The Shed

Every warm day we spent on the beach. My brother and I set up this huge canvas tent on the sand and we’d sleep there at night. My sister was too small. Between our house and the river was a giant Willow tree that had three or four trunks. During the day we’d play under it. I’d create highways in the dirt where my toy cars would have horrific accidents.
At night we kept our distance from the tree cause bums would hang out under it drinking, we’d find empty bottles of cheap wine and Sterno cans in the morning. One night there was a loud ruckus and my mother came down to the tent with a flashlight in one hand and a big kitchen knife in the other. She told us we had to go up to the house. Shortly after, the cops showed up and I guess took the bums away cause it was quiet after that.
A friend of my mother’s helped us build a Tom Sawyer type raft; logs tied together with twine and rope. It weighed a ton but we had a lot of fun on it until a storm busted it up. We soon found replacements in a shed a few houses down. There were five houses along this stretch of beach. One of the houses had a long low shed behind it. It was about the width and length of a double-wide trailer, only it wasn’t. It looked really old with peeling paint and windows so filthy we couldn’t see through them. We were really curious what was in there and since we never saw any activity around the place we decided to check it out.
The end facing the water was comprised of double-sided doors connected by a rusted padlock. One night, me and my brother along with a neighbor kid went over there and smashed the lock off with a hammer. When our eyes adjusted to the dark we saw that the place was filled with coffins. They lined the walls and looked to be the cheap kind you imagine poor people are buried in. I saw a pile of lids and got an idea, “We can use those for paddle-boards.” We each grabbed one and dragged them down to the beach where we hid them under some bushes.
The lids were heavy but floated, although they were always an inch or two under the water. We spent the rest of the summer paddling around the bay on them. I liked to go way out and just lay on mine, soaking up sun.
We pretty much ran wild all summer but sometimes we had baby-sitters. One of them was this kid Bobby, he was fifteen and the son of some friends of my mothers. Most of the time he just played with us like another kid but one day he told me to come with him, he had something to show me.
We went into the shed behind the last house on the row, on the other side of it was a park. The shed was small and filled with old furniture including a couch which I sat on.
“Check it out” Bobby pulled out his dick and I stared at it. I’d never seen an adult one and was sort of grossed out by the hair.
“Not that” he said, “over there.”
He pointed at the wall behind him where the sunlight through a little window was casting a long shadow of his limp penis. He started wagging it around and we watched the shadow move. I didn’t know what to make of this, it wasn’t very interesting.
“Cool” I said.


A couple weeks later a friend and I were standing in the doorway of that same shed flicking lit matches at an old overstuffed chair. Whatever it was stuffed with turned out to be super flammable cause when a match finally made direct contact it ignited immediately.
The shed was gone before the fire truck could even get there. Everyone knew we did it and the cops questioned us about it, but we lied and nothing ever came of it.
My parents were separated during this period but shortly after we moved to Illinois where my father had been living in a large walk in safe. His apartment, the safe, was located in a creepy old mansion on the Fox River. It had a tower and an observatory. His room had no windows of course. I don’t know how he did it, lived there.
He told me later he suffered from lifelong claustrophobia due to closet imprisonment at the hands of his mother. Maybe he was always drunk in the safe, or had company. I wonder if you’re still claustrophobic if you’re with other people. Probably but the distraction must help.
Some of my childhood pastimes seem pre-serial killer in retrospect, but the arson didn’t continue and I never tortured animals.
Bobby the babysitter did end up a killer. He murdered a prostitute when he was still a teenager and did a couple of decades in prison.