Framed on Cape Cod: The Jimmy Boozer Story
Chapter
One – It Was Not A Very Good Year
Monday, September 8, 1986. It
was the first day of school at the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School. All
the ninth graders were expensively dressed in the latest fashions from Puritan
Clothing on Main Street in Hyannis - except for Jimmy Boozer. His clothing also
came from Hyannis, but it was second-hand, having been obtained at the very end
of Main Street - an area the locals call ‘Leftover-Main’.
It was then, and still is today, the home to Cape Cod’s seediest
bars and a string of second hand stores where the unwashed garments offered on
the racks and shelves come with an assortment of extras - everything from stray
cat hairs to fleas, urine smells, and shit stains.
Speed-walking along Station Avenue towards the Dennis-Yarmouth
Regional High School, Jimmy Boozer ignored the Dennis school-bus passing by,
and the searing insults streaming through the open windows.
A few curses hurled from a moving bus were easier to bear than
what he’d have to put up with if he had chosen to ride the bus. It was far better to walk the five miles to
school than to sit in a seat next to the ‘normal’ kids.
Jimmy concentrated on the trees; their leaves still a bright green.
The autumn breeze prodded them into prancing like dancers on wooden poles. It
had stayed warm and the leaves probably thought they could endure until next
spring. Jimmy thought that he too could make
it through the winter, not knowing that the first day of school would be his
last.
Looking forward to leaving behind the torture chamber that the Dennis
Middle School had been for him for the last eight years, he hoped that things
would be better in the regional high school.
Since he rarely left the South Dennis Village, the Yarmouth kids didn’t
know him. He might stand a chance to
make a few friends, and find some happiness.
There was little that made Jimmy happy in 1986. He had no friends. He lived with his mother in a tiny apartment
above the ‘Cod-father’s Inn’ – the rowdiest bar in Dennis Village’s combat zone
– a line of a half dozen honky-tonks that hugged the bank of an otherwise undeveloped
section of the Rising-Tide-River. His mother got the apartment free as a trade
off for occasional bar tending. She also performed certain other services for
the clientele. It was a job she was good
at, and which she enjoyed.
The money she earned went for liquor and recreational drugs. Little was left over for clothing for her
son, or even food. Things had always been
bad for Jimmy. They became even worse after his tenth birthday when his father was
dispatched to Taunton State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Jimmy Boozer Senior was committed to the asylum because he had
become ‘incontinent, incoherent, and unable to function in society due to
habitual drunkenness’. That was the
official line as decreed by Judge Brooker of the Dennis District Court.
Unofficially, the whole town noticed that Brooker spent many of
his nights at the Cod-father’s tavern. It
was rumored that Jimmy’s mother had convinced the judge to get rid of her
husband. It was further gossiped that the judge received weekly gratitude
payments in Mrs. Boozer’s bedroom.
As bad as it was for Jimmy Boozer, 1986 was worse for the
world. The Space shuttle Challenger exploded in subspace about a minute after launch, killing
the crew of seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe
In Oklahoma a U.S. Post
Office letter carrier shot 20 of his co-workers, killing 14 of them: giving
rise to the expression “Going Postal”.
Jimmy didn’t pay much
attention to world events. He barely
knew that actor-turned politician Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. in
January.
He did know that his
favorite football team, the New England Patriots, had lost Super Bowl Twenty,
in January, to the Chicago Bears by a 46-20 score.
The best thing all year
long, happened in June when Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics won the World
Championship of basketball by defeating the Houston Rockets in six games.
Even that NBA
championship turned a little sour when their number one draft pick, Len Bias,
died two days after the team selected him.
The six foot eight inch forward suffered a heart attack, though just 22
years old. It was later reported that
Bias’ death was related to an overdose of cocaine.
Jimmy Boozer knew that
his beloved Boston Red Sox, led by outfielders Jim Rice and Dewey Evans, were
headed towards the World Series. He
didn’t know then that the Sox would lose the world championship of baseball in
seven games to the New York Mets on a ‘flukie’ play involving ‘Mookie’ Wilson.
On Left-over Main in Cape
Cod, the year marked the beginning of the last stages of the crazy 80s, a time
of 25 cent draft beers, two for one drinks, and wild parties in the strip’s bars
and taverns that often led to brutal fights and a number of homicides. Binge boozing and drinking games frequently turned
violent.
