Trigger Warning: the following contains language and themes which may invoke strong negative reactions in some individuals. Please proceed with care.

LIAR, LIAR

He could have you thinking he was the sharpest businessman south of Wall Street. He could tell you anything about any period in history. “Dissertations”, as an employee once called the talks. Of course the employee wasn’t one of his truck drivers, it was a dude with a college degree who knew that Ralph Smith did a lot of filling in the blanks. Some of his filler was clever, but most of it was straight bullshit. The truckers never knew or cared and only bided their time until they could hit the road. I got a laugh out of that. They’d be all glassy-eyed, staring at the road maps in their memory, and never hear a fucking word.

Where exactly he was born, I couldn’t say. He grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Little is generally known of him prior to his enlistment in the Navy. He claimed to have been aboard the USS Boxer after World War Two was over. While on land, as one story went, it was his job to taxi F-4U Corsairs, get the tail wheel up, line up a target downrange and off the tarmac and fire the guns so they could be properly zeroed. But once, though not a pilot, he said the plane felt so good he just kept going and took off. The operations tower supervisor got on the radio and screamed, “Smitty, you get that aircraft back down here on the double!”

He managed to land it but the story ended there. He never said how he landed it or if he was punished.

First of all, the F-4U Corsairs were difficult to fly. It wasn’t kind to first time flyers. The plane was a fighter but not a small one by any means; its long nose, inverted gullwing design with a span of 41 feet and a light stick at high speed, but a heavy one with lower speed meant that control would have been extremely difficult for anyone with zero hours of flight training in any aircraft. There was also enough engine torque to roll the plane if a propeller blade hit the ground, which was more common with the long blades used on F-4U-1 models. It grew less common when the shorter four-bladed props were added to later models, most commonly the F-4U-4, but which appeared late in the war and helped make the craft safer to fly off carriers. No matter what, all these things made for a plane that makes Ralph’s story highly improbable. Not impossible, but in the realm of the most unlikely bullshit kind of story.

What he would have found is that the Corsairs were tricky. At low speed, he’d have had a heavy stick. If he didn’t apply proper throttle, pre-stall speed would make the plane begin to roll right, in other words dipping the right wing. Again, with pre-stall speed, the craft would buffet. That’s aero-speak for shaking the shit out of you and kicking the stick out of the hand. Anyone could panic. Crashes on landing weren’t uncommon, which was one reason the Corsairs were deployed on carriers and then given to Marine squadrons ashore. Later in the war, they saw carrier action again but by then the F-6 Hellcat was the main fighter at sea. The likeliest result if he actually pulled this stunt would have been a crash.

It was also unlikely that if deployed aboard Boxer that he would have served ashore with Marines.

But Ralph Smith was never one to think anyone else could fact-check a tale. He’d put enough bullshit in and mix it well with things real pilots told him.

His “exploits” led one guy to call him “Walter Mitty” behind his back.

But bullshit is effective; and when mixed with just a little bit of friendliness and a pinch of honesty, people liked him.

MARRIAGE AND EARLY CAREER

He was married three times. First to a woman named Jenny, who nobody seems to know about. It didn’t last long, though. She departed for reasons unknown. His second marriage produced two kids but ended up with his wife leaving him and being basically traumatized for decades.

Third marriage: Betty Hutchins of Kentucky, a nurse, and six more kids. During this time he claimed to have killed his business partner by gunfire in southern Virginia or northern North Carolina for double crossing him and leaving him broke. If anyone ever investigated the man’s disappearance, I never heard about it. All the details were left out. It was a construction company and it concerned a place around “Lake Laura”, named after his first daughter.

Sometime between the Navy and this time he claimed he’d been in Hollywood and had tap danced with none other then Danny Kaye, who’s name also made it as a middle name for his first daughter. After leaving the Hollywood scene in what seems to have been a rather dodgy and fast move, and I speculate that this was a potential scandal involving whatever he did to his first wife and possibly bisexual behavior, he went back to Carolina.

