Transcription
Yeah. Heat.
Heat.
Heat.
Heat.
Heat up here.
Uh today I'm I'm going to do something which I I have uh avoided doing because I do not like to lead the young astray. I mean too obviously I don't like to do this. But you're listening to a reformed Well, I don't want to use the word criminal. You're listening to a reformed baddy and uh and this is a revelation day. Don't look so shocked at me, everybody. We all have crimes in our background. And uh there are just damn few of us who will lay it out and say, "Yes, I did it. I did it. I siphoned gas at one time for a living. I siphon so damn much gas that I still smell like Philip 66 in the quiet darkness of my soul." Yes, I did it.
Well, all right. You know, you see these important guys walking around, you know, you I mean, really official looking guys that have made it. Have you ever wondered whether they ever did any of the real stuff in their life? And there's an old rule of thumb, Jim, that I think you know about since you've lived a little life, too. The more indignant a guy gets over somebody else's evil, the more you're inclined to suspect him. Is this a true uh human equation or not? or am I inventing it in my life?
I don't think I am inventing it. Let's put it this way. I do not invent the news. I only report it. That's a nice place to be. You know, I That's why it's always kind of fun to sit back at third base at a ball game. I mean, you don't invent the errors. You only boo them, right? Yes, indeed. You don't make the decisions on a close play at first. You only yell at the guy that does you great. And when you're standing out there with that wind blowing in your face of dust rising and Frank Robinson charging down to first looking mean that first base was with that big mitt and that ball's coming over there. I'll tell you man, it ain't so easy to call them out or safe when they arrive at the base at the same time and you got to call them one way or the other. Right, Jim? Yes, indeed.
We are always hoist on the horns of a dilemma. a human dilemma. Am I going to pretend that I'm something I'm not, or am I going to let it all hang out, therefore get get driven totally from the community of men? I mean, there's evil around us at all times. Oh, before we confess tonight to our crimes, heat, heat, heat, heat has caused more than one person to do things which you would not wouldn't ordinarily do under normal conditions. man in uh in hot climates is volatile. Are you aware of that? In fact, the closer you move to the equator, the the the more rapid the revolutions occur, the quicker the gunfire. It's a fact. Until finally you get all the way. You never hear about a revolution among the Eskimos. Why not? I mean, they must have tyrants. I mean, they must have, you know, some local king that's running the kayak industry with an iron hand and all this. But no, no, because they're they're far north. See, the further north you go, the more man tends to just squat and stare off into the middle distance because he is aware of his uh of his uh infinite and almost frightening uh uh temporariness in the scheme of things. When you live in very cold weather, friend, you are very aware of the of the uh climate. You're also aware it's mean and dangerous and you got more things to worry about than the local tyrant. So, uh as you go further down the earth, you know, you start up at the North Pole, you start working down, the fist fights grow louder and and more more prevalent until you finally get down through places like Georgia and Mississippi where they fist fight night and day. And then finally you get all the way down to you get down to places you know in the in various Latin American countries where my god if there if there isn't a revolution going on it's like somebody turned off the air conditioning you know what is it how what happened no revolution today what what they do out of ammunition what happened you know a kumba well uh so this is a this is part of life yet you have to accept it yes nothing worse than trying to run a revolution you're out of you know out of 22 cartridges and stuff But uh nevertheless uh tonight we will we will talk about what hot weather did to one person's conscience and caused them forever to to feel a little terrible. Yes.
What I did on that night, that historic night, in fact, it was what me and Flick and Schwarz and Bruner did on that historic night has bothered my conscience since that time. I cannot go through the produce department of any supermarket without feeling a little twinge. And I did not go into a store and steal apples. That's kid stuff, friends. What I did was a heinous crime. And if you're interested, it's a great word. Heinous. Heinous. Some people say, "Wasn't he an old shortstop? Heinous." Wagner was a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates and is in the Hall of Fame. No. Heinous. H E I N. Heinous. Evil. Rotten. Skull duggery beyond human comprehension. Badness. Evilenness. Now, what what what is this crime? There's many kinds of crimes. And I'm going to I'm going to leave this up to you to decide what kind of crime this was that Schwarz and Fleck and Bruner and I perpetrated.
