Killroy Lives!

Killroy swung here.

I remember a day when I walked to elementary school with my friend David Herricks, otherwise known as “Butt”, and saw a 1950’s style Ranch house with several police cars in the driveway. A crowd of other kids on the way to school gathered at the curb across the street. An ambulance slowly pulled away, without its lights on. Coming out the front door, cops wheeled a young guy in a wheelchair, maybe eighteen years old, hands handcuffed and resting in his lap. Everybody was talking about it at school that day. Killroy, crippled on this very same playground years ago. Killed his dad with a shotgun.

A few days later the words KILLROY LIVES! was found spraypainted on the school wall. All of us kids felt a kind of liberation over the murder. In our minds it must have been a justified killing, the age-old story of a son rising up against the father, and we imagined it had been us. Years of your dad making fun of you because you’re in a wheelchair, always calling you a cripple and why couldn’t those high-bars have just killed you rather than breaking your back, and the pain and the constant taunting builds a pressure greater than the pain, the anger lifts you up and helps you pull the trigger, and that power of gunpowder and lead feels wonderful in the arms of a boy not too crippled to kill his rotten dad. And us school kids gather outside with our school bags and lunch boxes to watch him wheel down the sidewalk into a squad car, and across the yards we hear the school bells ring and we run off to class elated and exploding with excitement. Killroy lives. The guy in the wheelchair, who once swung on these bars and ran through this sandbox only to end up in a wheelchair, now raised above us all into local folklore, a legend, a myth to be spray painted on the walls of our school.