Everyone wants a ringside seat for history in the making. Who’d turn down the opportunity to watch the back of Kennedy’s head explode if given a ticket to Dallas in ’63, or the falling of the Berlin Wall? People who were there speak as if their clothes were stained with JFK’s cerebrum, as if the Berlin Wall fell from their own persistent nudging. No one wants to have missed anything, like sneezing during a small earthquake and wondering why everyone is screaming. The capture and possible killing of Terry Dean was Australia ’s biggest earthquake in fifty years, which is why they got to that bowling alley any way they could.
I leapt from the taxi and slid ungracefully over the bonnets of cars, cracking my hip on the side mirror of a Ford. I could see it: the bowling alley. It looked like the whole New South Wales police force was there. Snipers were taking their positions on the roof and in the trees in the children’s park opposite. One sniper was climbing up the jungle gym, two were balancing on a seesaw.
I couldn’t get through the mob. I was stuck. I shouted, “I’m Martin Dean! Terry Dean’s brother!” They caught on. They cleared a path and let me through, then I got stuck again. A few people around me made getting me inside their life’s mission, lifting me up on top of the crowd- I rode on a hundred shoulders like a rock god. I was getting closer, but sometimes the crowd pushed me in different directions. At one point I was going across, not forward. I shouted, “Forward! Forward!” as if I were Captain Ahab and that bowling alley was my great white whale.
Then I heard the crowd shouting something new: “Let her through! Let her through!” I craned my neck around. I couldn’t see who they were referring to. “It’s his mother! Terry Dean’s mother!” they cried. Then I saw her: my mother, coming from the opposite direction, rising and falling on the roll of the human sea. She waved to me. I waved back. We were both being propelled toward our family’s destiny. I could hear her now. She was shouting: “It’s the double! The double! We’ve got him cornered!” She was off her head! And the crowd was rushing us so fast now we almost collided. They dropped us on the ground in front of the police, who were trying to keep the crowd and the media back at the same time. Both groups were screaming outrage. We had to squeeze into the circle of police and start answering questions. We showed them ID. I just wanted to get inside, but my mother wasn’t helping with her crazy ranting about the doppelgänger. She was Terry Dean’s mother, she said, but the man inside was not her son. They couldn’t work it out. I had to shout over her: “I can get him to come out peacefully! Just give me a chance!” But the cops had different ideas. It dawned on me that they didn’t want him to leave that bowling alley alive. I had to snap into action. I said, “So what, you want to make a martyr out of him? You want his name to go down in history as another outlaw massacred by the police? If you kill him, no one will remember his crimes! You’ll turn him into a hero! Like Ned Kelly! And you’ll be the bad guys. Let him go to trial, where all his brutality will come to light. Then the hero will be the man who captures him alive! Anyone can shoot a man, just as anyone can shoot a wild boar, then run around screaming, I got him! I got him! But capturing a wild boar with your bare hands- that takes guts!”
I had to say this whole speech with my hand over my mother’s mouth, and she was biting me viciously. She’d really gone crazy. “Shoot to kill!” she screamed when I took my hand away. “Aren’t you his mother?” they asked, confused. They couldn’t grasp the meaning of this evil-twin business.
Holding my brother’s fate in the balance, the policemen conferred among themselves, whispering malignantly, almost violently.
“OK, you can go in,” they said to me, and unfortunately, they let my mother in too.
The bowling alley was on the second floor. There was a policeman on every step of the concrete staircase, eyes glowering. I thought: These men are unspeakably dangerous, like understudies waiting to be called to be the star, their raging egos determined not to be undone by performance anxiety. On the way up, a detective filled us in. As far as he knew, Terry had gone into the alley while Kevin Hardy, the three-time world champion, was rolling a few. There were unsubstantiated rumors that during competition Hardy had paid someone behind the pins to take out those he missed with the end of a broomstick. Because the accusations were shaky, Terry hadn’t gone in there to kill him, only to snap his bowling fingers, including the pinkie, just in case he was one of those rare bowlers who used the pinkie for extra spin. Afterward, Terry was tempted by a pair of pretty girls working behind the counter. The groupie phenomenon, the undeniable perk of celebrity, had always been too much for Terry to resist. Unfortunately, once he’d made his choice between the two girls, the jilted one called the police almost immediately, so by the time Terry had broken Kevin’s hand, had sex with the groupie, and was ready to leave, he was already trapped.
Now Terry was kneeling down in the middle of the last lane, gun in his hand, using four hostages as a human shield. Police were positioned at every point of the bowling alley; you could even see the black nozzle of a sniper’s rifle poking out between the pins. They had him covered, and I knew instantly that if they could take the shot, they would, but he was well hidden behind a row of faces contorted in terror.
“You!” my mother shouted. The police held her back. They didn’t trust Terry not to shoot his own mother, especially given her crazy story that he was not her real son but some insidious clone.
“Terry,” I shouted, “it’s me, Marty.” I didn’t get the chance to say anything else before my mother started up.
“Who are you?” she cried.
“Mum? Shit, Marty, get her out of here, will you?”
He was right, of course. When a man is staging his final bloody showdown, he doesn’t want his mother loitering around.
I tried persuading her to leave, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“Stop cowering behind those poor people, you impostor!” she screamed.
“Mum, get out of here!” Terry shouted.
“Don’t call me Mum! I don’t know who you are or how you got my son’s face, but you can’t fool me!”
“Terry, give yourself up!” I shouted.
“Why?”
“They’ll kill you!”
“And? Look, mate, the only thing that’s bugging me is that this whole scene is getting a bit boring. Hang on a sec.”
There was frantic whispering over at the human shield. Suddenly they started to move. They edged to the bowling ball racks, then back to the lane. Then it went! A ball flew down the center of the lane. Terry was bowling! The policemen’s eyes watched the ball fly toward the pins. There was a profound silence that verged on the religious. A strike! Terry had done it! He took out all ten pins! The crowd seemed to shout with one voice, reminding me how man is often stupid alone, but in packs he is absolutely cretinous. They might have been police at the dénouement of a long manhunt, but they were also sport-loving Australians- and nothing starts the heart beating faster than a victory, no matter how bloodthirsty the victor.
At the moment the ball hit the pins, a bullet hit Terry. That ball was Terry’s ploy to make a run for it, but not all police are that gullible or even like bowling.
He lay on the lane, smeared in his own blood, shouting, “My ankle! Again in the ankle! The exact same spot, you mongrels! That’s never gonna heal!” and he lay there while overcome by forty policemen all competing to be the one to walk him outside in the bright flashing glare of the paparazzi, to get their little dose of immortality.
Farewell
I’m no expert on linguistics or the etymology of words, so I have no idea if the word “banana” really was the best-sounding collection of syllables around to describe a long yellow arc-shaped fruit, but I can say that whoever coined the phrase “media circus” really knew what he was talking about. There’s simply no better description of a bunch of journalists clamoring for quotes and photographs, although “media primates,” “media rioting mob,” or “explosion of a media supernova” might do just as well. Outside the courthouse where Terry’s trial was to take place, there were hundreds of them- sweaty-faced leering men and women of the press, pushing and elbowing and jeering and by their appalling behavior generally degrading the human race in the name of public interest.