The local cops ran
regular shuttles between Left-over Main and the city’s lock-up on Route 132. The police had orders to check the
identification of every brawler, male and female, and then haul them off to
jail – unless their name was Kennedy.
An ‘off the books order’ was
handed down from the highest authority on how officers should handle any matter
involving America’s royalty, as the Kennedy clan was seen in that period.
If any member of the
family was involved in drunken incidents, they were not to be arrested, but
were to be put in an unmarked vehicle and driven to their homes.
Though some people have
doubted that such an edict existed in Hyannis or anywhere else on Cape Cod, the
treatment of Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, after his ‘companion’ died due to
his ‘negligence’ should be proof enough.
Though the exact details
of what happened are unknown, the facts are:
Kennedy was driving late
at night with an attractive young woman who was not his wife. Around 11:15 they left a party in
Chappaquiddick, one of the island playgrounds for the rich and famous off the
Cape Cod coast.
More than 90 minutes
later, a deputy sheriff spotted a car parked on a private cemetery road. He saw that there was a man and a woman in
the vehicle. He noted the license plate,
which belonged to a Kennedy car.
Thinking that the
occupants might be lost, he walked towards the vehicle. When he was within 25 feet of it, he shouted
an offer of help. The response by the
driver was to hit the gas and speed away towards the ocean, ‘leaving a cloud of
dust’.
Moments later, according
to Kennedy himself, he accidentally drove off a small single lane bridge,
landing the car in a tidal pool. Kennedy
swam out of the car to safety, leaving his ‘companion’ inside.
Unable to get out, she
died, apparently from suffocation, not drowning. The car was upside down and
the pocket of air at the top meant that she survived for a fairly long time
before the oxygen supply ran out.
Kennedy did not report the accident.
He claimed that he tried several times to rescue the lady but was unable
to do so. He further claimed that a
friend of his also tried to rescue the woman.
Neither he, nor the friend, sought the help of police and rescue units.
Eventually he went home
and went to sleep. He did not report the accident until the following
morning. There was a bit of a trial and
Kennedy was found guilty of negligence in the death.
The conviction carried a
sentence of a month or two in jail, but the
sentence was suspended and Kennedy never saw the inside of a cell, not even for
a minute - despite the fact that testimony indicated that if he had reported
the accident, rescue crews would have been able to save his companion’s life.
***
“Hey everybody, check it
out. Here comes the Cape’s biggest loser
- smelly Jimmy Boozer!”
The taunt came from George Brooker, the judge’s son, as Jimmy made
his way from Station Avenue into the high school’s parking lot. Brooker was a
star athlete in three sports at the Dennis Middle School and was expected to do
just as well in the regional high school. He was surrounded by a dozen or more
of his team-mates as well as a number of the cutest girls from Dennis and
Yarmouth.
Encouraged by Brooker the whole group joined in on the deriding of
Jimmy Boozer, who stood mute and motionless while verbal jabs pummeled his
ears. The up-thrust middle fingers of every single kid in the crowd, even the girls,
stung his eyes. Standing in front of the
school bus, their faces flushed with the excitement of their cruelty, they
chanted……
“Smelly Jimmy Boozer! Cape Cod’s biggest loser! His daddy is the Town Drunk and his mama is
the Town Pump.”
George Brooker stepped away from his posse and strode towards
Jimmy. The judge’s son was already six
feet tall, though just 15, and weighed 185.
His thick, sandy blond hair and chiseled face made young girls weak and
older women wet.
Six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter was Jimmy. But he was hard, flexible, and wiry; and was
able to dodge the big right handed haymaker Brooker threw at him.
“Smelly Jimmy was lucky to avoid George’s punch,” Marty Bannon
said to the rest of the kids, standing in front of their empty yellow school
bus. “He’ll make short work of the dirty
little punk.”
But George Brooker’s next punch, a follow-up left uppercut, also
fell short of the mark. Brooker, like
most big guys, had never really had to develop fighting skills. His size alone staved off 90 per cent of
potential foes. The few who did buck
him, generally backed off after being struck by one or two of his punches.
Steely Jimmy Boozer had to fight, pretty much every day of his
life. Whether it was a battle in the
school yard, or a struggle for a can of hobo stew in the freight-yards; Jimmy
rarely got anything without a skirmish.
