A Devil Dog in the Dark

I met Keith Sullivan on a Friday in September, the last day of Summer. I almost met him every day for a month before that, but kept not doing it. Eventually, it started to seem stupid not to after so long, so that day I stopped at the bench where he sits on the corner of Broadway and High and stuck out my hand. I didn’t necessarily have time, because I was on my way somewhere else. But when wasn’t I? I’d passed him a hundred times—literally a hundred times—and never said a word to him. But a few days after he showed up, and kept showing up, we began to take note of each other as fixtures in the busy downtown corridor. The faces, the cars, the bikes, ever flowing, never slowing, a river of humanity constantly changing and always on its way somewhere else.

But not us.

Every day the same. Me coming to work, him sitting on his bench. I was to and fro from appointments on Campus, parking in the rear of the huge building and walking around to the front where my office is, because there are three differently-keyed security doors and an elevator ride between me and my office if I go straight through. Plus, the creepy basement I'd have to pass through is straight out of Silence of the Lambs, and to be honest, I avoid it whenever possible. So I’d pass Keith four or five times a day, sometimes as many as ten times. As the days wore on, we began to look each other in the eye and give with a nod, the way some men do. A tip of the cap in acknowledgement that we were sharing space and time in life as our routines brought us into proximity like two ships passing. Except that I was the only one doing the passing, because Keith never moved an inch from his bench on the corner of Broadway and High.

He had a backpack and one of those little upright suitcases with the extendable handle and wheels that you roll onto the plane as your carry-on, and if the bench had been a bus stop, I would have believed that he was waiting on his ride to be about his daily business. But his bus never came, because it isn’t a bus stop and Keith isn’t on his way anywhere else. He just needs somewhere to be, and the corner of Broadway and High has a nice wooden bench on it where you can sit and watch the world go by. You’re a block from the Greyhound terminal, two blocks from the library, across the street from a Whole Foods, and the University of Oregon’s Baker Downtown Center is a huge building with overhangs that make for a nice rain shelter. There are worse places you could be if you just need somewhere to be.

Keith is a nice looking guy, with the tan and weathered face of someone who’s walked the world. Trim and in his early fifties, he’s got the faded denim eyes of a gunslinger, but the staid manner of somebody who’s in on the joke. His silver mustache is just shy of epic, and with his cropped silver mane, he looks like he could’ve been a riverboat gambler in another life, or somebody’s savvy AA sponsor in this one. But of course, Keith Sullivan is none of those things. Keith Sullivan is homeless.

It took me over a week to firmly settle on this determination, based on the few second walk-bys I got each day. Nothing about his appearance or affect backed up this notion; he didn’t have a sign or a cup, and he never asked for money. On the contrary, he was quiet, minded his business, and never said a word to anyone. He didn’t have a shopping cart or a cardboard box, just his two careworn pieces of luggage, that looked like they would if he were a twenty-something trekking across Europe and staying in youth hostels. He wore a jacket with a hunter’s camouflage pattern, he smoked Pall Mall straights, and his hat marked him as a US Marine. 

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Marines. Growing up on military bases my whole life, Marines were a routine part of my life. They guarded the gates, played reveille and taps as the flag went up or down at the beginning and end of each day, jogged together in formation down the road rhyming their rhymes, and their Honor Guard attended every funeral. Because we were a Navy family, I always heard them referred to as Leathernecks and Jarheads. Our Polack jokes were Marine jokes instead, the punchline always about their diminished IQ, although I never understood why. They were just stupid because we say they’re stupid. 

Except that every Marine I ever met up close knew a hundred different ways to kill you with a rolled-up newspaper—ninety-nine of which hurt—but they’d pick up a kid with a skinned knee and deliver him to his mama with all the tender care of a dog carrying her pups by the scruff. I can’t remember a single word to the Navy fight song, but I could snap off all three verses of the Marine Hymn—on key mind you—at the drop of a hat. Some of the men I respect most in the world and count among my closest friends are Marines, and I’ve yet to meet one I didn’t like. Keith Sullivan is no exception.

Baker Downtown Center is a hub of activity and attracts of a lot of the city’s homeless population. Consequently, we have a dedicated maintenance person who comes around every day to clean up all the broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, garbage, needles, and the occasional pile of human feces. Several times a year, the Police show up to roust someone sleeping in the parking lot, or passed out in the bushes on the nod from a heroin bender. And although Keith’s bench is bolted into the concrete in deference to this milieu, and has a center armrest to prevent people from lying down on it, he himself is the antithesis of all these things.

The area around his bench is cleaner when he leaves than when he came. Professionals working in the building will sometimes park beside him on the bench to enjoy a smoke, believing that they’re just sitting next to a fellow citizen of our fine town. He sometimes rousts the parking lot sleepers himself to get them going in the morning, because you can get sentenced to sixteen hours of roadside cleanup for that kind of trespassing and vagrancy if they have signs posted, which Baker does. I never knew that. But then there were a lot of things I never knew until I shook Keith’s hand on Friday, September 21.

By the time we officially met, I’d decided that he was for sure homeless. What finally convinced me was that his hands were always dirty, and it was the kind of dirt that you can’t wash off. The kind that gets ground into the pores by hard living, when you never come to rest on anything but wood, concrete, and steel. I’d had that kind of filth ground into my hands through decades of construction work, and knew that all you could do was wait for the skin to slough off and replace itself with the new stuff. Always assuming you get to stop grinding for any length of time. Of course, Keith never had that chance, and wet wipes and public restrooms are no match for the grime of all the world.

I was on my way to a dive watering hole by the name of The West End to tip a few back in celebration with a friend who’d gotten a promotion, but decided I just couldn’t walk past Keith one more time, and nod and be on my way without saying a word to him. So I stopped and introduced myself, shook his hand, and when he asked me for some spare change I took him back to my truck in the parking lot to get him one of the supply bags that the wife and I have assembled for distribution on just such occasions. On the way we talked some about his time in the Corps, the homeless outreach and fundraising efforts he’d lead in Seattle, and how friendly people are in Eugene. After I handed him the bag—which is comprised of a little folding cash, food, water, gloves, socks, and first aid enough for a day or two—he showed me some pictures on his phone of the people and organizations he’d been with in Seattle.

