Freddogg Off The Chain

Back in 1971 I was teaching at a private school for emotionally disturbed kids on the Philadelphia Mainline. The school was housed inside a Mansion on an estate. There are farm animals about. Dr. Barry Hershone a Jewish businessman arrived for work everyday by landing a helicopter on the football field. Sometimes he arrived during practice. I was the football coach. Hershone would wave his arms as blocking dummies blew away and once I could read his lips as he was screaming, ”Get the fuck out of the way”

This one morning I am in a small room with a door leading to the outside teaching 12 kids what I called “United States History for the Criminally Insane.”

The was a big headed boy named Frank who looked like “Frankenstein In Middle School” complete with singe marks on his neck. Any question you asked Frank was answered half way through by the word “Hydroelectric.” Frank was literally and cruelly short circuited after a high tension wire had fallen across the hood of a convertible driven by his father. The dad grabbed the door handle to “exit the vehicle” in cop parlance and got fried in front of ball park frank. It was arc of the covenant residual synapse shutdown for poor young Frank who never moved as his father went crispy critter and just kept getting crispier.

Also in this class was a clinically hyperactive tall and muscular blond boy named Mike with zero body fat. This kid was so hyped and piped you could see all the blood vessels at the surface of his skin. His head looked like a wiring harness inside the control panel for a trailer park. Back before A.D.D. hyperactivity was called M.B.D. translated as Minimal Brain Dysfunction.

There was Bruce who during a particular class took a fine tipped pen and drew roaches and ticks and rats all over the Mayflower. They were crawling in and out of ears and noses of the crew while rats chewed off parts of their legs. Bruce made no eye contact and I once asked the Vice Principal, a chain smoking math wizard who suffered from Night terrors during his waking hours, as to the particular behavioral designation used to describe the anti social and mal adaptive behaviors of Bruce. Van didn’t bat an eye. “Look in the cabinet over there filed under ‘Fucking Piece of Shit.”

And finally the ring master himself, a certified sociopath at just 12 years of age: “Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Frank Zito!”

So this once day a goat from the nearby farm walks into the room and down aisle number two. Hyper Mike leaps up onto his desk top and screams, ”There’s a mother fucking goat in here!”

I exclaim, ”What is the chance?” and Fab Fried Frankie screams ‘Hydroelectric!”

Bruce draws a goat on the Mayflower with a hatchet embedded in his skull. Frank Zito takes a lighter from his pocket and wants to set the goat on fire then laugh but not get blamed for it.

I tell them all to be quiet—not a word—and to look down at their books. They comply immediately and then I scream, ”What’s wrong with you people? You’re looking at textbooks and there’s a Mother Fucking Goat in the room. Let’s absorb and appreciate the moment. Trust me this will never happen again. "

The bell rang and I saw Zito follow Bruce out the door because Bruce was folding and unfolding a 20 dollar bill covered with perfectly drawn silverfish, what my grandmother called potato bugs.

I followed them like an unmarked police car because I knew Bruce was the socio-pathetic target of Zito.

Out in the court yard Bruce folded and unfolded his 20 over and over. Zito started to skulk towards his target like a house cat on a nut hatch. Then Bruce just dropped the 20 dollar bill down a storm drain and walked away. Game, set, match for Bruce! “Fucking with the sociopath” would make a great board game I thought.

About 35 years later I am watching the news out of Salisbury Maryland and I hear “cop killer” and think, ”Oh man, that’s not good.”

It turns out this local crazy dude down by Queen Ann's County in Centerville, Maryland is blasting his stereo so loud that nearby trailers are rattling like a C5 was landing in the side yard that they don’t have. The cops called the phone number but there was no answer.

Two young policemen went up to the side porch pulled open a barely hinged aluminum storm door and knocked on the interior door.

“Frank turn down the music! Yo Frank turn down the music!”

The knew the local whacko inside that trailer was the clinically paranoid, alcohol and drug addicted sociopath Frank Zito but what they didn’t know was that Frank had a double barreled loaded shotgun trained at the door.

Who knows what voices prompted Frank Zito to pull the trigger twice but he did and two young cops lay dead.

I fell out of my chair. The twelve year old Zito, the Captain of what the Vice Principal had called the “All Solar Team of Clinically Disturbed Adolescents” had lost his mind as an adult and became a cop killer.

Zito went to jail where he sat for a year in solitary with a cast of imaginary friends and finally one of them killed him. He did leave a note that had a drawing of a goat with a hatchet in his skull and along with one word, ”Hydroelectric!”

Peace Freddogg
http://www.mdcops.org/news/zito_guilty_in_officers.htm

Zito was real although certain elements of this factual fictional story were embellished although he did die in prison I have no knowledge of a note. But Zito was my student when he was 12. Condolences to the families of the fallen officers.