I have to think hard here about chronology, because some things from that day are still a little muddled in my mind. This, though, would have been a Saturday. Francis Greer, ringleader of the neighborhood cabal of my youth, and my brother-in-law of several years, had been released from prison a day earlier, and I had every reason to suspect that, while an unwanted guest in my home, Greer had stolen two tickets to a production of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
. I had no particular enthusiasm for this musical (which, I suppose I should mention, starred Donny Osmond), but I had bought the tickets as a gift for my wife, and she had been eager, even excited, to attend. This particular incident might seem relatively minor, and it was probably small pota toes as far as Greer was concerned. There was a long history, however, and the theft of the tickets was one more violation of an old trust and an even older loyalty.
I was seething that morning, and I’d had a spat with my wife Janice over the incident. Her natural inclination was to take her brother’s side in our frequent disagreements regarding his behavior. Janice had gone to work pissed off, Greer was unaccounted for, and I had a day to kill. I’d driven out to the Heights to poke around on the off chance that I’d run into Greer, and to pay a visit to my mother. She wasn’t home—my best guess was that she’d caught the free shuttle to the casino with some of her neighborhood cronies—and pulling up to the curb in front of her house had only served to bring back all sorts of bad memories. So that, at any rate, was how that day had started.
I’ve always known damn well that when you’re lost, the first thing you should do is turn back around, but even the most conventional wisdom is useless to man who is constitutionally incapable of adopting it. I’ve always been a plunger. I just keep going, allowing myself to be carried along and blindly hoping that I’m going to eventually end up right back where I started. And oddly enough, that’s exactly the way it always seems to work out for me, even though right back where I started is precisely the place I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from.
A little useful background: From a very early age Francis Greer had presided over a sort of neighborhood academy of lawlessness, to which I was something of a helpless conscript. There were a bunch of us out there in the Heights, boys of around the same age who had grown up together. We were—thanks, I suppose, to the accident of geography and the influence of environment—an uncommonly tight group all the way through high school. Francis was a persuasive character, with a certain transparently criminal charisma. All through our childhood and adolescence he progressively upped the ante on our illegal exploits until there was no longer any pretending that we were just playing around.
Alone among this group of characters, I should have known better. I was from the good side of Central Avenue; the other four primary members of our little gang were from the other side. Two of them, Slim Chung and his younger brother Randy, lived in the trailer park in Hilltop with their mother Dolores, who was in a wheelchair. Greer lived with Janice and his parents in an apartment building adjacent to the trailer parks. Gilbert Borocha, the patsy of our group, came from a big family and shared a room with a couple siblings in a little house a few blocks south toward downtown, off the avenue, right at the edge of a railroad switching yard.
I recognized from a very early age that my life was substantially different from those of my friends. I grew up in a modest split-level home in a 1950s development. My father was an unambitious small-fry lawyer with his own storefront practice on Central. Every day he wore a suit and carried a briefcase to work, and he drank as much as he worked. Whenever I asked him what he did for a living, he’d say, “It’s not important,” and I never had any doubt that he believed this to the very core of whatever was left of his heart. He’d been a junior associate in a big firm downtown, but after years of being passed over for a partner position he’d apparently gotten the message and bolted for his nickel-and-dime private practice.
My mother is a decent woman, a privately pious housewife, and once upon a time she could actually muster a passable imitation of cheerfulness, at least in comparison with the mothers of my friends. She was tight with my older sister, who was my only sibling. Growing up, I always had whatever I needed, and got most of what I wanted. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I had no excuses.
By the time I went off to the University of Minnesota, every one of my neighborhood pals had acquired juvenile criminal records of varying lengths. Somehow—and to this day I consider this the one miracle I may be given in this life—I managed to avoid the sort of serious trouble that would make such a mess of the lives of my friends. I had—as my mother would say—scrapes with the authorities, and my fair share of close calls, but I always exercised a certain prudence that was, I fully realize, essentially rooted in cowardice. The other members of my little gang were nothing if not imprudent, and after a certain age my primary role in their criminal enterprise became one of the consulting accomplice before and after the fact. I was the smart one, the confidante, the kid who always had to be in at a decent hour.
That didn’t, of course, save me from the clutches of my chums, or, eventually, their predations. There was that old history between us, and for a very long time, perhaps naturally, I retained a soft spot for the people I knew as children. I also lived in a pretty serious state of denial for years; I was basically naïve, and didn’t want to know the details of what Greer and the others were doing. To fully understand the extent of their crimes would have forced me to acknowledge the uneasy truth I had spent most of my life resisting. And the sad fact of the matter was that I had never been very successful at making friends once I left that old neighborhood behind.
At any rate, at one point, when I was married and living in a modest neighborhood in South Minneapolis, the Chung brothers and Gilbert Borocha showed up at my house with what I assumed were stolen tools and lumber, and began to cobble together a version of a serviceable flophouse in my garage. This project—carried out by some combination of my old friends, generally whichever ones weren’t incarcerated or roaming aimlessly around the country committing crimes that would eventually land them back in prison—went on for almost two years, and over time these accommodations became quite elaborate. A presumably stolen portable outhouse appeared in my backyard, stashed behind my garage, and remained there for more than a year. From this little clubhouse off the alley, my friends were free to come and go as they pleased. Perhaps needless to say, this arrangement was difficult to square with my wife and neighbors. I’ll admit it also made me somewhat nervous, but none of my friends ever seemed to stay for any extended period of time, and they never—so far as I was aware, at any rate—caused trouble in the neighborhood.
