At my midwife’s recommendation, I was taking a supplement from Community Pharmacy, evening primrose oil, or some such medicinal wonder. We dined on spicy Indonesian food and then drove to a custard shop, where I dumped castor oil into my root beer float and slugged it back like an enormous shot of brandy. I was a living, breathing science experiment. Sadly, nothing transpired, not even a stomachache. Ryan and I were fighting over his allergies. “I’m walking around with a baby’s head grinding against my pelvic bone,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll survive your stupid sniffles, you big baby.” And of course, the big bambino was all we could think about.
Finally on Mother’s Day—“a good day for birth,” our midwife said—we ate a large brunch, including smoked salmon and pastries, before checking out of our hotel and driving to the Madison Birth Center. With a tool like a plastic crochet hook, our midwife punctured my amniotic balloon. It was a clean break, and the fluid poured from inside me like warm water from a jug.
After the bike shop beating, Jared Cabot’s grandfather initially tried taking matters into his own hands by calling Pomeno to set the guy straight, but Pomeno told him in the most cavalier of ways, “What did you expect bringing the kid down to the clubhouse? I do shit like that all the time,” pointing out he had recently pounded the piss out of his fourteen-year-old nephew, just to teach him a lesson.
Corporal punishment is still legal in all fifty states, after all, so long as paddling your kid’s bottom with a wooden spoon doesn’t become batting practice with your kid’s head. If you slap your son or daughter to teach respect, you’re operating under a special parent privilege in the law, but if you slap a stranger on the street, you’ve committed battery. Such are the intricacies of the criminal justice system. Two days after Pomeno thwacked his stepson, Jared, still bruised from the beating, reported the matter to the police, and an investigation was opened, which resulted in Pomeno and two of his buddies being charged with felony child abuse.
When the public defender’s office called Ryan to see if he could help, he was gratefully not assigned to represent Pomeno but rather asked to take on one of Pomeno’s accomplices. A fellow named Carl Schunk was charged with being party to the crime of physical abuse of a child for allegedly having been one of the men who restrained Jared while Pomeno and his other associates whaled on the kid.
“Schunk was a really nice guy, totally normal,” Ryan said. Schunk, like Pomeno, was a Vietnam veteran and a biker. He was also a husband and a father. A bit grizzled, with a ZZ Top beard and tattooed arms, Schunk smiled virtuously, cheeks round and merry, as if he were wearing rouge. Probably a bit of an anarchist, he was nothing to fear, and Ryan felt Schunk had been unfairly charged. There existed little, if any, evidence to indicate his role in the beating. In fact, in his statement to police, he asserted he actually broke up the fight between Wayne Pomeno and Jared Cabot.
Carl Schunk belonged to a growing number of Ryan’s baby boomer clients, men and women whose formative influences—such events as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, and the Vietnam War—made them largely suspicious of the government and, arguably, of all people and institutions of authority. Living on the fringes of society, they were usually quiet about their radical ideas, not planning to declare mutiny or anything. But every so often, this clientele would give in to their renegade instincts. Schunk was one such client. Crazy old Doug Nelson was another.
Just like Pomeno, Nelson married into fatherhood. When his unemployed forty-year-old stepson began living in his house, Nelson’s wife promised “the kid” would be out on his own by springtime. “He should have a job by then,” she said. But when tulips pried through the dirt, Nelson’s stepson was still unemployed, probably because he spent every day lounging on his stepdad’s couch, stuffing his face with potato chips, and not even glancing at the want ads. Nelson told him on multiple occasions to get busy looking; his vacation was about to end.
“Too bad, Pops,” Nelson’s stepson said. “I’m not going anywhere.” That’s when Nelson, all 110 pounds of him, produced his loaded handgun and aimed it point-blank between his stepson’s eyes.
“You either leave on your own, or you’re leaving here in a body bag.”
Nelson’s wife, fearing for her son’s life and probably fed up with old Doug Nelson, helped her middle-aged son gather himself, and they left together, calling police almost immediately, proving, at the very least, that maternal instinct remains well-oiled for the full extent of its lifetime warranty, even when our children fail to reach their dreams or never dream at all.
Before long, the SWAT team had surrounded Nelson’s house, assault weapons drawn. When they called through their megaphone for the suspect to exit his home with his hands in the air, Nelson meandered outside in his polyester robe and his corduroy slippers, stooped like the feeble old man in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, slightly propped upright only with the help of his cane. What was all the fuss about—can’t a father call his stepson to action?
At trial, Nelson put forth an affirmative defense called “defense of property,” essentially arguing to the jury that, “Yes, I pointed a gun at my stepson’s forehead,” but much as in an instance of corporal punishment, he believed he possessed the privilege to act this way. Just as parents are protected with built-in rights in allegations of child abuse, property owners are likewise protected with built-ins, and therefore Ryan argued that Nelson was not guilty of intentionally pointing a firearm at a person, a misdemeanor, because, per the statute, he reasonably “believed in an unlawful interference with his property.”
The state argued that
