Twin Cities Noir

BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME by Brad Zellar Columbia Heights (Minneapolis)

For years, every time I drive up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights I’d start feeling like I had the barrel of a gun jabbed in the small of my back. If I hung around the place long enough, I knew damn well I’d eventually have that gun between my teeth, and every night when I went to bed I’d lie awake with the taste of iron and oil in my mouth. I grew up out there in the Heights, and my old neighborhood was the bit I’d never been able to spit.

Whenever I made that trip over the last couple decades I’d always had better things to do, and this particular occasion was no different.

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!”

As far as I know the book received exactly one review, a brief and entirely dismissive notice in the Minneapolis paper. Greer, from his cloister in prison, somehow managed to get his hands on that review, which he was kind enough to send to me along with a snide critique of his own.

The Friday afternoon that Greer was released from prison, Janice had driven out to Stillwater to pick him up. That evening we hosted—very much against my wishes—a party at our home in northeast Minneapolis. This was the second time I’d been forced to celebrate in a similar manner Greer’s surely undeserved freedom, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand what there was to celebrate. My wife, unfortunately, had inherited her mother’s denial as surely as Francis had received his no-account criminal disposition from his father.

It was a mercifully small gathering. Slim Chung and Gilbert Borocha were there, as well as Greer’s mother (lurching around the room with a cigarette clenched in her teeth and her oxygen rack gripped in her emaciated fist) and a handful of people who were mostly strangers to me. I had to hand it to Greer. He was a smooth and handsome character, a first-rate actor who could charm the pants off the most chaste woman in any room. He worked the party like he was running for office, and as the rest of the guests became progressively more inebriated, he never seemed to show the effects of the prodigious amounts of alcohol he was consuming.

It had been my understanding that Francis would not be staying at our house the night of the party, but as had so often been the case, my understanding was seriously flawed. After the last of the guests departed, he was still there at my kitchen table regaling Janice with some story, and a short time later my wife was hauling blankets and pillows out into the living room to make up Greer’s bed on the couch.

Disgusted, I went up the stairs to my study. I had papers to correct and my mood was darkening by the hour. It was never good news when Greer showed up on my doorstep, and I thought I had noticed some clearly conspiratorial conversations between Francis, Borocha, and Slim Chung at several points in the evening. When Janice came up to bed I gave her the silent treatment. It was impossible to talk with her about Francis without setting off a prolonged argument.

I later ventured downstairs (I have a difficult time sleeping under the best of circumstances, and having Francis Greer under my roof made me even more restless than usual) and found him sprawled on the couch watching a pay-for-view porn movie on my television.

“That’s going to show up on my records,” I said to him.

“Yeah, Richie, I’m sure those records are of a great deal of interest to many people,” Greer said. “Someone’s probably scrutinizing them as we speak.”

“You’ve been away, Francis,” I said. “Things have changed. That sort of information is widely and irresponsibly disseminated these days. The real issue here is that I don’t recall you asking my permission to dick around with my cable. You do understand that I’ll be billed for that?”

“Relax, Rich. I’ll go out first thing in the morning and sell some plasma so I can repay you your seven bucks. Would that make you happy?”

“What would make me very happy,” I said, “was if you would go out first thing in the morning and find someplace else to stay. You must have friends here. Janice has mentioned that you were corresponding with a number of women while you were in prison.”

“Those were old women, Richie. Christians.”

“I’m sure old Christian women have homes and spare bedrooms,” I said.

“Fuck you, Rich,” Greer said. “You’ve really been getting on my nerves.”

“I’d like nothing better than to get on your nerves, Francis,” I told him. “You’ve already brought more than enough trouble into my life. So fuck you, too, and goodnight. And I’m absolutely serious: I want you out of here first thing in the morning.”

The next morning Janice came up to tell me that Francis was gone. She was alarmed and wanted to know if I had any idea of where he might be. I told her, of course, that I had no clue, which was certainly the truth. I had no intention of recounting the conversation I’d had with Greer before I went up to bed. Janice was visibly upset and a short time later she left in a sulk for her part-time job at Target.

As I sat down to drink my morning coffee and read the newspaper it occurred to me that this was the day we were to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoatat the State Theater downtown. We had planned to have dinner somewhere beforehand. I went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen, where the tickets had been pinned next to the calendar. My intention was simply to confirm the date, but I discovered that the tickets were gone.

