I’ve got it coming. Eventually it will come. Everything is cyclical. The history of our planet proves this theory. We, being the idiots that we are, remain helpless to do anything about the inevitable reoccurrence of our stupidity. Because if that wasn’t the case then a great many things would be different. Like a certain chocolate bar, that will remain nameless, for example. Who, in their right fucking mind, puts chocolate and coconut together. Who?

I am perhaps the stupidest person who has ever lived. It’s true, ask anyone. There are examples of my stupidity that I have attempted to share with you. I failed, of course, but did try. Actually, failed is the wrong word, I didn’t fail. I succumbed to the better judgment of others. This, of course, is something that you should never do when it comes to things of a creative nature. It’s always best to trust your guts. Unless you’ve just taken some kind of antacid. Then you might want to wait a while and make sure you’re thinking straight.

I have no idea why I let myself be influenced in such a way. Then again, I can’t really remember most of 1991 either, so I’m really not one to talk. But I have come up with a solution to that problem. I simply got rid of my friends. It’s clear sailing from here on in.

I am confident that one day I will be assassinated by a right-wing organization of some kind. I have, in the past, done many things to test the bounds of my stupidity and the stupidity of others. I have come to realize that those boundaries may be endless. I have done so at the expense of others on occasion. Some years ago, while working at home one afternoon, I answered my phone and found myself caught in the web of a telephone evangelist. Instead of politely telling her that I was disinterested in her jargon, I decided to play along.

Tele-evangelist: Do you own a bible?

Myself: I think so.

Tele-evangelist: So I take it that you don’t read it.

Myself: No, not recently. But I’ve read it before.

Tele-evangelist: But you don’t read it often?

Myself: No, not really. Why?

Tele-evangelist: Do you own a computer?

Myself: Yes.

Tele-evangelist: Well, it’s like learning to use your computer.

Myself: What is?

Tele-evangelist: The word of God.

Myself: Are you saying that God’s in my computer?
Tele-evangelist: No, no, no!

Myself: Oh.

Tele-evangelist: Did you know how to use your computer when you first bought it?

Myself: No, not really.

Tele-evangelist: So you had to read the manual to learn how to use it?

Myself: Yes.

Tele-evangelist: Well, the same goes for God’s word. You have to read his manual to learn how to live your life!

Myself: I see. So what you’re saying is that God lives in my computer?

My Theory About Music Critics

I was thinking about music critics the other day. This is not a topic that I usually waste time pondering.

Music critics are a strange lot. A large percentage of them are failed musicians actually. This has always perplexed me. If most of them are failed musicians then who, in their right mind, would give them a job critiquing musicians that aren’t failures? It has nothing to do with their writing abilities whatsoever. I have never read a music review that possessed the satirical wit of say a Vonnegut or the texture of someone like James Joyce. True, both are legendary authors, so why compare music critics to them? Why not? They seem to have no trouble doing it to bands. But that’s beside the point. My theory concerning music critics is actually rather simple, and it’s this: if music critics seem to possess the secret knowledge of what components are necessary to make a record great, then why don’t they just do it themselves and spare us the torture of being subjected to their less than entertaining writing skills?

Perhaps bands, as we know them, don’t even exist. Maybe they’re nothing more than fronts for genius music critics who have been forced to take matters into their own hands because the state of modern music is in shambles. Maybe, and this might be a stretch, but what if there are only ten of them in the entire world, each covering a specific genre of music. One does classical, one does pop, one does techno, and so on. Have you ever seen more than two music critics in the same room at the same time? It’s odd.

And this goes back to what I was saying about their writing abilities. If you really examine most reviews they all seem to share a common thread. It’s as if they are only familiar with a small portion of the English language. I have come to the conclusion that all music critics are either from a distant planet inhabited by a race of musical geniuses or they are members of a secret organization, not unlike the Masons, who meet once a year in the basement of Berkeley. I know it sounds absurd, but if you examine this closely it’ll start to make sense. You’ll also get a headache.

There was a man with a hole in his head. He filled it up with water so goldfish could swim around in there. Indispensable at parties, all the pretty girls would put their drinks on his brain. He liked that. So did the goldfish.

There was a woman that liked him once. After putting her drink on his brain they got to talking. It’s always awkward for the first few minutes. They’re standing there and she’s trying her best not to stare at the glass sticking out of his head. So they talk for a while and start to hit it off, but the girl has her concerns—to say the least. I mean, it’s not normal to have a hole in one’s head, let alone use it as a drink holder. She starts asking him questions about everything and anything that doesn’t have to do with the fact that there’s a hole in his head. Her friends stand across the room talking in whispers, using sophisticated hand signals, weighing the situation, planning what to say if she actually decides to give it a go. But after a while she breaks down and starts asking him about his head, which she hasn’t stopped staring at the entire time.

“You live alone?� she asks him.

“Yeah,� he says.

