It was only about a ten minute ride to the police station. Lutherville is on York Road north of the Beltway, Towson is on York Road south of the Beltway, and Towson is the county seat and headquarters of the Baltimore County Police. I was quickly brought inside to a fairly clean central area with a big counter and pushed onto a bench against the wall. I was sitting next to another guy, early twenties, kind of scruffy looking, but hey, we were in a jail, also sitting there with his hands cuffed. I nodded at him but otherwise kept my mouth shut.
He nodded back. “They run out of the FBI Top 10 and had to bring you in?”
I laughed at this. I looked like exactly what I was, a slightly rumpled school kid from a rich, white neighborhood. “Yeah, they found out I’m the one who actually shot JFK. What’s your story?”
“I got picked up for boosting a liquor store, but I didn’t do it. They got the wrong guy,” he asserted. I just nodded in understanding. “You?”
“Some kids on the school bus decided they wanted my lunch money.”
He stared at me for a moment. “You’re shitting me. So why are you here and not them?”
“They’re in the hospital.”
He gave me a look of respect, which made me wonder about my standards in my new life. I was getting approval from criminals. I just gave an embarrassed shrug. Any further discussion was ended when a uniformed cop came up and took my new friend by the arm and took him away. After another couple of minutes a different cop came for me. I was led down a series of hallways towards what looked like an interrogation room of some sorts. I glanced in and then asked if I could use the bathroom first. The police officer led me to a bathroom and followed me in. Thank God the cuffs were in the front. I was able to fumble my zipper down and use the urinal. I don’t pee easily when being watched, but I ran the Fibonacci Series in my head until I relaxed and did my business. I zipped up and was led out. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I had a nice shiner starting. A minute later I was in the interrogation room.
“Who do you want me to call?” he asked, pulling out a small notebook and a pen.
“What, you mean my parents?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
I gave a wry shrug at this. “Well, they’re both at work right now.” I gave it a thought. “Listen, I don’t know the number, but my father works here in town at Harry T. Campbell’s. He’s an engineer. His name is Charles Buckman. I don’t know the number but they must be in the phone book. When you get him, you’d better tell him to bring a lawyer. I have a funny feeling this is going to be a hairball.”
The police officer gave me a funny look at this. “And your mom?”
“Why don’t you ask me that if you can’t reach my father. I think you’ll find him more… rational, let’s say.”
He just grunted at that and left the room. I had a chance to look around the room. Very stark and utilitarian, lowest bidder government work. A metal table, bolted to the floor. Four metal chairs, bolted to the floor. A mirror along the side, probably one way glass. No carpet. Plain sheetrock walls, painted institutional gray. Single door, steel, small window with the heavy glass and metal mesh, locked.
I sat down on one of the chairs and considered my predicament. In a lot of ways, despite my surroundings, I wasn’t doing badly. Yes, I was cuffed in a jail, but I hadn’t been booked, fingerprinted, photographed, or otherwise processed through the system, and the reality of it was that I probably wouldn’t be. Unlike my new friend out in the lobby, I had been involved in a schoolboy fight on a school bus. Okay, yes, I had put all three of them into the hospital, but the bottom line was that this was a fight on a school bus.
I reflected a moment on the fight itself. How had I beaten up three older bullies so badly, when at the time, the original time around, I would have been so much dead meat? It was purely a matter of surprise and circumstance. They had figured that the three of them could cower a little kid, but I wasn’t thinking like a little kid, but like a fully grown man who wasn’t going to put up with their shit. When I fought back it was like the mouse spitting back at the cat. They were stunned. The last time I was actually in a fight had been when I was 17 and working at Pot Springs Pizza, and a punk kid wanted to prove he was a tough guy. He shoved me from behind and I swung around and backhanded him across the face. He was so stunned that somebody fought back it was easy for me to hustle him out of the shop.
Mind you, it usually still works out badly for the mouse. The only reason I managed to win was that I managed to fight in a restricted space, where I could handle them one at a time. The bus aisle was the first place, with two boys tied up and falling all over everybody while I concentrated on Jerry. Later, outside, I had my back to the bus, eliminating 180 degrees of vulnerability, and still managed to get the two boys to attack me individually. If we had all been outside, on a field, with no place to hide, and all three had attacked me at the same time, I would have been the one in the hospital.
So what was going to happen now? They hadn’t started processing me through the system, so it was much more likely they were going to send me home with my parents. The cops and the courts are not how you want to handle schoolboy fights. But was that actually what I wanted? It is certainly what I would have wanted back the first time around. I would have been terrified; hell, I would have shit my pants being on a bench next to an armed robber! Now, at 67, I was nowhere near as impressed as they wanted me to be, even if I was 13 on the outside.
There were several tactics the police could use to get me out of their hair. They could threaten me and/or my parents. They could knock me around and show me how tough they were. Never mind the nonsense about how that was illegal. It was 1968. The Escobedo decision was only four years old and the Miranda ruling was only two years old and I was underage in any case. The cops could do any damn thing they wanted to a criminal and realistically get away with it.
Still, that wasn’t going to happen. After the war, when the highway system was being developed and it became possible to move out of the cities, Baltimore developed a large network of suburbs just like every other city in America. This was where the rich white people moved to get away from the niggers. Don’t blame me if you don’t like the language. This was 1968, not 2022, and this was south of the Mason-Dixon line and that was how people talked. So my parents moved to the new suburbs, and the richest and whitest suburb in the state was Towson. There was no way I was going to end up in the basement getting the rubber hose treatment.
I was in the interrogation room for over an hour and a half when the door was opened and two large men stepped in. The first man in was a big man, tall and stocky, dressed in a suit, and his hair was gray and his face was red. The second man was similar, only a bit shorter, and his face was a normal color.
I stood up and turned towards the red faced man. “Hi, Dad.”
“WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE NOW?!” he roared.
“Well, so much for ‘innocent until proven guilty’,” I commented. I turned towards the other man as my father fumed and seemed to get redder. “Hi, I’m Carl Buckman. Who are you?” I held out my right hand to shake his, but of course the left came with it since they were cuffed together.
The other man quickly came around to stand between me and my father. He stared at the cuffs for a moment before shaking my hand awkwardly. “I’m John Steiner. I’m a lawyer.”
“I asked what the hell you have done!” yelled my father again.
“Why don’t we sit down so I can tell you?” I answered calmly.
The lawyer pushed my father towards a chair opposite mine. “Charlie, sit down so we can figure this out.”