You know how I'm always telling you about hoboes whose names did not suit them in any way? No, I don't have any examples for you - just take my word for it. Okay? Thanks.
Stingo the Bandana Origami Prodigy is not one of those hoboes.
Born Stingo Jones, he officially joined the ranks of the nation's train-hopping transients in 1933, at the tender age of six. He never found out what had happened to his parents; they simply didn't come home, one day. It was just as well. He would not have coped well with knowing that they were on display in a downtown department store window, having been shredded alive in a wood chipper, then minced and baked into a couple of plus-size mannequins.
He spent exactly five minutes in the East Stroudsburg School for Boys Whose Parents Just Didn't Come Home One Day, before running- no, sprinting away, carrying only his bandana collection and some grapes.
From his earliest days on the rails, his innate ability to make fabulous bandana origami was obvious. He was a prodigy. So they called him Stingo the Bandana Origami Prodigy.
The End.
Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Catching Up With Fonzie - Crime & Punishment
"That's it?" The Union Pacific detective asked, looking not at his suspect, but at the two-way mirror on the back wall of the interrogation room. He knew that behind the glass, the Oklahoma City cops were shaking their heads.
"That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it, copper." Fonzie, a six-year veteran of the grinding, often brutal hobo life, had been in trouble before. His smile spoke of relief, as if he'd confessed everything.
He had not. Not nearly.
His confession had covered only the petty crime committed that morning - his attempted theft of a woman's purse at Union Station.
"Buddy, we got all night. I already told you the purse snatching ain't your biggest problem. So, before we go any further... Arturo Hebert Fonzarillo--"
"Call me Fonzie," the hobo said smugly.
The policeman cleared his throat. "Arturo Hebert Fonzarillo, you are hereby charged with the murders of Estelle Jane and Frank Joseph Fonzarillo. You have the right to remain silent--"
"What??" Fonzie slammed his handcuffed fists on the ancient wooden desk, and began to lunge from his chair, before several officers rushed into the room and encouraged him to reconsider. "My parents? What's wrong with you, bub? My parents died six years ago."
"Yes - the day you disappeared, Mr. Fonzarillo," the lead interrogator said flatly. "The day you murdered them. Now, you pays your money and you takes your choice, see..."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"What he's trying to say, Fonzie, is you did the crime, so now you're gonna do the time. I'd say about twenty-five to life."
Six hours later...
"You know what, coppers?" Fonzie sighed, exhausted. "I know I didn't kill my folks. God knows I didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure you fellas know I didn't do it. But, you know what? Write up a confession, and I'll sign it. Whatever you say - I did it. I drowned my dear old mama in the lobster tank in our restaurant. I knocked my pop unconscious with the pizza paddle from the kitchen, then burned him in the oven. Done and done. Where do I sign?"
The detectives stared at each other for a moment, then at Fonzie. "We'll get that typed up in just a minute, Fonz. But we been here for hours - with you proclaiming your innocence up one side and down the other. What gives?"
The weary hobo sighed heavily. "Like I said, God and me - we know I didn't do it. But there ain't a judge or jury that's gonna believe me. So, the way I see it, I already been punished to hell and back, over the past six years. You say I'll get twenty-five to life in the clink. About now, that sounds like a step up. A cot, a shower, food that don't have bugs in it, vaccinations, a roof over my head and no more running - I'll take it. Where do I sign?"
This time, I combined the STUDIO 30-PLUS prompt "he'd confessed everything" from Kirsten A. Piccini's "Man on a Mission," with the LIGHT & SHADE CHALLENGE prompt "You pays your money and you takes your choice," and the name Fonzie, from John Hodgman's list of 700 hobo names.
So. Did he do it?
"That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it, copper." Fonzie, a six-year veteran of the grinding, often brutal hobo life, had been in trouble before. His smile spoke of relief, as if he'd confessed everything.
He had not. Not nearly.
His confession had covered only the petty crime committed that morning - his attempted theft of a woman's purse at Union Station.
"Buddy, we got all night. I already told you the purse snatching ain't your biggest problem. So, before we go any further... Arturo Hebert Fonzarillo--"
"Call me Fonzie," the hobo said smugly.
The policeman cleared his throat. "Arturo Hebert Fonzarillo, you are hereby charged with the murders of Estelle Jane and Frank Joseph Fonzarillo. You have the right to remain silent--"
"What??" Fonzie slammed his handcuffed fists on the ancient wooden desk, and began to lunge from his chair, before several officers rushed into the room and encouraged him to reconsider. "My parents? What's wrong with you, bub? My parents died six years ago."
