The history of our fort (in progress)

So I was sitting in D’Angelo’s eating my sub today and my thoughts were drifting around. They centered on some old events of the 1990’s for example: where was I on the night of the OJ Simpson Bronco chase? I felt an urge to scribble out some thoughts— to write down some things I may not have written down anywhere or had written down in now long gone journals, maybe start purging my memory a little while I can still report accurately (well accurately enough). Then I started thinking about music, more specifically, Nirvana and Hootie and the Blowfish from the early days when they were just catching on, their tunes lighting up radio, bars and amusement parks all along the south shore. Then I thought about The Fort and Belcher Park. I don’t think I have many memories written down about the fort days, the fort itself— maybe a few pictures back on Facebook, a few pages from Fat Habits and I might even have some here and now pics of the fort on my Blog page so, I decided, fuck it, and let me ramble on a bit about The Fort.

Where do I begin? Well we actually had two forts. The first one was built in Belcher Park too. It was on the other side of Belcher Park maybe a hundred yards from a back yard off Dennis Circle. It was early summer and very leafy and viney and this fort was well hidden under so much brush and trees. If the owner of the back yard saw us, it didn’t bother him or her and they left us alone. It was a short lived fort and poorly built. Myself, Rich and Dave and I think Wabrek built this one. We were 16 or 17, my brother two years younger than us. I don’t remember if we actually just got bored of it, sick of the location (in 1985 the park was a lot different— there were no soccer fields to cut through but only one dirt road through a huge lot of trees, vines, thorns, an occasional hidden path or stream, rocks and so to get to our fort we had to walk through the park and around a curve in the road and then travel up and down some small hills that led down into the area of the fort) which was no small task to reach or exit late at night in the dark and or after a few beers. I don’t recall having fires there. Too close to the backyard. I think after the novelty of it wore off we just moved on and left it behind.  

I do recall myself, Rich and Wabrek trying our first cigarette there. I also remember one dark night, me, Rich and Wabrek were tripping are socks off on mescaline when all of a sudden we saw a light slowly coming toward us, we, laughing uncontrollably at the light— the light suddenly showing up made no sense at all— then I heard my brother making noise in the leaves, talking a little extra loud to— holy crap— it was my mom. She had heard about our fort and had decided to check up on us. She had snagged my brother at the house and made him lead her down to it. Well, other than the fact we were high off there were no signs of wrong doing— no beer or booze or girls and after a few moments they retreated back into the dark and man, we rolled with laughter after that.

I’m trying to remember how we found the area a few weeks later that would become the stomping grounds of The Fort. I must consult with Rich. Maybe he remembers. In the summer of 1985 we weren’t really friends with Dano yet. Me and Rich knew him from school was pretty much it at that point. I know Dano hadn’t helped with the first fort. Well the second fort we all pitched in finding spare wood from various places mostly from Callahan Construction, their shop on the other side of the park— we snagged a lot of scrap pieces from there. Dano took some old rug from his parent’s basement which we used for floor and parts of the wall. Me Dano, Rich, Mark Fitz, Wabrek and my brother. My brother’s two friends, Chris Beck and Tommy Williams wanted to help but just got in the way and we used to bust their balls and send them to D’Angelo’s to get our lunch. This was the summer of 85. 

I graduated in 1988. I quit one year and stayed back another (I was a major problem child in my early high school years). Well I have a memory of me sitting at the fort with Rich and my brother, on my graduation day, as the ceremonies were going on and yes I finally graduated but was so done with school by then I wanted nothing to do with it anymore. So I hung out at the fort with plenty of funny ball busting from Rich about my two years extra service! I’m pretty certain the fort would be destroyed not too soon afterwards. I was walking home one night, coming down Allen Street as the night was coming and there on my right as I got closer to the park entrance, was the fort, on fire, burning to the ground. Despite its inglorious ruin, we would continue to hang there— use the tree stumps to sit— it was a great place for a teenager to hang out— well hidden by trees and leaves, on a hill and we could see who was coming or going and they couldn’t see us, conversely in the fall and winter without the wall of foliage, they could see us plain as day. Even though the Randolph police knew we had a fort there, I think they also knew we were pretty harmless and they left us alone— unless a big party got loud and raucous and then neighbors would call the cops and they would come storming into the park and chase us away. I would find out twenty years later that it was mostly my father who called the cops all those times. Good grief.

