Shutter Speed
1
Moment of Truth
TRIGGER WARNING
This story contains scenes that could be PTSD triggers for combat veterans, especially of the Vietnam era. I do not wish to cause pain to those who have served, may have been wounded or lost friends, and returned to an ungrateful nation. Several of my friends are still dying from the effects of Agent Orange. If you are affected by PTSD, give this one a pass and rest easy my friend.
JANUARY 12, 1968. I’d remember that day for as long as I lived.
I sat in my room late at night—or maybe it was early in the morning—holding my draft card in one hand and a box of matches in the other. I could do it. I could just burn the damn thing. That would show them. I lit a match and held it until the flame touched my fingers and I dropped it in the ash tray.
Right. Exactly what would it show ‘them?’ They still had my name and address. Burning my draft card wouldn’t change that. I wasn’t even making a statement. I was alone in my room. I tossed the card on my desk and stretched out on my bed. I really hated those bastards.
I was still five months from graduating from high school in 1968, so I was told I ‘don’t need to worry about it until you turn nineteen’ in September. And if I was enrolled in college and was maintaining at least a C average, I could change my current deferment from I-S to I-SC or maybe II-S. The draft board didn’t seem to know for sure which classification college students could get. Gave me all kinds of faith in them. Not.
But I had time for making plans. I had my acceptance to Columbia College Chicago to study photography in their creative expression program. I’d stretch out deferments as long as I could, or perhaps investigate colleges in Canada or Europe. I was socking away as much money from my photography studio as I could get.
I went to Mom’s office and called Elizabeth. She’d talk me down.
I guess, in the interest of not just jumping into a story in the middle, I should introduce myself and tell you some of the reasons why I was so opposed to the military in general and to the draft in particular.
I’m Nate Hart. I’m the son of the first female Methodist preacher in Illinois, Rev. Joyce Hart. I call her Reverend Mother Superior. My family was moved from the South Chicago suburb, population ~45,000, to Tenbrook, Illinois, population ~750. I was going into my junior year in high school when we relocated in 1966.
The thing that excites me more than anything else is photography. I’m glad to say that I’m pretty good at it. I’ve won some awards at both County and State Fairs. When I came to Tenbrook, I was carrying an old 35mm SLR everywhere I went. That got me my first photos in Tenbrook, when I ran into Judy and Janice, two girls in my new high school class who loved to dress up in different costumes and were willing to pose for me. Their picture was one of my award winners.
I also found out gangs weren’t limited to the city when I encountered a group of motorcycle riders while I was out bicycling. Through a mixture of circumstances, bluff, and good luck, I ended up refinishing the leader’s motorcycle, which had been scratched up in an accident. Tony and his girlfriend, Patricia, became really good friends of mine, even though a lot of people in the town and in school would have nothing to do with them. Calumet High School was 85% black. When I moved to Tenbrook, I didn’t even notice that Tony had slightly darker skin than the rest of the population. I guess, like, his grandmother was black. So what?
That wasn’t true of the village constable who was a racist son of a bitch. Pardon my French. I caught him on film one night as he roughed up Tony and Patricia for no other reason than riding his bike through town. Those photos and an impassioned plea by my dad, Rich Hart, spelled the end of the constable’s employment by the village.
Unfortunately, the spate of petty thefts and vandalism in the village that the constable was trying to pin on Tony continued.
Patricia came to my garage while I was refinishing Tony’s motorcycle and posed provocatively on and around the bike while I took pictures of her. I was a little worried about how Tony would react, but he loved the photos and kept sending Patricia back to pose for me. Patricia’s was the first live human female’s nipple that I ever saw. It happened while she was posing. The photo of her on Tony’s bike—not the one with her nipple—won Best of Category for Black and White Photography at the Illinois State Fair.
After that, I showed my photos to Mr. Barkley, who owned the local grocery store, and he offered to let me use a corner of his fourth floor attic to set up my darkroom and a little studio. The rest of the attic was filled with junk he’d collected or that had been retired from when it was a full department store over the past seventy-five years. He let me use anything I found up there as a prop in my photography. Patricia, Judy, and Janice—and a really cute girl named Christine—all became regular models for me in the attic studio. It seemed like the more often they posed for me, the fewer clothes they wore.
