When Eddie Metz was thirteen years old he set fire to a bum sleeping in an alley. The bum was passed out drunk on cheap wine or whiskey. At nine o’clock one night Metz bought a gallon of gas for twenty-one cents at the Mohawk station on the corner of Ojibway and Rockwell, carried it in a plastic kids’ pail he’d found in a sandbox at a park playground and went in search of a bum to burn. He found him collapsed in the weeds of an empty lot on the fringe of an alley between Mohican and Laramie streets, poured the gas on the guy over his legs and up to his neck, tossed the pail into the weeds, then took out a book of matches from a coat pocket, struck several of them and ignited the gas. Eddie backed away and watched the flames engulf the bum’s body before running down the alley. He was never caught and he never knew if his victim had died or not. Eddie didn’t care, he’d done what he wanted to do.
Roy and his friends in the neighborhood, all of whom were nine, ten and eleven years old, knew who Eddie Metz was and they didn’t mess with him. He supposedly attended Stambolov Vocational, a school for retarded and so-called problem boys whose behavior was considered unfit for public or parochial schools. Stambolov was named for a Bulgarian statesman of the previous century who had sponsored a law separating inferior and unruly children from their families and banished them to labor camps until the age of eighteen, at which time the boys were conscripted into the Bulgarian army and the girls forced to work as street cleaners. Eddie and the other throwaways from Chicago schools called Stambolov “Stumblebum” prep. They knew their next misstep would cause them to be sent either to a state reformatory or, if they were at least sixteen, to the men’s prison in Joliet, Illinois.
Roy had only one personal encounter with Eddie Metz. On a morning before school Roy went into Kapp’s sandwich shop and school supplies store across the street from Torquemada Elementary to buy some pencils and found Eddie arguing with the owner, Wilbur Kapp, about the price of a powdered doughnut.
“It’s a dime, Eddie,” said Kapp. “I told you.”
“It ain’t worth more than a nickel. Come on, Kapp, I got a nickel right here.”
Metz took a coin out of a pocket and put it on the counter.
“Look, an Indian head.”
“Not enough, Eddie.”
“Hey, you,” Eddie said to Roy, “you got five cents I can borrow? I’ll pay you back.”
“I have fifteen cents. I need twelve to buy three pencils.”
“Okay, gimme three cents, that’ll make eight. Kapp, I can give you eight, how’s that? The kid’ll give you fifteen to cover his pencils plus what I owe.”
Kapp handed Eddie the doughnut, who took it and walked out without saying anything more. Roy showed three pencils to Kapp and put a dime and a nickel on the counter. Kapp scooped them up, deposited them in his cash register, and handed three pennies to Roy.
“Take your change, Roy. Forget about Metz, he’s a no good kid.”
Whenever Roy saw Eddie on the street after that he kept his distance. Metz never spoke to him about the three cents or anything else, and a year or so later he disappeared from the neighborhood. An eighth grader named Doug Groot who’d hung around with Metz before being arrested for stealing bicycles and sent to Stambolov Vocational for two months, told police that Metz had bragged to him about having torched a sleeping bum. This claim could not be proved and Eddie was gone, so nothing came of it.
What Roy and the others never knew was that many years later, when Eddie Metz learned of a festival held in the Nevada desert called Burning Man, at the conclusion of which a large wooden figure of a man was set afire, he laughed out loud and shook his head. Eddie was seated on a stool at the Golden Gopher Bar on 8th Street in downtown Los Angeles when he heard this coming from the television set above the bar. A patron sitting a couple of stools away asked him what was so funny and Eddie said, “Those drugged up punks don’t know what the real thing feels like.”
“And you do?”
Eddie didn’t answer right away, so the man asked him, “Were you in the war?”
Eddie took a swig of his double shot of Murphy’s and said, “I’ve been at war since I was a kid.”