I was struck by how intense he was about his previous life, pride absolutely beaming in his eyes, like he wanted me to know that he hadn't always been this guy. He’d had his moments in the sun. In deference to that, I chatted with him much longer than I actually had time to, and then shook his hand again, wanting him to know that I saw him for who he is, and not just a statistic or charity case. Then I got in my vehicle and drove off to my real life, patting myself on the back for being a helluva guy, and then washing his homeless cooties off of my hand with the Purell that I keep in my truck. You know, because I'm a helluva guy.

I had a good time celebrating with my friends at The West End, and then went home and told my wife that I’d given another bag away and would need a replacement to put in my truck for the following week. I don’t remember a single other thing that happened until Monday. Why would I? I guess it was a pretty ordinary weekend. I probably puttered around the house on Saturday, making excuses to watch Netflix instead of mowing the lawn. On Sunday, I suppose we ran errands and went to the big family lunch where I played pillow fight and demolition croquet with my nieces. I couldn’t say for sure that all of it actually happened, but I’m guessing it did, because that’s pretty much how the weekends all go.

But come Monday morning, I went back to work and there was Keith again, sitting on his bench at the corner of Broadway and High. Only now I couldn’t just walk past him on my way to somewhere else. Now I knew his name, where he was from, and that he was a Leatherneck-Jarhead vet who had served his country—my country—only to find himself living outdoors. So in an effort to keep my self-appointed status as a helluva guy alive, I stopped and made some small talk with him. Have you ever been so stupid as to ask a homeless dude how his weekend was? I now have the dubious distinction of being able to say that I have. I may as well have asked him how it was sleeping on the sidewalk. Was the concrete to your liking?

I recently had to lay down on the concrete floor of my office to get under my desk and unscrew some attachments in preparation for moving across town to yet another location, my fourth office in less than three years. I was probably on the floor, which has a quarter inch of industrial carpet on it BTW, for ten minutes. When I got up, I had a crick in my neck and a dull ache in my lower back that took two days to go away. When I was six years younger than I am today, I spent most of one night sleeping on a carpeted floor in the master bedroom of a vacant house I was helping my buddy to fix up for sale. That was the night I discovered that I don’t sleep on the floor anymore. Not even on deep pile carpet with memory foam pad under it. Now I’m six years older and have even less tolerance for that kind of thing, and Keith is yet another six years older than me, at fifty three. Well, he’ll be fifty three on December 13th. Close enough. I can’t imagine how he even gets a wink of sleep.

How was your weekend? Sweet, fancy Moses.  

Still, in my defense, I knew that Keith was a proud man, a veteran, a leader in charitable circles, and obviously didn’t want to be reduced to a one-dimensional demographic. So I made the conversation I would with any other contemporary I’d met on the street and somehow struck up a friendship with, despite the awkward mismatches that created sometimes. So as the days wore on, I’d talk to him about politics, about faith, about high finance, and a bit about whether or not Joe Bonamassa could really play the blues. Pretty much anything but homelessness. Some days he’d join me in my walk around the block on my coffee breaks, or over to Whole Foods to pick up bananas for the wife, and we’d talk about his life story.

He’d spent four years in the Corps and was honorably discharged with two purple hearts from injuries sustained in Beirut and Grenada. I knew plenty about the Corps because I grew up in the midst of Marines and could quote their latin motto, their favorite lines from Marine Corps Patron Saint Chesty Puller, and even do a decent rendition of the Hymn. Keith didn’t mind being called a Letherneck or Jarhead, though the first time I did it, he asked if my old man was a goddam Squid, because that’s the only way I’d hear dumbass terms like those. And, in fact, my old man was a goddam Squid, so I asked Keith how Marines would refer to themselves. He said they called themselves Devil Dogs.

I’d heard the term before, but always assumed it was derogatory, like the others. But it turns out that the term was given to them by the World War I German Infantry, who feared the Marines like no other force on Earth. Teufel Hunden might be more correctly translated from the German as "hounds from hell," but a rose by any other name… The Devil Dogs got their fearsome reputation among the Krauts because they would advance through impenetrable fog-banks of mustard gas and blizzards of shrapnel and hot lead, only to emerge undaunted and bringing hell with them. The Marines took it as a compliment and appropriated the term for themselves with pride.

Some days when I’m in a hurry, I’ll walk past Keith with a quick fist bump and a “Give us a bark, Devil Dog!” To which he replies, “Oorah!” as we both go on about our day. Other days, we’ll share a couple of breakfast burritos and talk about his experience as an HVAC technician and metal worker in the SMART Union, Local #9 in Golden, Colorado. He wants to get back into that line of work when his doctors give him the green light, so he’s asked me for a recommendation when he applies at the University maintenance department. I guess I forgot to mention that he survived a bout of stage three colon cancer while being a homeless vet. In a cruel dichotomy, the VA paid for his treatment and then released him to the street to recover. He says Chesty Puller hasn't given him permission to die, so he’s got a medical marijuana prescription and drinks a half-dozen tall-boys a day to get through. I can’t say I approve of the tall-boys—because it’s fucking Pabst—but whatever gets you through, I guess.

Keith’s life has been shot through with cruel dichotomies. He’d been an advocate for the homeless for years, and then become homeless himself after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. He survives on about twenty bucks a day, culled from various sources. He texted me the other day, looking for some wire strippers so that he could strip a bundle of wires he found in a dumpster next to the chiropractor’s office they’re remodeling over on Pearl Street. You get more at the recycle center for stripped copper wire than for the insulated stuff. I didn’t know that. It makes sense, of course, but I’ve haven’t had much occasion to recycle anything for money since before the turn of the century. He collects bottles and cans in a given circumference around the Baker Center, but he told me that he can’t go west of Willamette Street, because the homeless people from that point on are all crazy meth heads and heroin addicts that will jack other homeless guys for everything they’ve got. A subculture I had no idea about.

Keith has a cell phone, an EBT card, a PayPal account, and a Facebook page, so I guess as homeless people go, he’s pretty high falutin'. He keeps telling me I should get back on Fb so that we can friend each other, but right now I’ll settle for being his friend in real life. Though I always demonstrate dutiful interest when he brings up his Fb page to show me the people who still email him and send a few bucks to his PayPal account from time to time. He can scroll through his timeline for days, showing posts and pictures of him with donors, volunteers, and lovely people from back when he was a Real Boy.

