A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

BROTHERLY

LOVE,

BROTHERLY

LOSS

LEXINGTON

1992


They reach a crossroads and stop because the light is red.

Riiiiiiiing.

The woman in the driver's seat picks up the car phone, listens, says Dear God, no.

It's morning, just past rush hour. Outside the Chevrolet Suburban idling at the intersection of North Limestone and New Circle Road, the world is shuddering to a start.

Inside, the world has just shuddered to a halt.

The woman with the phone to her ear is state Rep. Ruth Ann Palumbo of Lexington. Sitting next to her is her second-born son, Joey. Their search for Joey's older brother, Johnny, has just ended.

His father is calling to say he found the boy.

It'll do no good to call 911.

Joey brings his fist down hard on the dash, says Nooooooo.

They will be stuck at this red light for what seems like forever.

This is a story about two brothers who loved each other very much. One dies, one lives.

It's a story about suicide, but it is as much about the one who struggles to keep going as the one who shoots himself.

Less than 10 weeks before his birthday -- he would have turned 17 on Jan. 25 -- Johnny Palumbo walked two doors down the street from his home, past majestic houses on lawns almost as big as football fields, and let himself into his grandparents' house.

That wasn't so unusual. He liked going down to his grandparents' basement to work out on the gym equipment there. And he was dressed for it, in a blue T-shirt with a picture of Michael Jordan, blue shorts and black Air Jordans.

But this time was different. It was late at night. His family thought he was in bed.

Johnny climbed the stairs of the empty house -- his grandparents were away on vacation -- and pried open the gun cabinet. He took out a blue-steel, .38-caliber revolver, went into the bedroom and locked the door.

Once inside the room, Johnny turned on the television to CNN. Who knows how much attention he paid to the news about the freed hostages. And the thing about Oliver North.

The weather was just ending when Johnny pressed the point of a pencil to small sheet of memo paper and wrote "My Will" at the top.

It was 3:41 a.m.

"Give that insurance to my loving brothers," he wrote. "And bank money . . . "

Bank money. Bank money. His pencil skated down the page, drawing a long tail on the y in money. It was late. He was tired. Dozing.

On a second sheet of paper, he wrote: "I was failing out of school.

"I hated it."

He had been thinking about suicide for a couple of weeks, he wrote.

He finished the note with a postscript:

“Sorry about the carpet, Grandma.”

CNN was still droning as he lay down on the floor and put the revolver to his temple.

It was early Monday morning, Nov. 18, but the school week would never begin.

From the start, life was a challenge for Johnny Palumbo. He was born two months premature, too small even to cry. He surprised the doctors when he lived.

For the first three years of his life, he hardly slept. When he started school, he couldn't sit still at his desk. In the cafeteria, he ate twice as much as his classmates but didn't get fat. He was accident prone.

When Johnny was in fifth grade, a doctor diagnosed the problem: The boy had attention deficit disorder, an academic handicap that causes distracted behavior, inattentiveness and hyperactivity.

His parents were paying thousands of dollars each year to send him and his brothers to Sayre School, a private school in downtown Lexington. Although Sayre has a reputation for being academically challenging, it still seemed the right place for Johnny.

"The small classroom situation with individual attention we thought was what Johnny needed," Ruth Ann says.

The Palumbos did everything they could think of to ease Johnny's way. They bought him a tape recorder and tapes to compensate for weak note-taking skills. They bought him books on tape. They paid for tutors and College Planning Services.

And it seemed to be working. Johnny's grades weren't spectacular, but at least his average was above a C.

"He did adequately," says Dr. John Riley, Johnny's pediatrician. "He was passing. He just had to work hard.

"And he did."

Johnny always seemed upbeat, his friends say. But psychiatrists suspect there might have been some anxiety behind the quick smile.

Here was someone with a learning handicap trying to do college preparatory work.

"We always wonder that for everyone who's not successful, did we make an admissions mistake?" Sayre headmaster Clayton Chambliss says.

"He had moments of success. His academic record was peaks and valleys."

All this trying, and in a family that seemed to have it easy.

