Perpetual Summer

The Principal of my middle school was a broad shouldered, rumbly voiced guy named Mr. Zurfluh.  He used to pace up and down the courtyard during lunch like a yard boss, breaking up groups of homogenous black or white boys in hopes of avoiding any race baiting and fights.  Looking back, it really was like prison. Pioneer Middle School was laid out like a penitentiary, with close-walled common spaces and red brick breezeways that connected the classrooms, gym, cafeteria and office.  The school was evenly divided between white and black students.  While instances of outright racism were few, there were eternal struggles about which was cooler; rock or soul, Prince or Journey, Members Only or San Francisco Riding Gear - sometimes coming to violence.  Mr. Z was really in his element there.  I believe he did indeed see himself as a warden. Year round, he wore these wool, three piece suits that felt like horsehair sandpaper whenever he got you in a headlock for a quick trip to the office.  For me, these trips were thankfully infrequent.

I got to know Mr. Zurfluh a bit during my middle school prison stay.  His intrusive strolls around the courtyard provided plenty of opportunities for conversation.  He had a sly sense of humor and could be pretty self deprecating at times.  Mr. Z didn't retaliate when I made cracks about snow in the forecast while pointing to his jacket collar.  This was quite a contrast from my initial impression.  I suppose the authoritarian Mr. Zurfluh was more his response to the immediate environment and the avuncular Mr. Zurfluh was probably closer to his civilian self.  His favorite movie was Patton.  I used to amuse him by doing George C. Scott imitations during lunch.  He'd chuckle and give me one of those knock-the-wind-out-of-you pats on the back with his giant, bear paw hands.

Mr. Z held down that Principal spot at Pioneer Middle School for a year after I went on to high school.  During the year that I left, his pregnant daughter was stabbed to death while closing up the Safeway near the community college.  Everybody in town knew about her murder within hours.  Steilacoom was a pretty small town and for some reason I never came to understand while my family lived there, very insular.  It seems odd that it was, considering it bordered the very large McChord Air Force base and the vast Fort Lewis Army Reservation.  Mike Loverick's sister broke the news about the Zurfluh death.  She got it straight from Mike, who worked at the Safeway with Mr. Zurfluh's daughter.  He drove a blue metal flake Trans Am and his family had a swimming pool tucked away behind their colonial revival styled home.  Mike's sister thought I was lame and gross so most of this information was stuff I gleaned from her constant loud babble during study hall. The stupid part of me was really jealous of the Lovericks.  How come the accident of birth stuck me with my hardscrabble lot instead of with these suburban Gatsbys?  Life for the Lovericks seemed to me like perpetual summer.

About a week after the murder, I came home from school to find the neighborhood filled with local news trucks and cops.  They were all massed down the street around the Loverick house.  Mike Loverick did it, I was told by my little sister, who walked right past their house on the way home from Pioneer.  They found the knife and the money in his room.  Mike worked as a shelf stocker at Safeway and was on the schedule the night of murder.  He later confessed to stabbing the soon to be mother to death when she caught him stealing money from a strongbox.  Needless to explain, this created quite a tempest in our town.  

Mr. Zurfluh was destroyed by his daughter's death.  He resigned from his post at Pioneer and took a year off.  He took up a position under the Superintendent at the high school and I would run into him occasionally in the halls.  He was always quietly soused.  These encounters were awkward.  I would do little scenes from Patton and Mr. Z's eyes would get red rimmed and wet.  He was in perpetual darkness. 

When I was a senior, I wound up at a keg party in the house of Marion Manlove (yes, that's her real name), who was close friends with Mike Loverick's sister.  This was one of those parties you wind up at after a night of driving around bored with friends, looking for a joint.  On a medicine cabinet raiding mission to the bathroom I chanced to hear these two girls prank calling the Zurfluh house on a cordless phone, "Hello, is this Mr. Zurfluh?  Well, we got your daughter, you're next."  Some people live in perpetual darkness and some in perpetual summer.