A shortened version of “The Stop Sign” is in the January Planet Cruz broadcast. It is a true story, maybe with a couple of stretchers. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

The Stop Sign

Everyone hates the sign. It is insane to put a stop sign on the road coming across the mudflats into our high school, but they’ve put the sign on the paved driveway to stop cars leaving school for a dirt road that is used by the janitor twice a day. Some say the highway department needs to satisfy an insurance regulation, some say they bought too many signs and have to use them. But the sign is wrong, and everyone knows it. It is asinine. We can hear the teachers asking each other, “Who the hell asked for the sign?” .

Miss Martin is the head secretary in the office and every one of us loves her. She is high strung, nervous, and she takes care of every kid and adult in this school. From the delinquents to the valedictorians she is everyone’s mom away from home. And when she leaves school the day the stop sign goes up, she gets flustered when someone behind her honks and she lurches forward, plowing into the car in front of her. The stop sign made Miss Martin have an accident. Everyone hates the sign.

It’s 1965 and we get a cool new English teacher, Mr. Emerson. He is a thin man, strong from hiking mountains. His tan face is weathered with lines that disappear when he laughs and get deep and dark when he frowns. He has climbed Mount Everest and studied in China and he is having us read books like War And Peace and Brave New World and 1984.

I check The Biography of Malcolm X out of the library and leave it on our living room coffee table so my father can see it and in minutes we are yelling at each other about Martin Luther King and the right of people to protest and use civil disobedience to change bad laws, until finally he slams his fist down on the table, “That’s it buster! I forbid you to experiment with any new hairstyles!”

That night I slip out of my bedroom window and join my buddies Gordon House and Lonnie Springfield. Gordon has stolen a half inch of liquor out of every bottle in his dad’s cabinet, careful to replace it with a half inch of water, and carries this precious, vile concoction as we start walking the streets of Arden Park, looking for a place to drink it. “Let’s go down to the school.” So we walk along Fair Oaks Boulevard, turn down Savern Drive past the last of the houses, past the brush and finally follow the little blacktop road over the mudflats to our school.

When we come to the sign I stop. You need to understand that I am never the leader of these escapades. Lonnie is the leader. Lonnie is one of the hard guys. Lonnie and his girlfriend go all the way. He has a part time job that will soon pay for a motorcycle. He smokes cigarettes and has a tattoo he gave himself with ink and a broken guitar string the night he spent in juvy. Lonnie is a man who makes his own way and I am a child who dances for the approval of parents. When we’re out at night Lonnie is the leader.

But tonight Lonnie just nods; he may be letting this lapse in his authority go because he is feeling the same thing, or he may be tired of walking. But tonight I am inspired, I am on fire. I feel that hot, euphoric nausea of inspiration rising in my chest. This idea is too outrageous, too wrong to speak. So I say, “Let’s drink it here, by the stop sign.”

We pass around the fruit jar with six different liquors and struggle not to puke. There really isn’t enough alcohol in the jar to get us all drunk but we start acting like what we think drunk men act like. And that’s when I hold onto the stop sign’s galvanized steel post like a Viking holding his spear and say, “Gentlemen, the sign has got to go.” I step back, look at my watch as Gordon and Lonnie bend the post back and forth and in thirty-six seconds flat it snaps at the base.

I raise my arms, “Gentlemen, we are surrounded by anarchy, chaos, and mayhem. Our work here is done.” We swear ourselves to secrecy and leave the stop sign lying in the mud.

The next morning the destruction of the stop sign spreads through the school like a cloud of nitrous oxide. Laughing voices boom from the teacher’s room, “There is a God!” When Miss Martin sees the sign laying in the mud she honks her horn and claps her hands. Every kid and teacher giggles and whispers, “Who did it?” When I walk into Mr. Emerson’s English class he is standing at the window, staring at the sign with his brown face smooth and he turns around to see us staring at him.

Mr. Emerson tells Gordon to read Lord of The Flies and asks him to reflect upon pack mentality. Mr. Emerson gives me a copy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and suggests I study nonviolent tools for social change. And Mr. Emerson recommends that Lonnie learn how to read.

I see Lonnie at the bell and he whispers, “You didn’t tell anybody did you?”

“No, I didn’t tell anybody. You tell anybody?”

“No. Gordon says he didn’t tell anybody. What if the cops come out?”

“Just don’t tell anybody.”

In the afternoon a highway department truck drives up and two men in orange overalls sink a four by four wooden post in cement and bolt on a brand new octagonal stop sign. The rain that night, a torrential Sacramento downpour, makes it easy to wiggle the post back and forth until the hole is big enough to pull it out, cement base and all. We leave it laying in the mud.

No cops show up. No highway department trucks. But the students in the halls are cheering with their fists in the air. Mr. Emerson stares at me, Lonnie and Gordon for a long time and says, “You guys look tired. Maybe not enough sleep.” When the bell rings Mr. Emerson hands me a mimeographed quote of Mahatma Ghandi, “Do not seek to end or destroy the relationship with the antagonist, but instead seek to transform or “purify” it to a higher level.” I think that it’s cool that Mr. Emerson cares, but I am a kid who is powerless and to transform anything is unthinkable. I am nothing.