Here's Ruth Ann, a respected legislator and community activist with a warm, genuine smile for everybody she meets.

And here's her husband, Lexington businessman John A. Palumbo II -- quieter but every bit as friendly.

They were the perfect family. Every year they sent out Christmas cards with the annual holiday portrait of the boys.

All four sons -- Johnny, Joey, Jamie and Stephen -- hated dressing up alike and posing for a portrait each year, but they conceded it as their Christmas gift to their mother.

"Whenever I write a book," Ruth Ann says, "I'll pull out all the pictures and say, 'This is the way it was for a happy family.'

"And then your heart's broken."

The only constant through all 15 pictures is the presence of the two older brothers, Johnny and Joey. Their birthdays fall within a week of each other. They were born a year and five days apart, and they were close. Very close. Best friends.

But if you look closely at the second-to-last photo -- the one from 1989 -- you will see Johnny, the older brother, standing on his tiptoes to be as tall as Joey.

The younger brother only recently had outgrown the older.

Joey was surpassing Johnny in other ways, too. It wasn't anybody's fault. But it meant the older brother frequently had to ask the younger for help with his homework.

The soft-spoken Joey also grew to be more popular at school than Johnny, who was livelier and more outspoken.

Of Johnny, neighbor and classmate Steve Johnson says: "He was liked by everybody. But he was not going to be the homecoming king."

Many things Johnny found hard, Joey found easy. Joey, a sophomore, even surpassed Johnny, a junior, on the basketball court. The older brother had a hard time learning how to run the plays.

Just as Joey was becoming a vital member of the varsity team, Johnny was demoted to junior varsity.

Nobody felt worse about it than Joey. Johnny seemed to take it in stride. "I'm just glad to be on the team," he would say.

But one night as Joey climbed into his mother's car to go home after a game, he wept.

"I'm not going to play without Johnny," he said. "I don't want to see him hurt."

"Your quitting isn't going to help Johnny," Ruth Ann said.

"We'll work this out together."

Nobody was too worried about Johnny, though. He seemed so strong.

"He was true to his values," Steve Johnson says. "One time at a party, everybody was drinking, and he was saying, 'This is wrong. Nobody should be doing this.'

"He never did."

Johnny seemed so mature, so at ease with adults. Sure, he loved to laugh and cut up. And he had that fun-loving swagger when playing basketball with Joey.

But he had a tender, patient side, too -- especially with relatives and with young children he met on church youth missions.

Sheer determination enabled Johnny to succeed at some things, Sayre soccer coach Les Chapman says. After Johnny decided to take up soccer last year for the first time in a long time, he got so good at it that Chapman was forced to start him.

He made up for his inexperience with lots of hustle.

"He had a big heart," Chapman says.

"When your heart's that big and it breaks . . . "

It spells trouble. Nobody knew yet the full extent of Johnny's impulsiveness.

"There's something about adolescence and impulsivity and depression," says Dr. Catherine Martin, a psychiatrist at the University of Kentucky. "It's a dangerous combination."

Johnny often acted on whims he regretted later. One night last summer, on the way home from a double-header at the drive-in, he stopped the car suddenly near some orange construction-site cones.

"Get out, man, grab a cone," he told Steve.

"Why?" Steve asked.

"Just do it. I want one for my room," Johnny said.

Johnson obliged, and they laughed the whole way home.

"I'm glad you did that," Johnny said. "I really wanted one." But that night, alone, he sneaked the cone back.

Johnny's parents talked to him about not letting him drive the car -- his grandfather's Jaguar XJ6 -- until his grades improved. It had worked before. And it was better than giving up basketball, which the Kentucky High School Athletic Association would force him to do if his grades weren't satisfactory.

The night of Nov. 17, Johnny called schoolmate Jamie Durham and told him his grades weren't so good. But he sounded like the same old Johnny.

"Every time I talked to him, he would say his grades weren't good," Jamie says. "So it didn't faze me one bit."

Later that night, Johnny asked Joey for help with his chemistry homework, and Johnny talked about what he wanted to be when he grew up: a police officer.