Back in those days, (actually I’m still kind of the same but just the equipment has changed) I used to take a lot of pictures of my friends and before I knew what a camcorder was or ever dreamed of having one, I used to record us talking, joking drinking— or whatever on a tape recorder, the kind where you had to press play and record at the same time to record sounds. I was recording one night inside the fort which I believe was one of the first nights we hung out to drink since its completion. I was recording when Dano took the bottle of liquor we were drinking, bragging, all macho, “let me show you how it’s done,” or something close to that and he drank it. A pause on the tape. Then you heard a gush of vomit like a cup of water being poured into the sink and then the roar of laughter from all of us. 

I also smoked a lot of weed from the time I was 14 through 16, a lot (one time before a hockey awards night banquet, I walked to the Lyons school alone and got so baked I had to lie down and close my eyes and I was pretty baked that night and remember hearing the whispers from my teammates parents. It’s embarrassing now looking back. I smoked weed to rebel against my parents. I hated Randolph and could not fit in. Weed helped neutralize a lot of my pain and nerves. However, when I started smoking weed it got so bad that I didn’t care who knew and I started smoking before hockey games and the coaches knew. I was a very good player and had my life not been in such upheaval, I probably would have played college hockey I loved the game so much. But weed took all that motivation away. Well, I also quit smoking weed at the fort when I was 17. I remember clearly. I was with Rich and Wabrek and we smoked a joint inside the fort and it made me confused and paranoid and I hated this feeling (it had begun before this but in small increments and now it was becoming the norm) and decided if I felt like this in the company of my best friends then… what’s the point? That was the last joint I ever smoked. Oh in the coming years, drunk out my mind, I would try a hit here and there but I would be too drunk for the high to break through my mind.

So the fort… I remember a guy named Bruce, much older than us and over 21 and who would buy us our beer (we were 16 or 17) — he was somewhat of a drifter— a tall overweight man with a red beard, red tinted glasses and a winter hat— he looked like a scruffy Electric Light Orchestra band member. Kevin Trull I believe introduced him to me and Rich and Dano, our Belcher group I guess you could call us. I know he used to sleep at the fort quite a bit— Joe Fitzgerald (Sue and Mark’s black sheep brother) was another drifter who often stayed at the fort. Who the hell knows who else may have slept there? I used to find shit there that wasn’t ours— menthol cigarette packs or baseball caps; often times there were remnants of a fire in the pit, simmering grey, still hot. People had sex in there, well at least that’s what I was told. I once saw a couple laying in there as I passed by the fort walking home from school (a habit, just to check on it). For all the extracurricular activities that were going on in there, I never slept nor did I have as much as a kiss inside the fort.

Tripping, I once jokingly coined the phrase: The Belcher 5 and the one who died. Of course no one had died but it was a funny line at the time. Rich had coined the phrase, “no conception of time” which to my young mind at the time totally blew me away with its apparent depth and over the years going forward I would use it in journals, maybe some poetry and it may have ended up in my novel, Fat Habits. When we dropped acid, we knew we were going to be out for the night and it was mostly, at the fort— once in a while in Rich’s bedroom in the basement of his family’s Holbrook home along the Grove or sometimes in my room at 70 Allen. One time, on a summer night when the green foliage hid us from Allen Street outside the park and to an extent, the dirt road that went through the park, six of us I believed dropped some mescaline. It was me and Rich and Kevin and Glen Christian— maybe my brother but it was definitely at least us four.  That night we got so carried away in our trip, that we forgot about the reality outside us and we laughed and talked without regard to noise and even took an extra 8 X 8 piece of plywood we had kicking around and we tossed it in the fire. The fire roared and lit up the surroundings like daylight and the next thing we knew, cop cars were flying around inside the park, shining their spotlights all over the darkness. I remember I was tripping so bad that I just fell to the ground hoping to avoid spotlight detection while the others ran. Well, the cops never did give chase or try and hike their way up into the fort. The others returned and we made a big joke about it. However, we kept the fire small from there on in that night.

