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(Regarding John The Bachelor)
John The Bachelor was so called only because he had never been married, and not because he embodied the ideal of bachelorhood, at least not the ideal commonly held by those living on his street, the very people who referred to him each day, even in his presence, as John The Bachelor.
Everyone knew everyone else on John The Bachelor’s street, and it was not uncommon for one neighbor to in some way, without agenda or expectation, offer help to another. If someone was raking leaves, for example, they might spend a few extra minutes raking the leaves from the side yard of their next-door-neighbor’s home. This sort of thing happened all the time. But when John The Bachelor raked leaves, he would often take it upon himself to rake the entire yard of the home next to his. Following that, in the interest of fairness and to avoid any hurt feelings, he would rake the opposite neighbor’s yard as well. And if, while raking either yard, he noticed a rebel tree branch growing askew from the rest, he would happily skip home to retrieve his hedge shears (or, in the case of taller trees, his telescoping pruner). When John The Bachelor raked leaves, it required most of the weekend and usually led to the careful manicuring of every lawn on the block.
When October came around, it was John The Bachelor who bought, assembled and set up the luminaria displays that would line the sidewalks of the neighborhood on Halloween night. And at Christmas, ever since a neighbor suggested he try to make a business of it, it had become a tradition for John The Bachelor to photograph, design a layout, and print holiday greeting cards for every family on the block, refusing every year to accept any compensation for the service.
The word bachelor evoked, in the minds of those living on John The Bachelor’s street, a character of independence, possessed of a cool, indifferent charm; the type of man, perhaps, whose unapologetic self-interest stood in defiant contrast to the traditions and values held dear by the rest of the small community, and whose subtle, social disobedience was secretly admired by all who were unable to emulate it. John The Bachelor’s neighbors could not remember when or how his name had been amended, and what’s more, none among them questioned the moniker they’d given him despite their awareness of its misapplication. John The Bachelor himself held a similar association with the word, but he, unlike his neighbors, often wondered why the term had been so inappropriately tacked onto his name. When his neighbors would introduce him to their family and friends, perhaps while John The Bachelor was helping them string their Christmas tree, for example, almost everyone involved in the interaction, even those who were first meeting him, could not help but react to the ill-fitting title by way of a small, awkward smirk. And more than the nickname itself, John The Bachelor had grown to despise that smirk. He believed it revealed an undertone of malicious irony in his neighbors’ continued use of the nickname.
It was while distracted by the thought of that very smirk that John The Bachelor unintentionally took the first step on a short path to the quick and complete ruination of his life.
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The house directly south of John The Bachelor’s was home to a Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wilkins and their children, Randy and Karen. Robert Wilkins ran a senior citizens center in the next town over, and his wife, Mia Wilkins, worked there with him, coordinating the daily activities of the center. Their daughter, Karen Wilkins, also volunteered an afternoon or two each week, giving piano and singing lessons, or sometimes just playing cards with the residents. Their younger child, Randy Wilkins, did not join the rest of his family at the center, but instead spent most of his afternoons bird watching, a hobby for which he was regularly ridiculed by the other boys in his neighborhood; sports being the primary interest of most boys his age, in most communities, in almost every part of the world.
Though the Wilkins’ house was like any other on the block, their yard was unlike any in the whole town, as it was host to an impressive menagerie of topiaries. The family who owned the house before the Wilkins had grown and groomed these bushes, and John The Bachelor had often watched with great curiosity and envy as the previous owner sculpted the plants. And so, soon after the Wilkins moved in, John The Bachelor, thinking it a welcoming and neighborly gesture, and also having noted in the new owners an apparent disinterest in creative landscaping, happily volunteered to maintain the topiaries.
