Blood Games (26 page)

Bart was immediately drawn to the diversions, both on and off campus. “It was real easy to get distracted,” he recalled later “So many people your age doing parties and raising hell in such a concentrated area.” At one period, soon after his arrival at State, Bart was attending parties almost every night, often staggering back to his room in a stupor.

Neal, on the other hand, detested parties and sneered at Bart and his activities, much as he had done in high school. Neal felt uncomfortable in groups of more than three and thought of parties as noisy and senseless wastes of energy.

This difference in attitude was only one of many things that separated Bart and Neal. Soon after moving in together, both realized that they probably should have chosen other roommates. Bart, for one thing, was neat. Neal was incredibly sloppy. A demarcation line was soon drawn down the middle of the room—cleanliness and order on one side, clutter and filth on the other. Beyond that, neither really liked the other, nor did they like one another’s friends.

“A lot of people didn’t like Neal,” Bart said. “Maybe because he was a real disgusting person. Anytime he got drunk, he got sick. He’d go throw up in anybody’s room he happened to be in. If you had a girlfriend coming, you didn’t want him around. He’d hit on her. Absolutely no shame. He just got on a lot of people’s nerves. Everybody more or less avoided him.”

Neal’s friends were mainly his acquaintances from his year at the N.C. School of Science and Math. Bart’s friends all were new acquaintances, people he had met during orientation and after moving into the dorm.

“Some of Neal’s friends were real genius types,” Bart said later. “Really bright but extremely eccentric.”

While Bart went out partying, Neal preferred staying in his room playing Dungeons and Dragons, Champions, and other role-playing games with his friends. Bart never played with them although he did play occasionally with others. Most of his time, however, was spent hitting bars and clubs where he could pass himself off as twenty-one, listening to rock and roll, and prowling the nearby campuses of Meredith and St. Mary’s colleges, attempting without much success to pick up the well-to-do young women who attended those private schools.

“We never partied in my room, just because Neal was there,” Bart said later. “Neal would bug everybody, drive everybody crazy, chase all the women away.”

Another thing separating Neal and Bart was study. Neal later would claim that he never saw Bart pick up a book during their year of rooming together. Only a few weeks into the semester, Bart quit going to his math and English classes for the simple reason that they were scheduled too early in the morning.

Neal, on the other hand, felt obligated to study, at least perfunctorily. In his final year at Bartlett Yancey High, he not only won top honors in English and mathematics, he was captain of the Quiz Bowl team and president of the Junior Engineering and Technical Society. He scored 1500 on his SATs, only 100 points short of perfect, prompting his admitting officer at N.C. State to note that it was the highest score he’d ever seen. More than that, Neal had won a full scholarship to N.C. State, the Aubrey Lee Brooks Scholarship, granted each year to the top student in each county of an eleven-county area. It was renewable for four years on the condition that he maintain acceptable grades.

Neal did not have much spending money, however, and several weeks after classes began, he took a job at a Pizza Hut near campus, first working behind the counter, later delivering pizzas. When he told Bart about openings for delivery drivers, Bart applied and was accepted. Soon Bart was working long hours on weeknights to support his weekend partying, and his grades suffered even more.

On October 17, another warrant was issued for Bart’s arrest, this one for probation violation, charging that he had failed to complete the 150 hours of community service he was ordered to render within six months of his sentencing for breaking into the lake house and his high school. His probation officer reported that he had completed only 49 hours and seemed indifferent about the rest. Bart was angry.

“It was mostly the fault of the guy assigning the community service,” he claimed later. “He didn’t assign me enough work to do. I did everything I was told, but he didn’t tell me to do enough stuff.”

On October 29, Judge Peter McHugh gave Bart a choice: he could complete his remaining community service or spend a week in the Caswell County Jail. Bart chose jail, and the judge allowed him to serve the week during the fall break in classes.