Now, um, it was reminded to me, first of all, by the heat. It was warm, hot, and and I love hot weather, by the way. I'm one of those guys that really dig hot weather. I'm basically a hot weather creature. I do not buy winter. If you ever came to me and said to me, "Sheepard, how about going skiing?" I have a ready suggestion as to what you can do with your skis. Anybody want to try it with me? I'll I'll do it. I'll say you. You want to call up and ask me to go skiing? I'll tell you right here what to do with your skis. All right. Nobody's calling. Okay. You're afraid. All right. You know what I'll tell you. And that's the way I feel about it. Anybody comes to me and says, "Sheepard, what do you say we go out and run up and down the hills that are covered with snow today?" Oh, come on. I I can even tell you what to do with the hill. Very colorful expression I have. I learned it in the army. It's very colorful and uh I learned a lot of things in the army. But nevertheless uh on this particular hot weather days it was really hot.
Now you have noticed u uh did you did you read a piece recently in one of the papers? I believe it was uh was in Jersey I believe where where these kids had built a cave. They called it in in Jersey newspaper pylons they made a cavern. Did you read about that? Yeah. And these kids and they caught these kids. They were living down in this cavern. They were kids that after school they had built a cave really out in the woods and they were they were out doing bad stuff actually. Now there's two things that come to mind right there. Did you read that story? Well, there was such a story and it was a quite a quite a story and the police finally staked it out. They didn't know where these kids were coming from. And they finally saw a kid come out of a hole. And they discovered that they had this cave these kids had built that had a sofa in it. And it was 12 square feet and it was 6 ft deep and it was totally covered with sod. Well, now for those of you who have and now for those of you who have never done this, you will probably think kids don't do this anymore. You say, "Oh, come on. That's out of the past." Get it out of your head. There's there's there's many clandestine activities that are done constantly that are by the nature of their clandestine quality are never talked about. In other words, a true clandestine activity is never discussed else what you know what the hell. That's why the the concept of underground newspapers that are selling on Time Square news stands is a contradiction in terms totally a contradiction in terms a meaningless phrase. A true underground newspaper friend you don't know about. Right. Okay. Now there are certain clandestine activities and I bet there are kids listening to me right now who are involved in it. So don't think this nothing to do with the past. It has to do with a contemporary current urge on the part of a certain kind of person.
Now everybody has a secret desire in his down inside of him to have a secret place. You will concede that. Now this desire takes many forms. Some people only have a secret place in their head. Most people do. Other people have a, you know, little secret things they do, which again is a mental thing. It's in the head. But then there are those few who translate it into reality and in fact have a secret place. Now this is very common among young males. probably common among females, too. But I never heard of a female getting together with several other females and digging a cave. I never heard of that. Now, it may have occurred. Now, I'm sure I'm going to get thousands. Yes, we Yeah. No, no. Uh that uh that I it's it's it's a const and these kids they caught in Jersey were bales. They were boys, right? So uh and I I think it goes all the way back to the I think man menn men masculine male I think they are closer to primitive creature kind humankind than the females are. Now that doesn't mean that females are more civilized. Oh, no. I mean that the primitive desires are closer to the surface and are stronger in male kind. I'm not saying that this is no value judgment. I'm not, you know, it's like that's like making a value judgment. The water's wet. That is not a value judgment. You know, there it is. You may disagree with it. You may say, "No, oxygen is not wet. Hydrogen is not wet. And water is composed of oxygen H2O right hydrogen and you say well you know in combination it gets wet well what is wet and you could go on and on and have these infinite philosophical discussions but we are not here for philosophy we're here to discuss digging caves which has a philosophical background incidentally and so I think that the male has has a thing inside of him that still remains deeply inside of him that still remains part of the ancient cave world.