On the day in question, John The Bachelor was doing just that, carefully clipping from a bush those leaves whose growth threatened the elegant contours of, in this case, a small shrub in the shape of a young bear. This was a new piece, one that John The Bachelor had planted himself, and for which he felt a great deal of pride. It was as soon as he had decided he was finished clipping for the day (for he always said it was patience more than skill that makes a great topiary artist) that he thought he heard Randy Wilkins calling to him. The boy was, in fact, calling to Dawn DeFranco, a young girl who lived nearby and one of the few friends Randy Wilkins had. John The Bachelor quickly realized it was not his nickname being hollered, but his mind began to fixate nonetheless on the ironic smirk that so often accompanied its use. And without realizing it, his face slowly took on that very smirk. John The Bachelor didn’t know that his face adopted this expression any time he was tumbling the thought of it around in his mind, but on this occasion he saw, reflected in a window just behind the bear family topiaries, the cursed expression draped offensively on his own face.
His shock at seeing this grew quickly into anger. The anger then developed into rage, but soon after, withered into a sort of bitterness. The bitterness became increasingly sour until it became something more like spite. His spite, for some incomprehensible reason, caused him to chuckle lightly to himself, and the laughter, after it passed, left him with a strange feeling of guilt. When the guilt subsided, he saw that the smirk was still there, and in fact, had been there the whole time. John The Bachelor was then forced to consider the variety of emotions that could exist behind a smirk. And at this thought, he experienced a great and unexpected joy, for he discovered that he had no way of accurately reading the insinuations of his neighbors’ expressions. John The Bachelor’s mouth grew into a large, toothy smile as he allowed himself, for the first time, to consider what it is that a nickname represents. The giving of a nickname and the continued use of it, John The Bachelor told himself, is and has always been an act of affection. And further more, he went on, his smile growing wider, the majority of nicknames are invented carelessly and with no real thought to their implication. To think the use of a nickname might be a malicious act became an increasingly ridiculous notion to John The Bachelor.
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Karen Wilkins had been running late. Although her parents had forbade her to do so, she had utilized a couple hours of free time in the middle of her day to visit an older boy named Anthony Ray who worked at the nearby movie theatre, and with whom she was pretty desperately infatuated. Her outfit had been chosen especially for the occasion, and had elicited just the response she was hoping for from Anthony Ray, but it was not an outfit she would feel comfortable wearing while working at the senior center, or more specifically, in front of her parents, so despite being late for work she stopped home to change before meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey, her newest piano students. She removed her top in one swift movement while zipping down the hall toward her bedroom. At the door she unbuttoned her skirt, and by the time she was at her dresser she wore only a pair of yellow and blue striped underwear. She dug through her dresser drawers in search of an appropriate top and a pair of comfortable jeans, while hunting also for a bra (something that had been intentionally excluded from the previous outfit).
Dawn DeFranco and Randy Wilkins were discussing the difficulties involved in distinguishing between the Fox Sparrow and the Song Sparrow. Dawn DeFranco, like Randy Wilkins, had very few friends. This was due in large part to a decision she had made, at the age of 8, to put her career goals ahead of her social life, though it should be mentioned that because she had no social life to speak of, this decision did not require any sort of sacrifice on her part; she had set her mind on becoming the first female president of the North American Association of Christian Architects, and had designed a 13-year, 27-step plan to that end. It was Dawn DeFranco’s contention that the Fox Sparrow differed from the Song Sparrow only in body size, but Randy Wilkins felt certain that only by comparing cheek color could one know for sure what one was looking at. This argument was only serving to waste time between sightings, and its outcome was not a matter of great importance as neither of them had ever seen a Fox Sparrow or a Song Sparrow, nor were these birds native to the city in which the children lived.