“It wasn’t a scary experience,” he said later. “It was a real pain in the ass. It was boring. Nothing to do except sleep and read. I felt embarrassed. Neal went around and told everybody about it. I was just glad to get it over with and be done with it.”

Soon after his week in jail, Bart had another brush with the law. He drove his pizza delivery truck in the wrong direction down a one-way street on campus to take a shortcut between dorms. A campus public safety officer stopped him and wrote a ticket. It was not his first.

Near the end of his junior year in high school, Bart got a warning ticket when he only slowed at a stop sign at a rural intersection in Caswell County. One week later, at the same spot, the same highway patrolman stopped him for the same violation and wrote him another ticket, this one no warning. Bart didn’t tell his parents about it. He and Emory and his friend Coy Odom scratched together enough money to pay off the ticket.

When he got the ticket on campus, Bart intended to go to court and argue that it was unjustified, but the court appearance came just two days before Christmas, while he was home between semesters, and he didn’t bother to return to Raleigh for it. When he came back to campus in early January, he received notice that his driver’s license had been revoked. It was of little concern to him. He had given up his job at Pizza Hut because it was taking too much of his time (sometimes he didn’t get back to his dorm room until 3 A.M.). He had no car and little opportunity to drive. Once again, he didn’t tell his parents about his difficulties.

Throughout his first semester, Bart had told his father that he was doing okay in class, making Bs and Cs. Jim was understandably perturbed when a transcript of Bart’s grades arrived showing mostly failures and incompletes. Bart blamed the bad grades on working too much and vowed to do better during his second semester. For a few weeks he did. He kept up his grades, didn’t party as much on class nights. A friend in ROTC helped him get a part-time job that didn’t interfere with his class schedule, writing parking tickets for the campus police.

Soon after the second semester began, Bart and Neal had a falling out.

“We need to get a stereo for this room,” Bart told Neal one day and Neal went along with the suggestion. Bart called a rent-to-own place and found that he could get a top-grade stereo for one hundred dollars a month. He had money that he’d gotten as a gift at Christmas. Neal was awaiting the spending money that came with his scholarship. Bart said he would pay the first month’s rent, Neal could pay the second.

“About the third week, Neal’s money came in and I told him, ‘Now don’t forget, you’ve got to pay the stereo bill this month,’” Bart recalled later “‘No problem,’ he said. Then came time the bill was due. I said, ‘Have you paid it yet?’ He said, ‘I’ve spent all my money.’ I said, ‘What did you do with it? He said, ‘I spent it.’ Made me mad as hell. I said, ‘Damn it, Neal, we agreed we were going to split the cost.’ He said, ‘Well, my name’s not on the lease.’ It was just tough luck. That’s the kind of guy he is. He didn’t want to do anything he had to do if he could figure out a way to get around it. I just said, ‘The hell with you. I’ll return the stereo.’”

Bart and Neal hardly spoke for several weeks after the stereo incident, and during that time Bart found himself uncomfortably confined to the room they shared. He started feeling sick and thought he was taking the flu. But after a trip to the campus dispensary, he was told that he had mononucleosis.

He spent two weeks in bed and fell so far behind in his classes that he knew he never could catch up. He had a legitimate medical excuse for dropping all of his classes and maintaining his status as a student. And he received permission to do so. But he failed to turn in the forms in time.

“The real reason was that I was lazy and didn’t feel like walking all the way across campus and seeing three or four people,” he said later.

By the time he got around to turning in the paperwork, it was too late. “Flunked every single class second semester. I was pissed. I said, ‘Damn, I screwed up first semester. Now second semester’s gone to shit.’”

With no hope of passing any course, there was no need to continue going to class, but he had paid for room and board, and even though he had to live with Neal, he remained in the dorm.