Then one morning six years ago, I woke to the hysterical racket of crows, and from my kitchen window saw Randy Chung crucified to the picnic table in my backyard. He’d been stripped to his appalling bikini briefs and shot once through the head, apparently (this was determined later) in my garage and sometime before he was nailed to the table. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that it’s difficult for a respectable man’s reputation to survive that sort of scandal. Anybody who has ever made the mistake of keeping questionable company, and allows himself to become however tangentially embroiled in such an ugly incident—which was, of course, all over the local news—learns only too well that though a man can be officially exonerated, he can never again be perceived as truly innocent.
Two characters with whom I was entirely unfamiliar were eventually arrested and convicted for Randy Chung’s murder, and the motive was allegedly some grievance over a drug deal gone bad. I felt terrible about the whole thing, of course. Randy was a simpleton, a quiet guy with a sweet disposition who had spent his entire life tagging around with his older brother Slim. What happened to him was horrifying, and literally beyond the range of my comprehension. And from a purely selfish standpoint, the real shame of it was that at the time I was in the midst of one of my phases as a respectable man, of which there have been several, each of them in their own way reasonably satisfying and successful.
I had never, unfortunately, been able to sustain any of them for long. In the aftermath of Randy Chung’s death, my wife filed for divorce and our house was put on the market and sold.
The older I got the harder it was for me to understand why it was I had such a hard time playing the part of the solid citizen. Because—honest to God—it’s always been easy enough for me to slip into that role. I’ve held three different teaching positions at junior colleges in and around the Twin Cities. For a time I successfully sold advertising for a Christian radio station. Characteristic for me, I’d taken the job out of desperation and found the work easy and, to some extent, satisfying.
Before my present marriage I’d been married twice, both times to wonderful, attractive, and modestly successful women, each of whom to this day maintains a life of the utmost respectability. I also had a teenaged son, made insolent, his mother assured me, by my erratic presence in his life. He was now playing in a band, Lounge Abraham, which, based on the tape I had received in the mail, was a very loud and angry proposition. The last time he came to visit I was stunned to see that he had acquired a tattoo on his arm—he is sixteen years old, which seems to me entirely too young for that sort of thing—that read, “
Death to the Great Satin.
” I was, of course, quick to point out what I felt was an inexcusable misspelling, only to learn that this was apparently an ironic tattoo, an allusion to a handmade T-shirt worn by some infamous psychopath who had shot up a California schoolyard with an assault rifle some years ago.
I couldn’t pretend to understand my life, but I can tell you that I’ve always had legitimate money in the bank. I’ve never missed a car payment, and I’ve now owned three different homes, and would have turned a tidy profit on the first two if it weren’t for complications related to my failed marriages. That said, crash landings and forced reinvention had long been my stock in trade. I can’t tell you how easy it is to burn down your entire life and build a new one from the ground up. The hard part, of course, is to keep the damn thing standing. I’d always felt the key, though, was to do the demolition work yourself, or at least to never let go of the illusion that your self-destruction was purely your own work. It was a point of pride; I never wanted to give someone else the credit for ruining my life. I’d be the first guy to admit that I’d made plenty of bad decisions, but they were my decisions, even when my arm was being twisted so far behind my back that I was practically on my knees.
I’d been coming around on this philosophy, though. Maybe it was a copout, but by this time it seemed plenty clear that I’d allowed these old friends of mine to ruin my life—by not knowing better than to have taken up with them in the first place, certainly, and also by virtue of the fact that I’d never properly distanced myself from them and their behavior, even at the point—which was admittedly long since past—when it became clear that they were all irredeemable. Hell, by this time they’d ruined several of my lives, every one of them perfectly decent, with all the usual trappings, responsibilities, and satisfactions.
Francis Greer was the most complicated of my old friends. He was easily the most intelligent, the most cunning and untrustworthy. Greer had been in prison when Randy Chung was murdered in my garage. In the intervening years I had married Greer’s sister, which was a complicated story in and of itself. I’d known Janice since we were kids, and had an on-again off-again relationship with her going back almost twenty years. The fact that she was helplessly related to Greer (and felt a genuine affection for him) had already created numerous problems in our relationship. Every time Greer got out of jail or needed something he was certain to show up on Janice’s doorstep. Between his two prison terms and a handful of stints in county jails and workhouses, I had long since lost track of his criminal offenses, which always seemed to be compound infractions that ranged from driving under the influence and all manner of moving violations (improper registration, failure to provide insurance, suspended license, stolen plates) to automobile theft, receiving of stolen property, possession and distribution of narcotics, burglary, and parole violations.
Greer had, by this time, spent nearly a third of his life behind bars and he had apparently always approached prison as the ultimate leisure. I’ve said that he was intelligent, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t come out of prison the first time speaking Latin. Over the years he had read more books than I would ever have the time for, had supposedly translated poetry from Spanish, and had spent so much time in prison weight rooms that it seemed like no matter where I went I was sure to encounter a photograph on the refrigerator of a half-naked Greer flexing his muscles.
Thanks early on to our old friendship and later to my relationship with Janice, Greer had maintained a running correspondence with me in the years that he was away. Once, while I was teaching at a junior college in a suburb of St. Paul, he had tried to scam me into signing off on some non-existent coursework he needed to complete a degree. My refusal to do so had resulted in a serious strain in our friendship, and his letters to me became increasingly hostile and condescending.
Around this same time—I was in my late twenties—I wrote and published a crappy little novel, a formulaic thriller that looks increasingly dated and implausible. An agent who was an old college acquaintance of my father sold the book as a paperback original to a fairly prominent publisher, and I received an advance that was nothing if not modest. I was excited by the prospects and felt certain that I was on my way to a career as a writer. There were several delays in the book’s publication—which I was assured was quite routine—and I had to wait more than two years for its arrival in bookstores, only to have all my confidence instantly transformed to outright shame by the appearance of a blurb—attributed to, of all people, Karl Malden—splashed across the front cover: “
I really enjoyed this book!
”