After the construction business failed, he apparently worked for a while for B.F. Moffitt, then moved north to Maryland and bought a trucking company, Boyer Transportation, after working for several years at Maryland Transportation. Since there is a company of the same name elsewhere, my search returned no results on another Boyer. It could mean he ran his trucks illegally under Boyer placards and rights. That’s only the beginning of weirdness. He quickly renamed the company Comet Fast Freight, and worked from his home in Pasadena. He had to meet drivers at Frederick, Maryland for paychecks and delivery manifests. I’ll say this for him: he really worked hard. By 1972 he had leased a small warehouse in Glen Burnie, just south of Baltimore. Spacious offices made it perfect for running two businesses, Comet and Atlantic Terminals and Equipment or AT&E. He warehoused products like Coco-López, Van Houten cocoa powder and empty soda bottles for Rock Creek Beverages. He expanded to add a warehouse in Curtis Bay, which was so old and filthy that Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers, who contracted to store bags of powdered milk, pulled out. Somehow he got out of that building and into a smaller one on Penrod Court in Glen Burnie.

Between 1960 and 1970, his family grew by five more children. His income began to show in his house, but for a decade, it was furnished with used shit from wherever he could lay his hands on it. Hardwood floors eventually got carpeted in ugly blue-green and orange shaded sections.

A console TV was added. Then it went up and for years it went back and forth between color and black and white TV sets. No flat screens back then. Personally I knew he was responsible for some of the sets going up. There was no cable. Pasadena was separated from TV stations in Baltimore by miles of buildings and trees. And it took him years to add a rooftop antenna; with rabbit ears we rarely drew in a clear picture. Yet he blamed the TV for the trouble and would take the back off and go in with pliers and screwdriver to repair shit. I had to stand in front of the screen with a mirror. I hated every minute that he was home. His father was a radio and television repair expert, so that may be one reason Ralph Smith never fried himself like a chicken.

PREDATORS

I was my mother’s second child and my father’s fourth. Between 1967 and 1976 I was “taught” once a week about sex. This mostly consisted of me being taken from bed into the den, and while my father watched TV and read a newspaper, my mother would perform oral sex on me. On New Year’s Eve 1970, after the youngest of my siblings was born the previous June and she’d had her tubal ligation, Ralph and Betty Smith decided it was time for me to graduate to intercourse. I was always cautioned never to tell anyone about it. Yet they said it was biblical to obey and honor “thy father and mother, that thy days be long”, quoting one of the Ten Commandments. As it was put by him, I’d die by an act of God if I refused to submit to rape, or “sex education”.

It was never easy having Ralph Smith as my father. He used threats, torture and mind-fucking to keep us in line.

THE CHURCH YEARS

I don’t remember when they joined Lake Shore Baptist Church. Don Moore was Pastor. That’s a long time ago. With such a big family to stuff into a Mercury Marquis, we were always, always late. I hated the embarrassment that caused. To prevent it happening again, he and my mother became Sunday School teachers. Imagine that.

Hours after my regular Saturday night rape by mom, which always took place in the midnight hours, exhausted and anguished, I would be in my father’s Sunday School class and he expected me to be called on to answer questions. But I hadn’t had time to study the lesson. At home he would berate me for not being prepared.

In the summer of 1973 after school let out, I was made to work in his warehouse. All heavy and dirty work, but after his manager went home around four, I had to stay with my father until he went home. That put me eating dinner at eleven pm, showering afterward, and getting back up around six am. I hated him. And he loved to take a 13-year-old kid, his son, and berate and curse at him in front of anyone around. Sometimes, the truckers would take me aside and say they were embarrassed to have heard such shit. These were tough men. But I pulled at their hearts when they saw tears in my eyes. They’d whisper, “For what it’s worth, I really feel sorry for you.” They had suddenly seen a side of Ralph Smith that they did not like. They never knew about what he was doing at home to his daughters, what he and his wife did to their sons. Years later I talked to a few of those drivers on Facebook. Now, even knowing that my father was a demon, they reminisced fondly about working for him. What fucking dicks would act like that? I burned those bridges. It was satisfying.

Yet, to this day, others remember him fondly too. Some of our neighbors did not believe those of us kids who wrote out police reports and testified against both of our parents.

They just didn’t know him. And fuck them all, the sick bastards.

DEVIATE, THIEF, MANIPULATOR, NARCISSIST

Ralph Smith was such an extraordinary pig and narcissistic bastard that he tried to make a bargain with the church. He promised to fund a new wing if they would make him a deacon.

