Mindhunter (6 page)

Not long after I started working there, I met Sandy, who worked at the hotel as a cocktail waitress. She was a beautiful young woman with a young son and I was instantly crazy about her. She looked spectacular in her little cocktail outfit. I was still in great shape physically from all of my exercise and working out, and she seemed to like me, too. I was living at home and she would call me all the time. My father would say to me, "Who the hell is calling you all hours of the day and night? There’s always this child crying and screaming in the background."

Living at home didn’t provide the opportunity for much action, but Sandy told me that if you worked at the hotel, you could get an unbooked room really cheap. So one day we got a room together.

The next morning, early, the phone rings. She answers it and I hear, "No! No! I don’t want to talk to him!"

As I wake up, I say, "Who is that?"

She says, "The front desk. They said my husband’s here and he’s on his way up."

Now I’m wide awake. I say, "Your husband? What do you mean, your husband! You never told me you were still married!"

She pointed out that she’d never told me she wasn’t, either, then went on to explain that they were separated.

Big deal, I’m thinking as I begin to hear this maniac running down the hall.

He starts pounding on the door. "Sandy! I know you’re in there, Sandy!"

The room had a window onto the hallway made of glass louvers, and he’s tearing at them, trying to rip them off the frame. Meanwhile, I’m looking for a place to jump from—we were on the second floor—but there’s no window for me to jump out of.

I ask, "Does this guy carry guns or anything?"

"Sometimes he carries a knife," she says.

"Oh, shit! That’s great! I’ve got to get out of here. Open the door."

I get into this pugilistic stance. She opens the door. The husband comes running in. He comes straight at me. But then he sees me in silhouette in the shadows, and I must look big and tough, so he changes his mind and stops.

But he’s still yelling: "You son of a bitch! You get the hell out of here!"

Figuring I’ve been macho enough for one day—and it’s still early—I say, very politely, "Yes, sir. I was just going as it was." I’d lucked out again, getting out of another scrape with my hide intact. But I couldn’t avoid the truth that everything in my life was going to hell. Incidentally, I’d also cracked the front axle of my father’s Saab racing my friend Bill Turner’s red MGA.

It was early one Saturday morning that my mother came into my room with a letter from Selective Service saying they wanted to see me. I went down to Whitehall Place in Manhattan for a military physi cal with three hundred other guys. They had me do deep knee bends and you could hear the cracking as I went down. I’d had cartilage taken out of my knee from foot ball, just like Joe Namath, but he must have had a better lawyer. They held up the decision on me for a while, but eventually I was informed that Uncle Sam did, indeed, want me. Rather than take my chances in the Army, I quickly signed up for the Air Force, even though it meant a four-year hitch, figuring there were better educa tional opportunities there. Maybe that was just what I needed. I sure as hell hadn’t made much of educational oppor tunities in New York or Montana.

There was another reason for going for the Air Force at that point. This was 1966 and Vietnam was escalating. I wasn’t terribly political, generally considering myself a Kennedy Democrat because of my father, who was an official of the Long Island printers’ union. But the notion of having my ass shot off in support of a cause I under stood only vaguely wasn’t all that appealing. I’d remem bered an Air Force mechanic once telling me that they were the only service in which the officers—the pilots—went into combat while the enlisted men stayed back to support them. Having no inten tion of becoming a pilot, that sounded okay to me.

I was sent to Amarillo, Texas, for basic training. Our flight (what an Air Force training class is called) of fifty was about evenly divided between New Yorkers like myself and southern boys from Louisiana. The drill instructor was always on the northerners’ asses, and most of the time I thought it was justified. I tended to hang around with the southern ers, whom I found more likable and far less obnoxious than my fellow New Yorkers.