At this point Francis Greer couldn’t have been further from my mind. There were any number of things in my home that I might have suspected Greer of stealing, but tickets to a Broadway show were not among them. I called Janice on her cell phone.

“Do you have the tickets to that Donny Osmond show?” I asked her.

“Oh shit, that’s tonight, isn’t it?” she said. “They’re on the bulletin board in the kitchen.”

“They’re not there. And what’s with this ‘oh shit’ business? I thought you wanted to see that fucking show.”

“I did,” Janice said. “But look, Richard, I just heard from Francis. He told me that you kicked him out of the house in the middle of the night. He’s very hurt.”

“Jesus, Janice, I did no such thing. Francis is a pathological liar.”

“Francis might be a lot of things, Richard, but one thing he’s not is a liar.”

“That just goes to show you how good of a liar he is,” I said. “If you honestly believe I kicked him out of the house in the middle of the night, you’re out of your mind. I simply asked him what his plans were.”

“Last night wasn’t the time for that, Richard. Francis hadn’t even been out of jail for twenty-four hours.”

“Prison, Janice,” I said. “Francis was in prison. There’s a difference there I think you should be aware of.”

“Oh fuck, Richard. I don’t have time for this.”

“Where the hell are those tickets?” I asked.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Janice said. “I just told you. They were on the bulletin board.”

“They’re not there. Are you sure you didn’t put them in your purse or something?”

“I’m positive. I never touched those tickets, and I don’t feel like going to the damn thing now, anyway. I told Francis I would meet up with him later.”

“Jesus, Janice,” I said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

She hung up the phone.

I spent the morning fuming, and tried with little success to get through the pile of freshmen composition papers on my desk. By late morning I was sitting in the living room with the blinds drawn, drinking beer and watching women’s beach volleyball. The phone rang at one point and when I answered I heard only silence on the other line, and then whoever was calling hung up on me. I checked the number on the caller-ID and saw that it was from a pay phone in Columbia Heights.

I showered, dressed, and drove out to the Heights. As I’ve said, I was just killing time. When my mother wasn’t home I cruised through Hilltop to see if by chance Greer was staying at Slim Chung’s, but got no answer when I knocked at the door of his trailer.

I was restless and ended up at this place on Central Avenue where I liked to play ping-pong. I’ve always found the back-and-forth, gnip-gnop nature of the game relaxing. It involved a concentrated engagement with a sort of reality that didn’t involve actually feeling anything. The place attracted a crowd of blank obsessives, and I seldom communicated with any of my partners beyond the rudiments of keeping score.

That afternoon I played several games with a pigeon-toed old priest I often saw there. The guy played a very aggressive game with a lot of topspin. I’ve never been much of a player, and the priest kicked my ass every game. When I arrived he had been slapping ferocious returns at one of the weird little ping-pong robots this place had installed in a corner.

After I left, I headed downtown and spent a couple hours drinking and watching a baseball game in Runyon’s. I honestly had no clear idea what I was up to, other than acting on a hunch I had no reason to trust. At a quarter to 7:00 I left the bar and walked down Hennepin Avenue, where I took up a surveillance position in a bus shelter across the street from the State Theater. Donny Osmond’s name was stretched across the marquee. I waited probably ten or fifteen minutes before people started showing up in front of the theater.

Almost surely, I thought, if in fact Greer had taken the tickets it had been merely to spite me, but I also felt there was a possibility—Greer being a notorious philanderer, and now fancying himself something of a man of culture—that he would actually use the damn things to impress some woman. It was a long shot, I realized, but I figured he would have noticed the stiff price on the tickets and he was nothing if not an opportunist.

About a half hour before the scheduled performance, I saw Greer coming down the sidewalk toward the theater. He had a new haircut and the rolling swagger of an ex-con. He was wearing a pressed pair of slacks, a dress shirt open at the neck, and a suit jacket that I recognized as one of my own. I watched as Greer approached a group of people milling around under the marquee. He had his back toward me, but several members of the group bent their heads toward him and a conversation ensued. One of the men talking with Greer turned and waved a woman over. The man and woman conferred briefly and then the man fished some cash from his pocket, counted out some bills, and handed them over to Greer, who in turn gave the woman my tickets. He completed this transaction with a wide smile and an absolutely phony attempt at a courtly bow.

