Still December 31st.
Blue Laws
Now the media were getting all pumped up again because the death took place on a huge backcountry estate in Greenwich and had all the makings of a good scandal. Details were sketchy, but just from the initial reports, the whole scene sounded good and grisly. I rubbed my hands with anticipation and grinned, but I would have to wait and see.
So, I focused my attention on the rest of the day which was being constructed on certain uncertainty, thanks to the current atmospheric conditions. The storm was moving north which just happened to be the direction we were heading in, so for once I used my noggin a bit and decided to wait a few hours to see if things cleared up.
In the meantime, I went to buy the Greenwich Time to check out what it had to say about the end of the year. I walked down to the deli, flipped the bird at dog on the way (mainly because it was inside and out of sight), purchased that day’s edition, bid a happy New Year to the owners and returned. I got to the doorstep and kicked off as best as I could the snow from the rubber canyons of the soles of my boots and walked in, only to pull them off again, sit down at the dining room table and set the expanse of the newspaper fully on the glass surface.
Considering it was the last day of the year, the headlines were extraordinarily dull, as if it were the 17th of Boredemder or Tedium Tuesday. Here’s what I laid my eyes upon:
- UnionReaches Vote Threshold. Yawn.
- Brushing Up on Painting Techniques. Yawn and groan.
- YMCA nears funding goal. Slap in the face.
- Man dies after being tasered by police. This was not in Greenwich so it doesn’t count.
- Lawmakers may consider wine sales in supermarkets. Bingo!
Now that last one is what I called news! Good news! Long overdue news! It turned out the state would probably give in because it could foresee a long-term revenue advantage built into the whole plan, but the rest of us believed it as something that should have happened long ago. Then again, this was Connecticut, and things don’t always moved forward that quickly. For example, alcohol, up until just a few years ago, could not be sold after eight and never on Sundays. Now the closing time has been raised an hour, and the Lord’s-day thing seems destined to be shelved with all of those other former-sabbath prohibitions.
But it sure took a while, trust me. These religiously-based rules were called blue laws and Connecticut was notorious for them. In fact the first mention of them in written form had to do with the rigid legislation that reigned in this state. Some laws may have resulted in many a dreary Sunday afternoon watching the game while sipping on a glass of water, but after looking at the way things were run around here back in Colonial times, you definitely get the feeling the state has loosened up over the years. For example, as a child you could legally be put to death for swearing or refusing to sweep the floor. To me, that makes staring at a closed sign on the liquor store appear almost refreshing.
The good thing about living in Greenwich, though, was that you could always cross the border into Port Chester, New York and buy booze basically at any time you want, then run it back. Our neighboring state is generous and more flexible in that sense. In fact, it seems to me that there was little that you couldn’t do around the clock there. Some call it shameless, others reckless, and even others opportunistic; we just called it lucky.
The big place to buy at was this dumpy-looking but effective warehouse called WestConn, which still exists by the way. The second choice was Cumberland Farms, one of the first true convenience stores in the area. The Farms was a last resort because it jacked up its prices in standard screw-you-because-we-can-do-it-since-we’re-the-only-ones-open fashion. It also purveyed all of those hazardous frozen cooked foods from the 1970s and 1980s that most likely have been responsible for the death of a generation or two since.
WestConn was the main aim, though, and also where you got your kegs for the parties when getting kegs for teenagers was not so frowned upon. Families actually supported it. Hell, parents practically pumped the taps for the guests. I remember my older sisters and brothers throwing some of the biggest shindigs in town. It was the kind of status that, back in the 1970s, made you proud to be a Murdock. The police would sometimes come and politely but firmly ask us to tone things down, turn a blind eye to the dozens of wasted teens stumbling off to their cars, and when all was settled down, go back to the public school parking lots and hang out…or whatever else they did at night in those days. In fact, having the local authorities sweep in to break up the crowd was a unquestionable sign of success. It meant we would be the talk of school on Monday.
They often came because one of our neighbors would always complain. He was a self-contained kind of person who owned two nasty German Shepherds called Lothar and Himmler, or some name like that. Most balls that floated onto their property were left there forever as acknowledgement that no toy was worth getting neutered for.
By the time I was of the age to have my own parties, drinking laws had changed fairly radically, with the brunt of responsibility falling heavily on the owner of the home, namely my parents; that curtailed almost all activity on a legal level. Which doesn’t mean we didn’t have parties; we just had to go underground. I authored two major clandestine events. One was in winter when snow covered the lawn. The side of the driveway was full of incriminating tire tracks. Some even curved around trees. The morning after, as I gazed out the front yard, I pondered the situation calmly but with a degree of desperation stirring inside. This was not going to be easy to explain. I gave it some thought and came up with one of those unsound Grinchy ideas. That was it! What if…
On paper it was a risky and last-ditch effort to salvage a lost cause. I went to the garage and returned with a shovel and, this is the honest to God truth, started to fill in dozens of wheel tracks. The finished product looked like, well, a lot of wheel tracks sloppily filled in with snow. I leaned on the handle of my shovel and surveyed the results of my endeavors. It looked like crap and there was no way in hell my parents weren’t going to nab me. In fact, had they arrived at that moment I most certainly would have been writing these lines from a jail cell as my father, being a lawyer, would have dug up some old blue law which entailed a life sentence.
It was hopeless, unless I got lucky and my parents return flight got delayed two weeks. Other than that, I just couldn’t see myself pulling it off. In fact, as I drove off to a friend’s house, I made tentative plans to seek adoption should the need arise. It didn’t. You see, it could not have been a sunnier day, but it was also very windy, and the blustery weather effectively swept the tracks clean, like a desert. By afternoon, no easily detectable evidence could be found. Only the most experienced manhunter would have possibly noticed something, and, even then, maybe not. Mother Nature had saved my ass.
Years later when we lived up in Darien and I tried it again, she would kick it. This time it was summer and it was raining all day. I even considered calling it off, but we were all in the mood, so we said what the hell. Well, muddy soil is a far more difficult terrain to control, and I awoke the next day to go to work, I knew I was a challenge because the backyard looked like one of those battlefields in France during World War I. It was as if Mother Nature was telling me, “You know, Brian, you are one big dumb fuck. And this time I’m going to make you pay for it.”
The first to nail us was Mary Jones, the housekeeper, who had no reason to be up at that time or day, or even that day at all, but had lived with us far too long to know what was going on. She went through the roof and I took a shellacking as a result. But that was just the beginning of it. Luckily for me I had to go to work and missed the arrival of my parents whose irate eruption, from what I understand, would have triggered a tsunami had it taken place on the shore. I got my share when I got home, and a well-deserved one. That party would end up being the final full-fledged Murdock party in history…the end of an era.
