboard boxes in the basement, and when we got bored, sometimes we would say “let’s play with the boxes!” and we would build worlds full of mismatched parts and intricate Rube Goldberg devices to destroy them.
I saw Planet of the Apes. Did you? Did you see 2001? I’m going to soon. Well, I guess there isn’t much more to say. Please write about coming down. Please write LONG letters.
(signed) Albert Compton, of the House of Finrod, son of Finarfin, Lord of Mirkwood of the Silvan Elves (line of Legolas)
Dante and The Cache
I’ve carried the cache of Albert’s letters with me for five decades, seldom if ever reading any of them. But over years of unfocused wrestling with Creation Science, just trying to figure out what the hell I was trying to do with that great blob of jello purporting to be a novel, I came to understand that not only did that book contain a character that I had named after Albert, I knew that it would somehow have to be about Albert.
And I also had come to understand, after working on Creation Science for years and years, writing drafts and throwing them away, again and again and again, that my novel would also have some kind of intrinsic relation to Dante’s Inferno. I resisted that idea for a long time too, but last year I gave up, and went to Thriftbooks and bought several different translations of Dante’s masterpiece.
But even as I came to accept that the enigma of Albert Joseph Compton Jr would be a central concern of my magnum opus, I couldn’t bring myself to read the letters. I don’t know why. I was aware of them calling to me, but I pretended not to hear therm.
But three days ago, as I started to work on this post, I grabbed bundle of Albert’s letters, bound by an ancient and brittle rubber band, and I snapped that band and grabbed a letter at random.
When I got to the part where he mentions Dante, I felt that old woo-woo.
Now, I suspect that at least one person reading this post will find it just a little too cute and coincidental that the one letter that I happened to grab would be the one in which Albert tells me about reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. But, y’know, that’s what happened, so honi soit qui mal y pense.
And now, having given you this little bit of background, I think I’m ready to write Mountain of Devils and Creation Science, part two. Stay tuned.
It's comforting to read this post -- and the comments -- from people who have experiences so similar to mine. You who know who Jerry Pournelle (Chaos Mansion, right?) and Soft Machine are and sometimes burn old letters. I believe I even said exactly the same thing about needing some Sundman after reading Stephenson. I surely recall being in a McCrorys Five and Dime. I can still hear the voice of the ancient sales clerk there, in her librarian glasses: "Keen I help you boiz?" as she tried, obviously, to prevent us from shop-lifting -- which we, as obviously, were doing.
I loved reading this. Sometimes life is indeed more interesting than fiction. ("Truth is stranger than fiction" also reminds me of an album by a band I can't remember called "Ruth is Stranger Than Richard") I got to know you, John, in a whole different way than I remember at Xavier, and I identify very much. I wish I had known you better then,...