Bobby Joe Burns, Gigsy and God: Stories from Earth

By Greg Karber

The fi rst anecdote recounted in this book relate to a deranged man, Bobby
Joe Burns, who killed and mutilated his mother in 1958, under the infl uence
of the Book of Revelation, terrifying the town including the author and his
lifelong best friend. That friend, Gigsy, had his own mental diffi culties many
years later and came face to face with the aging Burns. There are stories of the
relationship of various people with their gods, often played out in the legal
system where individual beliefs were parsed by experts, judges and parents,
some well-meaning, some simply tyrannical. The effects of a biblical story on
one man, of a whimsical Wiccan and devotees of cults, among other stories,
make for an interesting mixture of how religion effects our daily lives. The
stories are told in a wry, sometimes humorous manner, thought-provoking in
the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450015820

Greg Karber

The author has practiced law in a medium-sized town on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma for three decades, known for taking cases other lawyers didn’t want or understand, and; that judges didn’t like to hear.

Book preview

Copyright © 2010 by Greg Karber.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2009913648

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4500-1581-3

                Softcover        978-1-4500-1580-6

                Ebook            978-1-4500-1582-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

73936

CONTENTS

Foreword

I Bobby Joe Burns Killed His Mother—1958

II Ray Seaman and the Great Bolo—1959

III The History of Coach Malone

IV 1965

V Fort Smith and the Immaculate Conception—1967

VI 1969

VII 1970

VIII 1972

IX Salad Days—1978

X The Alamos—1981

XI Poor in Court—1984

XII Praying in School—1986

XIII The Wiccans—1990

XIV Falling Through Life—1994

XV Wayne Armstrong—1995

XVI Cuba—1999

XVII Today

XVIII Tomorrow

FOREWORD

I N THE UNITED States of America, by and large, we treat the litigant with high seriousness, with pomp and circumstance, as if right was going to be done. Hear ye, hear ye. We entertain. Then, we explain the awful outcomes with the disingenuous claim that while it might not be perfect, it is the best there is on this planet, Earth, in the Milky Way Galaxy, and the best in history, when what really matters is whether at this point in history, at this point on this planet, the best has, in fact, been meted out… at all. Lawyers practice their trade with a complete seriousness of mind—no, make that a complete solemnity of mind—holding forth as if what stands before them is a matter of some substantial gravity, perhaps akin to the end of life as we know it. Judges reverently sigh and wrinkle their brow and wring their hands in displays of angst that give me gas just to recall. And we are entertained, lulled to believe that everyone gets their day in court and therefore everyone gets justice, but as the great actor Clarence Darrow said, there is no justice in or out of court. Not on the planet Earth. Not in the Milky Way Galaxy. Not in the Virgo Cluster.

My own role in the farce was often to act as the agent provocateur, arguing that the downside was up, that the underbelly of the universe was being put upon by the powers that be, that pontifical bubbles needed bursting, that a gay Wiccan has rights, that forced prayer was madness, and so on, ad infinitum. Our adversarial system requires two sides, so there was always an actor in an opposite or antagonist’s role, one generally representing the forces of government or darkness, at least as I saw it. Lesser roles went to the actual litigants, who participated in live theatre without a genuine understanding of the art much less a realization that the art was farce. Now, don’t get me wrong, my side got to win plenty of times. Perhaps even as often as The Great Bolo when he wrestled against the mighty All-American Danny Hodge at Jimmy Lott’s Sports Arena in the 1950s, when he would hide that slug of metal in the forehead of his mask, bringing it out for the third and final round, the illegal weapon that gave him, alas, his only chance to win, while my brother Phil and I watched on as we sold popcorn, and I knew then that was what I would do when I grew up: I would engage in the practice of law, the art of fakery, theater, and I have now done so for nearly three decades. I write these stories of then and now for no other purpose than to entertain and enlighten, in the spirit of the Great Bolo, and lawyers evermore, and in the spirit of that young boy who thought he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

