Halting the seeds of violence at a young age

Kevin and Morty were a gang of two.

They both fancied themselves thugs, and they were the young terrors of the small western Montana town where I grew up. Kevin wore dirty grey tank tops, and even then, in the 1970s, he wore his pants low around his bottom.

Morty’s family was poor as dirt. Since his last name started with a B and we were seated alphabetically in grade school, I sat far away from him, but it was clear he didn’t get a chance to bathe often. His grandmother had some form of leprosy. Her face was knotted in lumps and cysts and the sight of her frightened us young children. (That was before I learned “there but for the grace of God go I.”)

Seeing Morty and Kevin coming down the same side of the street as me I’d make a move to the opposite side. In my hometown, with only one main street and nary a traffic light, avoiding people was not easy.

Kevin was the bigger of the two, with biceps the size of oranges (small ones, at that) while Morty must have been the brains of the operation. They weren’t just dirty. They were mean.  

Finally, when we were about 11, two of my buddies and I had had enough of the dynamic duo of Kevin and Morty, and we plotted revenge. The plan was to lure them up into the forest above our homes and tie one of them to a tree as part of a larger plan, which we hadn’t quite figured out yet. The other member would be taken out by an elaborate Rube Goldberg-like device that involved an overhanging tree and a hatchet.

We were angry and we wanted revenge. The plan, and our frustration over Morty and Kevin, grew. Then by some act of fate, the situation resolved itself. My parents announced we were moving.

Who knows what might have happened if I’d stayed in that small town outside Missoula.

That little smalltown gang situation came to mind last week when I was watching “West Side Story” on its opening night at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse.

Doc, the proprietor of the soda shop the Sharks and Jets frequent, is frustrated that the rival gangs can’t work things out nonviolently. “Weapons?” he says. “Can’t you just play basketball?”

Riff, the leader of the Jets, has to convince Tony, the defacto leader, why gangs are important to him. “You’re never alone in a gang,” Riff said.

Seeking higher ground, Tony was determined to help the gangs avoid confrontation, and he promises his new love, Maria, that he’ll stop the impending fight between the gangs. But he gets swept up in the fight, and well, you know the rest. Even Maria turned cold blooded after seeing Tony killed.

“All of you! You all killed him,” she says. “And my brother, and Riff. Not with bullets, or guns, with hate. Well now I can kill, too, because now I have hate!”

One of the funniest parts of West Side Story — and there aren’t many in this dark show— is when one of the Jets tells Officer Krupke that “deep down inside us, there’s good.”

 Doc is less convinced.

“You make this world lousy,” he tells the Jets.

“Well, Doc, that’s the way we found it,” Action, a member of the Jets, says.

The world was good, too, when Jesse Ernst and Ted Ernst, found it, but somehow along the way it got messed up. They shot Bigfork businessman Larry Streeter Christmas day in 1997. Next week, a Los Angeles film crew will be in Bigfork to document the story of how two boys from a good family went wrong. The film company is examining teen violence and how it manifests in our youth.

The violence might start as simply as being bullied on a playground, like those of us in our small town were in 1972. I often wonder what ever happened to Morty and Kevin; I tend to think they’re in prison somewhere, the end of the line in a life of crime and violence.

Or, maybe like Tony in West Side Story, they tried to turn away from violence but wound up on the wrong side of the gun.

Robert Marquez saw that kind of violence in his daily work as a prison guard in California. Now retired in Lakeside, he’s hoping to help show young men there’s a better path to belonging. Our society doesn’t do a good job with our young men, and Marquez is out to find a way to help.

There’s something in us that makes us want to belong to a group, to find peace and happiness and support.

It doesn’t have to be the Jets, the Sharks, or some other gang.

It can be a choir, or AA, or Boy Scouts.

Or a family.

— David Reese is editor of the Bigfork Eagle. He is at editor@bigforkeagle.com.