"Yes - the day you disappeared, Mr. Fonzarillo," the lead interrogator said flatly. "The day you murdered them. Now, you pays your money and you takes your choice, see..."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"What he's trying to say, Fonzie, is you did the crime, so now you're gonna do the time. I'd say about twenty-five to life."
Six hours later...
"You know what, coppers?" Fonzie sighed, exhausted. "I know I didn't kill my folks. God knows I didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure you fellas know I didn't do it. But, you know what? Write up a confession, and I'll sign it. Whatever you say - I did it. I drowned my dear old mama in the lobster tank in our restaurant. I knocked my pop unconscious with the pizza paddle from the kitchen, then burned him in the oven. Done and done. Where do I sign?"
The detectives stared at each other for a moment, then at Fonzie. "We'll get that typed up in just a minute, Fonz. But we been here for hours - with you proclaiming your innocence up one side and down the other. What gives?"
The weary hobo sighed heavily. "Like I said, God and me - we know I didn't do it. But there ain't a judge or jury that's gonna believe me. So, the way I see it, I already been punished to hell and back, over the past six years. You say I'll get twenty-five to life in the clink. About now, that sounds like a step up. A cot, a shower, food that don't have bugs in it, vaccinations, a roof over my head and no more running - I'll take it. Where do I sign?"
This time, I combined the STUDIO 30-PLUS prompt "he'd confessed everything" from Kirsten A. Piccini's "Man on a Mission," with the LIGHT & SHADE CHALLENGE prompt "You pays your money and you takes your choice," and the name Fonzie, from John Hodgman's list of 700 hobo names.
So. Did he do it?
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Sung, The Land Pirate - A Love Story
Some of the most famous hoboes were not actually hoboes at all. Many others were hoboes in addition to being something else - singers, carpenters, bankers, haberdashers and so forth. Two were pirates. One of those was Robert Louis Stevenson, The Pirate. Nothing is known of him. The other was Sung, The Land Pirate. His short life was the stuff of legend.
Tricky thing, legend. At best, it is a collection of facts warped to varying degrees. Often, facts are utterly bent, extending in a line perpendicular to the truth. How close to reality was the legend of Sung, The Land Pirate?
Legend has it, Sung's mother left him in a basket behind the livestock pens in Topeka, Kansas when he was three hours old, and that he climbed out and began riding the rails that very night.
This is not true. In reality, he was born on a dank, leaky boat en route from China to San Francisco. His parents were part of the last wave of Chinese near-slaves to come to the western U.S. to build railroads. So, technically he had been around the rails since his infancy, but he didn't start riding and wandering until he was ten years old.
It is rumored that the reason he left the labor camp at age ten was that he had murdered the daughter of his father's foreman, and his parents had sent him away for his own (relative) safety.
This is not at all what happened. Sung had been desperately jealous of his younger sister, who had come along when he was seven years old. On his tenth birthday, he was informed that his mother was again pregnant. He became enraged and cut her stomach open in an attempt to kill the baby. While she bled to death, his father came at him with a meat cleaver, but Sung snatched it from him, swung once and struck the man's leg near the groin, severing his femoral artery. With his parents quickly dying, Sung stuffed his meager belongings, all the money from the mattress, the cleaver and a hunting knife into a pillowcase, muttered something hateful to his traumatized sister and started running.
It is said that over the next two years, he assembled a small band of skilled young burglars, pickpockets and murderers, forming his crew of land pirates.
Again, not so. He spent his first few hobo/pirate years on the run. He made no friends and killed hardly anyone until his late teens. During those years, he taught himself to hunt, to steal, to evade the authorities, to ride trains without detection - to survive.
Legend has it that during his peak land pirate years - from age nineteen until his death at twenty-four - he only killed with his bare hands.
Wrong. In the midst of one of his first train robberies in California, he found a beautiful fourteen-year old girl with long, golden curls, cowering in a Pullman sleeper and clutching her long-dead grandfather's Union Army sword. He had no trouble taking it from her, and when he finished brutally beating and raping her, he used it to cut off her hands, then pushed it into her eye and through her head. From that night on, that sword was his murder weapon of choice, although he did occasionally shoot people, when the need arose.