Now, we did come from caves. You know that it's a and I'm not inventing this. It's a historical fact that at one time humankind lived in caves, holes in the ground. And to be in the ground was to be secret and safe and away from everything. We don't think much about that anymore, you know, but in many primitive societies to this day, they still live in holes in the ground. Did you know that? To get away from things. A hole in the ground, not a fortress or not a a cave that's high up in a wall of someplace, but a hole in the ground burrowing into the earth is a curiously satisfying thing. Not for everybody. But see, we don't know much about what's under the earth. Did you know that? We know more about space. We know more about the ocean than we do about what's say 5,000 miles into the earth. There's theories. But, you know, to burrow in to see it, it's fantastic. So, so one day, one hot day, we were making caves sporadically. We would make a cave. Yeah. Yeah. the cave syndrome would break out. But we got to the age when we could not only make a cave in our mind and start digging a cave, but we could actually pull it off. In other words, we got enough manual dexterity. We're strong enough to steal 2x4s. So, we could make a cave.
Now, how is a cave made? For those of you who are curious about making a cave, there are several variations on the basic kid cave that I myself was involved in and I have seen break out in various places. There's there's one type of cave that's very primitive. You just dig a hole in the ground, cover it up with uh pieces of uh tin, you know, like old signs and junk and uh and leave one corner open, you crawl out of it. That's one kind of cave. That's the very primitive. It's the first kind you start. Well, then as you get more sophisticated and subtle with your caves, the cave bea becomes complex. That shows growing complexity in the head and the mind and all that stuff. See?
Well, one summer and uh this was the summer just before we went into high school, which is a dangerous age. You're no longer a kid. In fact, there are many guys that are in eighth grade that are 6 feet tall and weigh 200 lb. You'll concede that, will you not? Now, they still have the mind though of a box of pablum. So, you you uh you put together a uh a 200lb body with the mind of a chimpanzee and you have got a lethal combination. Now in addition to that and and in addition to that uh the the the the guy who was in that age group he has roughly the the uh conscience and the morality of a rhinoceros which is to say none. Uh that it is all give and take. A guy will will will not do a thing because he's going to get kicked in the bottom. That's it. But he will not say I will not do a thing because it is wrong. He which of his means implies morality. He says I will not do it because they will catch me and all hell will break loose. Okay. So that's the difference. You know that's a complex issue there.
So anyway it was hot was warm. We got out of school. This was about our last year in grade school. Now, we ranged in weight and and height from about six feet on one end, Schwarz, Flick, and Bruner, to about 5'2 on the other. There's always a couple of kids that look a little bit like bowling balls at that age. And uh so, you know, too many baby Ruth candy bars and they're walking around hiding under tables a lot at home and he didn't grow. And uh so, nevertheless, here we are. See, we're and yet yet we're we're itchy. There's a fantastic itchiness that settles in with the adolescent male. That is an incredible itchiness. It's it's it's an inner sweatiness that is hard to define. A a a feeling of rising and constant excitement. A feeling that that uh you know now do girls have that? They do. Well, all right. I won't argue with you. It takes different ra it does say it takes different uh outward manifestations then right so nevertheless on this hot summer we just got out of school see this is added to it we were out of school and we're drifting around and we drift in and out of of uh of uh you know backyards and through vacant lots and there were thousands and thousands of of uh of of fireflies always fireflies exciting and erotic in in insect. You know, you know what the firefly is doing. You know, he turns his light on, don't you? You don't. You think he's just trying to find his way through the fog. That is a signal, friend. That sign, that little light that goes off and on, he is flashing his little light for other fireflies who may be interested in a little action. Now, this is not lost on the walking around Cub Scout, which we were at that time. We were in the Wolfpack. So, we're drifting in and out of the clouds of of fireflies and mosquitoes, and almost by spontaneous combustion, it began to build up. The crime began. Okay.
