Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp
Towson, Maryland, June 1986
One morning the summer of my fifteenth year, skateboarding alone
at the halfpipe in Timmy Tadder’s back yard, I began to see cop cars
pass by. And cop vans. And more cop cars. County and state police
and unmarked cars and one ambulance driving slowly like a hearse.
I was sure they were looking for me. They had me dead to rights
on the deck, full pads on, sweat dripping from my helmet, shirt
soaked through, Agent Orange blasting from Tim’s boom box.
Maybe it was the punk rock, the all-day back-and-forth roar of
polyurethane wheels on plywood, the grating sound of metal
on concrete pool coping that sent the neighbors dialing. I froze.
But they kept driving past the halfpipe to the end of the cul-de-sac.
I stopped counting cars at twenty and went back to my agenda
of nailing ollies to fakie and boosting my backside airs.
Still, I thought, a bored, observant cop might detour into Timmy’s
driveway and take my board because he could, but the procession
of Crown Victoria Interceptors rolled past, disinterested. Later
in the afternoon, the ambulance rolled slowly back up the road,
escorted by a police car, emergency lights dark, sirens silent.
That night, the news said the body of a man who lived at the end of
Timmy’s road had been found on the horse trail in the nearby woods
with a hole in the back of his head. Executed. His wife had heard men’s
voices in their garage before he left for an early round of golf, assumed
they were his friends. They never found out who killed him, or why.
And I had gotten away with another session on the Tadders’ halfpipe,
my airs a bit higher, still a month from landing my first ollie to fakie,
the cops none the wiser of the ongoing crime being committed in plain
sight on an otherwise quiet and safe suburban street, where everyone
was friendly and worked hard. Where that kind of thing never happened.
Matt Hohner holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His work has been shortlisted for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, taken both third and first prizes in the Maryland Writers Association Poetry Prize, and won the Oberon Prize for Poetry. Hohner once won a poetry slam held on Whidbey Island, Washington over the phone from Baltimore, Maryland. His work has appeared in numerous publications nationally and internationally. He has collaborated with local visual artists for the light ekphrastic, and Dutch musician / composer Brechtje for an original composition using his poem “How to Unpack a Bomb Vest,” performed by the band VONK in The Netherlands in March 2018. Hohner has held a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, which was made possible by a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. He is the author of the book Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House, 2018). An editor of Loch Raven Review, Hohner lives in Baltimore.