A High School Party in Connecticut in 1985

I was pressed into service at the bar. J. had to go deal with something, I don’t know. Broken furniture and spilled beer. The line was long and the kids were thirsty. Maybe they just wanted vodka, scotch. Gin and tonics. I was pouring as fast as I could. Everyone I satisfied might just be satisfied with me. Kirsten came up to the front with her friend Kim. Kirsten with her radiant smile, her glasses. There was a trace of mischief in her face, I always thought, or maybe just thought in that moment and thought I’d always thought. She was beautiful but easy about it, unconflicted. Laughing at the world and everything in it, ‘specially me. So she was a powerful person. Intimidating.

“I’ll have a gin buck,” she told me with her grin. 

At once I knew she was fucking with me. She had to be. This is what happens. A girl like that and me. I was powerless to admit I didn’t know what the fuck that was. I didn’t have the strength to be so weak. I fumbled with the bottles, finding the gin and stroking it uselessly by the neck. A few awful moments passed. The line behind Kirsten and Kim stretched from the dining room into the hall.

“Ginger ale,” she said full of wisdom. Smiling her smile. “It’s gin and ginger ale.”

I muttered yeah yeahs in my humiliation. I made her drink. I made I don’t know for Kim. And I never spoke to her again. Today she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Later we sat in the living room, seven or eight of us. The untiring inebriation of youth. We needed to go somewhere and do something. When you’re sixteen and drunk you have to take it somewhere. You can’t lean on a bar or watch TV. There’s sparks flying out your fingers.

We piled in the back of Sean’s pickup with a bat. Drove two miles to our math teacher’s house. His driveway was long and it twisted through the woods. Erik stood unsteady. Took a hard swing and bashed the mailbox off its wooden post. The violence was astonishing. The senseless malice. We saw the lights come on behind the trees. The poor put-upon teacher howling, running out the house. His son—our classmate—by his side. Flashlight beam zigzagging in the night. Go, go, go! Sean peeled out and we were gone down the hilly street, knocking against each other in the bed.

We got back and drank some more. In elated wonder at ourselves. Still it wasn’t enough.

We rode to the 7 Eleven in the strip mall near the house. Stormed in and took what we wanted of Ho-Hos and Funny Bones. The guy behind the counter was just a couple years older than us, some poor fuck who just wanted to disinfect the counters and make it through the night. We ridiculed him brazenly, to his face, behind his back. We came back an hour later for some more. He didn’t even look at us from behind the register. Ducked his head, pretending to be busy.

Mark said he fucked his girlfriend and J. said what’d you do with the condom and Mark took a drag off his Camel and he smiled and he said he flushed it.

"Good," said J.

In the cold, bleak light of the morning we took stock of the damage. Bottles, ashes, miscellaneous trash. Mysteriously an upstairs door was torn off its hinges. That was all apparently. 

The Enterprise - 61

Brett and Tom and I had been playing tunes, Brett on drums even though he’s not a drummer, Tom on bass even though he doesn’t play bass. I felt guilty playing guitar. Brett had a room in a storage facility in Chelsea where he rehearsed with his band. Climate controlled and powered. I didn’t know such a thing existed. I thought storage rooms were dark, dusty and cramped, a place for things not people. In this building the hallways were bright and clean and the spaces big enough to live in.

Brett had made a carpeted space for a set of drums, two amps, and a mic stand, ringed by miscellaneous belongings, furniture maybe, some clothes, appliances. Maybe they were his. Maybe not. Maybe this was all his bandmate’s shit, his bandmate’s space. I took advantage unthinkingly, ungratefully. Here we were. We could plug right in and play.

We played weirdo covers, a hard rock version of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” We played one or two of my tunes and Tom’s. Was there a point? We had fun. One time we thought, we have enough to play a set somewhere. We should play a show, one show only, start and end in a blaze of glory. But we never did.

After playing we’d go to a bar. Maybe that was the point.