After handing over the tickets, Greer headed north back down the sidewalk. I gave him a half-block head start before following, from the other side of the avenue, at what I felt was a safe distance. He was walking at a brisk clip, and the sidewalks along Block E were crowded. When I saw Greer turn down 6th Street I had to make a dash through traffic to avoid losing him. I pulled up short in the middle of the block on the Hennepin Avenue side and watched him cross at the light to the other side of the street. There was a moment when I turned the corner that I was walking almost parallel with him, but I was stopped in my tracks when I saw him raise his arm and let out a shout. I looked east and spied Janice coming up the sidewalk from the opposite direction. I ducked into the exit of a parking ramp and watched as they embraced. Christ, I thought, anybody else would take them for lovers. Janice even took Greer’s hand as they continued down the street and ducked into Murray’s, the steak place where Janice and I had celebrated our engagement.

At this point things got very dark and confused. I’ve never been a violent man, and I don’t even have much in the way of a temper. The rush of almost blinding rage that I felt building behind my eyes was startling to me. I broke out in an uncharacteristic sweat, and experienced what I felt sure was a panic attack.

I paced back and forth on the sidewalk opposite Murray’s, infuriated by my inability to simply barge in and confront Janice and Greer with their deception. I’ve always despised public scenes. That, at any rate, was my dim and cowardly rationale at the time.

I tried to think my way through the situation, but I couldn’t get my head around it. Greer, I felt certain, did not have transportation, unless he’d somehow borrowed a car from one of his criminal acquaintances, or—and this was certainly a possibility—stolen one. Janice would have driven her own car downtown, and must have parked in one of the ramps near Murray’s. I crossed the street and spent half an hour wandering the levels of the garage nearest the steakhouse, but I didn’t stumble across Janice’s Honda.

My car was parked over on Washington Avenue, and I thought of moving it someplace nearer, but there was no metered parking anywhere around Murray’s. I figured I had perhaps an hour to hatch some plan of confrontation. A short time later, feeling increasingly desperate, I headed back down Hennepin to get my car. I have no idea how long I spent circling blocks on the maddening system of one-way streets that comprises downtown Minneapolis, but it felt like I trolled past Murray’s at least twenty-five times.

Finally, just as I was turning down 6th Street one more time, I saw Janice and Greer emerge from the restaurant. I immediately pulled my car to the curb and illegally parked. I didn’t have to wait long. They exchanged a few more words, Janice fished in her purse and handed Greer what was almost certainly cash, and then they embraced one more time and parted. Janice headed east along the sidewalk and Greer strolled west toward the heart of downtown. Sixth was a one-way going in the opposite direction, so I had to circle back around again onto Hennepin. At the intersection of 6th I saw Greer on the next block, and I drove up to 5th and wound my way back around to First Avenue. As I turned the corner I encountered Greer, perhaps fifty yards away, getting into a beat-to-shit blue Impala. I stopped and waited for him to exit his parking space, and then I followed him east through downtown and onto 35 south.

There was almost no traffic on the interstate at that hour—it must have been around 10:30—and Greer was driving at a surprisingly modest speed. I was trying to stay back at least several hundred yards, but I had to resist the growing urge to overtake him and drive him off the road. At the Crosstown Highway he turned off 35 and headed east again, toward the airport.

Holy shit, I thought. That fucker was going to climb on a plane and skip town, probably with money he’d received from my wife. Greer continued right past the exits to the airport, though, and steered the Impala south onto highway 52. I was in familiar territory—I’d once taught at a junior college out that way—but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Greer might have been headed in that direction. There was nothing much out there but drowsy suburban development, the grimy industrial sprawl beyond the airport, and a giant oil refinery, the gleaming spectacle of which was already visible in the distance.

Greer kept plunging further south, and I was blindly determined to stay on his tail, for what purpose I still had absolutely no idea.

He eventually pulled into the parking lot of a desolate-looking strip motel. The sign out front was faded and dark, and if it weren’t for the presence of several pickup trucks backed up to rooms, the place would have appeared abandoned. I passed it and turned into the first street that I came to on the opposite side of the highway. I swung the car around and parked. The motel was perhaps two hundred yards away, and I could still see Greer’s brake lights in the parking lot. The driver’s side door was half open, illuminating the car’s interior. Greer was clearly visible to me, and it appeared he was leaning over in the seat, studying something.

I popped my trunk, got out of the car, and fished a tire iron from the wheel well. Without thinking I dashed across the highway and crept along the edge of the service road toward the motel.

