Chapter 4 – The Parish Hall
The last Saturday in June, Win and I went up to the Parish Hall at Holy Family Church, which was just down the hill from our school and very close to where I lived. They played records every Saturday night, and they had Kool-Aid and coffee for the more sophisticated. It was mostly eighth and ninth grade girls who hung out there, dancing with each other because hardly any boys showed up who were willing to dance.
One of the girls I recognized was Tom’s older sister, Kelly. She was sitting at a table by herself, drinking coffee and reading The Dharma Bums. She said hello to me and I sat down with her while Win went off to dance. We started talking about Kerouac, and I knew enough about him to hold my own. I had read On the Road the previous winter, mostly to impress my teachers. I had found that, if I read stuff that was considered beyond my level, I could get extra credit, and actually get out of doing some of my homework because I was doing “advanced reading.” I had also read a long article in “The New Yorker” about Kerouac, Ginsberg and the “Beat Generation” while sitting in my doctor’s office.
So I was able to say all the right things, even if I didn’t really understand any of it. This friendly conversation would bear valuable fruit eventually, but there was something else I found out that night that was of more immediate use. We were sitting off to the side, near the door to the storeroom, and the guy who was in charge asked me if I would help him carry another table out. He wasn’t a priest, I don’t think; I don’t know the Catholic system that well. He was just the guy in charge. I said sure, I would help.
We walked into the storeroom, and there it all was: at least a dozen Army surplus folding cots leaning against the wall, and it looked like hundreds of khaki blankets stacked on the shelves. I had found the answer to one of our problems, if we could find a way to get them.
When we reconvened at the pit on Monday morning, I revealed my find, and we talked about it at length. Tom and Rollo knew all about the Parish Hall. As reluctant, but obedient Catholic boys, they were forced to attend CYO classes on a regular basis, and some of them were at the Parish Hall. They both lived at the other end of town, though. Holy Family was about equidistant between my house and Win’s, so we decided the two of us would give it a shot. If we failed, we would ask Karl for his help, but we wanted to see if we could do this on our own.
Meanwhile, our stock of food was growing steadily, thanks to Jimmy and Larry. All of us helped out some; I managed a minor haul from one of our neighbors. They had built a bomb shelter in their basement, convinced that Khrushchev was going to drop an atomic bomb on Plattsburg Air Force Base, and they had hundreds of cans of food on the shelves. Their son was my brother’s best friend, and we used to play poker for marbles in the basement, so I was a regular visitor. One day, fortuitously left alone, I made off with six cans of Pork & Beans, pulling the cans forward on the shelf to make it look undisturbed. It wasn’t something I felt I could repeat, though, since they were the kind of people who probably kept an inventory.
Karl had got us a couple of pallets. He didn’t even have to steal those; you could get them for free behind the Grand Union. We stacked the cans on the pallets to keep them off the ground, and put the tarps over the stack. The stock of food was composed overwhelmingly of three items: Spaghettios, Pork & Beans, and Dinty Moore Beef Stew. A few other things showed up occasionally, but it was mostly those three. There were a few non-food items we started to accumulate; a short, but growing list of essentials: toilet paper, soap, Band-Aids, matches.
It looked like we would have the pit dug out by the end of the week, or early the next, so we started planning the structure, talking about it while we dug. We knew we were going to need lots of two-by-fours and sheets of plywood, but, like I said, we weren’t exactly construction experts. We bounced a lot of bullshit ideas back and forth, but we came to a general agreement on a basic structure. We knew what a stud wall was, and we figured we could build four frames for the sides, and another for the floor, and figure out some way to attach them at the corners.
Roofing the pit was going to be a problem. We could obviously make the same kind of frame of plywood and two-by-fours, but that wasn’t going to keep the rain out. We would have to cover the frame with something waterproof, or semi-waterproof, at least, and then cover that with dirt and moss and leaves to make it look natural. So the roof would have to be pretty well supported to hold all that weight. It would also have to be able to support somebody walking across it. Although we all realized that, if it came to the point of searchers walking across our roof, we were sunk anyway, we still didn’t want anybody falling through it.
Win had watched his Dad replace some roof shingles on their house, and he said it would be pretty easy for us to do it that way. All we would need is some tarpaper, roofing shingles and roofing nails. If Karl could get us that stuff, it would be easy.
“But a roof is slanted,” Rollo pointed out, “With a flat roof, isn’t the water going to come through anyway, even if it’s shingled?”
