Destroyer

Alchemy

Photo by Chromatograph on Unsplash

I didn’t feel good the day we moved to Hathaway, but it was the day of the Bicentennial Parade, so my mom put an Uncle Sam hat on me and red, white and blue bell bottoms, and made me go meet kids.

I met a kid named Ludden Royal.

He was really nice to me, right from the start, even though I looked kinda stupid, just standing there on the side of the parade and all.

I found out later Ludden Royal was nice to me because no one played with him because they thought his family was weird. 

Ludden Royal’s dad, Ludden Royal, Sr. had a science lab in their garage. I don’t know how scientific it was, but it had bottles, and hoses and heaters and stuff.

People said he was trying to find a cure for cancer.

After I got to know Ludden Royal pretty good in a couple days, I asked him what his dad did in the lab.

Ludden Royal told me his dad really was trying to find a cure for cancer. 

In February 1977 Ludden Royal’s dad disappeared.

People joked that he turned himself invisible in his lab, but it wasn’t funny to Ludden Royal because his dad was gone.

Ludden Royal’s mom said Mr. Royal had perfected his cure for cancer and took it somewhere and never returned.

I do know this: After a week, The FBI showed up at the Royal’s house, which is really exciting for a 9 year old kid.

They took some of his lab stuff and left, and I never saw the FBI there again.

Jason Sescysni said the FBI took Mr. Royal’s invisibility potion and came back to the house all the time, so Ludden Royal and Jason fought and Ludden went home with a bloody nose, crying.

Mrs. Royal said that someone kidnapped her husband because they wanted to steal his cure for cancer and she started going by the name Jones.

Ludden Royal was now Mark Jones.

Me and Mark Jones stayed best friends. 

The first time we watched Saturday Night LIve together was after the 11 o’clock news ran a story about the anniversary of his dad’s disappearance.

Mark Jones cried, but wiped tears away real hard, saying if he was gonna pretend Ludden Royal wasn’t his dad, he better stop crying when someone talked about his dad.

Saturday Night Live was so funny my ribs felt like after crabapple fights, but Mark didn’t laugh once. 

We watched again the next week, and I was hoping Mark would laugh this time, because the 11 o’clock news didn’t talk about his dad this time, and he did laugh, but then The Kinks played Destroyer.

Everyone knew that Mrs. Jones was getting super paranoid and wanted to move the family out of Hathaway. She thought that by then they would have started using the cure for cancer and wherever her husband was they would release him.

She thought that her husband was being stubborn and not telling them the exact formula and that someone was going to take her and Mark and his little sister Stephanie hostage.

After the Kinks were done singing about paranoia Mark got up and left. He said “Bye,” like it hurt to say it.

When we were seniors in high school a TV show called “Unbelievable” did a story about Mark’s dad.

Mark’s mom spoke with her identity hidden and her voice distorted. She really believed that Ludden Royal was out there, alive, somewhere.

At the end of the show, without Mark’s prior knowledge, the host Grant Badel said that Ludden Royal might be living under an alias in Portland, Oregon.

I remembered being the goony little kid in the Uncle Sam hat, new to Hathaway, no friends.

So I stood up in front of the Hathaway Bishop Norwood Lacrosse team and told ‘em we had to do a fundraiser to get Mark on an airplane to find his dad.

We threw a keg and jungle juice party, and invited everyone from Lawaska County Community College.

The hundred and twenty nine bucks we were short of a plane ticket to Portland, Leigh Cosson’s mom loaned us, because she owned the DairyWink.

The morning after we threw our graduation hats in the air, Mark Jones was off to find his dad.

Mrs. Jones was convinced the kidnappers were gonna blow up the plane.

Mark was convinced that all the chemicals his dad played with gave him brain damage and he didn’t know who he was.

Ludden Royal, Sr. from all the stories I heard, knew exactly who he was.

He had taken on an alias, but he was the same guy, living with a chemist he met at a conference in Trenton, New Jersey.

His father’s dishonesty would have been hard enough for Mark, but in the process of finding him, found out the FBI had informed his mother of his father’s whereabouts in January of 1985 and she, in full blown paranoia, hadn’t believed them and didn’t tell the kids.

The Hathaway Bishop Norwood Lacrosse team, with the help of Mrs. Cosson had purchased a round trip plane ticket.

Mark, still furious at his father, hooked up with his father’s stepdaughter and never used the return ticket. They were married somewhere on a mountain in the State of Washington.

We kept in touch. Mark told me once, in the spring of 1992 that his father, with whom he didn’t speak, and his mother-in-law with whom he did, believed that they were on the verge of a major breakthrough with a cancer fighting drug.

In late summer of 92, Mark was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was survived by his wife, and his daughter, Stephanie Royal Jones, named after his sister.

The day before his daughter Stephanie’s college graduation, I didn’t feel good. But I got on a plane anyway and watched his daughter accept her diploma.

I never went back to feeling good.

Yesterday they put me in hospice.

I don’t believe that the FBI took a viable cancer cure out of Ludden Royal’s garage lab in Hathaway.

But I believe it’s possible that somebody somewhere has a cure.

I just know that I don’t. 

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