We drove to Baltimore one weekend to see their friend Jim, the drummer in their old band, play a gig. It rained hard on the way and Brett was driving fast, peering below the windshield fog. This was DC Sniper time and we were heading into his territory. He’d shot eight people already, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven. I imagined him laying in wait in a perch overlooking the freeway. Maybe we’d be next.

We stopped at a rest stop just over the border in Maryland. There were teenagers hanging out, like this was the place to be in whatever fucking town this was. Racing through the main hall, twisting the knobs of gumball machines for something to come out. Two boys wrestled as they walked, smirking insolently, getting in people’s way and not caring. This is how they interacted, with arms and hands. How they communicated.

At the table next to us a girl gushed to her friends, “I heard he shot five people in a single day!”

We went out in the streets of Baltimore, bar to bar and down some ruined streets with the houses boarded up. Slept on a couch in Jim’s house. On Saturday night we watched his band play fusiony prog rock at a hipster bar crowded with young guys in beards. A confederate flag hung on the wall with no apparent irony.

A strange, quiet evening when dinner’s too early because Jackie was at the dentist and they brought back Shake Shack. Now golden sunlight streams across the space and birds are chirping and there’s nothing to do, not even a kid to put to bed.

On my morning run I thought of writing a play about the tragedy. Why not after all? As I turned around at the end of the park I thought of a cutely poignant little ending. Then I thought no. Now I’m not sure.

Sunday before last we had dinner in a covid enclosure on the street, a neighborhood Italian on Sixth Ave. We took our time, had dessert. Everyone so nice and friendly. I observed a shadowy figure pacing a living room on the second floor above the restaurant. A drizzle began to fall but not on us.

On our way back we passed another restaurant. Their street tables were bustling. The food looked good. We thought we’d like to try it sometime. Just past its perimeter, where cars again occupied the parking spots, there was something strange. You could feel it before you saw it. A nice SUV parked beneath a tree, dotted with fresh rain. The windshield was smashed in by a pipefitter’s wrench that remained nestled in the breach, radiating a web of cracks across the glass. It seemed staged, theatrical. Like there was a hidden camera capturing our reactions. A performance art installation, maybe. The wrench was just too perfect. Weighty, industrial. Everything else was just so pretty. The dusting of pink blossoms on the cars and street. The lamplit walls and stoops. We scrutinized the wrench for a minute. Peered at the front seat of the car, apparently unaffected. We thought of taking pictures but we didn’t.

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 18

Harry and I began to hang out with Jim. Just another loser with a mother who knew our mothers. Is that not how lifelong bonds are formed? I sensed that Jim was interested in more than television and Atari and Star Wars and sports. He did like guns and swords and tanks. That was normal but he liked them more than me, more than most. In the library I’d look for race car books. There was one with black and white pictures of North American sports car races in the ‘60s, a book that was already old and nobody cared. Races that had faded deep into history, their results recorded but never re-examined, the names of the drivers forgotten by all but their descendants. Triumphs and Corvettes with roll bars winding up and down and through the fields. Men in white, short-sleeved, button-down shirts and their wives or girlfriends in long floral-print skirts sitting on the hilly lawns to watch. This is all I wanted. Jim came over to my house one day to build model airplanes. We began with a strangely ceremonial lunch, as though my parents had to check him out to be my girlfriend. For some reason Mom had severely undercooked the burgers. I gamely swallowed clumps of cool, mealy meat, its blood soaking the bun, dressed in pickle relish and Heinz Tomato Ketchup, as Jim excitedly explained why he’d prefer a knife to a machine gun in hand-to-hand combat. “A machine gun might jam,” he said. “With a knife, you can stick it in the other guy’s body.” I gulped my iced tea and the lemon wedge knocked my nose. My parents examined Jim with some concern. “Unless you have a bayonet on the gun. A bayonet is the best,” Jim exclaimed. “It’s like a knife!”

