Car Wash
One of the things I remember doing with my church youth group was having car washes to raise money. The girls would be in the streets with hand made signs yelling at drivers that passed. We all would help wash the cars that came in. One adult, Richard Lawson would bring his big Ford Bronco in and demand that it was cleaned thoroughly. Then he would pay 5.00, when we were only asking for 2.00.
Richard Lawson was a tall broad man with curly brownish red hair. He had a booming deep voice that would ring out in the church choir. He would hang out and do favors for a Southern Appalachian woman with four blond children. I went out with the daughter for a little while. I remember her buying me the James Taylor album Handyman. Well I always thought Richard was odd because tended to be authoritative and I shied away from people like that. Later we found out that he was a predator and child molester. He acted interested in the lady, but was molesting her boys. The oldest boy had a shyness about him that wasn't natural. My father found out about it. I'm not sure if he went straight to the police or he tried to counsel him first. We didn't know back then that you don't counsel a predator. Years later, I was googling my father on the Internet and I found an entry by one of the Southern Appalachian women angrily writing that my father protected a child molester. That made me angry because of all the good things he did for those people and the sacrifices he made to improve their lives and this is what is posted after his death.
But Richard Lawson was truly a child molester. Later I found out that one of my best friends, James, a boy who was very smart but grew up without a father, was molested by him. Years later after I finished college James came over to my housewarming. This brilliant child was selling pots and pans in parking lots to whomever he could hustle. He was also gay, which was strange to me because whenever we were together, he would always ask my sister, Margaret, to go out. I wondered if the molesting made him gay. I don't know how that works. I know some people are born gay, but I don't know if situations in someone's life can turn them gay.
Years later, my foster brother, John Thompson, came to my father's funeral. Now John was an interesting person. His parents owned a bar and both died young from alcoholism. He came to our house as a foster child when he was around 14. I was 9 years younger than him. He was wild and he always smoked weed in the house bathroom and then covered up the smell with strawberry cologne. Everyone knew what he was doing, but my parents were not willing to acknowledge it or confront him about it. Still, my mother was cold to him. He was the clown of the hippie group that included my brother Robert, and my sister m, Diane. He would do any crazy dare that people would ask. As he got older, his craziness turned into coolness, especially when he started tending the bar. He had a bubbly personality and he knew how to make people feel good so he was the perfect bartender. Later he owned two very successful bars. John was a lady’s man or a womanizer, I'm not sure. He had sex with hundreds of girls and they were all willing partners, so maybe he wasn't a womanizer. I guess he brought excitement and humor to the suburban girls who came down to the ghetto for fun. John smoked weed daily as a way to calm himself down. He also drank heavily for the first 10 years as an adult. Then he stopped drinking and only used weed and cocaine. Well, back to my father's funeral. John came to it stoned and coked up and was telling people that he was molested by Richard Lawson and he had blood in his underwear because of it. Then he said my dad knew about it and didn't do anything. But the way I figure is that John was always kidding, partying, and telling stories. I don't know what happened, but I can imagine my dad just thought he was being his crazy self, if he knew about it at all. So that's one of my memories about the church youth group and their car washes.