“When you go to bed, do you dream about your pillow?� she says.

“What?� he says.

“Your pillow. Do you dream about your pillow? You know, ’cause of the hole,� she says.

“No. Not usually,� he says.

And that was pretty much it. They stood there for a couple of minutes in one of those uncomfortable silences before her friends came to her rescue.

“Come meet Bill,� they said. “He’s absolutely delightful!�

After that he went home. So did the fish. It’s not easy spending your whole life looking for a girl with a hole in her head. We’ll see.

Halfway around the world there is a tiny country where everyone is red. And by that I’m not implying that they’re Communists, I’m referring to their skin. It’s a small island country that’s turned into quite the tourist hot spot in the past few years. But the indigenous people of this island are still rather primitive. Most of the natives that live in the interior of the island still dwell in huts. But that doesn’t stop people from going to the south coast and staying in fancy hotels.

The tourists act crazily, drink too much, and wear as little clothing as possible. They use the heat as an excuse for such behaviour. But the natives in the interior never see the vacationers. They’ve never even seen the hotels on the southern coast. They just live in the jungle with the monkeys and tigers.

I recently read somewhere that, over a considerable number of years, they’ve taught the monkeys to speak. And by speak I am inferring that they carry on conversations and hold debates and such. The article went on to say that, since the monkeys don’t converse in English, it’s not considered to be all that impressive. The fact that a monkey has the ability to lecture other monkeys about the works of Noam Chomsky in a foreign language doesn’t seem all that exciting to anyone. One must wonder why that same principle is not applied to opera.

The monkeys just sit in the trees casually making off-colour comments about the tourists as they walk by. Having never appeared on That’s Incredible they feel altogether unappreciated I’m afraid.

One of the villages in the interior is ruled by a tribal chief named Hubaru. Hubaru has three children, a son and two daughters. The younger of his two girls has never been seen by anyone, save her parents and siblings. She stays in the family hut all day. There are rumours that she was wooed by a monkey and a damaging scandal ensued. Hubaru thought it best to confine her to the hut. This all happened many years ago, of course, so no one can really recall what actually occurred with any accuracy. Unbeknownst to his subjects, Hubaru’s reasons for condemning his daughter were altogether different.

She has a rather large hole in the top of her head. He thinks she is embarrassing so he confines her to the hut. He fights about it with his wife day in and day out.

She spends her time trying to comfort her daughter, vainly attempting to convince herself that her husband isn’t a tyrant. She keeps trying to convince Hubaru to allow his daughter to leave the hut, but Hubaru won’t have any of it. There’s a hole in her head, end of discussion. He has come to believe that she gets the hole from her mother. His wife’s thinking the same thing. The monkeys, by the way, could care less.

In another part of the world a man is getting on an airplane. He’s leaving on holiday. He’s had it. He’s tired of pretty girls using his head as a drink holder. Especially the stupid ones. He’s discussed it with the fish and the fish agree.

He hadn’t really planned on taking a holiday. Out of curiosity, the day before, he had stepped into a travel agent’s to look at holiday brochures. He started flipping through some of them when a travel agent started in on him about how he deserved to have some fun. He wasn’t looking for fun but he let the travel agent talk anyway.

Some people have obvious character flaws. Some are rude, some are hot tempered, some are flakes, some tend to lie. The man also had a character flaw: he was too polite. He’d always been too polite. So by the time the travel agent had finished showing him a multitude of brochures and pictures he started to get a sick feeling in his stomach. He couldn’t just walk out, not after this lady had spent an hour of her time going through everything from hotel choices to rental-car agencies. He wasn’t even sure where it was she had him going. It didn’t matter. Before he knew it his credit card was out and he was paying.

Now he’s on a plane going to some small island in the South Pacific that he’s never heard of. He’s not a rich man, he could barely afford the trip, but it’s too late now. A million things are running through his head at once. Everything from how he’s going to survive for two weeks on $193 spending money to how he’s going to explain missing work for fourteen days without any kind of advance notice. He doubts that he’ll get fired.
He’s the most complacent employee in the world.

It’s just that the whole thing feels foreign to him: doing something which is so clearly not the proper thing to do. The feeling that confuses him the most is the tingling sensation running up and down his body. We know it as excitement. As far as he knows, it’s the flu. He does his best not to think about it. He takes out a book and starts reading. 1 Elevator, Silence, Overweight. The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure… The hours pass. The plane slips through the upper atmosphere as night falls over the Pacific. He falls asleep, tingling. The fish play dream games.

