Bad News
On a steaming Saturday night in August of 2000, 38-year old Tom Dierkop and a female companion partied in a local park, after hours. At one point, he started walking west toward the Mississippi River which bordered the park, but he disappeared in the hazy darkness. The woman heard a splash. When she couldn’t locate him, she called the police.
Ninety minutes later, authorities found Dierkop’s body in 18 feet of water. According to the newspaper, the bank was “covered with brush and large rocks” in the area where he’d been at the time of the splash.
Dierkop, who had lived in the same modest, working-class home all his life, was survived by his elderly mother and a divorced, older half-brother, both of whom lived together in another small house a few blocks away. No father was mentioned in the obituary, living or dead. Tom carried his mother’s maiden name, as did the half-brother.
There was no funeral or visitation.
***
Although we never had any interaction, Tom Dierkop and I attended the same junior high school, Longfellow, in the mid-1970s. He was a year-and-a-half older than I — a chasmic expanse of time at that stage of life. But really, there was little chance that I’d have known him then, even if we had been the same age.
He was bad news.
There were many scenes involving Dierkop during those years, but one stands out. It happened during an assembly in the gym. The principal stood next to a pile of papers he’d intended to hand out. He started to address us, but Dierkop was goofing off in the bleachers. I could hear him off to the left of where I sat.
Finally, the principal stopped mid-sentence and barked, “Dierkop, go to the office!”
I watched the tall, muscular ninth grader with long hair strut across the gym floor. As he neared the principal, he made a sudden sidestep and kicked the pile of papers.
He left the gym to the cheers of the student body.
The principal didn’t follow him out. I think he knew better than to risk losing a physical confrontation in front of us. For out of all the big, bad hoods at Longfellow, Tom Dierkop was the biggest and baddest.
When I entered Longfellow, a seventh grader in 1975, I could not have been more different. As the only child of parents who owned their own businesses — my mother was a florist, and my dad a barber — I’d never wanted for much. I was squeaky clean, from my short hair and pressed slacks (never jeans) to my reputation. I joined the football team. I respected the establishment.
Looking back, I don’t think I was innocent so much as grossly inexperienced. I’d never engaged in any trouble more serious than goofing off in school — class clown stuff. I’d never stolen a cigarette from my parents, skipped class, or even egged a house at Halloween. And the closest I’d come to committing a crime was a couple of years before, at a Woolworth, when I was tempted to rip open a box containing a General Custer action figure. I already owned a Custer action figure but had lost the plastic cavalryman’s sword that came with it. I remember holding that box in my trembling hands for a long few minutes, debating whether to slice the cellophane wrapping with my fingernail and pocket the sword.
In the end, I slid it back on the shelf unmolested and hurried out of the store.
Life up until junior high was tame. My one nagging concern at the time was at home: a growing suspicion that my parents drank more often than the parents of other kids in my circle. My neighborhood friends had begun to tease me about my folks’ “problem drinking” — a term I’m sure they’d learned in health class. It angered me to hear it, so angry I would’ve hit them if I’d had the bravado.
But I also knew they were right. They’d seen my parents getting tipsy during sleepovers. And I had watched them for years —learned to anticipate their many fights by the number of drinks it took to get them to that point. I knew that whenever my father ordered a martini at a restaurant, I could count on him getting mean by the time the entrée arrived. However, if he stuck with his usual Manhattans, the harsh words wouldn’t come until after we’d left for home.
But my experience was otherwise wholesome. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood where nothing too scandalous happened outside of the occasional divorce, which, to my amazement, never happened at my house.
Coming into Longfellow from elementary school, I was in for a shock. For one thing, the early-70s had happened. The drug scene I’d been warned about, but that had always seemed far-off — something that happened in other neighborhoods, or on TV dramas like “Kojak” or “The Streets of San Francisco” — was evident in all three grades. The kids who did the drugs looked the part. Do you remember the 1975 album, KISS Alive!? The back cover shows a smoky indoor arena filled with mostly white teens and young adults, overwhelmingly male. Almost to a person, the young men wear shoulder-length or longer hair, parted down the middle. Some sport patchy facial growth. Even the youngest of them appear older and tougher than I did, their faces bearing a look of having been there, wherever “there” was that gave them that particular countenance. All of them look high.