There were little details of his land piracy that got twisted over time, as well. He did not carry his possessions in a rickshaw. He pulled a child's wagon, taken from one of the paltry few he robbed and left alive. He did not have gold teeth. He had homemade implants, fashioned from balsa wood and the teeth of several of his victims. He did not lop off the head of one of his band of pirates for asking for a day off, but he did in fact quietly kill all of them, one by one, as they drunkenly slept one New Year's night.
Finally, he did not die all Bonnie-and-Clyde-style in a hail of police bullets. He got scratched by a raccoon and died a week later from the ensuing infection.
But the part about him drinking rum was true. It was hard to come by, but he loved it so much that, on occasion, he actually paid for it.
Tricky thing, legend. At best, it is a collection of facts warped to varying degrees. Often, facts are utterly bent, extending in a line perpendicular to the truth. How close to reality was the legend of Sung, The Land Pirate?
Legend has it, Sung's mother left him in a basket behind the livestock pens in Topeka, Kansas when he was three hours old, and that he climbed out and began riding the rails that very night.
This is not true. In reality, he was born on a dank, leaky boat en route from China to San Francisco. His parents were part of the last wave of Chinese near-slaves to come to the western U.S. to build railroads. So, technically he had been around the rails since his infancy, but he didn't start riding and wandering until he was ten years old.
It is rumored that the reason he left the labor camp at age ten was that he had murdered the daughter of his father's foreman, and his parents had sent him away for his own (relative) safety.
This is not at all what happened. Sung had been desperately jealous of his younger sister, who had come along when he was seven years old. On his tenth birthday, he was informed that his mother was again pregnant. He became enraged and cut her stomach open in an attempt to kill the baby. While she bled to death, his father came at him with a meat cleaver, but Sung snatched it from him, swung once and struck the man's leg near the groin, severing his femoral artery. With his parents quickly dying, Sung stuffed his meager belongings, all the money from the mattress, the cleaver and a hunting knife into a pillowcase, muttered something hateful to his traumatized sister and started running.
It is said that over the next two years, he assembled a small band of skilled young burglars, pickpockets and murderers, forming his crew of land pirates.
Again, not so. He spent his first few hobo/pirate years on the run. He made no friends and killed hardly anyone until his late teens. During those years, he taught himself to hunt, to steal, to evade the authorities, to ride trains without detection - to survive.
Legend has it that during his peak land pirate years - from age nineteen until his death at twenty-four - he only killed with his bare hands.
Wrong. In the midst of one of his first train robberies in California, he found a beautiful fourteen-year old girl with long, golden curls, cowering in a Pullman sleeper and clutching her long-dead grandfather's Union Army sword. He had no trouble taking it from her, and when he finished brutally beating and raping her, he used it to cut off her hands, then pushed it into her eye and through her head. From that night on, that sword was his murder weapon of choice, although he did occasionally shoot people, when the need arose.
There were little details of his land piracy that got twisted over time, as well. He did not carry his possessions in a rickshaw. He pulled a child's wagon, taken from one of the paltry few he robbed and left alive. He did not have gold teeth. He had homemade implants, fashioned from balsa wood and the teeth of several of his victims. He did not lop off the head of one of his band of pirates for asking for a day off, but he did in fact quietly kill all of them, one by one, as they drunkenly slept one New Year's night.
Finally, he did not die all Bonnie-and-Clyde-style in a hail of police bullets. He got scratched by a raccoon and died a week later from the ensuing infection.
But the part about him drinking rum was true. It was hard to come by, but he loved it so much that, on occasion, he actually paid for it.
Friday, November 30, 2012
The Lamb Chop Murders
Today, an old friend made the mistake of asking me if I remember the kiddie TV character "Lamb Chop." Ha! Do I remember Lamb Chop? Who doesn't remember Shari Lewis' adorable and timeless Lamb Chop? Yeah, that would be me. At least, I don't recall the puppet itself, or the show. But I remember the incidents.
Not many people know of the first one, because there was another, much more widely-publicized story, involving a frozen leg of lamb, from around the same time. This story, short on details though it may be, is better, because it's true.
There was a wife, mercilessly berated and belittled by her bully of a husband for years, who reached her rope's end one evening and cracked his head open with a stack of lamb chops that had frozen together in their icebox. Thinking quickly, she screamed a few times, broke the window that opened onto the fire escape, threw the bloody chops into a sink full of warm water, and called the police.