At times, Keith has disappeared for a day or two, and I started to worry that something bad had happened. After the first time he dropped out of sight, he showed me the Wonolo app he has on his phone that pings him for day labor, explaining that he’d been away stacking pallets and clearing out rentals for a property management agency. Other times, he’ll get a little influx of cash from one of his Seattle benefactors, or a particularly good haul of bottles, and he’ll save it up for a rainy day (or night, as the case may be), and spend it at the 66 Motel, staying until the last possible second for check-out. On those mornings, I can’t even lure him out with a texted offer of a chorizo breakfast burrito from Burrito Boy—our favorite breakfast place, just down the street from Baker—and I just have to eat both of them myself. Oh, the humanity.

I don’t mean to paint a Rockwellian portrait of homelessness. Keith is a bit drunk almost all of the time, his stainless steel water-bottle is full of beer, and his words are always slightly slurred. As a result, he tends to go on about the same things over and over, having forgotten what stories he’s already told. He has a bit of a complex about being looked down upon by the housed and the gainfully employed, so he cites his life-experience and triumphs often, becoming more and more belligerent and defiant about it the drunker he gets. He forgets that I’m there to work, and will sometimes stop me for a rambling conversation that I genuinely don’t have time for, and will continue in an unbroken stream until I put a stop to it by telling him that I have to get back to it.

Still, I wonder what I’d be like if our positions were reversed. I've lived in my car and a tent in Skinner Butte Park, but even then it was only so I didn't have to suck it up and ask my parents for help. And I was in my twenties, so it was kind of an adventure that made for an interesting anecdote. So even at my most delusionally self-righteous, I don’t imagine that I would have half the composure or grace that Keith demonstrates every day. I throw a fucking tantrum internally if I don’t get my favorite parking spot or somebody takes three days to reply K to one of my texts. One day he asked me if I read the Bible, and I said that I do. He told me that his favorite verse was in Psalms where it says: The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those whose spirits are crushed. He reads one Psalm, one Proverb, and one chapter from the Book of Acts every day. I guess it’s true that man does not live by bread alone…

One morning I didn’t find Keith at his bench on my way in, but happened to see him across the street, hurriedly tucking his stuff into his backpack in the alcove of the chiropractor’s office. Somebody had arrived on a motorcycle and wanted to park it in the alcove, so they were running him off. He saw me from afar and waved, so I stood waiting for him, shivering a bit in the chilly Fall air, a harbinger of things to come. He came over kind of sheepishly, still a little bleary-eyed. I poured him a cup of coffee from my thermos and we sat on the bench for a few minutes. He was cussing the alarm on his phone that hadn’t gone off for some reason. Then he looked and saw that his phone was dead.

“Close one! They’ve got trespassing signs posted over there and I know I gotta be up and out by 6:45a at the latest. Don’t wanna find myself on roadside cleanup again,” he said. “I’ll just hang out here for a bit until they open up over at the supermarket. They let me charge my phone if I buy anything, even if it's just a stick of gum.” As we sipped our coffee, he said that his backup sleeping spot, in the stairwell of the parking garage over on Oak, didn’t have such an early checkout time, but was just inside the circle of crazies who might just jack him in his sleep, so he preferred the chiropractor’s alcove. I nodded sagely in agreement.

The next morning I brought him my zero-degree REI sleeping bag that had been stashed quietly in the garage since it was last used for a camping trip, almost twenty years ago. Lindsay isn’t fond of camping, saying that we work way too hard all year to go and pretend to be homeless as a hobby. I always laugh at that joke, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. When I told him, Keith laughed, too, which I was glad about. That could have gone either way. 

Later that day, I found the yoga mat I bought from Walmart back when I was fooling myself into believing that I would use my coffee breaks to do some downward dog and get my lazy ass into a shape other than round. I think I actually used it twice in the year since I’d bought it, then stashed it in the Chasm of Shit I Don’t Care About in the alcove between my desk and the wall. I only found it again because they’re moving me out of my office and down to a location on campus, so most of my stuff is in boxes. I’m not thrilled about the move, or the reorganization they’ve got going on in our department. Although it does mean that I’m up for a promotion, which I’m kind of stressed about. It’s something that I talk to Keith about sometimes, one of those weird mismatches that could otherwise be so awkward. 

I gave Keith the mat on my way out of the building, and the next day he called me early in the morning to tell me how much he loved it. He’d actually been able to roll over in the night without waking himself up. I can empathize with that as one of life’s little joys, since I usually wake myself up every night rolling onto a bum left shoulder from my construction days. And I’m indoors. Jeez, what would that be like on the sidewalk? When I told him later about the move and possible promotion, he said that he’d say a prayer for me. I got a bit choked-up by that, but didn't want to let a Marine see me cry.

A week or two later, I was working late, trying to get a bunch of projects cleared off the deck so that I’d look good when they went to check my stats before the promotion interview. I came out of the office a little after 8:00p, and realized that Fall was hard upon us. The night was chilly, and I was struck by how deeply dark it was, not a trace of gloaming left in the sky. I was walking down High Street, having never been on it that late—as I’m usually home and dry by then—wishing I'd gone through the building and the creepy Silence of the Lambs basement instead. The canopy of overhanging oak and maple trees blotted out most of the light from the street lamps, so I traced my way slowly through the darkened corridor, hoping I wouldn’t run into the denizens that run the Baker Center while the gainfully employed are away. I came up on the bench cautiously, until I realized that the silhouette sitting there was in fact Keith.

I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that he had the same number of hours in a day to fill that I do. Not just during the daylight hours, but at night while I’m having dinner and watching TV as well. It’s like I thought everyone else on Earth were all just figments of my imagination, and nothing happens in the world while I’m asleep. He was just sitting there, staring out into the street, and I was struck by how much he looked like a guy watching TV in a living room, except he was on a bench on the corner of Broadway and High, just watching the sparse traffic go by. I looked on for a full minute, unexpectedly heartbroken by the image of a decent man sitting alone in the dark.

I started whistling a tune so that I wouldn’t surprise him when I emerged from the darkest part of the tree tunnel. He looked up at me and gave with a tired smile. “Heeeeeyyyyy…what the hell are you still doing here?” he asked. He was fully in his cups and I-love-you-man-drunk, so I sat down on the bench next to him and cracked open my beat-up old thermos, pouring out the last of my stash for us to share together. It’s a good thermos, a warhorse leftover from my days in the field, so the coffee was still hot even twelve hours later, pluming steam in the chilly air. I told him I was bucking for that promotion and was working the OT to impress the brass. He laughed and made the kind of jokes about the powers-that-be that a Devil Dog Staff-Sergeant would make about the Platoon LT. "Don’t call me sir, I work for a living!" That joke is older than me, but I still laughed.