It simply was of no event which side won on any given day. The Klan got to march in Marion, Arkansas, because even the rotten to the core Klan had some rights on that day, and their march was little more consequential than a burp. And the black man got his job back at the biggest factory in town because he had been fired in a discriminatory manner, contrary to federal law, but his boss still called him nigger and he died inside one hundred times until the faith had flown from him. A gay Wiccan was denied his rights in a town full of fury and lacking in humor, while three sisters who chose a path they thought devine were trampled by their abusive family using the powerful tool of the American justice system, available, as always, to the highest bidder. Some of these stories are set out in these pages in an attempt to make some sense of the years gone by; the theme is an arbitrary justice system, a diversity of religions and people, and me along for the ride. I liken the American justice system to pro wrestling because of the theatrics, which are remarkably similar, but because, also, of the incredible arbitrariness of outcomes. The Great Bolo would whip Danny Hodge on Wednesday night in Fort Smith and then they would travel together up the road to Tulsa, where Hodge was from, and Hodge got to win on Thursday night. The best show the town had seen in the last century was the hanging of six men at one time, a staggering accomplishment for my hometown, a point of pride. It was the marquis event of the year. It is also a record that will stand the test of time since local executions went the way of the covered wagon, but the State of Arkansas, coming in a close second, killed three men in serial fashion on the same night just a few years ago. We don’t execute people in public anymore; civilization has its price.

My son and stepson have been able to grow up in this town, hometown of Gigsy Parker and Bobby Joe Burns, Judge Isaac C. Parker and Belle Starr, the Immaculate Conception Church and no more whorehouses, of judges with cap guns and coaches with grudges, and they will experience life in the United States of America, where lions and tigers and bears, oh my, coexist with witches and fundamentalists, and how they will be entertained. At times, in these stories, I may appear critical of the venue in which these two children will become adults, what with negative references to our national preoccupation with prayer and our weird policy toward Cuba and our frivolous and often fraudulent judicial system and our genocidal treatment of Indians, but keep in mind that I have only in passing, in my conversation with America, mentioned slavery and the war on drugs which imprisons our sons and daughters to protect our drug companies and feeds the judicial beast, nor have I mentioned the shear humiliation of being a citizen in a country that elects the like of Ronald Reagan, a man who played a supporting role in a movie called Bedtime for Bonzo, or Jimmy Carter, a man with a pathological attachment to his Mister Rogers-esque sweater. My regards to Richard Milhous Nixon, who should be indicted if only he weren’t still dead, along with Augusto Pinochet, the murderer of Chile, and their mutual confidant, the bloody Henry Kissinger, the only world-class serial genocidal expert extant (read Cambodia, Vietnam, Argentina, Timor, and so on), are also only in passing, but forgive me for mentioning the penis Ken Starr or his obsession, the penis of Bill Clinton, or Clinton’s wife, Hillary, about whom I once drunkenly mused of fornication.

There is coherence to these stories of mysteries beyond the realm of mortals and of events that unfolded decades ago, but no biblical explication here, no denouement of the secrets of the universe. Harken to the days of the Pantheon in Rome when multiple gods ruled before Christianity devoured them all, to the days of 300 C.E., when you could be killed for being a Christian, and to 400 C.E. when you could be killed for not being a Christian, and read on, read on. They are, in principle, stories of conformity and nonconformity, some writ large, some not. My dear dead father’s most urgent advice to me throughout childhood and even as an adult was that I must conform; conform, son, conform. His own mid-life was reached during the McCarthy era, when nonconformity was confused with ideology and ideology confused with communism, when being a non-comformist was risky, when the thought police could get you; my father had his own personal Red Scare going, to be sure.

And there are stories of friends who passed through this world without ever loving it, and some who loved it well, many of whom shared a small burg on the planet Earth, in the Milky Way Galaxy, in the Virgo Cluster, some who had their own rules for conformity, and some who didn’t. And to each of them, and everyone, I raise my glass to all we have in common. But not to conformity. My dear dead father got that part wrong.

The chapters are identified by particular years, but it is only a rough approximation of some event that occurred in that year; important events in our lives tend to spread over several years; otherwise, they lose their context, their meaning. My life began on Pendell Lane, a middle-class neighborhood, in a small town in Arkansas, the fourth son of two parents living further from home than anyone in either family had ever lived, in the early 1950s.