By the time the deputies arrived, she had concocted a story about a break-in by a crowbar-wielding thug who had struck the fatal blow upon her husband's crown and fled when she had screamed. She had also cooked the lamb chops - pan-seared in a little olive oil, rosemary and mint. She was never even arrested, and always thought it pathetic that the cops hadn't bothered to ask why she had cooked eight chops, when the table had been set for two. She had no idea that they had absolutely made that observation, but that her husband had been a monster and her actions were more than justified. Why put her through a trial, they had decided before even knocking on her door.
The second "Lamb Chop" murder took place in a studio prop room in the 1980s, and well, we all know about that one, don't we?
The third incident, and the only one I was lucky enough to have witnessed in-person, was more about "Rambo III" than it was about Shari Lewis or her TV puppet. I was working at Erol's Video Club in late 1988 when "Rambo III" was released on VHS. It was a Friday night, and the video had come in the day before. All 25 copies - a lot, for our store - had all gone out Thursday, so most of them were coming back at random times throughout the evening. We didn't have a waiting list, because they had always been more trouble than they were worth, so there was a small crowd gathered around the "returns" table, waiting for Stallone's latest Razzie Award-winning masterpiece.
I hated approaching that table under those circumstances, with a copy of the sought-after video du jour or without. This time, I was with. A couple of people shouted something or other about having been there first, but I just tossed the tape onto the table and ran. NEEDLESS TO SAY, a scuffle immediately ensued. Punches were thrown. Our brand-new candy display carousel was toppled. Noses were bloodied, screams and obscenities filled the air. The police were summoned.
I didn't see anyone leave in particularly serious condition, but we learned the next day that one of the combatants had died of his injuries, having been struck in temple with a videotape. A detective came by that afternoon to pick it up from the manager's office. It had been the only other tape on the returns table, at the time of the fracas, and it was the only one that had turned up broken, that night.
It was our lone copy of "Lamb Chop's Sing-along, Play-along."
Do I remember Lamb Chop? Yeah, I do. In my nightmares.
Not many people know of the first one, because there was another, much more widely-publicized story, involving a frozen leg of lamb, from around the same time. This story, short on details though it may be, is better, because it's true.
There was a wife, mercilessly berated and belittled by her bully of a husband for years, who reached her rope's end one evening and cracked his head open with a stack of lamb chops that had frozen together in their icebox. Thinking quickly, she screamed a few times, broke the window that opened onto the fire escape, threw the bloody chops into a sink full of warm water, and called the police.
By the time the deputies arrived, she had concocted a story about a break-in by a crowbar-wielding thug who had struck the fatal blow upon her husband's crown and fled when she had screamed. She had also cooked the lamb chops - pan-seared in a little olive oil, rosemary and mint. She was never even arrested, and always thought it pathetic that the cops hadn't bothered to ask why she had cooked eight chops, when the table had been set for two. She had no idea that they had absolutely made that observation, but that her husband had been a monster and her actions were more than justified. Why put her through a trial, they had decided before even knocking on her door.
The second "Lamb Chop" murder took place in a studio prop room in the 1980s, and well, we all know about that one, don't we?
The third incident, and the only one I was lucky enough to have witnessed in-person, was more about "Rambo III" than it was about Shari Lewis or her TV puppet. I was working at Erol's Video Club in late 1988 when "Rambo III" was released on VHS. It was a Friday night, and the video had come in the day before. All 25 copies - a lot, for our store - had all gone out Thursday, so most of them were coming back at random times throughout the evening. We didn't have a waiting list, because they had always been more trouble than they were worth, so there was a small crowd gathered around the "returns" table, waiting for Stallone's latest Razzie Award-winning masterpiece.
I hated approaching that table under those circumstances, with a copy of the sought-after video du jour or without. This time, I was with. A couple of people shouted something or other about having been there first, but I just tossed the tape onto the table and ran. NEEDLESS TO SAY, a scuffle immediately ensued. Punches were thrown. Our brand-new candy display carousel was toppled. Noses were bloodied, screams and obscenities filled the air. The police were summoned.
I didn't see anyone leave in particularly serious condition, but we learned the next day that one of the combatants had died of his injuries, having been struck in temple with a videotape. A detective came by that afternoon to pick it up from the manager's office. It had been the only other tape on the returns table, at the time of the fracas, and it was the only one that had turned up broken, that night.
It was our lone copy of "Lamb Chop's Sing-along, Play-along."
Do I remember Lamb Chop? Yeah, I do. In my nightmares.
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