Corryton Crime Confessions Continue

Right on the heels of my confessions of being a car thief, I thought I’d go ahead and reveal another piece of my shady past.

It was the summer of 1980, the same summer that I was an accessory to Grand Theft Auto. I guess there was some meanness in me that just needed to get out. Once again, Kevin and I were camping out in the back of his dad’s old Fairlane station wagon. We were lying in the back in our sleeping bags, telling jokes, eating potato chips, and passing gas (yes, in that order). Perhaps it was all of the sodium and monounsaturated fat talking, I don’t know, but we had our minds set on mischief. It was there in the back of that car that we decided we were going to commit a crime in the dead of the night…

Tug: “Man, that new golf cart your papaw got is cool!”

Kevin: “Yeah, he let me ride on it the other day, it was a blast!”

Tug: “Do you think he would let me ride it?”

Kevin: “Probably but he’s pretty careful with it.”

Tug: “Hey, maybe we could sneak up to his house and take it for a ride.”

Kevin: “Okay, but we gotta make sure he is asleep cause he’s liable to shoot at us.”

This is when the fun began…

Kevin’s papaw, Louie Roberts, lived next door to Kevin’s parents. I don't know what he did for a living. I reckon as long as I knew him, he had been retired and spent most of his time tinkering around his place. He would construct all kinds of contraptions from pieces of junk that he had stored in several sheds on the backside of his property. He was the envy of the neighborhood when he would ride around on his homemade riding lawnmower with 2-push mowers hitched to the back of it. He could mow a 6-foot swatch of grass in one pass. I had much respect for the man because I considered him to be some kind of eccentric genius. Why he had a golf cart, I'll never know. I guess he just enjoyed riding around the yard on it.

Like I said, Kevin's papaw lived next door. All we had to do was walk up the hill about 150-yards and we would be at the carport that housed the golf cart. We got out of the Fairlane and quietly walked up the hill. Some dogs began barking in the distance. We fell flat down on the ground to take cover. All of the lights were out in Kevin’s papaw’s house. “I think he’s probably asleep,” Kevin said. We stood back up and crept up to the carport. The golf cart was parked on the concrete floor beside a car. Kevin whispered, “be really quiet, if he catches us we are dead.” We tiptoed around the cart admiring it. It was then that we noticed that the key was in it! Talk about excited. We definitely had to steal that golf cart now!

First we had to try and back the cart out without making any noise. Kevin reached down in the cart and turned something. “Okay, lets try to back it out.” He held the steering wheel while I got in front of it and started pushing. The tires made a loud squeal as the rubber moved on the concrete. “Oh crap! Kevin shouted, lets get outta here!” We took off running as hard as we could. A light came on in his papaw’s house. We slid down on the ground and hid behind some rocks. We lay there out of breath and scared to death. “I don’t think he saw us,” Kevin said. “Yeah, me neither, it’s a good thing,” I replied. After about 5-minutes the light went back off. Kevin and I looked at each other. “You wanna try it again,” I asked? “Yeah, but lets wait a little while longer until he gets back to sleep."

We sat there on the damp ground just biding our time. Finally we decided that enough time had passed and we crept back up to the carport. We walked up to the cart and had no more than put our hands on it when the carport light came back on. “Run, Run, Run!!!!” Kevin yelled. My heart was in my throat. I was running like a scalded dog back down the hill toward Kevin’s house. “Who’s out there!!!!?” roared his papaw’s voice, piercing the night. Kevin and I were still running like wild Indians. His papaw kept yelling from the side door of his house. I knew that he had a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it. Kevin and I ducked behind the old Fairlane. By this time dogs all over the neighborhood were barking and his papaw was yelling. We slid down the side of the car and sat in the gravels. Our hearts were pounding out of our chests. “I better go tell him it was us,” Kevin said. “He might shoot you if you go up there,” I said. I don’t know if we were more afraid of his papaw or afraid that his dad would wake up and catch on to what we were doing. Kevin’s dad had to get up early for his job at Standard Knitting Mills and he didn’t like to have his sleep disturbed. We had found that out the hard way.

Finally Kevin’s papaw quit yelling, the carport light went off and all was quiet again. We breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow we escaped again. We crawled back into the back of the Fairlane and laid there in our sleeping bags discussing our adventure. “Maybe I’ll tell him it was us, in the morning… if he asks,” Kevin said. We ate what was left of our potato chips and giggled for the next 30-minutes or so, and eventually fell asleep. I don’t know if Kevin ever confessed to his papaw about that night. I never mentioned it to another soul…until now.