It was on a quiet midweek day after playing ball all afternoon and grubbing in and out of the weeds and chasing lost golf balls and all the stuff that you know your kids do. You're just walking around when without even any discussion we began to dig a cave. It was by almost like mutual instinct. Now, this cave was in a sort of wooded lot. Was really a large wooded vacant lot. And it was good big. It was not really a vacant lot. It was a whole big wooded area that I suppose technically was a vacant lot. There were no houses on it, but it was wooded and uh you know, no weeds in there. Not many people went in there. And we started to build the cave and we started to dig. And the next morning we were out again digging. Now, I went home and I down in the basement, we had a a spade, you know, one of these uh sharp pointed shovels. That's a spade. See, a shovel is flat. Did you know that everything is spade? Okay. Uh so, we we that's what we needed. We couldn't work with a real shovel. We needed a spade. So, so we had a spade, a couple spades, and uh Schwarz got a hold of a pick somewhere and and we were digging, really seriously digging out there, you know, and and as the hole got bigger, it got more exciting. I mean, it's really a big hole now. And and we cut down through about five layers. You know, you begin to see layers of soil. You first you cut down through a layer of of yellow wet sand. Then you cut down through a layer of black dirt and then a layer of grayish dirt and a layer of pebbles and stuff. And we came across a fantastic nest of grubs. Yeah. We just, you know, you hit it and there's, you know what a grub is? These big thick white worms. And they were digging deeper. And then we began to smooth out the bottom, which it's incidentally now about 6 ft deep. Roughly six, maybe 6 ft half, maybe 6 and 1/2 ft. That's a pretty deep hole. And we began to dig now towards the north. We we had the hole now, which is about 6 ft square, and we begin to enlarge it going straight out. And we begin to dig more or less towards the north. And now we've got a large rectangular hole after about 3 days. It's 6 ft deep and it's now about oh I'd say 12 13 ft maybe 15t long. And then we began to widen it. And so after about a week we had a hole that was roughly maybe 15 by 10 or 12. A good big hole. Now that's a lot of dirt we've moved. Now we knew that if you left the dirt all piled up around there'd be problems. See people would see it. So what we did was take the dirt in bushel baskets and and we we went down a hill and threw a lot of weeds and we there was a creek down there and we would just dump this dirt into this creek. We just wash it down and it's all that happened. See? So so you know it was just plain dirt. It wasn't pollution just dirt. So we kept doing this and by by the end of a week we had this great looking hole.
Now what do you do after that? See now how do you Now this is this is the sophisticated cave maker. Now at that point you need what would be beams. You need beams. All right. So they they were building houses about half a mile away. See? And every night they would leave all this tarpole on and all kinds of of uh canvas piled up over the various materials they're using. So one by one we were stealing these long 2x4s. They were these big 12t 2x4s. You know, you've seen them that they used to build a house. And we're stealing one by one. One by one. Now, we only needed about six of these, maybe five. And we finally, at the end of a couple of days of stealing, this is not a story about stolen wood. So, you're you're you're missing the point. We finally got our 2x4s across this thing. And then we went out went junking. We went up and down the alleys looking for pieces of tin and and uh and old signs and stuff which when we bring them back, we bring these things back and we would lay them on top of the 2x4s. Now, after you cover these things up with metal signs and we used all metal. So, you laid these things all over the top of this thing. You put sod on top of it. The original sod that you had dug out when you dug the hole. So, now it's covered up nicely. See? Now, what do you do? Do you do you just leave a hole that you drop in? No way, friend. You covered this thing all up and then about 8 ft away, you dig an entrance that goes in, a tunnel that slowly burrows in and then goes into the cave. And that really gets fantastic. Now you've really got something going. Well, by the time you get this tunnel in and you you begin to bring other stuff. We had we had guys brought in boxes and stuff and to sit on. We had a candle. We had a kerosene lamp that Flick brought in from the basement. And uh we had a little table we made, you know, out of a barrel and stuff. We had all this stuff in there. So, and it begins to really get we had all our books we brought in. Guys started bringing their comic books in. I have my entire collection of Red Rider and all that stuff. You see, and and we we we we'd squat down in the cave with the candle going and uh kids then Schwarz began to dig his own room. He dug his own room out of the side where he would squat. And so, it's dark and flickering. It's fantastically erotic scene in there. It's really, you know, it's it's exciting because it's you're you're like 20 million miles. You might as well be in space millions of miles from the Earth.