For a lot of young men, basic training is a stressful experience. With all the discipline I’d experienced from coaches in team contact sports, and as much of a jerk-off as I’d acknowledged to myself I’d been the last several years, I found the DI’s rap almost a joke. I could see through all his head trips and psych jobs, and I was already in good physical condition, so basic training was kind of a snap for me. I qualified quickly as an expert marksman on the M16, which was probably a carryover from the aim I’d developed as a high school pitcher. Up until the Air Force, the only riflery experience I’d had was shooting out streetlamps with a BB gun as a young teen.

During basic training I was developing another sort of badass reputation. Pumped up from lifting weights and with my head shaved close, I became known as "the Russian Bear." A guy in another flight had a similar reputation, and someone got the bright idea that it would be good for base morale if we boxed each other.

The bout was a big event on base. We were very evenly matched, and each of us refused to give an inch. We ended up beating the holy hell out of each other, and I got my nose broken for the third time (the first two having come during high school football).

For whatever it was worth, I ended up third out of the fifty in my flight. After basic training, I was given a battery of tests and told I was well qualified for radio-intercept school. But radio-intercept school was filled and I didn’t feel like waiting around until the next class began, so they made me a clerk typist—even though I couldn’t type. There was an opening in Personnel at Cannon Air Force Base, about a hundred miles away outside of Clovis, New Mexico.

So that’s where I ended up, spending all day long pecking out DD214s—mili tary discharge papers—with two fingers, working for this idiot sergeant and saying to myself,
I have to get out of here.

Again, here’s where my luck comes in. Right next door to Personnel was Special Services. When I say this, most people think of Special Forces, like the Green Berets. But this was Special Services, specifically, Special Services—Athletics. With my background, that seemed an excellent way to defend my country in its time of need.

I start snooping around, listening at the door, and I hear one of the guys in there saying, "This program’s going to hell. We just don’t have the right guy."

I’m thinking to myself, this is it! So I walk around, knock on the door, and say, "Hello, I’m John Douglas, let me tell you a little about my background."

As I talk, I’m looking at them for reactions and "profiling" the kind of guy they want. And I know I’m clicking, because they keep looking at each other like, "This is a miracle! He’s exactly what we want!" So they get me transferred out of Personnel, and from that day forward, I never had to wear a uniform, they paid me extra money as an enlisted man for running all the athletic programs, I became eligible for Operation Bootstrap, where the govern ment paid 75 percent of my educa tion costs to go to school at nights and on weekends—which I did, at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, twenty-five miles away. Since I had to overcome my D average from college, I had to get all A’s to stay in the program. But for the first time, I felt as if I had some focus.

I did such a good job of representing the Air Force in such rigorous sports as tennis, soccer, and badminton that eventu ally they put me in charge of the base golf course and pro shop, even though I’d never played a hole in my life. But I did look great running all the tournaments in my Arnold Palmer sweaters.

One day the base commander comes in and he wants to know what compression ball he should use for this particular tournament. I had no idea what he was talking about, and like my ninth-grade book report almost ten years before, I got found out.

"How in hell did you end up running this thing?" he wanted to know. I was immediately taken off golf and moved into women’s lapidary, which sounded exciting until I found out it meant stonework. I was also put in charge of women’s ceramics and the officers’ club pool. I’m thinking, these officers are flying over Vietnam getting their asses shot and I’m here getting chairs and towels for their flirtatious wives and teach ing their kids how to swim and they’re paying me extra for this while I get my college degree?

My other responsibility seemed to hearken back to my bouncer days. The pool was next to the officers’ bar, which was often full of young pilots training with the Tactical Air Command. More than once I had to pull wild, drunken pilots off of each other or off of me.

About two years into my Air Force hitch, while I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, I found out about a local association that helped handicapped children. They needed help with their recreational programs, so I volunteered. Once a week, accompanied by a couple of civilian staffers, I took about fifteen children roller-skating or to play miniature golf or bowling or to some type of sports situation where the kids could develop their individual skills and abilities.

Most of the youngsters faced serious challenges such as blindness or Down’s syndrome or severe motor-control problems. It was tiring work, for example, skating around and around a rink with a child in each arm, trying to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, I’ve had few other experiences in life I’ve enjoyed as much.

