Gateway First Four Years and More - 1969 and onward

I had dropped out of my first semester at Rutgers Camden. I didn't like college at all, and I had no idea what to do in life. I had a vague ambition about being an actor, but not the foggiest idea how to go about it. I took a job with the company I had worked for during the past two summers, unskilled labor unloading trucks, and then I ended up emptying trailer loads of magazines at the post office building near 30th Street Station in Philly. It was a dirty, thankless job, but it was easy and I was on my own and unsupervised.

So, you may be asking, did this really happen?
Yeah, it happened, alright.
I and a bunch of friends went out for an afternoon of fun and instead we got caught up in a murder-suicide; a personal tragedy with really bizarre overtones.
A young man my age was so troubled that he was able to convince himself and two of his closest friends that he should die, and they made it happen.
I was troubled that summer too, and so were many young men my age who still worried that their lives would be cut short by being sent to Vietnam.

Michael. That was his name, the name of the young man who convinced himself that he needed to die a violent death in order to serve Satan and command a legion of demons. He not only convinced himself, he managed to talk his two friends into tying him up and throwing him into a lake, and then walk away from it like nothing happened.
So I had found the body of a Satan worshiper who wished to die a violent death.
He died a violent death with the help of his friends.
Think about it.
Think real hard.

It was hard to believe the truth, but there it was. A 20 year old young man was dead, and I had found his body floating in a lake in an abandoned sand quarry.
This young man was murdered, but not murdered.
It was a sort of suicide, but with a little help from some friends.
I couldn't believe what the newspapers were saying.
This guy from Vineland had convinced his two teenage friends to tie him up and throw him into a lake so he could die a violent death. He needed to die violently, he told them, so he could serve Satan and command a legion of demons.

Think hard, real hard. How persuasive do you think you could be? How much influence do you have with your closest friends? Could you get them to believe something supernatural? Could you convince them that another world exists, and that they could help you get to that world?
Think hard.
Think really hard.
The newspapers are hitting the pavement.

Usually you don't have much to say to your parents when they ask you how your day has been.
Of course my mother didn't believe me at first when I told her I found a dead body floating in the lake we went to swim in. She had been just as perplexed about us all going there as the police had been. What's the big deal, anyway? If we had all decided to go down the shore for the day nobody would have questioned that now, would they?

So here we were watching the Vineland/Millville area's finest investigate what appears to be a murder at the Menantico Sand Wash. The sandy soil is making life difficult for the patrolmen and detectives. They slip and slide down the incline towards the body, and several of them lose their footing, and they tumble towards the water's edge. They take photographs and scour the scene for clues, and then they wait for the coroner to arrive.

The day wasn't going as planned. What was supposed to be a day of fun in the sun had suddenly turned into a murder mystery.
It had to be a murder, right? You can't tie your hands behind your back.
We had to go to the police. Which police? Were we in Vineland or Millville? Who could tell? None of us even knew where the police stations were around here anyway.
Wait a minute. Those two boys hanging around, they're local kids, they must know where the police are.
So Sherri and I and the local kids are in my 63 Fairlane heading for the police.

A beautiful summer day in June, and I'm getting ready to swim out to a dead body in a lake in an abandoned sand quarry somewhere near Millville or Vineland.
A dead body?
What am I doing here?
I'm pretty tired from swimming out there and back from before, so I decide to take a small inflatable raft, you know, the little ones you use in swimming pools.
Sherri Ehlers says she'll go with me for support.

No one believed me. Not John or Keith or Lynette or even Sherri.
"He's pulling our leg," one of them said.
"Yeah, you're just trying to prove what a good actor you are."
"You just want somebody to swim out there and make a fool of himself."
"It's just a log with some moss on it."
"Yeah, or just a turtle or something."

"I tell you it's a body," I said. "I don't know for sure if it's real or not, but that's a body out there."

So I'm swimming across this lake, and it's a lot farther to this thing floating in the water than I thought, so my arms are getting tired. I'm getting closer to it, but I still can't make out what it is.
It's round and dark, and it sure looks like moss of some kind in strands floating off of it.
My arms are tired, and I'm tired, but I'm determined to see what it is. Good thing the water isn't very cold or else I'd never have made it this far. They're calling out to me from the shore, asking if I can tell what it is yet.