With the photos of the girls and the props in the attic, I developed a distinct trashy glamour style that I started calling Attic Allure.
The photographer who took all the school photos really screwed up the senior photos. Nearly half the senior class came to me to retake their portrait and do an Attic Allure photo of them. That turned out to be a really profitable enterprise for me. And it landed me five more models who weren’t afraid to bare it all for my photos.
Enter my Uncle Nate from Chicago. He’s always been a fan of my photography and had given me my very first camera when I was twelve. He saw what I was doing in my new studio and figured out a way to get me a professional Hasselblad setup. I was able to take some really good photos with that and when he saw my newest work, he said he thought there were some people in Chicago who would like photos in my style and he’d start referring them to me.
To make a long story short, I ended up expanding my studio to the abandoned third floor of Mr. Barkley’s store. I got a lot of stuff from my unnamed patrons in Chicago, including backdrops, props, and photographic supplies like film, photo paper, and developing chemicals. When I started doing photos for a client in Chicago, the unnamed benefactor was so pleased that he and a few other people put together an entire new darkroom setup for me with a much better and modern enlarger and all the supplies I could possibly need. My dad and Tony’s dad, Jim Kowalski, took over building me a new darkroom on the third floor.
I had a photography mentor, Don Grossman, in Huntertown, about fifteen miles away from Tenbrook, who suggested that I should try printing some of my photos full frame instead of cropping them and told me I should be looking at the entire composition through the lens instead of just the central part. That got me started taking another look at all the photos I’d taken since arriving in Tenbrook.
What I found was not something I wanted to find. The town has a kind of hero—a guy named Billy Lamonte—who had been a basketball star in the high school and then joined up in the army. He’d been sent to Vietnam and a year later came home after he’d been wounded. He had a dent in his skull from some shrapnel, I guess. He walked with a limp and his mental faculties seemed to have been adversely affected. He spent nearly all his time taking care of the dogs at the Humane Society.
Areas I had cropped out of previous photos caught his figure, in its familiar army fatigues tucked into his boots, in several incriminating circumstances. I took them to our new town constable, Stoney Stoneburner, not really wanting to, but feeling like I had to. It turned out the constable was a really good guy and had been Billy’s captain in Vietnam. He’d come to Tenbrook after he’d been medically retired to see if there was anything he could do to help his wounded soldier.
I accompanied him as he went to visit Billy and took pictures of them as Billy took the items he had stolen back to their owners. Every single one of them gave the item back to Billy—including me, from whom he’d stolen two photos from my studio gallery. The town kind of came together to offer Billy more support. They’d been calling him the town hero, but they really hadn’t been watching out for him. Seeing them all commit to taking better care of their hero made me proud to be a resident of Tenbrook.
I guess the only other thing I should mention is that when I started my junior year in school, I almost immediately started dating Anna, a really sweet girl who liked a lot of the things I did and was happy to go out to a movie, to a school dance, or even bowling. She did a lot to help me stage photos for the yearbook, but she couldn’t cope with me having a studio where I brought people—mostly girls—and took sexy photos of them. We broke up just before Christmas. But she continued to assist me for yearbook photos and after school was out for the summer, she became my bookkeeper/accountant. That was something I hadn’t even known I needed, but I had a pretty good photography business going.
After the breakup, I was taking some pictures of Christine on New Year’s Eve and on the spur of the moment, I asked her out to a party at a neighboring community church. I was really surprised when she said yes, and later that night, a little after midnight when I took her home, we both got to experience our very first kiss. With some kind of strange caveats, she’s been my girlfriend ever since and she likes sex as much as I do.
One of those caveats was Ronda, a cheerleader who challenged me and said she’d fight me for Christine’s affection. I suggested that maybe we should share her instead of fight. The result was that now I had two girlfriends and they each had a girlfriend and a boyfriend. I loved being with either of them, but having all three of us together was just the best ever.
Unfortunately, Ronda had to leave for the summer to attend a college prep school in Colorado. That left Christine and me to grow closer and closer over the summer.
There was a lot more that got me to this point, though.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