Late in April, he was sitting around with a suitemate, Fred Benson*, who was called Opie* because of a character he resembled in his favorite TV program,
The Andy Griffith Show.
Bart and Opie had little in common other than a strong interest in the military. Bart was Army ROTC, Opie was Air Force. Their politics, however, were widely divergent. Bart considered himself liberal. Opie was so strongly right-wing that some of his fellow students called him “the Nazi.” Opie was wanting to buy himself a Jeep, and he and Bart were looking through the want ads for likely prospects. Bart saw an ad for a Datsun 240Z, a snazzy sports car, for only $1,700. Intrigued, he and Opie went to look at it. Bart liked it so much that he called his father and asked about the possibility of borrowing money to buy a car. He soon would be going to work for the summer, he said, and would have no trouble paying it back.

Opie liked the car, too, and he had enough money to buy it. He made Bart a temporary loan to get the car and told him if his father wouldn’t let him have the money, he would keep the car himself. Bart proudly drove the burgundy and gold sports car to his father’s farm in Caswell County.

“I pulled up and the first thing Dad did was look to see if it was stolen,” he said later.

Jim negotiated a loan so his son could have his first car. He was unaware that Bart’s driver’s license had been revoked and that Bart had twice ignored summonses to come to court to face the charge of driving the wrong direction on a one-way street. Bart was unconcerned about the lack of a license and had no intention of staying off the road.

“I was a good driver,” he said later. “Never got stopped. I didn’t see any reason for a license.”

Soon after he got the car, Bart took another job delivering pizzas, this time using his own car. When he wasn’t delivering pizzas, Bart and Opie would load a case of beer into the car from the restaurant Opie’s mother operated next to campus and cruise around looking for girls to talk to.

When the semester ended in May, Bart and Opie had to move out of the dorm. They already had rented a two-bedroom two-bath apartment near the campus that they planned to share with another friend, Chris Williams. Neal frequently accompanied Bart and Opie on their apartment-hunting forays, unaware that they had no intention of letting him move in with them.

“Neal just tagged along,” Bart said later. “We would try to sneak out without him, but he just glued himself to our group.”

Once they found an apartment that they liked, Bart and Opie signed the lease. Although Neal had thought all along that he would be moving into the apartment with them, Bart informed him before the semester ended that they didn’t want him living with them. Neal’s objection offered Bart a chance to deliver the retort he’d been waiting months to get off his chest.

“Hey, your name’s not on the lease. Remember, you left me hanging on the stereo.”

Before Bart and Opie could move into the apartment, however, Chris Williams decided to take summer classes at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and wouldn’t be staying in Raleigh for the summer. Needing a third roommate to help pay the rent, Bart and Opie had to seek out Neal and see if he still wanted to move in with them. He did, although he later would proclaim it a mistake from day one. The three suitemates moved in early in May.

Bart received official notice that because of his grades, he no longer was welcome as a regular student at N.C. State. He could have his student status reinstated, however, by enrolling in summer courses and making acceptable grades. His father’s fears had come true, and Bart still seemed to be without a course in life and little interested in finding one. Bart said that he wanted to take a year off from college to work and save money so that he could pay for his education himself when he reenrolled. Perhaps that would be best, Jim thought. Maybe he would mature a little and become more responsible having to make his own way. Joanne’s main concern was that he not drop out of school permanently. She, too, went along with his plan, but reluctantly.

After a poor showing in his first semester, Neal’s grades had declined even more in the second. Weldon Skyton, who held such great hope for Neal, had become concerned. Neal still called his former teacher occasionally, but the calls came less frequently because Slayton always brought up the subject of study and grades and never failed to let his feelings be known. “I’d get angry,” he recalled later. “I told him, ‘I ought to come down there and kick your butt all over that campus. You’ve got to do the work, Neal. They don’t care what you made on your SATs anymore. You’ve got to perform.’”

At the end of the second semester, Neal found himself on academic probation, his scholarship threatened. “I was still okay,” he said later. “They just told me to get my act together I didn’t really worry about it because I knew I could pull out of it if I wanted to.”