Randy Wilkins, unable to find any notable species of birds, shifted his binoculars to scan the exteriors of his neighbors’ homes. Dawn DeFranco immediately scolded her friend for what she considered to be “peeping” on their neighbors. A brief argument followed wherein he claimed that the exteriors of people’s homes were open to his scrutiny because they were “in the public realm,” and she countered by saying that the use of binoculars categorized looking at anything but birds as peeping. The argument was resolved when Randy Wilkins and Dawn DeFranco agreed that using his binoculars for non-avian purposes was acceptable, so long as he looked only at his own home. So Randy Wilkins, with his binoculars aimed in that direction, and after some necessary refocusing, was able to clearly see John The Bachelor standing directly outside his sister’s bedroom window. Without speaking, he passed his binoculars to Dawn DeFranco, who noted what she thought to be a very goofy smile on his face and quickly assessed that what John The Bachelor was doing qualified, without question, as peeping.
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The trial lasted only a few days, but became something of a media event, largely due to a young and eager local newscaster, Judie Waters, who crafted a fiery exposé on the case. The story she told was that of a long-dormant evil suddenly reemerging to terrorize an unsuspecting neighborhood. John The Bachelor, who watched the report from a small, but comfortable enough cell in the local jail, noted how ominous his nickname looked when written in dark red, blood-splatter font. The segment concluded with a video clip of John The Bachelor taking a chainsaw to a low-hanging branch in his front yard. The clip had been converted to a grainy black-and-white and then played in ultra slow motion while Judie Waters offered her final condemning thoughts on what she was calling “just the beginning of an imminent plague of voyeuristic pedophiliacs.”
Though the story never gained national attention, the trial was the biggest thing to hit the community in years. The prosecution’s list of witnesses included the majority of John The Bachelor’s neighbors, and those who were not subpoenaed showed up at the trial in support of their family and friends. Dawn DeFranco, Randy Wilkins and Karen Wilkins were called in as key witnesses. At his attorney’s suggestion, John The Bachelor did not testify in his own defense, but as soon as the opening statement had been made, he felt this was a mistake. At hearing the startling words the prosecutor used to describe him in his opening remarks, John The Bachelor felt that if given a few minutes on the stand, he could show the jury he was nothing like the character the prosecution was presenting. On the second day of trial, after the prosecutor had articulated the events of that afternoon and promised to bring up witness after witness to testify to the accuracy of his portrayal, John The Bachelor told his attorney he wanted to testify. His attorney still insisted he not speak, and John The Bachelor would have demanded, and was in fact, just on the brink of demanding, when the first witness was called to the stand. Dawn DeFranco, dressed in a very smart, junior-sized pin-striped pant suit, gave her own account of the afternoon, including an exaggerated and pretty fully inaccurate characterization of John The Bachelor, wherein she detailed the numerous times she had seen him loitering in and near her neighborhood park while she and her friends (whom she could not specify when asked to name) were playing.
John The Bachelor knew of the park she mentioned, and he remembered walking by it often. He liked to buy his groceries at an organic market just around the corner from that park, and since it was only a few blocks from his home, he usually walked. He even remembered seeing Dawn DeFranco there, although in his memory, she was almost always alone. John The Bachelor was disheartened by the girl’s testimony, but decided it was only the voice of an impressionable youth whose innocence had been compromised by media hype and gossip. She was doing only what she thought was the best thing to do, John The Bachelor told himself.
When Randy Wilkins was called to the stand, he said very little, except to mention that he hated yard work and could not understand why anyone would spend more time doing it than necessary. But his testimony was not wasted, as the prosecution was able to use the boy’s innocent statement to suggest that far more than landscaping must have been going on. The prosecutor went so far as to say that the topiary John The Bachelor had been grooming that day had been intentionally planted outside the girl’s window. “Who knows,” the lawyer said, “how long this animal had been watching her?” John The Bachelor tried to remember if he had known which room that window looked into at the time that he began work on the bear cub topiary, but all he remembered was deciding it would look best if planted beside the other two bears. However, his memory of it was vague, and he began to wonder to himself if there weren’t sometimes ulterior motives to his landscaping decisions. As the prosecutor continued to call up witness after witness, all of whom spoke, however vaguely, to the strange character the defendant was, John The Bachelor tried to recall any other circumstances in which he’d found himself at or around his neighbor’s windows. He could think of no such circumstances, but he did recall, with a tinge of guilt, the joy he’d experienced while purchasing an articulated, power hedge trimmer, a tool designed for nothing if not the tight, cornered trimming required near windows. Did this joy come from something more sinister than the ability to reach the delicate angles his other tools could not? John The Bachelor couldn’t help but feel grateful that his articulated trimmer had not been entered into evidence.
