Roy met Trick Mullvaney in 1962, a couple of months after Trick got out of prison. Trick, whose Christian name was Patrick, was paroled to the custody of Roy’s Uncle Buck, who provided him a construction job in Tampa, Florida, where Buck lived. Roy was fifteen at the time, Trick was twenty-two, the same age as Buck’s son, Kip, who introduced them. Trick knew Kip from before he was sent to Raiford for stealing medical supplies—narcotics, mostly—from pharmacies in Hillsborough County. Kip persuaded his father to take a chance on Trick, which required Buck to sponsor and keep track of him for one year, the length of his parole. Roy’s uncle rented an apartment for Trick on a property he owned near the construction site Trick worked on with Kip, building townhouses north of Tampa in Temple Terrace. Kip and Roy, when he was visiting from Chicago for the summer, lived with Buck and his wife, Belita, Kip’s stepmother.
Trick took his wife, Lorelei, and their four-year-old daughter, Tanya, to live with him. Trick was good-looking, tall and lean, fair-haired, and had a Van Dyke beard he began growing as soon as he was released from “durance vile,” as Buck referred to imprisonment. Roy’s uncle had had a taste of it himself when he’d been in the marines, having spent four months in the brig for bringing girls into the barracks to service the men. He had been spared a dishonorable discharge thanks to his father bribing a congressman he had helped to get elected.
“Raiford isn’t so bad,” Trick told Kip and Roy, “compared to local and county lockups. Negroes do all the dirty work, of course, this being the South. Shouldn’t be that way, but state prisons in the North aren’t much different. They’re segregated, too, even in New Hampshire, where I grew up.”
The boys were sitting and drinking beer in Trick and Lorelei’s living room after work. Roy was also on the job, shovelling lime rock off the curbs where Buck’s construction company was paving streets.
“Can’t be fun, huh, Roy?” Trick said. “Hundred and some out there every day, hotter when those trucks come through shootin’ asphalt. How much is your uncle paying you?”
“A dollar an hour.”
“Negroes get eighty-five cents,” said Kip.
“It’s not right,” Lorelei said. “What if they have families? That’s not a living wage.”
Trick laughed. “In Raiford all the inmates get paid the same, nine cents an hour. Don’t go to prison, Roy, no matter what state you’re in.”
“Roy won’t never do a jolt,” said Kip. “He’s too smart, he’ll go to college. Isn’t that right, cousin?”
“I’m goin’ to college after I’m off parole,” said Trick, “then maybe divinity school. I got tight with a parson in Raiford. He’d had a good life, he told me, until he got caught puttin’ it to an eleven-year-old girl. Couldn’t keep his hands and other body parts off underage poontang. Roscoe Rainwater. There he was in a North Florida swamp with me layin’ sewer pipe instead of little girls. Told me he quoted scripture all the while he was taking his pleasure.”
“Quit, Patrick!” said Lorelei. “No more trashy jailhouse stories. I don’t want Tanya to ever know you were in prison.”
“You’re right, honey, I’ve got to fight to keep my mind clean, but it’s damn sure hard work.”
“Do you like living in Chicago, Roy?” Lorelei asked. “What do your parents do?”
“My father’s dead and my mother gets married.”
“He was only five when his dad died,” said Kip. “And his mother’s been married three times since.”
“Jesus on a pony,” said Trick. “Ain’t life grand?”
“It will be for Tanya,” said Lorelei.
“I’ll do my best to make that happen, darlin’,” Trick said. “If I don’t, promise you’ll shoot me.”
Lorelei looked directly into her husband’s eyes when she said, “I promise.”
Trick maintained his good behavior during the year he worked for Roy’s uncle, and after his term of parole ended he passed a high school equivalency examination and enrolled in the University of South Florida in Tampa. He did passably well there and two years later entered the Pontius Pilate School of Divine Investigation in nearby Boca Lupo, from which he earned a certificate entitling him to call himself a Doctor of Divine Investigation and proselytize wheresoever God directed him to go.
Kip, meanwhile, had a falling out with his father over a navy insurance policy Kip wanted Buck to sign over to him and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he became a card dealer. He worked there in various casinos for a few years but became an alcoholic. His alcoholism caused him to be fired repeatedly until he was no longer employable in Vegas. He bounced around the country, working as a taxi driver in Denver, an elevator operator in Chicago, a janitor in Kansas City, and a fruit picker in Texas.
During all of this time Kip and Trick Mullvaney stayed in touch by mail and occasional phone calls. Trick and Lorelei started a church in Boulder, Colorado, where they bought a big house on a mountainside with money Lorelei inherited from her parents following their deaths in an automobile accident. Tanya graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in engineering, after which she moved to Montana.
Trick proved himself successful as a pastor but soon fell prey to what he referred to as Roscoe Rainwater Syndrome, which caused his downfall. After losing the majority of his parishioners, he began playing the stock market with the remainder of Lorelei’s inheritance, eventually losing it all. Their house was foreclosed upon and his Church of Divine Wrath and Retribution was shuttered. Lorelei filed for divorce and went to live with Tanya in Montana, where Tanya worked as a civil engineer in the city of Bozeman. Lorelei never again spoke to Trick, shed the name Mullvaney, and soon remarried to a local real estate salesman named Ripley Palmer. Tanya refused to answer her father’s letters or take his phone calls, ignoring his repeated requests that she send him money. She married a firefighter who threatened to murder Trick if he did not cease trying to contact Tanya.
Trick returned to Tampa, where, like Kip in Denver, he became a taxi driver. The Pontius Pilate School of Divine Investigation had closed due to its founder, Franklin Furto, having been convicted of defrauding several businessmen who had been on the school’s board of directors. He was sentenced to serve fifteen years in the state prison at Raiford, which gave Trick a chuckle. Trick lost his looks and drank himself to death at the age of forty-two, not long before Kip, depressed and destitute, shot himself in the head while sitting on the steps of the entrance to a fast food restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona.
Roy, who never did go to college, nevertheless travelled the world and became a successful author of popular adventure novels for boys. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and corresponded frequently with his Uncle Buck, who informed Roy of Trick’s early demise and his son Kip’s suicide. Buck outlived both of them, passing away in his sleep at the age of ninety-three.
Roy was troubled and mystified by the facts of how his cousin Kip and Kip’s pal Trick Mullvaney had led such pathetic lives and come to terrible, if not tragic, ends. When Roy was fifteen, they had been kind to him, generous with the little money they had, did their best to keep him out of trouble and harm’s way, and always welcomed his company. Roy decided to write a novel about two young friends named Trick and Kip and their often humorous adventures and misadventures together. He would make everything up.
