GIN-4 Glory Hole

Excerpt

I had been going to Ripley Park since I was nine years old. My grandmother and I lived just four blocks away. My mother died when I was two years old and my grandmother raised me.

My father’s work kept him overseas, mostly in the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. He came home to the California Valley town where we lived only on brief leaves of absence from his work.

Ripley Park occupied one square block and was within easy walking distance to the main shopping center of town and directly across from the Post Office. It was frequented mostly by the town’s castaways—old men and winos and transient farm laborers.

A few kids played on the playground at one end, but most went to a better, cleaner park further away from town. The Ripley Park playground consisted only of a sandbox and several swings.

I was maybe thirteen years old when I first became dimly aware that “something” was going on in the park men’s room. I didn’t see anything specific, but instinct told me that “something” was going on…something forbidden.

After school I used to sit over by the swings for two hours at a time—’til dinnertime-watching the can which was over on the other side of the park. And when school was out for the summer, I spent entire afternoons there and sometimes I came back after dinner on those long summer days when it didn’t get dark until nearly nine.

I began to notice that the same group of men gathered on the benches near the can at about the same time of day…one group in the early afternoon, one group in the late afternoon and another at night. A few even hung around for all three “shifts”.