There was no sign anything was wrong.

"I've been looking for the answer," Ruth Ann says. "Why was this night any different from any other night?"

All Ruth Ann knows is he didn't come down from his attic bedroom when she called him the next morning.

When had he left the house? Had he gone to bed that night?

The only person who knows is Johnny. Ruth Ann wrote him a letter Jan. 2:

Johnny --

Why Why Why. I wish I knew.

I never knew you suffered so.

Coping has been almost impossible.

The youngest boy, Stephen, is an indomitable 11-year-old. He built a nativity scene for the front hall, complete with a Baby Jesus and a wood chip with a face drawn on it. That's Johnny, he says.

But even he has had dreams.

Jamie, 13, and his father don't talk much about what happened.

And Ruth Ann: She has struggled, too. New Year's Eve was especially hard. Midnight marked the end of Johnny's last year. "It was like closing the casket again," she says.

Many nights she wakes up at 3:30 a.m. And she can barely bring herself to discipline the boys. But she knows she must.

"You couldn't love them without disciplining them," she says. "That's not love.

"Love is hard."

Love has been hardest on Joey. At first he blamed himself for Johnny's death.

Joey surprised his parents when he stood up at the funeral and began talking spontaneously about his beloved brother.

His voice was strained and soft.

"I really don't have anything to say right now," he said, "but my brother would always speak up for me, so I just think I owe this to him.

"We were the closest two people in the world. No two people could have what we had. I'm just so glad we had something as special as we did for my life.

"Even though now I'm gonna have to do it on my own."

Right after Johnny died, Joey tried to replace his brother by becoming him. Joey wore Johnny's signet ring; he traded in his jersey number 44 for Johnny's number 35; he wouldn't let his mother clean out Johnny's locker.

He even asked the coach what Johnny ate before each game. But being a teen-ager, Johnny ate anything and everything.

The Friday after Johnny died, Ruth Ann gathered her boys and asked whether any of them ever had thought about suicide.

The answer took her breath away.

"I felt like that all day long," Joey told her. "All I wanted to do was be with Johnny.

"I won't do it. But when the Lord comes -- and I hope it's tomorrow -- I'll be first in line."

Joey has had trouble focusing on his school work. Right before final exams last week, he went to his mother seeking help. She was so glad. It was a good sign.

It was the first time she had heard him mention Johnny voluntarily since the funeral.

Joey told his mother he couldn't concentrate because he was having flashbacks about his brother at least six times an hour. But they're working that out now. Slowly.

"The kid smiles now," Chapman says. "He's back to the old Joey. He wasn't Joey for awhile."

One drizzly night less than two weeks ago, his dreaded chemistry final over and done with, Joey seemed to his mother like he hadn't seemed since before Johnny's death. For one thing, there was a special about Elvis Presley on TV that had Joey acting silly.

Like a kid again.

The unbridled passion of youth might have dragged this family into the abyss, but it also is their best hope for climbing out.

The light is green and the road is wide open.

"Elvis lives!" Joey says, and his mother smiles.


POOR

MAN'S

RACE

HORSE

SPEARS

1992


The cars and trucks crunch and pop and bounce up the long gravel drive, carrying doomed chickens to the droopy tin building at the back of Tommy DeMoss's farm.

It's Sunday morning. A few miles away, in Lexington, the Christian Church is preaching "Alertness to Temptation." The lesson at the Presbyterian church just up the road is, "Accept Christ's word of forgiveness and practice it."

Out here, Derrick Foresman Sr. simply tells his son, "Hold the right leg back and kick the left leg out like this."

Welcome to the underside of the Bible belt. Derrick Sr. is showing 14-year-old Derrick Jr. how to hold a chicken so he can lash a steel spur onto the bird's leg and send him into battle. Cockfighting Kentucky-style is a family affair.

DeMoss, who says he hasn't touched a drop of alcohol in his 65 years, won't

abide beered-up rednecks at his cockfights. The crowd propped up on the ragged wooden bleachers and tattered old theater seats in his little tin building is as diverse and well-mannered as a church congregation.