When I asked him what he was doing hanging out here so late, he informed me that the crew remodeling the chiropractor’s office was also pulling a late one and were just wrapping it up for the night. So he was stalling, waiting for them to go so that he didn’t have to sleep in his backup spot in the stairwell of the parking garage inside the fringes of crazy-town. It turns out he had some good news: a woman named Angela that works in Baker had seen him around, the same as me, and been lending him the use of the trunk of her car to store his things in during the day, so he didn’t have to drag the suitcase, sleeping bag, and yoga mat around everywhere he went. Even better, she had offered to let him sleep on her couch on Friday and Saturday nights. I got a lump in my throat and was immediately mortified by how many times I’d patted myself on the back for giving him a bag of my old long-johns, some quarters for laundry, or a pack of smokes.

 Helluva guy, helluva guy. Just ask me, I’ll tell you.

We toasted with our coffees to his stroke of good fortune and the chances of my promotion, like any friends and brothers in arms would. He knew I was moving the next day and wouldn't be running into him as much, so we made plans to have dinner together the following night. Then I got a worried text from my wife wondering what was keeping me, so we got up from his bench, hugged, and I headed for home. I could smell a residue of stale beer and the grime of all the world on me as I drove toward the warm light of my hearth and the open arms of my wife. I added another to the million prayers I’ve said for Keith, and knew that he was saying one for me, too, because he promised he would. I've had a dozen people praying for me to get that promotion, but if I wind up with it, I know his entreaty will be the one that put me over the top. No doubt in my mind.

I wish I could say that Keith got back on his feet, but he was still sitting on a bench in the dark, staring into eternity as I drove away. He probably still is, even as I write this. I wish I knew what the endgame here was. I wish there was some sunset I could ride off into, my good deeds done and my promises kept. But there isn’t, there’s just the next day. I guess that’s life. Still, I’m comforted when, like Keith, I think of one of my favorite Bible verses: He who gives to the poor, lends to the LORD who will repay in kind. Sometimes I think about what it is I’ve been trading for with my spare change, wire-strippers, and leftover jackets and work-boots. Because rather than being rewarded with breakfast burritos and Pall Mall straights, I find a new grace for all the stress, disappointment, and anxiety of life.

I just think of Keith, and the rest is easy.

Life Cycle

Occasionally, the odd Saturday will crop up where I have no deeds to do and no promises to keep. Lindsay will be off donating blood, volunteering at the mission, baking cookies for the HIV Alliance, or whatever other awesome thing she does that makes her such a better person than me, and I will find myself with an unexpected sliver of unscheduled life. This past weekend I used one of those to bring a new book to a fading Cafe in Eugene known as The Beanery. 

In the 90’s, The Beanery was a hip little Douchery that attracted the cream of the Hipster crop. It’s one of those purposefully haphazard semi-industrial spaces. High ceilings, clerestories, rough brick, exposed ductwork, mismatched furniture, etc. You know the drill. It shares a space with a place called A Very Eugenian Bike Shoppe (Note the pretentious old world spelling), and a parking lot with an Herbal-Gerbil version of Pier 1 called Down To Earth. That parking lot seems designed to punish people for killing Mother Earth with their cars, and you expect to find your vehicle defaced when you return unless it’s a hybrid or has a Coexist bumper sticker on the back. You know, because of how tolerant everyone is. 

In my bachelor days I lived within walking distance of the joint and would spend a considerable amount of time with a book and a cup of joe out in the patio seating area, although back then it was paperbacks as opposed to the e-reader I brought this time. I read most of “A Prayer for Owen Meaney” there, laughing uproariously at my table for one, and attracting not a few odd stares from the Dreadlocked honkies around me. Glad I finished that one at home, because I cried like a girl at the end.

Today the place has been largely abandoned by that crowd, as the whims of elitist Hipster douchebaggery would dictate. They’ve all taken their manual typewriters somewhere more organically obscure to blog about GMO’s and Occupying whatever needs Occupying. So what’s left is a smattering of locals who live or work within walking distance. The county jail is across the street, so there’s an aging bureaucratic demographic in here, a random cross-section of moldering hippies, and what looks to be a few of the catch-and-release crowd from the jail itself. It’s sad to see the place slowly fading away, although the service is faster because there isn’t a crushing line of people dying to give their money to the place so they can be seen here. 

No, the only reason to come here now is for the coffee itself, which is black as dark matter. They roast their own beans and appear to have two settings on their roaster: Blonde and Cinderized Memory. I prefer the latter, and you can get a contact buzz even out in the parking lot from the aroma of the bitter, acrid tar they’re brewing behind these doors. I brought a copy of the latest e-Book I’ve downloaded, “Thirteen Reasons Why,” and plan to spend a couple of hours enjoying their air conditioning and getting lost in a good book.

The Barista on duty is a brunette, apple cheeked twentysomething named Rose. She’s helped me a couple of times before, and I took an immediate liking to the kind of open ebullience she has for life in general. She seems to have a very Rosey outlook on life, which I hope is permanent but fear is simply a result of not having had enough time dealing with the public to have it beaten out of her. For some reason, she’s alone behind the bar and has to fill food orders as well, which I’ve also made to go along with my tanker of java. I got here just ahead of a couple of guys who appear to be in a bit of a hurry, and so threw a monkeywrench into their schedule with my order of Spinach Artichoke Quiche and warmed Toffee Scone, which poor Rose is having to make under the baleful stares of their impatience.

One of these august personages is a mid-forties business type in a dark tweed coat, only no tie like it’s Casual Friday. On a Saturday no less. He looks like the kind of guy who takes his day out on helpless waitstaff because he’s given up on his dreams. I’m sure if I had a minute, I could pick his Ford Taurus out in the parking lot. If I’m being honest, he probably bothers me more than he should, because that’s me if I’d gone down a slightly different path. Hell, maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe that’s me now, except I can’t afford Tweed coats. So instead, I’m just a grown-ass man in a superhero T-Shirt.

The other guy is the very definition of an old curmudgeon. Not sure if he knows this or not, but his whole face is frozen in disapproval, all of the time. His hair has finished its abandon ship drill and his huge, face-consuming tri-focal glasses are so heavy his pinched nose can’t possibly hope to support them, so they perpetually sit on the end of his nose. This is convenient for condescending and disapproving looks in any and all directions. He’s wearing one of those indistinct khaki and beige uniforms that seem to be issued to every guy with their first Social Security check. The exact color of Nothing. If he stood still long enough, he’d be invisible. Everything about him says, “Get off my goddam lawn,” so I immediately decide that his name is Herb. Because what else would it be?