He knew not only how to dodge a punch, but how to come roaring
back with one of his own. After Brooker
missed with his wild right and the uppercut, Jimmy lashed a quick, precise left
to the bigger boy’s kidney. The surgical punch had the big blond bruiser
howling with pain that only got worse when Jimmy bashed him in the chin with a
flashing right uppercut.
Brooker was caught with his mouth partly open. The punch propelled
his lower teeth into his top lip, shattering his front teeth and cutting the
lip to shreds. With rivers of blood streaming from the stumps where his teeth
had been, Brooker screamed in horror, dropped to his knees and cried like an
infant. All the fight drained from him, Brooker cradled his bloody mouth, as if
trying to hold his teeth in.
Enraged from the sting of a lifetime of taunts and cruelties,
Jimmy showed no mercy, launching a flying, feet first leap. Brooker was struck
on the forehead and collapsed on his back.
“He’s not moving! I don’t
think he’s breathing! You killed him!” screamed Becky Johnson, Brooker’s
girlfriend, “Somebody call the police.
Go get a teacher! Find the bus
driver! Smelly Jimmy has killed George. Help! Help!”
Jimmy did not wait around to see if he actually had killed the
boy. He ran away as fast as he could.
His family had never owned a car, so Jimmy was used to running and walking long
distances. He could cover five miles in
less than 30 minutes, and he did just that.
When he reached the mid-cape highway in Hyannis, he stopped to rest.
End of Chapter One - The full E-book is coming to Kindle in mid 2018. Comments negative or positive are invited, welcomed and considered.
Framed on Cape Cod: The Jimmy Boozer Story
Chapter
One – It Was Not A Very Good Year
Monday, September 8, 1986. It
was the first day of school at the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School. All
the ninth graders were expensively dressed in the latest fashions from Puritan
Clothing on Main Street in Hyannis - except for Jimmy Boozer. His clothing also
came from Hyannis, but it was second-hand, having been obtained at the very end
of Main Street - an area the locals call ‘Leftover-Main’.
It was then, and still is today, the home to Cape Cod’s seediest
bars and a string of second hand stores where the unwashed garments offered on
the racks and shelves come with an assortment of extras - everything from stray
cat hairs to fleas, urine smells, and shit stains.
Speed-walking along Station Avenue towards the Dennis-Yarmouth
Regional High School, Jimmy Boozer ignored the Dennis school-bus passing by,
and the searing insults streaming through the open windows.
A few curses hurled from a moving bus were easier to bear than
what he’d have to put up with if he had chosen to ride the bus. It was far better to walk the five miles to
school than to sit in a seat next to the ‘normal’ kids.
Jimmy concentrated on the trees; their leaves still a bright green.
The autumn breeze prodded them into prancing like dancers on wooden poles. It
had stayed warm and the leaves probably thought they could endure until next
spring. Jimmy thought that he too could make
it through the winter, not knowing that the first day of school would be his
last.
Looking forward to leaving behind the torture chamber that the Dennis
Middle School had been for him for the last eight years, he hoped that things
would be better in the regional high school.
Since he rarely left the South Dennis Village, the Yarmouth kids didn’t
know him. He might stand a chance to
make a few friends, and find some happiness.
There was little that made Jimmy happy in 1986. He had no friends. He lived with his mother in a tiny apartment
above the ‘Cod-father’s Inn’ – the rowdiest bar in Dennis Village’s combat zone
– a line of a half dozen honky-tonks that hugged the bank of an otherwise undeveloped
section of the Rising-Tide-River. His mother got the apartment free as a trade
off for occasional bar tending. She also performed certain other services for
the clientele. It was a job she was good
at, and which she enjoyed.
The money she earned went for liquor and recreational drugs. Little was left over for clothing for her
son, or even food. Things had always been
bad for Jimmy. They became even worse after his tenth birthday when his father was
dispatched to Taunton State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Jimmy Boozer Senior was committed to the asylum because he had
become ‘incontinent, incoherent, and unable to function in society due to
habitual drunkenness’. That was the
official line as decreed by Judge Brooker of the Dennis District Court.
Unofficially, the whole town noticed that Brooker spent many of
his nights at the Cod-father’s tavern. It
was rumored that Jimmy’s mother had convinced the judge to get rid of her
husband. It was further gossiped that the judge received weekly gratitude
payments in Mrs. Boozer’s bedroom.
