A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about Richard Kunkel. Big things were expected of that poor fellow. Certainly no one believed that such a fine, bright boy as Richard Kunkel would stick around a tiny little jerkwater village like ours for the rest of his life. Many assumed Kunkel would join the Armed Forces like his father had, and would rise quickly through the ranks. Others thought certain that he would become a supper club singer, what with that fine voice of his. He was always getting up to sing at parties and special occasions around town, and he knew all the songs from the famous Broadway shows. As for myself, well, I thought perhaps Richard Kunkel would carve out a place for himself in the political arena. I always pictured him smiling and waving from the back of a train, waving goodbye to that little town of ours forever.
But no, sir, it turns out that our Richard Kunkel didn’t have the ambition God gave a field mouse, and he never went anywhere. As he grew older it was always one odd job around town after another. The fellow couldn’t seem to hold a position to save his soul, and it was the death of his poor mother. After a time rumors began to circulate that Richard had a fondness for liquor and played cards with the priests for money. He never married, but he never did stop being the same friendly, outgoing Richard Kunkel the town had known as a boy. He never amounted to a hill of beans, either, which saddened all of us. You like to see your bright young people go out into the world to make something of themselves.
Then one year Richard Kunkel did an unusual and entirely unexpected thing, a rather scandalous thing in our little scheme of things. Richard recruited some children from the church youth group and mounted a Christmas pageant from a play he had apparently written himself, based on some of the questionable stories regarding St. Nicholas of Myra. In actuality the play had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas and focused almost entirely on the legend of St. Nicholas’ resuscitation of three boys –Timothy, Mark, and John– who had allegedly been slaughtered, pickled, and sold as meat during a fourth century famine. This peculiar incident was described by Richard Kunkel –and most clumsily enacted by his rankly amateur players– in obsessive and grotesque detail, complete with much shrieking, writhing, and the liberal spilling of false blood.
This inappropriate production was staged as a prelude to a chili dinner in the church basement, and needless to say whatever point Richard was trying to make was entirely lost on the horrified spectators, most of whom were elderly folks from the local senior citizen center who had come expecting some celebration of the spirit of the season.
Richard –playing a filthy and half-dressed pawnbroker (St. Nicholas being the patron saint of pawn brokers, or so Kunkel explained in the program notes)– narrated the play with a disturbing and incoherent zeal. There was much speculation that Richard was, in fact, intoxicated, speculation which was perhaps fueled by the fact that his character was swilling messily from a large bottle of whiskey throughout the production. A prop, Richard later claimed, but there were few believers.
People need to recognize the effect one untoward incident can have on a man’s reputation in a small town. I’m not saying it’s always fair and square, but after Richard Kunkel’s little lark at the church dinner people’s attitudes towards him changed. He’d been a bit of a disappointment to that point, but this was something else entirely. Richard Kunkel went from a boy with failed promise to the sort of mystery nobody really wanted around. It’s sad, but that’s the way of the world. He finally left town a year or so later, and the word around here is that he’s working at a Fleet Farm up in Rochester these days.
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