“Why does it have to be flat?” Win responded, “Why don’t we just make the wall on this end twelve inches higher than the wall on that end, and we’ve got a slanted roof. The rain hits the shingles and runs down to that end and down the side.”
We talked that idea back and forth for a while, and it seemed like it would work, so that became our plan, at least for the time being. We also needed to build the wooden tunnel connecting the pit with the crevice, and make some kind of door. None of us really had a clear idea of what we were going to do with that, but we would deal with that problem when we needed to.
It turned out that we needed to deal with it sooner than anticipated, because it became obvious as the pit got deeper that we needed another way into and out of the pit. Pretty soon we wouldn’t be able to just jump in and out. What we did was, with some more two-by-fours and one-by-sixes, we built a wooden box, thirty by thirty inches, and four feet long. We concentrated on digging down deeper in the northeast corner of the pit, and then dug out the connecting tunnel between the crevice behind the spruces and the pit. The box fit in the tunnel, and it worked. We would have to figure out how to attach that box to the wall on that side eventually, and make some kind of door, but, for now, we could get in and out without jumping or climbing.
We were nearly finished digging by the end of that week, and we were hoping to get some sheets of plywood and more two-by-fours soon, so we could start on the first frame, which we figured should be the floor. Meanwhile, Win and I had some major scrounging to do.
The two of us showed up at the Parish Hall on Saturday night. Kelly was there again, and we sat with her and talked for a while. She was still reading the same Kerouac novel. Win was not really interested in the subject, so he went off to get us a couple of Kool-aids and see if he could sneak into the storeroom. Kelly and I got into the Beat writers and, while my knowledge was fairly limited, I tried to steer the conversation towards certain aspects of the movement, specifically rejection of mainstream culture and the authority figures that ruled our lives. That sparked a little interest; she definitely saw herself as a rebel, and I was trying to project that same image.
When Win came back to the table, he was a little agitated because his older sister had just come in with a couple of her friends, and Win had no intention of hanging around to be taunted by his sister. He managed to convey to me, silently, that he had accomplished something, so we gulped our Kool-Aids and bolted. We walked up to the Summit Street School playground, which was just behind the Parish Hall, and sat down on a slope where we could watch the place.
“Look,” Win said, “maybe this isn’t going to work, but it’s so simple and stupid that it might work.”
“What? What’s going to work?”
“I walked into the storeroom when no one was looking, and I just put a book of matches in the lock on the side door. If the guy, the half-a-priest, or whatever he is, is doing his job, he’ll check that door, and we’re screwed, but maybe he won’t check it.”
I laughed. He was right; it was simple and stupid and it might work. We just had to wait until everyone was gone and it was dark. If we were lucky, all we had to do was walk in the side door. So we sat there and shot the shit for an hour, or more, waiting for the place to close at nine o’clock, and then for the guy to leave, and since it was the end of June, for the sun to set. While we sat there, Win broke the news to me that Rollo wanted in. That is, he wanted, not just to help us, but to join us when we disappeared.
I was surprised, and, I must admit, pretty skeptical. It was true that Rollo had helped us a lot, done a great job with the latrine, and, in his own gross, disgusting way, had fit right in with the group. I just wasn’t sure that he had the same level of commitment that Tom and Win and I had. Win understood my point of view; in fact he agreed with me. But he thought it might be better to accept him and see what came of it.
“Chances are he’s going to back out. We’ve still got two months of work to do before school starts, and Rollo’s never stuck to anything for two months his whole life. But he’s a friend, and he’s been a big help so far, so why don’t we let him in, for now, and see what happens?”
“Does Tom know he wants in?”
“Yeah. I guess he asked Tom after the CYO class the other night, and Tom asked me.”
I pondered on it for a bit, but in the end I went along with it.
“He’s not going to tell on us, whether he goes through with it or not, so it guess it can’t hurt.”
We talked for a while about the size of the pit. We had already decided to make the pit twelve feet square, for the simple reason that plywood sheets came in eight-by-four, so it meant a lot less sawing. It would be crowded, especially at night, but, if we could get the folding cots, we would be able to have a lot more room when we weren’t sleeping.
As the sun went down, we speculated, not for the first or last time, about how long we might actually last before they found us. Depending on the person and the mood, estimates among the group had varied from a few days to two weeks. I was more optimistic than most, partly because of the deception plans I was working on, which I had not shared with anyone. I wanted to have way more supplies on hand than anybody thought we would need, just in case.