As bad as it was for Jimmy Boozer, 1986 was worse for the
world. The Space shuttle Challenger exploded in subspace about a minute after launch, killing
the crew of seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe
In Oklahoma a U.S. Post
Office letter carrier shot 20 of his co-workers, killing 14 of them: giving
rise to the expression “Going Postal”.
Jimmy didn’t pay much
attention to world events. He barely
knew that actor-turned politician Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. in
January.
He did know that his
favorite football team, the New England Patriots, had lost Super Bowl Twenty,
in January, to the Chicago Bears by a 46-20 score.
The best thing all year
long, happened in June when Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics won the World
Championship of basketball by defeating the Houston Rockets in six games.
Even that NBA
championship turned a little sour when their number one draft pick, Len Bias,
died two days after the team selected him.
The six foot eight inch forward suffered a heart attack, though just 22
years old. It was later reported that
Bias’ death was related to an overdose of cocaine.
Jimmy Boozer knew that
his beloved Boston Red Sox, led by outfielders Jim Rice and Dewey Evans, were
headed towards the World Series. He
didn’t know then that the Sox would lose the world championship of baseball in
seven games to the New York Mets on a ‘flukie’ play involving ‘Mookie’ Wilson.
On Left-over Main in Cape
Cod, the year marked the beginning of the last stages of the crazy 80s, a time
of 25 cent draft beers, two for one drinks, and wild parties in the strip’s bars
and taverns that often led to brutal fights and a number of homicides. Binge boozing and drinking games frequently turned
violent.
The local cops ran
regular shuttles between Left-over Main and the city’s lock-up on Route 132. The police had orders to check the
identification of every brawler, male and female, and then haul them off to
jail – unless their name was Kennedy.
An ‘off the books order’ was
handed down from the highest authority on how officers should handle any matter
involving America’s royalty, as the Kennedy clan was seen in that period.
If any member of the
family was involved in drunken incidents, they were not to be arrested, but
were to be put in an unmarked vehicle and driven to their homes.
Though some people have
doubted that such an edict existed in Hyannis or anywhere else on Cape Cod, the
treatment of Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, after his ‘companion’ died due to
his ‘negligence’ should be proof enough.
Though the exact details
of what happened are unknown, the facts are:
Kennedy was driving late
at night with an attractive young woman who was not his wife. Around 11:15 they left a party in
Chappaquiddick, one of the island playgrounds for the rich and famous off the
Cape Cod coast.
More than 90 minutes
later, a deputy sheriff spotted a car parked on a private cemetery road. He saw that there was a man and a woman in
the vehicle. He noted the license plate,
which belonged to a Kennedy car.
Thinking that the
occupants might be lost, he walked towards the vehicle. When he was within 25 feet of it, he shouted
an offer of help. The response by the
driver was to hit the gas and speed away towards the ocean, ‘leaving a cloud of
dust’.
Moments later, according
to Kennedy himself, he accidentally drove off a small single lane bridge,
landing the car in a tidal pool. Kennedy
swam out of the car to safety, leaving his ‘companion’ inside.
Unable to get out, she
died, apparently from suffocation, not drowning. The car was upside down and
the pocket of air at the top meant that she survived for a fairly long time
before the oxygen supply ran out.
Kennedy did not report the accident.
He claimed that he tried several times to rescue the lady but was unable
to do so. He further claimed that a
friend of his also tried to rescue the woman.
Neither he, nor the friend, sought the help of police and rescue units.
Eventually he went home
and went to sleep. He did not report the accident until the following
morning. There was a bit of a trial and
Kennedy was found guilty of negligence in the death.
The conviction carried a
sentence of a month or two in jail, but the
sentence was suspended and Kennedy never saw the inside of a cell, not even for
a minute - despite the fact that testimony indicated that if he had reported
the accident, rescue crews would have been able to save his companion’s life.
***
“Hey everybody, check it
out. Here comes the Cape’s biggest loser
- smelly Jimmy Boozer!”
The taunt came from George Brooker, the judge’s son, as Jimmy made
his way from Station Avenue into the high school’s parking lot. Brooker was a
star athlete in three sports at the Dennis Middle School and was expected to do
just as well in the regional high school. He was surrounded by a dozen or more
of his team-mates as well as a number of the cutest girls from Dennis and
Yarmouth.
