One of Tom Lehrer’s more bizarre songs was an early ditty called “My Home Town,” in which he sang rhapsodically about all the bizarre and criminal behavior exhibited by his town’s denizens:
I really have a yen
To go back once again,
Back to the place where no one wears a frown,
To see once more those super-special just plain folks
In my home town.No fellow could ignore
The little girl next door,
She sure looked sweet in her first evening gown.
Now there’s a charge for what she used to give for free
In my home town.I remember Dan, the druggist on the corner, ‘e
Was never mean or ornery,
He was swell.
He killed his mother-in-law and ground her up real well,
And sprinkled just a bit
Over each banana split.The guy that taught us math,
Who never took a bath,
Acquired a certain measure of renown,
And after school he sold the most amazing pictures
In my home town.That fellow was no fool
Who taught our Sunday School,
And neither was our kindly Parson Brown.
We’re recording tonight so I have to leave this line out.
In my home town.I remember Sam, he was the village idiot.
And though it seems a pity, it
Was so.
He loved to burn down houses just to watch the glow,
And nothing could be done,
Because he was the mayor’s son.The guy that took a knife
And monogrammed his wife,
Then dropped her in the pond and watched her drown.
Oh, yes indeed, the people there are just plain folks
In my home town.
That song has relentlessly played itself through my head when I read this bizarre story from Marin County, a story that has moved to the top ranks of emailed stories in in the SF Chron today:
A man who died after being brought with a gunshot wound to a California Highway Patrol parking lot in Corte Madera was a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club and had been shot on Highway 101, authorities said today.
The victim, whose name wasn’t released, was found suffering from a gunshot wound at CHP parking lot at 53 San Clemente Drive at 8:22 p.m. Saturday, said Sgt. Keith Boyd of the Marin County sheriff’s office.
Sheriff’s deputies responded to the scene after someone using a pay phone outside the CHP office called 911, Boyd said.
The shooting victim was taken to Marin General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Barring San Rafael’s Canal District, which has a lot of Hispanic residents, many here illegally, and Marin City, which has a black ghetto that formed back in shipyard days during WWII, both of which are neighborhoods that boast their fair share of gang activity and other violent crime, Marin generally has very little violent crime. It’s got a fair amount of shoplifting and car break-ins, because of the many shopping centers that dot the landscape, and the usual domestic squabbles and drunkenness, but otherwise it’s as bland a place as can be imagined. Yet suddenly we have Hell’s Angels cruising down the freeway, dead bodies dropped at the Highway Patrol headquarters, and late night phone calls reporting those bodies. It sounds like something from a badly scripted Hollywood movie. It makes Tom Lehrer’s rather grotesque song sound a little more real than it ever did before.