Rose calls my name and I head over to the counter to receive the jumbo sized ceramic vat of coffee she pushes across the counter to me. It scrapes another minute layer off the industrial laminate the counter is covered with, contributing to the patina of scratches that mar the surface like a map of a million proffered morning eye-openers. Coffee is up, but the quiche and scone are still on their way. The place is getting older even as I wait. In fact, the only new thing here is Rose, her youth and optimism shining like a new dime. Everything else is chipped, nicked, scratched, dented or covered in the filmy residue of a thousand hands. Slightly tacky with the congealed resin of oils we leave behind everywhere we go. Hand prints on glass, nose prints on windows, little dust bunnies of sloughed humanity in drifts under the tables. Doesn’t say a lot for their housekeeping efforts.

I take the chipped ceramic vessel Rose passes me. It’s thick and heavy, even when empty, let alone filled with java. Lift with your legs. The coffee is so black it looks like negative space, like it could be a tunnel to somewhere else. I take it to a table and catch the look of annoyance on Casual Friday’s face. Yes, she’s still helping me. I think about throwing a cookie on my order, just to irritate him. They do have delicious Reese’s peanut butter cup cookies here, but one look down at the 15 pounds I’ve gained back since last summer puts an end to that idea. So I just take my mug of tar to a table by the window, where I can also keep an eye on the door. I’ve got issues.

As far as I know, there’s not one table or chair in this dive that doesn’t rock. Nothing is stable. At least one leg on everything is too short, or missing a glider on the bottom. There are matchbooks shimming up table legs and the chairs all creak like Herb’s hip when the weather turns. Everything is succumbing to the entropy at work on us all, all of the time. It’s all defective now. As adorable as they are, even the dimples on Rose’s plump cheeks are technically a defect. They’re caused by a dominant mutation that shortens or bifurcates the zygomaticus major muscles in the face. Things like that make me wonder if perfection itself might be a flaw.

The music they play in the Beanery seems designed to remind you that you are not at Starbucks. There’s no smooth jazz, or indie Sub-Pop artists here. There is however an abundance of lesbian music. And not the good kind. Not Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, or Tori Amos. No, this is pure Ani Difranco territoryhere you’re supposed to like it because they’re lesbians. You’d think the Hipsters would’ve taken that with them. Maybe she’s too mainstream for them now. She has been on the cover of Spin Magazine. I should probably just get down to minding my book, and my own business for that matter. Just sit here with my gourmet coffee and e-book being terribly modern. Rose knows what she’s doing.

I don’t need to attend to anything other than the strange book I’ve selected out of what I’ve discovered is actually the Young Adult section at Barnes and Noble. The last couple I’ve read have been about young people’s perspectives on death. They’ve seemed remarkably mature, and not just a little haunting. Makes you wonder what’s going on. "The Fault in Our Stars" was about a couple of teens and terminal illness, and now “Thirteen Reasons Why” is about teen suicide. I had no idea that either of them were considered teen books when I initially picked them up at the store and then later downloaded at home. I immediately found them compelling. Why are they thinking about this stuff? Don’t they know they have their whole lives in front of them? Death is for others to worry about. 

But instead of doing any of that, I continue to watch Herb and Casual Fridays tap their feet, check their watches, sigh with irritation while casting looks at poor Rose while she hustles and bustles behind the counter. These are clearly important people, with places to be. This whole pointless drama is, at the moment, more interesting to me than anything my little e-reader could show me. I’ve noticed that if you’re in a moment, really in it, sometimes life will show you stuff. Like it wants you to learn something. Maybe even tell you a joke. It’s just that we’re never paying attention. Regretting, fretting, or daydreaming, anything other than being here now. The world washing over us unbeknownst, to be reflected upon later as even more of your life gets away from you.

That’s when I see it. Rose, Casual Fridays, and Herb. 20’s, 40’s, 70’s. I’ve got a cup of joe and the continuum of life right in front of me. Who could ask for anything more? Just beginning, in the middle, and fading away; the life cycle of the Human Being. All of us in a relationship of demands with each other for these few minutes. Under pressure. Me holding up Casual Fridays, him delaying Herb and all of us waiting on Rose to serve us. Everyone disregarding or reducing everyone else to a demographic, an impediment to their happiness.

Casual Fridays has sized Rose up. First, a servant; second, too plump to be a sexual object, therefore no deference accorded. Herb is too old to be even worth noticing, or maybe he’s just been standing still too long and his nothing-colored camouflage has done its perfect work. And who the hell is the loser in the superhero T-shirt, doesn’t he know who I am?

Herb is here to disapprove of us all. Rose’s bosom is too exposed. Casual Fridays should have let his elder go ahead of him in line. And what is that punk in the Flash T-Shirt looking at? Him and his newfangled e-reader. I can just picture Herb growing up hearing how shouldn’t sit so close to the radio, it’ll melt your brain. His dad disapproving of the radio, as Herb does the same with the Internet. All the new technology that was ruining the younger generation, and the country was going to Hell in a hand basket, because nobody has any work ethic these days. 

I feel the same when I think of kids today in the back of their parents’ minivan, each with their own entertainment system. They don’t even have to share a TV screen anymore, they all have their own. As a kid we travelled thousands of miles across country routinely, and all I got was a box of crayons, a Rubik’s Cube, and a tall glass of “Shut the hell up back there.” So of course today's kids have it too easy. I mean, all this new technology is just ruining the younger generation. I tell you what, the country is going to Hell in a hand basket because nobody has any work ethic these days. Like anybody is born with a work ethic. 

I look at Rose and think that she’s probably too old for Justin Beiber, but maybe about right for Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or Pitbull. Any and all of whom are responsible for the decline and fall of Western Civilization, and for whom I reserve the haughtiest scorn. Her generation has terrible taste in music. Not like Milli Vanilli, Wham!, or Poison back in my day. Or Elvis, The Dave Clark 5, and The Lettermen in Herb’s day, otherwise known as the Pliocene Epoch. Just another go around of the same cycle of bullshit, pretending that things have changed from generation to generation, and always for the worse. In my day, we didn’t… whatever. Shut up, Herb! He probably railed against such hedonism as Bogey and Bacall in Key Largo. Doesn't he know that anything from the black and white days is wholesome family fare?