Cockfighters insist this largely Southern sport stands for all that's right and good: family, diligence, devotion, conscientiousness, hard work and sacrifice.

"It's not something good people don't do," says Joe McCord of Winchester. On the contrary: Cockfighting is practically a religion to those who participate. Men like McCord and DeMoss live for their birds.

"We're slaves to 'em," DeMoss says.

"The game chicken is a poor man's racehorse," says McCord, 75. "We take better care of these chickens than we take of our wives."

Still, many cockfighters shy away from publicity and outsiders because of the controversy the sport stirs. DeMoss's Jessamine County spread is less than 10 miles from the office towers and shopping malls of downtown Lexington, but it is hidden in the countryside.

Those who disapprove see cockfighting as nothing short of a sin. A Kentucky lawmaker in the 1992 General Assembly is trying to make it illegal, too.

"It's not one of our prouder traditions, and I think it is a cruel and a violent entertainment," says Pat Freibert, a Republican lawmaker from Lexington.

Cockfighting is illegal in 44 states, 16 of which have made it a felony. Kentucky is one of only six states where the sport is legal. The others are Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

The Humane Society of the United States offers a $2,500 reward for information about illegal cockfights.

Since last May, authorities in Ohio and Tennessee have arrested hundreds of people and rescued almost 1,000 birds during raids on cockfighting pits, says Jim Tedford of the Humane Society's regional office.

They also have confiscated drugs and weapons.

As for the chickens, the Ohio judge ordered most of them returned to their owners, but his Tennessee counterpart ordered the confiscated birds destroyed.

"It's a sad ending," Tedford said, "but not nearly as sad as death in the pit."

It's a big day for the Foresmans.

Derrick Sr., his wife, Sue, and Derrick's twin sons, Derrick Jr. and Samuel, have driven from Richmond to compete in their first cockfighting derby together.

Sue was so wound up last night she didn't get to sleep until 5 a.m.

About 40 people have rolled in for the four-cock derby. Gathered around the pit are old couples in plaid flannel, young couples in University of Kentucky sweatshirts and teen-agers who would look at home on skateboards.

A squirmy 2-year-old boy sits in his mother's lap and clutches a Mickey Mouse doll.

Each participant will fight four roosters one time each, and whoever can claim the most victories at the end of the afternoon takes home the $300 pot of entry fees.

DeMoss matches the entries by weight as he sits on the edge of an old airline seat in a little plywood booth near the ceiling.

A bare light bulb and a handful of wasps hang just over his head. The sharp ends of exposed nails jut through the low ceiling.

Below, men mill around on the dirt floor, munching on hamburgers and ham sandwiches from the concession stand. The crowd isn't as big as those DeMoss enjoyed when he built his arena 16 years ago -- well before cockfighting became legal in 1980.

Now a grand, new 700-seat pit in Montgomery County is about to put DeMoss out of business. "A country store cannot compete with Kroger's," he says.

Many of DeMoss's seats remain empty on Sundays. The backs of those reserved for regulars are painfully visible, revealing the hand-scrawled names there of those who might have opted for the Montgomery County pit:

Dotsen. Clem. Wilson.

Mr. Bowlin.

DeMoss's farm just south of Lexington used to be the only place to go for cockfighting in Central Kentucky. "I've had ex-governors here, several state senators and representatives, a couple of preachers," he says.

"We've had sheriffs, deputies and parole officers, too."

People come for the gambling, competition and camaraderie "You can find out how good a fella's tobacco crop was or who's sick," DeMoss says.

Sue Foresman tries to hold a rooster while her husband lashes a 2 1/2-inch steel spur to each of its scrawny yellow legs, but she can't get the hang of it.

"I'll teach you on the next one," Derrick Sr. promises as he takes the chicken from her and hands it to his son.

They get the spurs on and walk into the dim building to weigh the chicken and send it into battle.

"I bet 10 on the redhead," a man sitting in the bleachers shouts as Derrick and his opponent approach the pit. Nobody here seems to heed the hand-drawn "No Gambling" sign on the wall.