The only evidence that had been collected was John The Bachelor’s photographic equipment, which was shown to Karen Wilkins just as she took the stand. She was asked if she recognized the camera and she told the court that it appeared to be the same camera the defendant had used the previous Christmas to take the photo for their family’s holiday greeting card. The equipment had been seized by police immediately after John The Bachelor’s arrest and combed for any trace of “inappropriate content.” Although they found nothing but archived family portraits and a few nature landscapes, the camera was still allowed into evidence and the term “pornographic imagery” was used on more than one occasion by the prosecuting attorney. The defense consistently objected to the use of the words for one reason or another, and in the end, it was absent from the official court record, but it’s the sort of phrase that tends to linger in a juror’s mind.
Karen Wilkins’ testimony gave the prosecution just what they needed to properly sway the jury. Under oath she stated that she “didn’t exactly see” anyone standing outside her bedroom window that day, but that she did recall “feeling a presence close by.” Her attorney asked for clarification in regards to this presence and asked if she had felt threatened. She amended her statement to say she felt a “threatening presence, just outside the window.” The defense objected and the remark was removed from the record, but the jury disregarded the judge’s orders to “disregard the statement.”
One of the last witnesses to testify was a woman named Cynthia Parks. She was one of the few witnesses called who did not live in the same neighborhood as John The Bachelor, but she and John had dated for almost three months a year earlier. They had parted on friendly terms, and John The Bachelor had been very glad to see her name on the witness list, both because he hoped she would have only nice things to say and because he thought it would be nice to see her again, despite the uncomfortable circumstances. While most of her testimony was in no way damning to the defense, she did say that he sometimes seemed preoccupied with the lives of the people in his neighborhood, and would tell her stories about them while they were on dates together. Although this was only one more detail to the already decided jury, it was considerably upsetting to John The Bachelor, who had never thought it in any way unusual to be invested in the lives of his neighbors. As she stepped down from the witness stand, averting her eyes from his as she did, John The Bachelor remembered a time he had spoken to her about Karen Wilkins on one of their dates. He had seen Karen leaving her house as he left his; he going to meet Cynthia and she going to her first high school dance. John The Bachelor had known Karen Wilkins since she was a child, and when he saw her in her beautiful gown, he was struck by just how elegant and grown up she looked. That night at dinner, he spoke with a father’s pride about Karen Wilkins and her dress. But though he intended to tell his date that the girl looked beautiful in the gown, he said instead that she looked pretty. It was of no particular consequence, and Cynthia Parks did not even remember that particular conversation, but nonetheless, he remembered deliberating, if only for a second, between those two words. Waiting for the jury to return with their verdict, all John The Bachelor could think of was what it meant that he had needed to say pretty instead of beautiful.
Following the trial, Karen Wilkins spent many days questioning the integrity of her statement, but eventually concluded that she gave as honest and true an account of the event as she possibly could. As it happened, her memory had been accurate, and it was true she had sensed a threatening presence outside her window. What she had not considered, however, was how often she felt such a presence, nor did she consider the fact that each day, sometime in the late afternoon, just around the time of the incident in question, the sun casts into her bedroom the shadow of a seven-foot olive tree shaped like a grizzly bear.
The defendant was sentenced to six months in prison and charged a fine of 1,500 dollars, which he paid with money he had been saving for a trip to Florida to visit his cousin. At John The Bachelor’s request, his attorney asked that a portion of the prison sentence be served in a psychiatric hospital, where John The Bachelor hoped he could get the help he finally understood he needed.