It’s the same old song and dance that we dress up in new shoes every generation. The hem lines go up, they go down. The music gets louder, society becomes more Godless, etc. Nevermind that back in the good old days of black and white movies and respectful teenagers, the darkies rode in the back of the bus and women knew that hopes and dreams were Satan’s way of distracting them from making dinner. Back when smoking didn’t cause cancer, and you didn’t have to wear seatbelts in your car while you got a lavish 1.8 miles to the gallon. Before Jazz music and indoor plumbing ruined our morals. 

So Herb snuck 45’s of Elvis and parked with girls at the drive in, only to grow up and disapprove of Casual Fridays feeling his girl up to Mötley Crüe. Now Casual Fridays can’t imagine how he’d ever wind up fading into the background of life like Herb, and can’t remember that he was just like Rose once. Full of naïve dreams, asinine schemes, and idiotic optimism. Back before the Tweed and Ford Tauruses. In turn, Rose looks at us like she can’t imagine ever caring about inflation, compounding interest, or a 401k. She thinks OMG (That’s right, she actually thinks in text acronyms) these guys have always been old. Just born flossing and getting oil changes. 

No one remembers how they got here, and can’t imagine they’ll ever be…old. They’ll never die. Teenagers all think they’ll be dead before they’re 30. And every 30 year old thinks they were an idiot when they were a teenager, but still thinks 40 is the end of the world. Maybe if we didn’t disregard Herb as irrelevant we might learn a thing or two about perspective. Of course, he would have to stop thinking everything about the 21^st century was scandalous, stupid, or immoral. He’d have to see someone with tattoos and piercings as a person, instead of a symptom of a societal disease.

Looking at everyone in this momentary melodrama that I’ve both perceived and projected onto us, I wonder that we’ve survived at all. Somehow we have. In spite of judging, misunderstanding, and disregarding each other, we’ve still managed to cure polio, leave the earth, and stop burning witches and queers at the stake. Only God knows how. With the young charging head first into change like there’s no tomorrow, because for them there isn’t, and the old riding the brakes like their lives depended on it. And those of us in the middle shaking our heads at everybody on either end of the continuum, like we know what the hell is going on. Like we were different when we were young, and we could never get old. Never die.

But every day I hear myself saying things like, “Where did the time go?” and “It feels like just yesterday when…” Seriously, Christmas seems like it comes 3 times a year now. Is that how you get old? You just start sounding that way? If I had any balls, or thought he would answer, I’d ask Herb. He must’ve played baseball once, catcalled to the ladies, told off-color jokes with his buddies, right? Maybe he’d tell me that you don’t stop having fun because you get old, you get old because you stop having fun. Or maybe he’d tell me to piss up a rope. What kind of dick would do that, you ask? Probably the same kind of dick that would invent personalities to project onto total strangers based on their clothing or some random look on their face, and then proceed to judge them as though they actually were those people.

But what the hell do I know? I’m a grown-ass man in a superhero T-Shirt, for crying out loud.

Redemption Road

In the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Six, a grave wrong was visited upon a young man, fifteen years of age. Tall, slender, and pale, the young man had a hawkish nose and bright eyes. He didn’t smile easily or often, but it was worth the wait when he did, because each one was earned. The world was not always a kind place to the young man, since he was above average in intelligence and preferred comic books to sports. Though he was a talented baseball player, his crippling shyness made team tryouts a nonstarter, and most would still have called him nerd—otherwise known by its scientific nomenclature Dorkimus Maximus. And the world is no friend to nerds, as you shall see. 

As a result, Dorkimus Maximi (plural) typically travel in packs known as Nerd Herds, which can often be found in long lines ahead of certain movie premiers, at conventions of similar variety, and of course comic book stores. Owing to their rejection by and persecution from the general populace, especially the athletically inclined or otherwise genetically favored of either gender, Nerd Herds are often skittish, insular, and rigidly territorial. They will usually situate themselves on the periphery of gatherings, with clear sightlines both to exits and clusters of pretty girls. The former for obvious reasons, and the latter in the hopes that a female that would otherwise be uninterested might be charmed by some overheard bit of clever repartee or hypnotized by the intensity of the Nerds’ desire.

These tactics virtually never work, of course, and on the rare occasion that they do, the presence of the female will often be a disruption to the cohesiveness of the Herd. The males tend to compete over her attention, which is ultimately the demise of the Herd, even if neither of them wins. And it’s worse if one of them does win. Nonetheless, the prolonged absence of the female can be just as harmful to the health of the Herd—testosterone and involuntary celibacy being what they are—if the group decides that one of its members is responsible for repelling females or otherwise damaging the group’s standing among existing social hierarchies, low as it may be. 

At these times, the Herd behaves much like other groups in higher social strata, turning on their own and designating a scapegoat upon which to heap the blame, a lightning rod to absorb all of the self-loathing that society has taught Dorkimus Maximus to feel for himself and his kind. Within the Nerd Herd, this designee is usually the nerd’s nerd, and much like the ‘winner’ in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” they find themselves the victim of the group’s efforts at expiation in order to please some social deity who might look kindly on the propitiation of their sacrifice. Such was the cruel and unjust fate of the young man.

For although he was a bit awkward and ungainly, he was also without artifice or guile. He liked Star Wars, comic books, and Steven Spielberg movies. If he liked or disliked something or someone, he said so, and that was it. He took things and people at face value and would be friendly to anyone that was friendly to him. He was completely himself and was unburdened by ambitions to fit in anywhere other than where he naturally fit. Though there were many that seemed to be above his station in life, there were none that he deemed below him, and though his circle was small, he was a stalwart and true friend. His name was Tim Smith, and for no reason at all, I betrayed him.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately what a great memory I have. I never thought it was especially good myself until I started writing these ad hoc memoirs, spelunking deep in the recesses of dusty archives and discovering some true delights, and not just a few moments that made me cringe with regret. On average, a person remembers a total of about nine days per year. That’s 2.4% of your life, in case you’re wondering. I’m guessing that means I remember maybe thirteen days a year, or 3.6%, which is why people say I have a ‘good’ memory. I wish I could pick and choose what went into that measly 3.6%, because there’s a lot that I’d prefer to put in the trash bin for collection. Things I’ve done that are inexcusably, unequivocally wrong. Not talking about boosting GI Joe figures from Target here, or pilfering quarters from Mom’s purse to buy Slurpees and play Mario Bros. and Yie Ar Kung Fu down at the 7-11. No, I mean the truly dishonorable things that I’ll take to the grave with me.