When I pulled up in my car at their school each week, the kids would all run out to greet me, crowd around the car, and then I’d get out and we’d all hug. At the end of each weekly session, they were all as sad to see me leave as I was to have to go. I felt I was getting so much out of it, so much love and companionship at a time in my life when I wasn’t really getting it from any other sources, that I started coming in in the evenings to read stories to them.

These children were such a contrast to the healthy, so-called normal kids I worked with on the base who were used to being the centers of attention and getting everything they wanted from their parents. My "special" children were so much more appreciative of anything that was done for them and, in spite of their handicaps, were always so friendly and eager for adventure.

Unbeknownst to me, I was being observed much of the time I spent with the children. It must say something about my powers of observation that I never found out! At any rate, my "performance" was being evaluated by members of the Eastern New Mexico University psychology department, who then offered me a four-year scholarship in special education.

Though I had been thinking about industrial psychology, I loved the kids and thought this might be a good choice. In fact, I could stay in the Air Force and become an officer with this as a career. I submitted the university’s offer to the base’s civilian-run personnel board, but after consideration, they decided the Air Force didn’t need anyone with a degree in special education. I thought this was rather strange because of all the dependents on base, but that was their decision. So I gave up my thoughts of going into special ed as a career, but continued the volunteer work I loved so much.

Christmas of 1969, I was going home to see my family. I had to drive the hundred miles back to Amarillo to catch the plane to New York, and my Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t in such great shape for the trip. So my best friend in the Air Force, Robert LaFond, swaps me his Karmann Ghia for the trip. I didn’t want to miss the Special Services Christmas party, but that was the only way I could get to Amarillo in time for the flight.

When I got off the plane at La Guardia, my parents met me. They looked grim, almost shell-shocked, and I couldn’t figure out why. After all, I was turning my life around and finally giving them reason not to be disappointed in me.

What had happened was, they’d received a report of an unidenti fied driver killed near the base in a VW that matched the de scription of mine. Until they saw me get off the plane, they didn’t know if I was alive or dead.

It turned out that Robert LaFond, like a lot of other guys, had gotten drunk and passed out at the Christmas party. People who were there told me that some of the officers and noncoms had carried him out to my car, put him in with the key in the ignition, and when he came to, he tried to drive off the base. It was snowing and freezing out; he hit a station wagon head-on with a military mother and her children inside. Thank God, they weren’t hurt, but in my flimsy car, Robert went into the steering wheel, through the windshield, and was killed.

This haunted me. We were very close and I was plagued by the thought that this might not have happened if he hadn’t lent me the good car. When I got back to base, I had to claim his personal effects, box up all his possessions, and ship them off to his family. I kept going back to look at my wrecked car, I kept having dreams about Robert and the crash. I was with him the day he’d bought a Christmas present for his parents in Pensacola, Florida, a gift that arrived in the mail the same day Air Force officers came to the house to tell them their son had died.

But I wasn’t only grief-stricken, I was also angry as hell. Like the investigator I later became, I kept asking around until I’d narrowed it down to the two men who had put Robert in the car. I found them in their office, grabbed them, and put them up against the wall. I started hammering on them, one by one. I had to be pulled off them. I was so mad, I didn’t care if I got court-martialed. As far as I was con cerned, they had killed my best friend.

A court-martial would have been a messy affair, since they would have had to deal with my formal accusation against the two men. Also, by this time, American involvement in Vietnam was beginning to wind down, and they were offering early outs to enlisted men with only a few months to go. So to smooth things out as best they could, the personnel people discharged me several months early.

While I was still in the service, I’d finished my undergraduate degree and begun a master’s in industrial psychology. Now I was living on the GI Bill in a $7-a-week, windowless, basement apartment in Clovis, fighting the legions of three-inch waterbugs that went into attack formation every time I came in and switched on the lights. Not having access to the base facilities anymore, I joined a cheap, run-down health club whose atmosphere and decor roughly matched that of my apartment.