On our second or third day at the lake shots rang out somewhere on the far shore. They weren’t pops or cracks like from a handgun, more like booms, maybe a rifle or shotgun, but who knows what the water does to sound. Every five or ten seconds for a long time, so it wasn’t hunting. Target shooting I guess. It didn’t happen again but every day out on the water I imagined some malevolent presence over there. Would I hear the evil whistle of a bullet over my head, or skimming through the gentle waves, or piercing my donut floatie to lodge into my hip? Some bored teenager, thinks he can take a few shots at strangers, no one the wiser. I’d tell the kids turn around, head back to shore. Fast! Single file to make a smaller target. And when they were close enough to stand: run!

Having curious fantasies, daydreams, at work that while I’m focused on my screen someone will walk up from behind me and punch me hard in the back of the head. This act will be outrageous, of course—others will look in horror, will intercede to help me, to confront my attacker. But on a certain level it will also be deserved.

There was a young man seated on the bench in the middle of the Seventh Avenue platform, perfectly still, gazing in my direction. There was something on his forehead, a kind of starburst pattern radiating down. I thought it had to be makeup, a tattoo, something deliberate. As I approached I saw that it was blood—dark, drying, oozed from an unseen wound.

He made no sounds, not of pain nor anguish, nor anger, nor despair. An MTA employee stood guard beside him, also still, unconcerned, maybe just waiting for someone else to come. I glanced around for telltale objects—a weapon, debris, a skateboard. There was nothing.

What happened? I wondered as I walked away.

The tedious progression through the day, the sitting down, the getting up, the walking past strangers in the hall, the yanking of paper towels crookedly from the men’s room dispenser. The afternoon punctuated by another active shooter, on time like a clock.

In the kitchen, a man was telling another about some work trip he’d been on, where he’d expensed a crazy tasting menu.

“One of the dishes was like, this truffle jelly with a straw,” he said. “I was like, what the fuck is this?”

“Ha ha,” said the other.

“But it was fucking awesome,” he continued as I turned my back and walked away.

Someone, maybe it was Cruz or Bush or Rubio, but it could have been anyone, spoke of violence “in our communities” as the bigger issue than gun rights. It struck me how obviously “communities” is a metaphor for “ghettoes.” Reminded me of that dick Rudy Giuliani mocking Obama for being a “community organizer” at the 2008 Republican Convention. He was really saying “ghetto organizer.” He was really saying “N-word organizer.” Ha! Can you imagine that? A lowly N-word organizer. Now he thinks he’s gonna be president!

Now I’m remembering Giuliani’s objection to the pissed-on Jesus art exhibit way back when. Someone should have pissed on Rudy’s face. That’d be art.

After the gig Jesse, Kevin, Jake, Mark and I went to a little bar on 6th Street off 2nd, next to Jesse’s place, apparently the only establishment on the block that wasn’t a bodega or an Indian joint. It was one of those cozy, garden-level spaces, off the beaten path. Felt like you were entering some sort of secret lair. There was an old-timey bar to the left with a big mirror behind it, a few stools and that was it. Maybe a table or two, but maybe not. The whole place was bathed in a lime-green glow.

The bartender knew Jesse and poured us free drinks for hours. Kamikazes and mudslides, mudslides and kamikazes. Each drink seemed to fortify us somehow. Who knows what we talked about, but we talked. Who knows what was said. We were the only ones in the place, I’m pretty sure.

Finally we left, back up the little steps and out on the avenue. Someone shoved somebody, who knows who. Might have been me doing the shoving. Probably not. But I shoved back. Soon we were all hitting and slapping each other, zigzagging all over the sidewalk. Someone carried a sweatshirt with him. Someone else grabbed it and threw it into a bum-piss–filled puddle in the street. The owner—was it Mark?—retrieved it and swung it hard across the thief’s head. Now we were all grabbing at the sopping-wet shirt, taking turns slapping each other with it. When I got it in the face it felt cool and very heavy, a little grainy, deeply insulting. It made you stagger. It made you fall to your knees.

I think someone humped a car for a few seconds but I might be making it up.

