THE BOY BICYCLE THIEF.
Diarrhea Gold—The Curious Back Story.
I have the unlikely distinction of creating a brand new color on the Sherwin-Williams paint chart. It happened back in 1972 in the seedy furniture manufacturing town of High Point, NC. I was a rookie social worker struggling to re-adjust back in the World after a harrowing infantry gig in Vietnam. My task focused on providing help to youths placed in county foster care because of a plethora of unfortunate family social crises.
High Point then had no middle class to speak of—a few folks were pretty well off but most labored tirelessly in the signature furniture factories, textile mills, or the tacky service sectors.The burg could best be described as suffering seriously from acute red neck urban blight.
President Johnson’s staff was so dismayed by conditions there that little High Point was targeted by the fledgling Model Cities program for emergency urban renewal and thousands of dollars in anti poverty funds. I went straight from the Jungle War into a social policy laboratory.
The kids that I tried to help landed up in foster care because their families were beset by every social problem imaginable. They came into county custody completely acculturated by the social and economic mayhem afflicting the underbelly of the Furniture City. Their extreme aberrational behavior was a given.
The city was actually a seedy mix of traditional Southern industries not destined to survive too much longer, petty municipal corruption, and seasonal whores drawn to town by the several big furniture shows. The colorful police chief had previously starred on national television wielding dogs and fire hoses against civil rights protesters in smoldering Alabama.
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT could have easily been shot here. Truth be told, just coming out of a beleaguered infantry battalion in the Nam, I secretly kind of grooved on this funky mix. I soaked up an informal street doctorate in social work and sociology during my stint in town.
Rankin was my caseworker office mate. By a preordained act of god, we inherited a 13 year old named Ronnie. He was a latch key kid who came into county custody through juvenile court. He had penchant for stealing bicycles, dozens of them. He stole every color and size imaginable. The cops were always shadowing him. But he soon came up with a perverse plan to disguise his purloined haul before trying to sell it.
In a dilapidated unused warehouse in Southside, Ronnie found plentiful storage space and 20 five gallon cans of various paints. He mixed them willy nilly a like mad scientist. He ended up with a color that he fell madly in love with. And he thought he could avoid arrest by painting all his stolen bikes a single putrid color.
Somehow he naively believed the freshly coated velos couldn’t be traced! Their dubious hue could best be described as as being somewhere between canary yellow and international orange, with a lean toward the latter. You might stretch a point and broadly say “gold” but in a muted, almost garish way.
Ronnie was in constant conflict with the police. Rankin and I were frequently called upon to attend interrogations, juvenile court hearings, and very stern counseling sessions. However, the troubled kid eventually became somewhat of an outlaw celebrity amongst the High Point law enforcement and counseling community.
People really got off on his brazen, unchecked, two wheeled thefts, augmented by on going sloppy work with his overactive paint brush. He became a kind velo Rembrandt ironically tinged with an idealistic public notion of Robin Hood.
One afternoon we were kibitzing in our office, breaking up the job stress with ribald, goofball riffs about our caseload. Ronnie’s name up and I knowingly blurted out “That crazy kid actually thinks that he can cover up his capers with gobs of diarrhea gold paint!” Well! I had innocently uttered poetic genius.
We began routinely using “diarrhea gold” in our conversations with other professionals, in case notes, and even in the courtroom. It became a sort of badge of honor for Ronnie, almost a sobriquet. One day outside the police station I heard the walkie talkie of a passing officer crackle to life.The color of a stolen car was clearly broadcast as being “diarrhea gold”. Onlookers stared with confusion as I hopped along the sidewalk pumping my fist.
Eventually the term made it into the local newspaper in connection with an evidentiary sweater in a big assault case. But the icing on our bizarre cake came when Police Chief Pritchard cornered me one day on Main Street. He happily informed me that the paint chip for diarrhea gold was being added to the color chart at our local Sherwin-Williams store.
The Chief even opined that I deserved a nice prize for coming up with the catchy name. He slyly proposed setting me up with a New York prostitute the next time the furniture show was in town. In tawdry High Point, all the whores were scheduled through the police department.
I politely demurred but instead I expressed an interest in his cute blonde receptionist. He quashed that notion in instant and he brusquely informed me that he was already joyfully banging her. I backed straight off. Being just home from the Jungle War, I totally understood the significance of loud banging. I also had a healthy respect for survival at the hands of a Bull Connor wannabe.
*******For Young Dave. RIP. You turned me on to the amazing rap. I hope this measures up …
:
.