Well, now the next move, of course, is to say go home and say, "I want to stay out. I want to stay at Flick's house all night." Right? Flick said, "I can come over and stay. Can I stay over there?" Well, we started that routine. See, where we would stay in a cave all night. We never went to Flick's house. Flick would say to his mother, you know, I want to stay at Shepherd's house. See? And so the next thing you know, we're all in this cave all night. See, of course, if we ask, "Can I go out and stay in a cave all night?" Forget it. If it's Flick, you know, you can stay there. So Schwarz and Flick and Buner and I one night are squatting in a cave and we decided what we needed to do was to make something to eat. We're going to start cooking in there. Okay. Well, now we were in the Cub Scouts and we used to go out on these camperes. And when you went out on the camper, you would make a thing always called hunter stew. Right now, how is hunter stew? You just put a whole bunch of vegetables in a pot is what you do and boil it. And if you got some hamburger, if you got a chunk of meat, you throw it in. That's called hunter stew. Well, we had no vegetables. You know, you can't say your mother, "Hey, I'm going to go st I have a bag of carrots. Take it over there." So, what we did was unbelievable. guys all around there had these big gardens. They were like little farms, truck farms and stuff. And one night we crept out in the dark. I I hate to even tell you this, Mr. Falpel's field. Mr. Falpel lived down there and he he was a truck farmer. And one night, Flick and Schwarz and myself crept in the darkness of his field where he was growing potatoes. Potatoes. And potatoes, you know, are an underground plant. You don't go and pick potatoes. In case you don't know how potatoes grow, potatoes are a root and they grow on the bottom of the plant. Well, we crept through the field on our bellies, each one of us crawling along a furrow, and we would take, each one of us having a rope, we would come to a potato plant. They were nice. They were growing beautiful and green. And we would carefully pull up the potato plant and take the potato off of it and put it into a gunny sack and replant the plant. Do you hear what I'm saying? Replant the plant. Well, now being true criminals, after a while, we began to get sucked into this. We didn't just take let's get three potatoes for our stew. No, it's like eating popcorn. You can't eat one piece of popcorn. You can't steal one potato. It is impossible to steal one avocado. Well, we crept from one end of Mr. Falpo's field to the other of his little potato field and carefully pulled up every plant in his field and then removed each potato and put it in the gunny sack and we would scurry back. This was all at 2:00 in the morning. We'd scurry back to our cave with our candle and we had a sack full of big sack now. A gny sack full of brand new unborn tiny potatoes. Well, you know that that was just the beginning. We then moved one field over, one field over and we removed every beat that Mr. Falpole was growing. This is also a root plant. And that summer, we squatted in our cave every night and at 800 stew made out of half raw boiled potatoes and beets.
And ever since that time it has well we did other things there some some things we even now at this point to protect the the guilty I cannot discuss. It is not a matter of protecting the innocent any of us that are innocent. It is to protect the guilty that I want to tell you some of the other things that went on. But this cave began to be the center, the focal point of the primitive, evil, lurking, scrunching life that we were living that hot, steamy summer. And every night we'd make our hunter stew out of Mr. Falpel's unborn illicit potatoes. And it wasn't only until you know I began to slowly grow a conscience a vestigial one at first uh you know until finally today now it's going back into a vestigial form. I don't know what's happening but uh nevertheless uh I began to say what about can you imagine Mr. Falpal that glorious day when he sets out to reap his potatoes and he pulls up plant after plant and there's no potatoes on his potato plants. They were growing. They grew beautifully. They could no potatoes and then no beans on his bean plants. What would you think? To this day, Mr. Falle has no idea what the hell happened that summer to his potato crop. There were no bugs. He did everything right. What happened to his beet crop? He did everything right. God, what evil there is that lurks in the hearts of men. What evil there is.