We hit each other all the way up to 13th Street and walked back in the bar. The headliners were packing up, it had to be past four. I let the lead singer patronize me about our band while he wrapped up mic cables. I nodded and thanked him like a little bitch. I felt the glow of the good, hard beating I’d gotten on my neck and face, the alcohol in my brain, the filth from the gutter on my cheeks.

The Enterprise - 50

Blam blam blam blam blam blam blam blam!

Just like that. Pointed. Utterly emphatic.

“That was scary,” said Sean from his easy chair.

I was eating rice and beans, sunk deep in the ass-welt of my faux Eames, feet propped up on its spinny, matching ottoman.

“S’long as they’re not aiming at us.”

“Eight shots,” he declared. As though the number might mean something.

“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure he was right. The count seemed high. But he probably was. They did come in an awful hurry.

When witnesses hear shots, do they report more than occurred or fewer? I guess more, usually. What with people prone to exaggeration. But then you hear these crazy numbers, cop shot the suspect 68 times. Doesn’t seem possible but it is. We tend to think one’s enough. Except if you’re the shooter, I guess.

It wasn’t the first time we’d heard shots in our neighborhood. But still, this seemed particularly dark. Those were purposeful bangs. And no sporadic, extra ones after. There had to be a body at the other end of them. I lifted my wine glass to my lips. In my mind I saw the arm, the hand, the gun; the body falling and the killer run.

Sean had found a poem on the street and brought it home:

DON'T

WALK

WALK

It was the knockout screen from a crossing light. You know, the top two words light up and then the bottom one. But all at once, propped on the living room wall, the words together had a jarring effect. The instant contradiction was brutal, stark.

But at least it started with a negative and ended with a positive.

Made me think of the song:

Don’t you know that you can count me out, in

As I walked across 9th Avenue last Friday, on my way to pick up Jackie from school, I saw two men walk past each other in front of me. They seemed unremarkable: in their 30s, dressed casually, one white, one black. I noticed that they bumped shoulders slightly, awkwardly. No apologies were made. The white guy passed me as the black guy walked on ahead—but after a few paces, still in the crosswalk, he stopped and turned around, as though he’d suddenly remembered something. He strode up to the other guy and smacked him on the side of the head. I watched from the sidewalk, expecting a brawl to erupt in the Avenue as the lights turned green. Instead, the victim cowered a little and stared at his aggressor, perplexed. They both went on their separate ways and that was it.

A couple weeks ago I went to Baltimore with Chris and Jim, to see their old friend Jeff play. We drove in the pouring rain, Chris racing in the fast lane and peering over the dashboard to see below the fog on the windscreen.

Down this way the sniper was hunkered somewhere, thinking. Or maybe sleeping or maybe having something to eat. He'd shot eight people by then, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven.

We stopped at a rest stop just across the border into Maryland. It was overrun by teenagers who had evidently adopted it as their hangout. Friday night at the rest stop, hanging out in the food court, racing through the main hall, dodging drifters and old fat couples, twisting the knobs of gumball machines. Two boys were languidly wrestling each other, getting in people's way a little and not caring, fully preoccupied with each other but addressing each other only with arms and hands – their eyes looked elsewhere. Tittering girls at a table near us discussed the sniper.

"I heard he shot five people in a single day!" one girl gushed.

Right outside of Baltimore, October 2002.

I am becoming aware of the passage of time as a terrible confluence of seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into eons, until lifetimes and generations pass in what seems like instants.

It was my last day at Aetna, and Meg took the occasion of my departure to contrive a pleasant, gossipy exchange about what else, O. J. Simpson. We were discussing the length of the knife used to commit the murders and we agreed that it was indeed a very large knife – I thought of J. L. quoting the cop: "It was a substantial knife," such cop talk – and just as suddenly, as though continuing a phrase uttered about the gravity of the wounds and Nicole Simpson's nearness to decapitation, a secretary mentioned all the wonderful knives her father had given her for her new apartment: some big, some small, all very sharp, with stone sharpeners, her dad is a chef you know. And we nodded just as agreeably to the train of this conversation as to the previous one.