I’ve discovered that memories are most easily retrieved from the foggy ruins of time when they’re attached to some sort of association, like a song or even a smell. Better still is when they are tagged with a particular emotion. It’s easy to remember when someone embarrassed me or made me angry. Exhilaration and fear are big ones, too. I have vivid snapshots of sitting at the top of a steep hill on my bike at six, mere moments before being hit by a car; of making serious attempts to gain superpowers by way of high voltage. Sharp memories of the first girl that I liked who liked me back, and the fluttering jolt of electrochemical love. A note taped to a cold door that didn’t open when I knocked, explaining why a different girl would not be spending Christmas with me. Of realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to stop in time and feeling the world slide into dreamy slow-motion, as I shouted an expletive before slamming the family Datsun 710 into the rear bumper of a Chrysler New Yorker at sixteen. Moments of absolute panic, when guns came out in anger, or when a ladder gave way and I went two stories down with it. And thousands more, all tagged with some emotion and filed away as important for some reason.

The memory of how we treated Tim is especially vivid because of the emotion it’s tagged with: shame. More than regret, shame attends the things that I’ve done wrong in life when I knew better ahead of time, and couldn’t blame it on being young or foolish. When there wasn’t a lesson to be learned or good that arose from the wrong that was done. That’s when having a good memory can be a double-edged sword. Because I perfectly remember standing up on the bridge between the Admin and History buildings at Long Beach Poly, looking down on the quad and seeing Tim standing at the flagpole, waiting for us at our usual meeting place. He was checking his watch, looking around in confusion because he didn’t know that we wouldn’t be coming that day, or ever again. 

I first met Tim when I was a scared little pencil-necked honky at a rough inner-city school in Long Beach, CA. I was fresh from Naples, Italy and a very civilized DOD school run by the military, only to be dropped into the Darwinian Thunderdome of Washington Jr. High. By the time our paths crossed, my status as star-student and teacher’s pet had gotten me noticed by some pretty scary people, and I’d become a regular target for hazing and abuse. It was as I was taking the long way around campus, through service breezeways and behind buildings—instead of across the quad where I might run into Mike Connelly—that I walked past a group of four Dorkimus Maximi out by the athletic field who were talking about what turned out to be a mutual friend of ours, Matt Murdoch. All I had to do was hear that name come out of their mouths and I was arrested dead in my tracks. If these guys knew that guy, then they were all right with me. Out of simple relief and a sense of recognition of an island of my own kind amidst this sea of chaos, I butted right in on their conversation. Anyone who considered Matt Murdoch a friend was bound to be good people. My kind of people. Because Matt Murdoch is also known as Daredevil, the blind superhero and Patron Saint of lonely nerds everywhere. As Patron Saints go, you could do worse, believe me.

So I jumped right in with those four, and was welcomed with open arms. Tim Smith, Phillip Holliday, Mike Price, Stephen Abatay, and I formed a nerdly cadre that somehow navigated all the treacherous waters around us. Staying the night at each other’s houses for Star Wars trilogy marathons, trips to Richard Kyle books on Friday for new comics and Wester Bacon Cheese Burgers at Carl’s Jr, and using washers to trick dilapidated old pinball games into letting us play for free. We fought and backstabbed, we saw each other through California earthquakes, school violence, first forays into the world of girls, and the beginning of the end of our collective innocence. But eventually, the day came when none of that mattered. Because in the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Six, ‘ghosting’ may not yet have been a term, but it was absolutely a thing.

If you said it to a kid today, they’d know right away that you meant disappearing out of someone’s life without explanation by pressing the right series of buttons on a screen to delete, block, ban, or otherwise unfriend a person. The result being that the victim can’t see you on social media, their emails get delivered straight to the trash, their text messages dissolve into the ether, phone calls go straight to voicemail, and any message they leave is heard only by machines who instantly forget what was said. All without notice or fanfare, all unbeknownst to them. At the touch of a button, they simply fade away like a ghost. Kids these days and their rock n roll music. In my day, we didn’t have machines to do our dirty work. You had to be a coward the old-fashioned way. Right to someone’s face…except, you know, behind their back.

For all my vaunted memory, I wish I could recall the specific event that lead to our decision to “ghost” Tim. I’m certain that it centered around a girl, as every teenaged boy’s problems do. I can see a parade of faces from the myriad girls that I wished would have liked me the way that I liked them: Ylani, Julie, Norma, Juvy, Luz, Gloria, Anna, Rosie. The list is endless, because it’s made up of pretty much any girl that I’d ever exchanged more than ten words with outside of class. At some point, one of them approached me out on the quad for some reason—maybe socially, or more likely some help with school work—and got a gander of me in my native habitat, amongst my Nerd Herd. I could practically see the gears turning in her head as she reassessed her impression of me and beat feet for the hills. Unlike Tim, I wasn’t content to just be myself, to accept my station in life. So instead of disregarding someone like that for their shallow judgment of us (or me, specifically), I took it as a perilous loss of status that I couldn’t afford if I was ever going to escape exile in Dorkdom. That had to be somebody’s fault…

There is no measure for how absolutely desperate I was not to be labelled a nerd, dork, geek, spaz, egghead, poindexter, neo-maxie-zoom-dweebie loser. Not again. Not after the nightmare of Washington Jr. High and Gladiator Academy. No matter what, I couldn’t let that cling to me at another school. So over the next couple of weeks, as the dust began to settle on the initial chaos and uncertainty of our Sophomore year, and our reputation as the Dorks Who Met At The Flagpole was firming up into a fact, the wheels were turning as to who was to blame for that assignation and how we might shed the taint of their presence. Looking around, the group began to triangulate on Tim as the nerd’s nerd, a lightning rod to absorb all of the self-loathing that we’d been taught to feel for ourselves. Our scapegoat.  

And like the scapegoat of old, we cast him into the wilderness alone to bear our shame, starting first thing one random Monday morning. No preamble, no explanation, we just stopped showing up. So, at fifteen, Tim went from having a group of faithful friends on one day, to having literally no friends at all the next. Poof! Ghosted. All because we were callow and stupid enough to believe that with him gone, our status would surely rise of its own accord. But of course it didn’t. Over a few short weeks it became clear that Tim’s absence hadn’t changed a blessed thing. How could it? After all, I still had the same off-brand fashion sense, goofy Donny Osmond haircut, dumbass sense of humor, and anorexic Gumby-like physique that I’d always had. Still, it was easier to imagine that Tim was somehow uncool, than to admit that I was. That, as a scrawny, sycophantic little know-it-all dork, I could repel girls just fine on my own, solely by virtue of my personality and appearance. That all things being equal, we were exactly where Darwinian forces would have us be in the social hierarchy. But rather than come to our senses and admit it, we stayed the course.

