The Long and Winding Road



Maybe I was knighting Gus but we definitely
needed better props than a winter jacket, a
beanie and a corny lamp.

In Hell on Earth, a love story I tried to show the crazy twists and turns that life takes us through to get us to where we are going. The winding road I created was the result of sins committed in a different world at a different time with a little assistance from a renegade angel with too much time on his hands. It took about 250 pages to tell the story.
The same story was related to me a while back in the space of one line in an alumni directory with much of the details left out.

I met Gus my freshman year at Lowell Tech and knew he wasn’t your ordinary Gus from the start. The man I came to know by the very trade union, blue-collar worker name of Gus was actually introduced to me as Arthur. He was the only Arthur I had ever known and I remember thinking it sounded kind of hoity-toity.

He attended the vocational school at Medford High in one of the tougher neighborhoods of Boston and made a name for himself by becoming the first student president to come out of the shop classes.

He lived in the dorms but, along with a few other students, came to the house I rented with three other guys every Wednesday to work on the weekly physic labs.

One night, after the reports were completed we were—like Foo Ling, the renegade angel in Hell on Earth—kicking the idea around of causing a little mischief.


It was the mid-’60s and protests against campus ROTC were just coming into its own as a legitimate anti-establishment extracurricular student activity. ROTC was mandatory for freshman but we really didn’t have anything against the Air Force other than having to watch two hours of carpet-bombing every Tuesday. But like Foo Ling, we just had to be doing something.

The Air Force was celebrating some anniversary and a 50-foot mock-up missile had been set up directly in front of Comnock Hall across from the library and dorms. Two cadets guarded the make-believe missile around the clock but after a night of drinking beer and struggling to interpret the importance of various wavelengths exhibited by different chemical compositions—well, we had no choice.

We devised a plan where Gus and Pete would create a disturbance while Joe and I snuck out from the bushes behind the mammoth missile and spray painted  “Class of ’68” on each of the four large booster engines.

The good news is that we were immensely successful. The bad news is we didn’t have the sense to stop when we were ahead. We reconvened to watch the guards discover to their horror that the model missile had been mutilated on their watch. We had to do it again.

Only this time it didn’t go as smoothly. Gus wound up being captured and as he told the story, the next morning the Air Force colonel was practically in tears as he assessed the damage that was being done to his career. Hell, he was already assigned to a small New England engineering college. Gus didn’t have the heart to tell him his career had already gone down the tubes.

He also didn’t give the colonel any names. He wasn’t a snitch and it seemed the school didn’t want to make an A-student the fall guy for a prank that they felt four inebriated physics students shouldn’t have been able to pull off in the first place. On a side note, ROTC did cease to be mandatory the following year.

The next year I joined a renegade fraternity but shared an off-campus apartment with Gus. My home was 400 miles away so I didn’t go home very often. His home was only 20 miles away and he drove a little MG sports car but he didn’t go home much either.

I think we were typical college students. I remember listening to him laugh his way through Catch 22 and then insisting that I read it also, even through he had already read all the good lines to me. After finishing that masterpiece we both concluded that painting the missile had been the right thing to do.

Those were the days, when everyone didn’t have a camera as close and accessible as the nearest phone, which also wasn’t always a fingertip away. Because of that I only have one picture of the two of us. From a note on the back we had apparently seen a performance of Becket and were reenacting a scene with whatever props we could come up with. The only other clue to what we were thinking of in this picture is the other picture, which shows our homemade bar.

Typical college apartment in the 1960s-a guitar, homemade
bar, some books, some mugs and a reel-to-reel tape deck.

We had a very good year that saw us involved in activities like stealing a Christmas tree—on foot no less—in the winter and pretending to go to the beach when the weather warmed up by taking a six-pack to the closest golf course and getting soused in one of the sand traps. At the end of the year he was still an A-student and I, as I explained in vivid detail in Hell on Earth, transferred out of engineering into business.

On my recommendation, my renegade fraternity offered him a bid and like a true renegade, he turned it down. I moved into the house the following year and didn’t see much of him during our remaining years in college.

The last time I saw him was graduation day. He drove up to the curb in his MG with the top down and a woman that looked to be a few years older than him in the passenger seat. She not only looked older but also appeared to have came from a different age. With bright red lipstick and blonde wavy hair she looked like she came right out of a World War II era magazine. He said they were getting married.

Like the story I told in Hell on Earth, sometimes we wind up in places we didn’t expect and sometimes we wind up where we wanted to be but don’t know how in the hell we got there.

So where did Gus—A-student, high school class president coming out of the vocational wing, missile painting stealer of Christmas tree and sports car driving suitor of older woman—wind up. I don’t know the 250-page story but the two-line entry in the alumni directory informs me that the 1968 engineering graduate is now a Congregation of Jehovah’s Witness minister in New York State.

I sure didn’t see that coming.http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Earth-story-Phil-Terrana/dp/1456565575