They refused. He’d been divorced and that disqualified him. He eventually got mad and left the church. God I was glad to be free from that fucking place. There were people there I loved very much, but I had already grown adept at burning bridges. So I gladly turned and walked away when he said I didn’t have to go anymore.

Sometime in 1974 into 1976, he came into a shitload of cash. He was scamming the IRS but that was the least of it. He also broke a law that forbade him to strip overseas containers within a 50 mile radius of the ports of Baltimore. Often it fell on me to transfer the loads onto Comet trailers, saving the company a fortune in deadhead miles, which means hauling an empty container back to the port. On his trailers, he could deliver the bonded goods and get a load back to Baltimore with few empty miles. More money.

Freight sometimes went missing altogether. This is sketchy; I know almost nothing of it, but it did happen. Once, a container of coffee went missing and that time the FBI came around. My father knew they were coming and instructed me to answer their questions: I knew nothing.

Well I didn’t. He was telling me to lie but all I had to do was tell the truth. I’d heard a comment, ambiguous and meaning nothing to me because I never knew we hauled the shit.

It got weird at the trial in 1990 when he testified that I’d sworn revenge on him for the load of coffee. That’s his testimony as to why I would report to the police years of sexual abuse. It was lame. The jury knew it. Funny thing was, if I had known anything, I’d have kept my mouth shut. I was more afraid of him than the feds. Goddamn bastard once held a loaded .357 to my head, cocked it, and warned me never to cross him or I’d die. That’s my father. That’s Ralph Smith.

ONE OF SATAN’S OWN

One late autumn afternoon, at sunset, I headed out to my car to meet a friend for pizza. I was 17. I got to the car and found I had forgotten my keys. I went back inside, down to my room. I didn’t bother turning the light on because I had a straight walk across the room to my desk, where my keys were. Halfway across the room I stopped and froze. I wasn’t alone. I sensed great evil, which I had become sensitive to. Some thing was there in the dark, and it felt like pure evil had me in its sights as if the devil in Hell himself were there.

I couldn’t move. I was terrified to the point that had I not already used the bathroom, I’d have let go my bladder.

After an eternity I heard a movement in the dark and my father stepped out of my closet and said, “Yeah, I’m in here.”

There was something extraordinary about the man. Some force that I’d never sensed until I felt him without knowing he was there. That day I believe I “saw” his true self. There’s no forgetting it.

A LEGACY OF PAIN

It surprised everyone when Ralph and Betty Smith were arrested and tried for rape, statutory rape, incest, unnatural and perverted sexual practices and child sexual abuse.

Some neighbors believed them guilty. Some did not. And I spent way too much time worrying about it.

Ralph Smith spent 11 years in the State of Maryland DOC. He lived two years after parole. He wasn’t visited by a single person. His place and cause of death and his grave site are unknown to me. Nor shall I look. I face my own mortality and I live with his legacy: pain. Horrible nightmares. PTSD. Dysfunctional in every way. Never having known two days in a row of happiness or even peace.

Because I am damned. Because I’m an asshole.

MEANT FOR MORE THAN JUST THIS?

There’s a song by Alabama Shakes. “Hold On” is the title of the excellent track. My God it’s like Brittany is me. Someone up above keeps me around. Keeps telling me to get back up. To hold on. I really didn’t think I’d make it to 22-years-old. I was 21 the day Ralph Smith held a pistol to my head and pulled the hammer back.

Somehow I’ve survived and I’ve been wondering why. What was I meant to do? I’ve survived so many times when I should have died. I’ve outlived my children. I’m a mess and my time runs short.

The best I can do is tell people to hold on. You’re here for reasons you don’t know and may never know. But you’re here. You and I, we have to tell people to stop before it’s too late. And that someone up above wants us to hold on.

If that is the true legacy of Ralph Smith, then I’m okay with it. I’ll keep writing. I’ll bare my soul. I’ll do it for other survivors. Because that’s an honorable job to have.

But Ralph Smith is surrounded by darkness, and I’ve been there. He’s adrift on his way to divine retribution. He’s already in a hell of his own making. A Twilight Zone.