From the dim recesses of my past comes swimming up a memory of Pee-Chee Pocket Portfolios (the pocket portfolio of choice for the sophisticated schoolboy on the go). Each one had some of the most obscure tables of references ever provided to a suburban American youth of the 1960’s printed on the flap. And lo and behold, the one that mentioned the unit of area known as a township finally corresponded to something I have encountered as an adult!
A surveyor’s report always makes reference to these measurements. “Congressional District 7, Township 19, Section 14, Range 3, Corner 2” etc., then begins with the “832 feet from…”.
Some townships have names whether there are people in them or not. Weokahatchee was a name given to a Range that was given to a section on the 19th century survey of my father’s property and it’s a name I’ve never seen in any other source. I know it’s a Muskogee name but I don’t know what it means*. It appears in no signs and on no official documents that I’ve ever seen and to my knowledge I’m the only one who uses it. I do so because the place really had no name other than that. The mailing address was originally Lake Jordan, then Equality for a while, and eventually Titus, but the land isn’t remotely close to any of those settlements.
My favorite names of towns in Alabama, incidentally, are Slapout, Smuteye, Eclectic and Barbecue. If you drive down I-65 there’s a stretch of road where every exit is for two small towns and each sounds like the name of a blue haired old Southern woman and they’re begging to be incorporated as fictional characters into a book; the exits are Grace Garland, Pintala Tyson and Georgiana Starlington.
*[SIZE=1]hatchee was the Creek Indian suffix for “water” but I honestly don’t know what Weoka means. It figures in other place names in Alabama and Oklahoma (which shares a lot of placenames with Alabama due to the decision of the Creek Indians to move there after early settlers struck Turquoise Bolo and a Stuckeys there in the 1830s).
I had no idea who they really were until the lawsuit outed them. Even if they win the lawsuit, this is just going to bring that much more attention to them.
It’s going to be an interesting case. The most damning accusations he made in the book are that:
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Turcotte let his 13 year old daughter live with/have sex with a very wealthy middle aged client
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Turcotte allowed, if not encouraged, Burroughs as an adolescent to be molested repeatedly and continually for several years by another of his patients (an unofficially adopted son) who in the book Burroughs calls Neil Bookman.
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Turcotte raped Burroughs’ mother while she was drugged, suffering from a depressive cycle and a patient under his care.
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The family kept an absolutely filthy house that was filled with live-in mental patients.
Of the above:
1- Turcotte did do this- at very least he was found guilty of it by the state of MA. It’s why he lost his license to practice psychiatry.
2- Burroughs admits that Bookman is a pseudonym and that he has had no contact with him since childhood and that he doesn’t know if he’s living or dead. This will be very difficult for him to confirm or for the family to refute.
3- Turcotte is not alive to defend himself and Burroughs’ mother is estranged from him and crazy and has many health problems (which include being a stroke victim). Whether or not she’ll corroborate his claim under oath may be interesting, and if she does she could prove easy to discredit due to her stroke and past history of delusive illness.
4- This would be easy to confirm or verify with the testimony of others who saw the house in that time or with photographs.
If Burroughs has an insurance company they’ll probably offer the cost of defense to the family to drop the suit. It honestly sounds to me like the family wants money (again, why wait three years after the book’s a best seller to file suit?).
What bodes best for Burroughs is that Turcotte himself was found guilty of criminal neglect of his daughter (no jail time, but probation and surrender of his medical license) and other extremely bizarre behavior (among other things he was arrested for stalking Bill Cosby) and was the recipient of several malpractice lawsuits in his own lifetime. He died penniless due to legal fees, an IRS debt and inability to pursue a medical career in his last few years, which would also create motive for why the family wants money. I can’t imagine them walking away with a big verdict, but it’s frustrating that Burroughs (who, incidentally, comes across as a self centered self exonerating monumental prick in his latest book [Magical Thinking]) will have to pay six figure legal fees when at most he’s probably well within a Standard Deviation of what actually happened.