Tom Dierkop would have fit perfectly in that photo.
***
Often, impressions are all we go on when it comes to strangers who briefly affect our lives. We move on, but those impressions remain, conjuring a narrative of another’s life that is perhaps half true, if even that much.
What did I really know then about Tom Dierkop? I knew by observation that he was prone to trouble. I knew that he was scary.
And I knew that he fascinated me. He embodied a level of audacity I couldn’t imagine expressing at the time. Ever since I was five and my parents took me to see Little Bohemia — the rustic northern-Wisconsin lodge where John Dillinger and his gang had battled federal agents in 1934 — I have been enthralled by outlaws. My impressions of Dierkop, concocted in my early teens, fit that mold. Like Dillinger, he appeared to live outside conventional restrictions. It wasn’t so much that the rules didn’t apply to him; he just didn’t acknowledge them. That ethos appealed to me, though at the time I would not have dared embrace it for myself.
But again, these were all impressions. They told only part of the story. Even John Dillinger had soft spots that belied the stereotype of a gangster — his playful sense of humor, for example, or the special reverence he held for the older sister who helped raise him after his mother died.
By the time that I’d read the newspaper report of Tom Dierkop’s drowning in 2000, I was in my fourteenth year of sobriety. Yes, I had fallen to the same disease that eventually took down my parents. I was lucky to have gotten out alive. It had started for me in the ninth grade, my last year at Longfellow, with a shared jar of brandy and eggnog, and it took off fast. By the first year of high school I was already deep into drugs, taking pills by the handful, setting my own trajectory of infamy. My brush with audacity.
I might even have made common cause with Dierkop, but by that time he had dropped out of school. I never saw him again.
***
Reading a later, lengthier version of Tom Dierkop’s obituary, I was struck by a statement so simple that, in any other circumstance, I might have glossed over it.
He loved his dog.
The incongruity threw me. For all of those years, I had cleaved to the legend of the big, bad hood of Longfellow Junior High. I’d never set aside my prejudice sufficiently to allow that, like all of us, Tom’s term on Earth was a sum of disparate parts — complex, terrible, banal, at times perhaps even beautiful.
I wanted to know more. So I searched the newspapers. Sure, there were the legal hassles and self-inflicted hard luck: numerous drunk driving arrests, a bust for burglarizing a pharmacy in the mid-1980s (true to form, Tom stood mute, defiant, at his plea hearing).
But given the recent turns in my own life, I now considered these from a perspective of similarity. At that same time Tom was in trouble for the burglary in 1986, I was facing my own drunk driving charges. I’d suffered a temporary paralysis in one arm that year after passing out at a Halloween party. And I was in the midst of destroying my first marriage through my words, habits, and actions. Like my father, I could be a vicious drunk.
In our separate worlds, we were both being written off as bad news then, our friends and loved ones shaking their heads. No doubt strangers looked on with a sort of awe at our excesses, the more self-destructive of them seeing a hint of themselves, water seeking its own level.
Through that search, I discovered another side of Tom. He had bowled in the local leagues and achieved a decent average. During the summer of 1975 — just before I first became aware of Tom at Longfellow — he’d joined a team of young volunteers to help repair houses on a Native American reservation up north. He even showed a flair for art, once winning a puppet contest at a city parks department festival.
Paradoxically, in light of his watery end, he also loved to swim and fish in the Mississippi. It was on one of those jaunts, in 1973, that 11-year-old Tom Dierkop happened to be in the right place along its banks to find an orphaned hatchling crow. He rescued that bird and brought it home to raise.
How I rejoiced at this last item! It was as though I were a fiction writer who had sniffed out the perfect detail to flesh out a character, all irony lost to me in the moment.