Encouraged by Brooker the whole group joined in on the deriding of
Jimmy Boozer, who stood mute and motionless while verbal jabs pummeled his
ears. The up-thrust middle fingers of every single kid in the crowd, even the girls,
stung his eyes. Standing in front of the
school bus, their faces flushed with the excitement of their cruelty, they
chanted……
“Smelly Jimmy Boozer! Cape Cod’s biggest loser! His daddy is the Town Drunk and his mama is
the Town Pump.”
George Brooker stepped away from his posse and strode towards
Jimmy. The judge’s son was already six
feet tall, though just 15, and weighed 185.
His thick, sandy blond hair and chiseled face made young girls weak and
older women wet.
Six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter was Jimmy. But he was hard, flexible, and wiry; and was
able to dodge the big right handed haymaker Brooker threw at him.
“Smelly Jimmy was lucky to avoid George’s punch,” Marty Bannon
said to the rest of the kids, standing in front of their empty yellow school
bus. “He’ll make short work of the dirty
little punk.”
But George Brooker’s next punch, a follow-up left uppercut, also
fell short of the mark. Brooker, like
most big guys, had never really had to develop fighting skills. His size alone staved off 90 per cent of
potential foes. The few who did buck
him, generally backed off after being struck by one or two of his punches.
Steely Jimmy Boozer had to fight, pretty much every day of his
life. Whether it was a battle in the
school yard, or a struggle for a can of hobo stew in the freight-yards; Jimmy
rarely got anything without a skirmish.
He knew not only how to dodge a punch, but how to come roaring
back with one of his own. After Brooker
missed with his wild right and the uppercut, Jimmy lashed a quick, precise left
to the bigger boy’s kidney. The surgical punch had the big blond bruiser
howling with pain that only got worse when Jimmy bashed him in the chin with a
flashing right uppercut.
Brooker was caught with his mouth partly open. The punch propelled
his lower teeth into his top lip, shattering his front teeth and cutting the
lip to shreds. With rivers of blood streaming from the stumps where his teeth
had been, Brooker screamed in horror, dropped to his knees and cried like an
infant. All the fight drained from him, Brooker cradled his bloody mouth, as if
trying to hold his teeth in.
Enraged from the sting of a lifetime of taunts and cruelties,
Jimmy showed no mercy, launching a flying, feet first leap. Brooker was struck
on the forehead and collapsed on his back.
“He’s not moving! I don’t
think he’s breathing! You killed him!” screamed Becky Johnson, Brooker’s
girlfriend, “Somebody call the police.
Go get a teacher! Find the bus
driver! Smelly Jimmy has killed George. Help! Help!”
Jimmy did not wait around to see if he actually had killed the
boy. He ran away as fast as he could.
His family had never owned a car, so Jimmy was used to running and walking long
distances. He could cover five miles in
less than 30 minutes, and he did just that.
When he reached the mid-cape highway in Hyannis, he stopped to rest.
Framed on Cape Cod: The Jimmy Boozer Story
Chapter
One – 1986: It Was Not A Very Good Year
Monday, September 8, 1986. It
was the first day of school at the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School. All
the ninth graders were expensively dressed in the latest fashions from Puritan
Clothing on Main Street in Hyannis - except for Jimmy Boozer. His clothing also
came from Hyannis, but it was second-hand, having been obtained at the very end
of Main Street - an area the locals call ‘Leftover-Main’.
It was then, and still is today, the home to Cape Cod’s seediest
bars and a string of second hand stores where the unwashed garments offered on
the racks and shelves come with an assortment of extras - everything from stray
cat hairs to fleas, urine smells, and shit stains.
Speed-walking along Station Avenue towards the Dennis-Yarmouth
Regional High School, Jimmy Boozer ignored the Dennis school-bus passing by,
and the searing insults streaming through the open windows.
A few curses hurled from a moving bus were easier to bear than
what he’d have to put up with if he had chosen to ride the bus. It was far better to walk the five miles to
school than to sit in a seat next to the ‘normal’ kids.
Jimmy concentrated on the trees; their leaves still a bright green.
The autumn breeze prodded them into prancing like dancers on wooden poles. It
had stayed warm and the leaves probably thought they could endure until next
spring. Jimmy thought that he too could make
it through the winter, not knowing that the first day of school would be his
last.