"Do it for Sue, Derrick," a bearded man yells, cackling loudly.

Foresman's first fight is against Tommy "Taterhead" Begley of Richmond -- "just a poor man tryin' to have some fun."

Taterhead wears a black T-shirt that shows the tattoos on his arms. Foresman wears a plaid flannel shirt and a Camel cigarettes cap.

They walk to the center of the 15-foot-wide pit at the center of the arena, chickens tucked under their arms, and let the birds peck at each other for a few seconds.

From her seat in the bleachers, Sue stares intently through the wire mesh surrounding the pit.

Derrick and Taterhead back off and crouch eight feet apart on opposite sides of a white square drawn in the dirt.

"Pit," the referee says, and the men turn their roosters loose.

The birds half fly, half leap across the square and slam into each other, neck feathers bristling like the fur on a angry cat.

Wings snap-snap-snap and feathers fly.

Derrick and Taterhead watch intently, each bent slightly at the waist. The birds get tangled, and the men bend over the mass of feathers to gingerly pull them apart.

Then they start over.

Foresman's chicken is getting the best of Taterhead's bird, which has been reduced largely to pecking. Between rounds, Taterhead blows on his bird's back to warm it. He puts its head in his mouth to rescuscitate it and suck out the blood clots.

Then he props it up on the line.

Foresman pulls the opponent's feathers from his chicken's beak, claws and spurs and places his bird on the line, too.

There is not much blood to see. The gaffs make clean wounds and the feathers conceal the wounds. The heads and feet, raw and matted with blood, tell the story of the fight best.

As the chickens get weaker, the referee instructs Foresman and Taterhead to put them on the smaller, 16-inch square in the middle of the pit so they don't have to go as far to get at each other.

Foresman's chicken wins the fight, and Taterhead carries his limp bird out of the pit. Like most losers, it's still alive, but just barely. A chicken loses by dying or by not pecking anymore.

At the end of the day, the ground outside the arena will be littered with the carcasses of dead chickens.

Sometimes matches continue long after a chicken has lost the will to fight. Foresman was involved in a three-hour fight one day, Sue says. When a chicken can no longer stand, it's placed on the line sitting down.

As long as it can still move its head to peck, it must continue the fight.

The fight over, Derrick cuts the tape off his chicken's leg. His hand shakes. "He gets hyped up," Sue says, smiling.

Like most cockfighters, he takes this seriously. On Mondays, he feeds corn to his birds-in-training. On Tuesday, it's cottage cheese and peaches. He lets them listen to he radio -- country music or basketball games -- so they'll get used to crowd noise.

Now, even though his chicken won, Derrick is not entirely happy. His bird didn't show a killer instinct, didn't attack Taterhead's chicken when it was down. It acted like a big -- well . . .

"I don't like that lettin' up," Derrick says.

"That's when they'll get up and kill ya," a friend tells him.

The fresh, peaceful sound of crowing roosters never fades at DeMoss's farm. It's the song of the country, and you can hear it any day.

Don't let it fool you.

These birds are not peaceful at all, DeMoss says. They want to fight. All the time. He keeps them tethered to poles in a field so they can't get at each other.

It's a common sight along Kentucky's backroads.

"If the good Lord didn't want 'em to fight, why he woulda made 'em different," DeMoss says.

Thunder rumbles across the gray late-winter sky.

DeMoss sees nothing wrong with cockfighting. "They say it's cruel. It's also cruel to stick a worm on a hook."

"A game rooster's got to fight about two hours in his lifetime, and he lives perfect the rest of the time," McCord says.

Owners generally only fight a rooster once a weekend. And they don't keep fighting a good chicken until his luck runs out, DeMoss says. They're worth more as broodcocks, which is what many of DeMoss's are.

DeMoss doesn't fight his roosters as much as he used to, but he still sells a lot. A good one will bring up to $300.

Still, there's no money to be made in all this, McCord says. "If I had all the money I've thrown away on chickens, I'd be rich," he says.

"I spend more on feed alone than I make from winnings."

Cockfighting is a labor of love.

"It's a form of insanity," McCord says.