I

Bobby Joe Burns Killed

His Mother—1958

G IGSY PARKER’S FUNERAL was not well attended. There was his father, Carroll, our church league coach and a Korean War veteran I once saw dive behind their couch warning us that we were under attack. In hindsight, over these many years, I have come to believe that alcohol may have played some small role in those Korean War flashbacks. Gigsy’s dad was a southpaw batting practice pitcher with perfect accuracy who assured us from the time we were five that we could lean into the plate—and you must, this above all, lean into the plate—unafraid. By the time of Gigsy’s funeral, age had taken Carroll’s mind but not his memory as he called my name in the receiving line. He was a big, gentle man who never once uttered an impatient word in the many years he coached our teams. There was Gigsy’s brother, Bobby, who we thought to be thoroughly and righteously stewed to the gills, but who had in fact suffered a stroke only hours earlier. Note to wife: strokes and fits of intoxication are indistinguishable to the naked eye. Bobby’s wife couldn’t make the funeral—something about Bobby’s mother never having been in their home—and they weren’t talking. As I hugged Gigsy’s mom in that line, I thought of the afternoon nearly forty years earlier when she had been the only line of defense against an enraged and insane man—Coach Bill Malone, to be discussed in the next chapter—who had entered her home without knocking and with a bone to pick with me, and with Gigsy, too.

There were a few old friends from the outstanding high school basketball team on which Gigsy was a star forward (good quickness and a great eye). There were a few friends from college, where Gigsy began his descent a few years after he moved out of the apartment we shared and refused to speak to me for years because I had accidentally opened but left unread a personal letter from his high school girlfriend. There were no friends from beyond college.

In college, Gigsy had it made. His father, ever indulging, gave him a fast car—a brand new Chevelle Super Sport—and all the money he could spend at the University of Arkansas, sixty miles from home, where most of his friends were going and where I went. He was popular and outgoing, always surrounded by friends in high school, and college was no different. But gradually he started to slip away. I didn’t think much of it when I saw him spend day and night placing the name of racehorses on the top of three-by-five index cards followed by their vital statistics and races won and lost, by how much, against what competition, all the while knowing full well that he never went to the race track and had never placed a bet. I didn’t notice that he wasn’t even washing his hair.

He didn’t speak to me for a few years after the letter incident, but I ran into him in Fort Smith after I had finished graduate school and before starting law school, and he invited me over to his house to catch up, play some pool, and drink some beer. There were a few others there. There was Paul Wilson, our rotund friend since junior high, embodiment of the perceived connection between size and jolliness. There was Dan Isaacs, from one of the poorest families in town, too poor to afford to send him even to the U of A, and who had already settled into what he thought would be a good job at a local refrigerator factory where I had worked for two weeks one summer until I began to suffer auditory hallucinations amid the grinding roar of an assembly line: Greg Karber, good job, go home, good job, go home, good job, go home… Dan had a bad case of acne and was always uncomfortable with his looks, always with his head down, but he would have walked to hell and back for you or just opened his home or wallet, a quiet guy among an otherwise gregarious crowd. And there was Joe Johnson, our sole black friend, one of the best ball handlers I ever saw in high school basketball. Joe had a grin that stretched to his ears and he laughed at everything. It was easy liking a guy with such a generous laugh. He was attending the local junior college on a basketball scholarship, but having trouble with his concentration in class, and thus making horrendously bad grades despite the usual assistance doled out to the better athletes. They were all eating white crosses, speed, the same little pills I had used in college to stay up all night studying for a morning test before we went to Roger’s Pool Hall, an old-style pool dive with a mixed clientele of older locals playing dominos and college kids playing pool, where we drank beer until we were tired enough to go home and sleep it off. But they weren’t using them as study aids; they were gobbling them like mints. Dan must have eaten fifty in the few hours I was there.

A few days later, Gigsy called me and asked if I wanted a summer job working with him for his dad. We started working together a few days later cleaning oil residue from fifty-gallon drums. It was a miserable job for both