Looking forward to leaving behind the torture chamber that the Dennis
Middle School had been for him for the last eight years, he hoped that things
would be better in the regional high school.
Since he rarely left the South Dennis Village, the Yarmouth kids didn’t
know him. He might stand a chance to
make a few friends, and find some happiness.
There was little that made Jimmy happy in 1986. He had no friends. He lived with his mother in a tiny apartment
above the ‘Cod-father’s Inn’ – the rowdiest bar in Dennis Village’s combat zone
– a line of a half dozen honky-tonks that hugged the bank of an otherwise undeveloped
section of the Rising-Tide-River. His mother got the apartment free as a trade
off for occasional bar tending. She also performed certain other services for
the clientele. It was a job she was good
at, and which she enjoyed.
The money she earned went for liquor and recreational drugs. Little was left over for clothing for her
son, or even food. Things had always been
bad for Jimmy. They became even worse after his tenth birthday when his father was
dispatched to Taunton State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Jimmy Boozer Senior was committed to the asylum because he had
become ‘incontinent, incoherent, and unable to function in society due to
habitual drunkenness’. That was the
official line as decreed by Judge Brooker of the Dennis District Court.
Unofficially, the whole town noticed that Brooker spent many of
his nights at the Cod-father’s tavern. It
was rumored that Jimmy’s mother had convinced the judge to get rid of her
husband. It was further gossiped that the judge received weekly gratitude
payments in Mrs. Boozer’s bedroom.
As bad as it was for Jimmy Boozer, 1986 was worse for the
world. The Space shuttle Challenger exploded in subspace about a minute after launch, killing
the crew of seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe
In Oklahoma a U.S. Post
Office letter carrier shot 20 of his co-workers, killing 14 of them: giving
rise to the expression “Going Postal”.
Jimmy didn’t pay much
attention to world events. He barely
knew that actor-turned politician Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. in
January.
He did know that his
favorite football team, the New England Patriots, had lost Super Bowl Twenty,
in January, to the Chicago Bears by a 46-20 score.
The best thing all year
long, happened in June when Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics won the World
Championship of basketball by defeating the Houston Rockets in six games.
Even that NBA
championship turned a little sour when their number one draft pick, Len Bias,
died two days after the team selected him.
The six foot eight inch forward suffered a heart attack, though just 22
years old. It was later reported that
Bias’ death was related to an overdose of cocaine.
Jimmy Boozer knew that
his beloved Boston Red Sox, led by outfielders Jim Rice and Dewey Evans, were
headed towards the World Series. He
didn’t know then that the Sox would lose the world championship of baseball in
seven games to the New York Mets on a ‘flukie’ play involving ‘Mookie’ Wilson.
On Left-over Main in Cape
Cod, the year marked the beginning of the last stages of the crazy 80s, a time
of 25 cent draft beers, two for one drinks, and wild parties in the strip’s bars
and taverns that often led to brutal fights and a number of homicides. Binge boozing and drinking games frequently turned
violent.
The local cops ran
regular shuttles between Left-over Main and the city’s lock-up on Route 132. The police had orders to check the
identification of every brawler, male and female, and then haul them off to
jail – unless their name was Kennedy.
An ‘off the books order’ was
handed down from the highest authority on how officers should handle any matter
involving America’s royalty, as the Kennedy clan was seen in that period.
If any member of the
family was involved in drunken incidents, they were not to be arrested, but
were to be put in an unmarked vehicle and driven to their homes.
Though some people have
doubted that such an edict existed in Hyannis or anywhere else on Cape Cod, the
treatment of Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, after his ‘companion’ died due to
his ‘negligence’ should be proof enough.
Though the exact details
of what happened are unknown, the facts are:
Kennedy was driving late
at night with an attractive young woman who was not his wife. Around 11:15 they left a party in
Chappaquiddick, one of the island playgrounds for the rich and famous off the
Cape Cod coast.
More than 90 minutes
later, a deputy sheriff spotted a car parked on a private cemetery road. He saw that there was a man and a woman in
the vehicle. He noted the license plate,
which belonged to a Kennedy car.
Thinking that the
occupants might be lost, he walked towards the vehicle. When he was within 25 feet of it, he shouted
an offer of help. The response by the
driver was to hit the gas and speed away towards the ocean, ‘leaving a cloud of
dust’.