Of the four remaining members of our original Herd, only Mike Price had the humility and character to see that what we were doing was pointless and cruel. After a few days, he went and mended fences with Tim and made things right between them. That should have been enough to break the spell of self-delusion we were under, but rather than admit what shitty assholes we were, we doubled down on our assholery, finding ways to taunt Tim and flaunt our shunning of him. It was as if, by piling up enmity and derision on him, we could cover over our bizarre and inexcusable behavior. Looking back, I’m glad Tim had Mike to stand with him, because Mike was a big guy, strong as an ox, and he had a punch like a pile-driver. Not only did he teach our little pack of hyena-like cowards to keep a respectable distance, but he went on the offensive to get back at us in a variety cunning ways. Until that moment, Mike had kind of been the troublemaker of our group, the ruffian shoplifter and foul-mouthed oaf. But when the chips were down, and I was the villain instead, he was a loyal guy who stood up and did the right thing.

That year passed into the next as they are wont to do, and by then we were moving in different circles and mysteriously never had one class with Tim, or saw him in the halls, at the mall, or the movie theater. It was as if we were living in parallel dimensions, existing at the same time and place, but somehow removed and unaware of the other’s existence. We didn’t necessarily escape the dreaded label of nerd, or dork—or whatever it was we were so terrified of—but we did learn to live with it and accept ourselves and who were with a little bit of grace, as everyone eventually must. Over the course of our High School career, we began to look back on what we’d done like it was from a fever dream, or something done by other people. Disassociated, as though it were too shameful to have been done by what were otherwise terrific guys like us.

Even after I’d graduated, I kept the story in my back pocket, carrying it with me everywhere I went. Every now and then, when I’d get into a deep conversation or truth-or-dare type of game—like you do when you’re of a certain age or have been drinking—and people would ask what the worst, most embarrassing thing I’d ever done was, the Ballad of Tim Smith always came to mind and then inevitably came tumbling haplessly out of my mouth. No matter what anyone else had to say, my story always topped theirs. I’d get these looks of shock or mild horror, as though they were reassessing me as someone capable of things that even an animal wouldn’t do. Well…not the cute ones anyway, like weasels and rats. To this day, my wife and closest friend all know the name Tim Smith. Such is level of remorse that I’ve felt ever since, that it’s become a permanent part of my biography.

Over the years, I added a couple of other whoppers to the resume of regret that I left in my wake. Things that, in spite of the years of drug addiction, small-time dealing, and money laundering etc., still stand out as the worst things I’ve ever done, and which make up a special trifecta of regret that I’ll take to my grave. Since I turned 40 (cliché as that is), I’ve been on a low-key mission to rebuild friendships and make amends—or at least apologies—for long-term sins, wrongs, and general douchebaggery that I engaged in over the course of my life. It’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would, because people are busy and our lives are complicated, and you can’t just show up on somebody’s doorstep out of nowhere and, apropos of nothing, blurt out how sorry you are for being a jerk.

What I couldn’t have guessed at the outset of my “mission,” was how pivotal these stories would turn out to be in helping me to connect with people.  Not only resurrecting old friendships I thought were lost to the sands of time, but for creating opportunities to have conversations I would never have been able to even begin otherwise. Phillip and I got back in touch in 2012 and have dinner a couple of times a year these days. At some point during those long and boozy conversations, we inevitably return to Tim and the indelible sense of remorse that we’ve carried with us, always. I guess there are just some things in life you never get over. Still, the outcomes have otherwise been so gratifying that I started telling all the stories that I had in me. By way of all this bloviating, I’ve managed, incredibly, over the course of the last six years, to find redemption and even restoration with virtually all of my beloved old friends that I’d so grievously wronged. Everyone except Tim Smith.

That is until the morning of June 6^th, 2018.

On that fine morning, an otherwise nondescript Wednesday, I checked the blog and noticed a spike of unusual activity in the analytics. I poked around and found that someone had left a new comment on a three year old story, “Whitey Sings the Blues.” The comment began this way: “Jerk, asshole, tormentor? Yes to all three.” I recognized my own words from that selfsame story being spit back at me in pain and discovered that they had been written by none other than Tim Smith himself. Through a series of unknown connections and coincidences, he’d somehow found the story—in which he is briefly mentioned by name—and left a lengthy reply. http://scratchedinthesand.blogspot.com/2015/01/whitey-sings-blues.html

In it, he confirmed all of the things I’d felt about myself for the past three decades and described in some detail the injury he’d suffered more than half our lifetime ago. It was exactly as painful an experience for him as I'd feared, and more besides. I read it over and over again, until it was like a silent bomb had gone off inside. When I finished picking my jaw up off the floor, I immediately reached out to Phillip, and so began many hours-worth of soul searching. Long discussions about what we should say and how to say it. Reminding each other of details we’d forgotten, debating the timeline and our motivations. More than a few tears were shed in fresh anguish, and yet somehow there was still this air of…possibility.

So I sat down and began writing the single-biggest apology I’ve ever owed in my life. Inflation adjusted for 1986.

“Whitey Sings the Blues” is a story about bullying, and about how even a Dorkimus Maximus like me had found people lower in the social hierarchy, and saw fit to keep the same shit I received rolling downhill to them. That being a victim of bullying doesn’t indemnify you from being a bully yourself. About how we find ways to pass on our pain, and that my regret for that is why I tell all these tales in the first place. The closing words of the story are these: “I write these rambling, oblique apologies for the way that I was; these huge love letters to friendship and days gone by; thank you notes to the Grace that has planted itself at the corners of my life as a bulwark against my own stupidity… Try not be too big of a dick, Whitey. It’s a helluva vig when it comes due.”

Well, after thirty-two years, the vig has indeed finally come due. But rather than an unpayable debt, it somehow feels like a gift. It’s hard to say where this will lead, because thirty-two years is a long time. A lot of years, a lot of miles, a lot of hard feelings. Still, difficult and candid conversations have begun between Tim, Phillip, and me at long last. Reflections on betrayal, rejection, and pain; meditations on the vulnerable, confusing years of high school, and how life has turned out for us in the wake of it all. Looking back on the best of times and the worst of times. And maybe a bit forward as well...so who knows?

Of this I’m certain, even an inch down Redemption Road is worth a million miles anywhere else.