There was a cluster of scrub maples and weeds at the southern edge of the place, and I crouched in the darkness, breathing heavily, waiting for Greer to make a move. It seemed like I waited a long time. Greer remained slumped in the front seat. I could hear strains of rock music coming from the open door of the car.

Tiptoeing from the brush, I managed to get within perhaps twenty feet of the Impala, where I took shelter behind one of the trucks. I could smell marijuana, and peering across through the windows of the truck’s cab I could see Greer, almost reclining, his head tilted back and his eyes closed, taking a long drag from a joint.

I crawled around the back of the truck and moved to a position directly behind the Impala. It took me perhaps two seconds to lunge forward and fling the car door wide open. Greer sat up straight, started to speak, and then turned his upper body away from me. The first time I swung the tire iron I hit him directly across the back of his head, almost at the base of his neck. When he hunched forward over the steering wheel, I hit him again, and he rolled over onto his back in the front seat. His eyes opened wide for a moment and then closed, and I heard a pitiful moan as I turned and ran.

Back at my car I settled in behind the wheel and tried to stop trembling. I rolled down the window and flung the tire iron out into the grass. I’d never really hit anyone in my life, and it was a strange, almost euphoric experience. The combination of rage and ecstasy is a feeling that I would have certainly described at that moment as wonderful. I tried to remember if I had said anything to Greer before I swung the tire iron, but I had no recollection, and regretted that I had not made some memorable statement. I also tried to recall at exactly what point, if ever, my actions had been premeditated. Did I even have what I could classify as a real memory of the moment I decided on a precise course of action, the instant I went to the trunk and removed the tire iron? I honestly don’t believe I did. The whole thing just happened, but I felt an immense sense of satisfaction, and had absolutely no regard for potential consequences.

The bottom line was that Francis Greer had ruined my life, perhaps once and for all. And at that point, sitting there in the darkness alongside the highway, I truly didn’t care. In that moment, for the first time in my life, the future literally did not exist in my mind.

I started driving back into the city. Somewhere en route I turned off highway 52 onto a dark little county road. There was no real thought involved in this decision. The road was entirely unfamiliar, but maybe I just felt like driving, and had some weird faith that I’d end up where I needed to be. I thought about all my days on the straight and narrow, all the times I’d awakened surprised to find myself where I was, and doing whatever it was I was doing; surprised by the clean-shaven face I’d see in the mirror every morning and the smiling man I’d frequently encounter staring me down from the family portraits around my house and on my desk at work. Some guys I suppose get a sort of disoriented feeling when they study a picture of themselves from an old high school yearbook. I’ve always had that same feeling whenever I see a photograph of my present self. I’m not saying I feel embarrassed or abashed; it’s more a feeling of befuddlement, almost like I’ve literally never truly recognized myself in whomever I was pretending to be at any given moment.

I don’t know, perhaps these thoughts came later. Maybe I wasn’t really thinking or feeling anything that night other than the blank rush of adrenaline. I know I was driving very fast. They’ve told me that much. And then all of a sudden there were a pair of bright lights hurtling toward me down that dark road. I saw the approaching car swerve into my lane, and then the driver—some punk, I’d later learn, eighteen years old and roaring on Old Style—killed his lights.

I was in the hospital for almost two months, most of it spent in rehab learning to crawl back into my body. It was like my body was this empty suit in the corner and I couldn’t do anything until I learned all over again how to put it on and move around in it. The whole time I was in that hospital there was a card from Francis Greer on the stand next to my bed. “Tough break, Richie,”it read. “Better luck next time.”

The doctors tried to tell me that I had to learn to remember, and that I had no recollection of what happened the night of the accident. That’s not true. I have a very precise memory of the accident; in fact, I know it was no accident at all.

The whole thing was deliberate, a game of chicken. The kid challenged me. I remember there was an instant when I could have jerked the wheel and conceded the lane, a moment when the collision could possibly have been avoided. I’d already yielded once; maybe two hundred yards before the crash I had instinctively swapped lanes with the oncoming car, but the other guy had followed my lead. And in those last few seconds I resolved I wasn’t going to budge again. I’d done enough budging.

The kid who was driving the other car was killed instantly, and I’m told that neither of his surviving passengers had any memory of the accident. I know exactly what happened, though. The little bastard would too, if he’d lived: I won.