I grew up in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a small, relatively affluent community built around a manmade lake about eight miles south of Portland. We had relocated there in 1960 from north Portland because our home was going to be razed to accommodate an I-84 Freeway overpass.
My parents had chosen Lake Oswego for our family of six in large part because of its reputation for safety and school quality. The small, one-story house they bought was in a quiet, unassuming neighborhood of other modest, mostly one-story houses inhabited by families with kids of all ages.
The kids in one of these houses, Dan and John, were both adopted. I don't recall whether they were biologically related, but they referred to each other as "my brother." Biological brothers or not, they were both...weird. Maybe even a little scary. And they lived next door to us.
I first became aware of John's weirdness when he was about 14 and he invited my brother Ken and me, ages 10 and 9, respectively, to join him in his "clubhouse," a plywood shed his dad had built in their backyard. During our brief gathering, he told nasty jokes, farted, and tried to get Ken and me to smoke a cigarette. We tolerated the nasty jokes and farting (hey, it was just guys being guys, right?), but—mainly because our ex-smoker mom would have been devastated if we'd chosen otherwise—we refused the cigarette. Shortly afterward, we politely excused ourselves.
A few weeks later, Ken and I spotted John and Dan hitting golf balls into the woods in their backyard. When they noticed us watching, John came up to us and said, "Hey, how would you like to earn some money?"
Ken and I looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, and replied in unison, "Sure. How?"
"Go into the woods there and find the golf balls we hit," John replied. "We'll pay you a penny for each ball you find. There's probably a hundred of 'em out there already."
Doing the math quickly in my head, I calculated that Ken and I would each earn 50 cents if we found all 100 balls...assuming John and Dan had, in fact, hit that many. Since our allowance at the time was 25 cents a week, 50 cents sounded like a pretty good deal. But first, we would have to find those balls.
Within a few days of searching for golf balls for about an hour per day, we had found a total of maybe 30 balls. Realizing that was too much work for too little pay, we decided to cash in our finds and call it quits. I'm sure we each spent our 15-cent earnings on something ephemeral, like rainbow pops from the ice cream man.
At some point while John and Dan were still in their mid-teens, John was somehow invited into our living room to play our spinet piano. To my utter astonishment, this crude, foul-mouthed, rule-breaking, golfball-wasting weirdo was able to lay down a nearly perfect rendition of—what else?—"There is a Tavern in the Town." But what made it even weirder was that my mom, who seemed to have sanctioned the event, was right there with us, singing along while Weird John played. And when he was done, she applauded.
I didn't know what to think. If my mom was OK with John (or even more than OK...like, interested in him somehow?), what was my problem? Why did he give me the heeby jeebies? Had I misjudged him?
And then there was Dan, who at this time was about three years older than John. One night, not long after John's surprising piano performance, my mom was taking a bath in the master bathroom, the door to which was situated directly across from my bedroom door in the hallway. Suddenly I heard her scream, open the bathroom door, and run down the hallway. I couldn't quite make out what she was screaming, but I later learned that it was "peeping Tom," which apparently meant "creepy guy peering at naked woman through bathroom window."
Eavesdropping on Mom's breathless conversation with Dad in their bedroom, I heard her repeat "peeping Tom" and add that she thought it might've been...Dan. Trying to calm her down, Dad suggested that she withhold judgment until they knew all the facts, ostensibly meaning "until you're absolutely sure there was a peeping Tom, and that he did, in fact, resemble Dan." Because, you know, relationships with neighbors can be so precarious, I guess.
I never heard whether Mom called the police or confronted Dan's parents at that point (and I understand why such actions might have been kept confidential), but I do remember her arming herself against future violations, by making sure the bathroom window shade was pulled all the way down while she was bathing (or in any state of undress), and by keeping a...plumber's wrench under her pillow at night.
Things didn't get any less weird. That summer, Dan and John's parents inexplicably left them alone for a weekend, and the boys did what teenage boys do when left alone: They had a party. Complete with loud music, alcohol, rowdy voices, and...guys peeing on the driveway. (Were the toilets out of commission?) And that Halloween, my siblings and I, still somehow oblivious to any potential danger of an alleged peeping (or peeing) Tom, trick-or-treated at John and Dan's house, where we were "treated" with...rolled-up pancakes. Stuffed with jam and black pepper. Had their parents moved out?
Lest you think all this is the "off his rocker" behavior to which the title of this post is referring, fasten your seatbelt. A year or two later, when Dan was about 19, he committed a crime that sent shockwaves through the community: He attacked three schoolkids with a hammer, nearly killing one of them. The kids had been on their way to school, walking on a path through a short stretch of woods—the same path that my siblings and I had traversed many, many times.
My horrified parents, trying to explain to my siblings and me what had happened, while also trying to comfort us, told us that Dan had "gone off his rocker." I wasn't sure what a rocker had to do with anything, but I caught their drift: Dan had gone crazy. Or crazier. And although he had been arrested, we were henceforth forbidden from taking our nice little shortcut to school through the woods. Instead, we would either have to take the bus or ride our bikes the long way—up a rather steep hill.
Dan was found to be criminally insane and was sentenced to a number of years in a mental hospital. I lost track of what happened to his brother, likely because his family moved away shortly after Dan's trial.
Although my mom was finally able to sleep without a plumber's wrench under her pillow, our little town's image as a relatively safe place to raise a family had been permanently shattered. And maybe that was a good thing, if only to prevent complacency from setting in and calcifying into a false sense of security. I don't know. At the time, all I knew was that I preferred Hershey bars over pancakes filled with jam and black pepper. And, of course, people who stay on their rockers.
