Hairy Man Road

This blog isn’t abandoned.

I haven’t given up.

I have, however, struggled a bit over the summer. Fiction was going nowhere and I didn’t feel like banging my head against the keyboard, so I took the month of July off hoping to refresh. Then July became August and I found once again that I had nothing in the tank. I didn’t want to write about politics and I was running out of old beer drinking stories and I felt weirdly blank. So August became September and my laptop began gathering dust.

In September the Foxtales story telling series launched it’s winter season at the Foxboro performing arts center with a show featuring the best stories from the previous year. Since I’d won, twice, last year I was invited back to perform both of my stories in front of a larger audience. Preparing for this took up most of September and once again nothing new got written. I tried to at least get video of my rendition of Fear and The Best Turkey Sandwich so I’d have something for the blog but my lovely, talented, smart wife who’s brains pay our bills filmed the WRONG story.

At the event I was told they were short story tellers for October and asked if I had anything. I didn’t. In fact I felt washed up. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever write another word again. So I told them I could come up with something. What the hell, maybe a little added pressure would help get me over the hump. At least it would force me to put something on the page.

The loose theme for the month of October was “Skeletons” as in, Skeletons in the closet, and I couldn’t help but immediately think of my time working in law enforcement. Eight years of night shift as a Patrol Deputy has given me access to a lot of skeletons. I’ve got more than a few hair raising tales, but they present an ethical problem. Every story. Every crazy call, every gory scene, every pursuit, every wild arrest, every fight represents somebody else’s worst, and in some cases last, day on earth and I can’t ask the victims, witnesses, and perpetrators to consent to me telling their tales.

But October is Halloween and skeletons are spooky and the theme for these events isn’t particularly rigid so why not do something a little scary. I had this Ray Wylie Hubbard lyric in mind about “Day people and night people” and this mental image of Fat City in Metairie on a warm winter weeknight sometime after midnight. Fog would roll in off of Lake Ponchartrain and the old sodium vapor street lights gave it an eerie yellow glow. It blocked out the sound, so everything was quiet. Only night people moved around that late and they were ghost like, almost spectral, shadows in the fog.

That’s spooky but it’s just a vibe, a cool image and I’ve told my film making buddies over and over a thousand times that vibes and cool images are not stories.

So what if I added a ghost story of sorts?

There was an apartment complex on 18th street in Metairie where for three weeks a ground floor apartment called 911 every night at precisely 10:15. Every shift I would drive out, find my way around or through the locked security gate and knock on the door and every night no one answered because the apartment was empty. I climbed through the bushes one night to look through the window, the whole place was bare, nothing but dusty bunnies and old shag carpet inside. But despite no phone being plugged into the outlet the 911 calls kept coming every night at 10:15. Our dispatch swore they were coming from a land line, but there was no phone in the apartment and the neighbors hadn’t seen anyone coming or going. We never figured out what was going on. The calls just stopped one night as quickly as they’d started.

I wrote it out, but unfortunately that’s all there is to the story that I can tell publicly. There’s a coda, something that happened one of those nights that haunts me to this day, but it’s deeply personal and the other party involved can’t consent so that tale is reserved for patrol cars and camp fires.

But that wasn’t the only spooky story from my night shift days.

In Texas my county had a famous horror movie setting and two legitimate, documented, ghost stories. They filmed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the East side of the county, and the house still exits. Every year around Halloween Deputies have to run tourists and sight seers off. But I worked the West side of the county. I only drove past it once in training and couldn’t find it on a map today. On my side of the county, the West side, there was an alleged witch who haunted the graveyard where she was buried but we never quite figured out which of the half dozen small graveyards she lurked in. I accidentally scared the hell out of some kids who’d gone out looking for her one Halloween night, but I couldn’t quite make that story work on paper either.

This left The Hairy Man, a ghost that allegedly haunts Hairy Man Road, which made up the Southern border of my usual patrol district. I never saw him, but that was a spooky, dark, stretch of road. So I originally thought I would tell three spooky tales: the 911 calls as an opener, the lore of Hairy Man Road, in the middle, and then end with another odd little tale that occurred in the subdivision just South of Hairy Man Road.

One night, or morning, long after midnight I was cruising aimlessly through a suburban neighborhood where I’d had a rash of kids playing “ding dong ditch” when I came across something odd. Sitting perfectly on the centerline of the road were a pair of brand new sneakers. No one was around, but kids leave stuff laying around neighborhoods all the time so I just moved them out of the road and continued on. I hadn’t gone a block before I found a shirt, once again laying neatly on the center line.

Now I knew something was up.

A short time later I found the pants, once again folded neatly on the centerline of the road. I thought I’d get lucky and find a wallet but the pockets were empty. I briefly lost the trail when the subject turned left, but picked it up again when I found socks, filthy from walking on blacktop, but neatly laid on the center line. A few hundred feet past them were the underwear.

Someone walking down the street stripping off their clothes is weird but not necessarily abnormal for a night shift in suburban Texas. Methamphetamine was big in those days and it heats people up pretty good. It wasn’t even all that strange that I never found the naked person at the end of the trail, they could’ve passed hours before, ducked into the green belt park, or simply arrived home.

What was odd was that no one ever called us about it. No passersby witnessed a person stripping in the middle of the road. Nobody caught a naked person on their security cameras. It’s as if the person disappeared as soon as they were fully disrobed. The only evidence that anything ever happened was the bag of clothing I had to inventory and log into evidence as found property for lack of knowing what else to do.

I tell that story here because I couldn’t make it work for Foxtales. There just wasn’t enough room for three small tales. So instead I talked about the Hairy Man.

Hope y’all enjoy.

There’s a version of this story that’s dark. It talks about the real bad things that happened down on Hairy Man road and trauma as a ghost that haunts it. Maybe one day I’ll be good enough to capture it on the page. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to post it.

Meanwhile, here's Ray Wylie Hubbard...