Moments later, according
to Kennedy himself, he accidentally drove off a small single lane bridge,
landing the car in a tidal pool. Kennedy
swam out of the car to safety, leaving his ‘companion’ inside.
Unable to get out, she
died, apparently from suffocation, not drowning. The car was upside down and
the pocket of air at the top meant that she survived for a fairly long time
before the oxygen supply ran out.
Kennedy did not report the accident.
He claimed that he tried several times to rescue the lady but was unable
to do so. He further claimed that a
friend of his also tried to rescue the woman.
Neither he, nor the friend, sought the help of police and rescue units.
Eventually he went home
and went to sleep. He did not report the accident until the following
morning. There was a bit of a trial and
Kennedy was found guilty of negligence in the death.
The conviction carried a
sentence of a month or two in jail, but the
sentence was suspended and Kennedy never saw the inside of a cell, not even for
a minute - despite the fact that testimony indicated that if he had reported
the accident, rescue crews would have been able to save his companion’s life.
***
“Hey everybody, check it
out. Here comes the Cape’s biggest loser
- smelly Jimmy Boozer!”
The taunt came from George Brooker, the judge’s son, as Jimmy made
his way from Station Avenue into the high school’s parking lot. Brooker was a
star athlete in three sports at the Dennis Middle School and was expected to do
just as well in the regional high school. He was surrounded by a dozen or more
of his team-mates as well as a number of the cutest girls from Dennis and
Yarmouth.
Encouraged by Brooker the whole group joined in on the deriding of
Jimmy Boozer, who stood mute and motionless while verbal jabs pummeled his
ears. The up-thrust middle fingers of every single kid in the crowd, even the girls,
stung his eyes. Standing in front of the
school bus, their faces flushed with the excitement of their cruelty, they
chanted……
“Smelly Jimmy Boozer! Cape Cod’s biggest loser! His daddy is the Town Drunk and his mama is
the Town Pump.”
George Brooker stepped away from his posse and strode towards
Jimmy. The judge’s son was already six
feet tall, though just 15, and weighed 185.
His thick, sandy blond hair and chiseled face made young girls weak and
older women wet.
Six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter was Jimmy. But he was hard, flexible, and wiry; and was
able to dodge the big right handed haymaker Brooker threw at him.
“Smelly Jimmy was lucky to avoid George’s punch,” Marty Bannon
said to the rest of the kids, standing in front of their empty yellow school
bus. “He’ll make short work of the dirty
little punk.”
But George Brooker’s next punch, a follow-up left uppercut, also
fell short of the mark. Brooker, like
most big guys, had never really had to develop fighting skills. His size alone staved off 90 per cent of
potential foes. The few who did buck
him, generally backed off after being struck by one or two of his punches.
Steely Jimmy Boozer had to fight, pretty much every day of his
life. Whether it was a battle in the
school yard, or a struggle for a can of hobo stew in the freight-yards; Jimmy
rarely got anything without a skirmish.
He knew not only how to dodge a punch, but how to come roaring
back with one of his own. After Brooker
missed with his wild right and the uppercut, Jimmy lashed a quick, precise left
to the bigger boy’s kidney. The surgical punch had the big blond bruiser
howling with pain that only got worse when Jimmy bashed him in the chin with a
flashing right uppercut.
Brooker was caught with his mouth partly open. The punch propelled
his lower teeth into his top lip, shattering his front teeth and cutting the
lip to shreds. With rivers of blood streaming from the stumps where his teeth
had been, Brooker screamed in horror, dropped to his knees and cried like an
infant. All the fight drained from him, Brooker cradled his bloody mouth, as if
trying to hold his teeth in.
Enraged from the sting of a lifetime of taunts and cruelties,
Jimmy showed no mercy, launching a flying, feet first leap. Brooker was struck
on the forehead and collapsed on his back.
“He’s not moving! I don’t
think he’s breathing! You killed him!” screamed Becky Johnson, Brooker’s
girlfriend, “Somebody call the police.
Go get a teacher! Find the bus
driver! Smelly Jimmy has killed George. Help! Help!”
Jimmy did not wait around to see if he actually had killed the
boy. He ran away as fast as he could.
His family had never owned a car, so Jimmy was used to running and walking long
distances. He could cover five miles in
less than 30 minutes, and he did just that.
When he reached the mid-cape highway in Hyannis, he stopped to rest.
