Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir by Gary Taylor Page A

level of comfort with her.

    Boop entered my life at a
particularly unsettled point, and I've always given her a lot of
credit for my career. In the beginning, I wanted to do well for
her. She provided motivation. I wanted to impress her. I was
showing off for her. And in the process, I proved to myself how
good I really should be.

    At the start of my junior year I stood at a
personal crossroads. I had burned out on school. I was just
starting my journalism curriculum after two years of preliminary
coursework, and it was proving pretty much of a basics bore that
would not trigger my excitement until later when I actually started
reporting. I seriously considered dropping out and heading for
Vietnam.

    Boop did not arrive in a loveless vacuum. I
had endured at least three serious relationships to that point. A
high school sweetheart sat heartbroken in St. Louis, and a Mizzou
co-ed had broken my heart by dumping me the year before to stick
with her high school boyfriend. Then, there was a girl named Pixie
attending one of the girls colleges in Columbia. Everyone should
have an old girlfriend named Pixie. She was still in the picture at
the start of the year, and for a while I juggled her with Boop. But
Boop won out with her reaction when I told her I had decided to go
steady with Pixie. She laughed in my face. So I broke up with Pixie
and went steady with Boop.

    Just as our relationship grew
tighter, my best friends started peeling off to lives of their own.
Suddenly one day, I looked around to realize my entourage had
boiled away to myself, my last remaining roommate, and Boop. But
Boop was two years behind. I realized I had started thinking in
terms of "us" when I noticed I had decided I needed to resolve the
future.

    So, in a drunken haze one night at
a party, I slobbered something like, "We should get married." I
expected her sarcastic laugh again, but instead I got a wink and a
nod. She, too, had reached a point where she wanted something new
for a lifestyle. I had already agreed to take that job in Flint and
the options seemed clear. We either got married or broke up.
Marriage suddenly looked like a pretty interesting adventure of its
own.

    The next week found us making
wedding plans with her astonished father in Kansas City. He didn't
look that thrilled, and I guessed he had always imagined his
daughter as a college graduate rather than a newspaper reporter's
wife in Flint, Michigan. My sympathy for his plight grew even
larger a few years later when I calculated we probably got divorced
before he had finished paying for the full-blown church ceremony of
June 8, 1969.

    FIFTEEN
    Early 1970s

    With my student deferment gone and
Vietnam looming just ahead, Boop and I approached our move to Flint
with a fatalistic view. We figured we'd go up, learn about sharing
a life, have a good time, and keep an open mind about the future.
We packed everything we owned into a trailer and pulled it to Flint
one sunny day in June behind the black 1966 Mustang I had bought
with money saved from my part-time jobs. She wanted to continue
school up there, working at that point toward some kind of a degree
in psychology. But we learned she would not qualify for the
affordable Michigan resident tuition until we had lived there a
year, and we couldn't afford it until then. But she didn't seem all
that upset and found a job in a shoe repair shop just around the
corner from The Flint Journal. We rented a furnished apartment just
outside Flint and drove back and forth together each day in that
Mustang. We settled in to wait on the draft.

    Those times in
Flint formed the kind of idyllic salad days on which many couples
usually build their lives together. We struggled some financially
but learned to live within our means. And many times when I have
needed to find peace in the midst of some later life hassle, I have
retreated in my mind back to that time when the world stood filled
with promise. Just as she had at Mizzou, Boop became one of