At the bell Lonnie and I corner Gordon and he starts going, “Hey, man, everybody’s talking about it. Rita Shoemaker just was sitting next to me man… hey, I can keep quiet. You guys worry about your own mouth.”

The next day two Teichert Construction Company trucks pull up to the felled sign. One is a cement truck and the other is loaded with steel working equipment, welders, and rebar. A crew of four men work for two days building a monolith of cement and steel. A massive pillar with the stop sign itself encased in steel bars. When the history teacher, Mr. Roberts, gets to the new stop sign, he stops his car and gets out to look at it, shaking his head. Everyone thinks it’s a little creepy that Mr. Roberts is a part time guard at Folsom Prison and that he enjoys ramming sharpened steel rods into the garbage to keep the inmates from hiding in the trash. Mr. Roberts walks into the classroom, goes to the window and looks out at the sign, “That’s the way they build things out at the prison.”

In English class Mr. Emerson is staring out the window and his frown creases his brown forehead and cheeks into black crevasses. He turns to scan the class. “What makes civil disobedience successful? Gandhi rejected the idea that injustice could be fought using violent, coercive, unjust means.” Mr. Emerson looks directly at me, “Gandhi wrote that if you use violent, unjust means, whatever ends you produce will necessarily embed that injustice.” I act like I’m taking notes.

At lunch period a bunch of us walk out to look at the structure. There are about twenty kids in the group so Gordon, Lonnie and I feel OK to go out there. It is built like a safe; a pillar of steel and cement over two feet square with steel angle iron running up the corners and over the sign itself. It is over. We have lost. At first some yell at the sign when they come to a stop on their way home, but soon the grumblings turn into silent defeat. In two days no one speaks of it.

The rain is replaced by the Sacramento tule fog, so dense that sometimes you can’t see your extended hand. Walking through fog this thick, you’re a spirit drifting through time. And the Sacramento fog wraps itself around our school like quiet depression.

I’m sulking on the couch Sunday night when my mom says, “Phone honey.”

“Dick, it’s Hugh. Don’t call me back, the old man’s on a drunk. Just meet me at the sign at two o’clock.” Click.

Hugh Comstock is a close friend of Gordon’s, they are both on the football team. Hugh’s dad is a cement contractor and a notorious drunk. Old Man Comstock will be blind for days at a time. Hugh has periods of freedom the rest of us only dream about. I call Lonnie. “Yeah, Hugh called me too. OK. Two o’clock.”

The fog is so thick that I walk past the sign before I hear the guys. Now we are four. Hugh shines a flashlight on his dad’s work truck, it says, “Comstock Cement, no job too big, no job too small.” Hugh walks to the back of the truck and lets down the tailgate, “Men, chose your weapon.” The truck is full of sledge hammers.

To prevent hitting each other in the fog we work in shifts, going at it two at a time, one nine pound hammer on each side. The fog deadens the sound so we hammer with abandon. After four shift changes our initial exuberance begins to wane. We have roughed up the cement but it shows no sign of failing. Hugh urges us on. Lonnie orders everyone out of his way and rains blows upon the cement like he is a Spartan single-handedly holding back the Persian horde. He sinks to his knees, exhausted, beaten. Gordon, the strongest kid in our school, pulls Lonnie to his feet, takes the hammer from him and strikes with all his might. Where his blow lands a tiny crack opens. We howl like wolves bringing down a kill, all four of us swinging with the hammer of Thor, pounding on it with all our testosterone fueled fury. It‘s a miracle we don‘t kill each other in the fog.. A chunk of cement flies off. Then another. Steel rods are exposed and then bent and beaten out of the cement and cement is crumbling now, the sign itself is coming loose and white hot heat is radiating from my muscles and I smash and I smash and smash and now we’re tearing out chunks of cement with our bare hands. A sharp piece of rebar rips my right hand open and my blood splashes onto the cement and the guys step back so I can beat that piece of rebar out of the cement and down into the mud, driving the instrument of my wound out of sight deep into the wet earth. We beat on that structure until there is no piece of it above six inches. Never doubt the devastation potential of four sixteen year old boys. Entropy at it’s finest.

In the morning both my parents are sleeping in with hangovers so I am able to get out of the house without them seeing my bandaged hand. First period class has to be postponed because the entire school is standing outside, shouting. The chunks of cement are taken by kids as souvenirs. At lunch, Gordon breaks and tells Rita Shoemaker, hoping that she’ll let him feel her up. But it doesn’t matter because by now a dozen kids are taking credit for it. One rumor even says a teacher planned it.

I walk into English class with my bandaged hand in my pea coat pocket. As I sit at my desk Mr. Emerson holds out an assignment sheet so I have to take my right hand out of my coat. He stares at the bloody bandage, “Mr. Stockton, I hope the injury to your writing hand will not interfere with your essay on nonviolent resistance.“

The rubble from the sign lays in the mud for the rest of the week. The next Monday a highway department pickup truck pulls up to the pile, the driver picks up the steel and cement that was left. He puts up a Yield sign and drives away. We watch him from the window of Mr. Emerson’s English class.

Mr. Emerson’s brown face is smooth, like his skin is filled out with a smile, “Class, I want you to write an essay considering this question, ‘When, by consensus, a people decide that something is wrong, can a government permanently control it‘s people with barriers?’ You may want to write about the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, or you may want to write about a stop sign.”