 

It was certainly a hangout spot for us, a meeting place throughout the fort’s life including the later years after the fort was burned down. It was all innocent stuff for our age— it was just a place where we could feel freedom from our parents or school or whatever perceived restrictions we may have had and rebel (although there was no rebellion going on but to us at that age, it felt like rebellion— rebels without causes and we’re not going to take it). It was a place where we could drink beer, smoke cigarettes or pot and laugh with friends. It was place where it felt like time did not exist— that it surely existed for the older people of the world. We were immune from its changes and blinded by our youth and to some extent felt, our lives would go on forever. 

After the fort had been burned down (by a couple of Randolph kids whose names I’m not going to bother mentioning) as I said, we still hung out there. Nothing had changed except the fact that our fort was no longer there. Everything else was— the tree stumps we used for seats, the fire pit and overgrown trails outside the fort area. By 1991 probably, we had started to outgrow the Belcher Park of our youth. Here and there we met for beers or to just talk in private. The parties were long gone. Changes in the park began to take place— the construction of a soccer field, the remodel of the Girls Scout House, the removal of trees and a shitload of landscaping along the front of the park, opening up the fort so that it was no longer hidden but just another slight hill plateau. The park’s entrance had been paved. By 1992, the powers that be had all kinds of new contemporary plans for the park.

I do have some memories of the park itself. I’m pretty sure I lost my virginity there. Her name was Sandra and I was 16. It occurred during the day, most likely during  summer vacation. We were fooling around and making out and somehow we ended up rolling around the grass and dirt, just off the side of the dirt road. Of course I had no experience in such things and was unsure of myself and nervous so that when our underwear came off, I got on top— well I certainly had put my dick somewhere— and if it wasn’t inside her, it was outside her somewhere in her thighs or belly button, God knows. It was confusing and I’m not 100 % sure if I did the deed. I cannot recall the girl who was my second. I feel pretty confident though that she was my first— that somehow through all the awkward groping I had successfully, at least partially, entered that forbidden place.  

So then there was the epic bottle rocket fight. Me, Rich, Dano, Wabrek, Todd and Rick were hammered, somehow decided to light off left over 4^th of July fireworks at midnight. It was a steamy sweaty summer night and a firework fight broke out, in teams, two per unit— Rich was my partner— as fireworks whistled through the park and M-60’s tossed about like hand grenades— the rockets screaming and lighting up bark when they exploded. We’re running all over the place, dodging rocks, trees and fireworks, in complete darkness, planning our next attack or ambush. “He’s over there. Give me a light.” Swish. Pop. Laughter rolls out in the distance. “Damn. Almost got him.” Then Swoosh. Boom. The oak tree beside us lights up like a sconce light. Well, we were just lucky we didn’t shoot anyone’s eyes out and avoided injuries or arrest. I remember capping off the night cooking up some old fashioned ham egg and cheese English muffin sandwiches in my parent’s kitchen for me and Rich after the fun broke up.

 

My first impressions of the park: haunting, scary and huge. Coming from Watertown and its tight quarters and tiny yards, Randolph might as well have been Maine or New Hampshire— it was definitely country to me. I have a distinct impression, from back then, of shimmering leaves and purple, quaking from the drooping branches. When I first moved there, I don’t remember if I was allowed in the park or not. I’m sure I only ventured in a little at a time anyway. The most vivid early memory of the park occurred probably only a month after I moved in— after I was ripped away from my familiar roots. My friend Rick Miller and my girlfriend, Ann Woods from Watertown came up to visit and spend the night (Ann on the couch, of course— me, so puppy-in-love goo goo gaa gaa over her; I used to listen to the REO Speedwagon record Hi Infidelity over and over, the songs hitting me right in the heart, every song seemingly written to me about my goopy love). That first day we entered the park, we made it to about the center, where the road goes off in three directions when Ann began fidgeting and nervous. We continued as long as we could before she was really creeped out, thinking there might be a murderer slipping quietly behind the Oak trees and we turned around.