You know it’s not all that strange to have a hole in one’s head. Technically we all have several to speak of. So one more shouldn’t be all that big a deal. But obviously it is. People see it as some mark of questionable humanity. Holes are not found atop the human head, it’s a scientific fact. So it automatically implies difference. Difference is not something anyone takes to all that well. We’re much more excited about familiarity. That’s why the majority of hotel rooms appear to be the same. No matter your level of economics, all hotel rooms look alike. Whether they be penthouses or singles, suites or a tiny little bed in an impossibly small room. They’re all the same. Maybe, had we been differently devised, we would have made sure that they were not alike. But too long have we favoured familiarity to do anything about it now. And so they will all remain the same. As will holes atop the head remain anomalous. Even more so if they happen to be the only outlet from which to feed goldfish.

Nevertheless, our friend did his best to conquer his fear of the unknown before arriving at Narita. He would have to change planes there. He did this with surprising accuracy, considering that he had never been in a major airport before. But he found himself over three hours early for his connecting flight, leaving him with little choice but to make his way to the nearest lounge. Once there, he ordered a drink. It cost him a million dollars. Japan is like that. Everything costs a million dollars.

From Japan he would travel south into the wide expanse of the South Seas. Waters in which many Japanese and American sailors and airmen are buried. Waters that are deeper than any other on earth, containing dangers aplenty. Waters that have even been kissed by atomics, thanks to the French. Leave it to the French to make certain that parts of the South Pacific will glow for the next 200 years. Not that they’re alone, mind you, but they’re French and that’s good enough. So south he went, hurled through the air at outrageous speeds towards the mysterious and alluring bosom of paradise. Hopefully, Tattoo would be sober enough to greet him. This was the wish of the fish.

Some hours later, following the always chancy in-flight service of any major airline, the plane landed and he promptly made his way to the hotel. To his surprise the lady at the travel agency had misled him. He remembered being shown pictures of a lavish hotel, the kind that has four pools, two bars, and 24-hour room service. Such hotels did exist on the island, mind you. In fact, from his room he could see most of them across the harbour. There they were, all in a row. He just wasn’t staying in one.

He was staying on the north shore of the harbour in a hotel called the Sea Breeze. It was nice enough, he figured, as he wasn’t one to complain. Nor did he attempt to call the travel agent and demand an explanation. To him it seemed pointless. The fish, who rarely bothered to look out through his eyes, did not care about such things. They were quite upset that Tattoo had not been present when they had deplaned. Fantasy Island was their favourite television program. And when it got cancelled, they agreed never to look through his eyes again.

He was officially on holiday. This of course meant that, after unpacking his clothes and whatnot, he had no idea what he was supposed to do. So he spent the better part of the afternoon looking out across the harbour at the hotels and the water. It didn’t occur to him to go outside. He was content with just being somewhere that offered him a view such as that. Sometimes loneliness has its charm—it being secretive and quite impossible to predict. Most of the time it lacks charm simply because no one else is ever there to bear witness. This is the unsullied beauty of a such a singular and private moment.

Later that night he went to dinner, after which he returned to his room and organized his toiletries in the bathroom. If anything he was orderly. It’s a condition of loneliness. It drives you to constantly clean things and make sure that they’re in the proper place. He placed his things in their proper places and proceeded to clean the sink. It wasn’t until he accidentally hit the light switch with his elbow that he saw the moon reflected in the bathroom mirror.

Captivated by its light, he left the sink and wandered over to the window. And that’s how he spent his evening. Some hours later his eyes grew heavy and he decided to turn in. Having been completely dazzled by the prospect of such an immense body of water, the fish talked excitedly into the night. The man dreamed of the ocean, like a sailor lost to his love.

Many miles to the north of the Sea Breeze Hotel a young, red woman was making her way through the jungle. She was, to the embarrassment of her ancestors, completely lost. In her defense she had spent most of her life confined to a hut, so she could not be counted on to uphold centuries of miraculous woodland navigation.

She had been planning this night for almost four months. She had water, food, a spear, and what she thought was a pretty good idea of which direction the coast lay. This last factor was, of course, the weak link in her plan. And, after hours of tromping through the bushes, she found herself right back where she had started. But this only heightened her resolve. She set out again, deciding to rely on the worst possible thing that one could ever rely on, talking monkeys.

Sometimes talking monkeys can come in handy. Always ones to gossip incessantly, their chatter could be heard in the surrounding trees. Two such monkeys, Albert and Cosmo, made a habit of taking some shade under a tree quite near to the hut of the chief. The girl would sit there for hours and listen to Albert and Cosmo talk. Most of the time they babbled on about monkey business. But some of the time they would talk about a magical place far to the south where the trees were made of diamonds and no one ever died. They did this on purpose, of course.

Talking monkeys are smart, much smarter than most believe them to be. Both Albert and Cosmo knew that the girl was listening to them, because she would laugh at their silly jokes on occasion. Instead of bad-mouthing the tourists, as they commonly did twenty hours of each day, they decided to breathe a little life into the girl’s imagination.

As the girl ventured back into the jungle she came across several monkeys sitting under a tree. They were drinking vodka martinis and wearing smoking jackets. None of them noticed her approaching, for they were all half-cut and in a bit of a verbal tizzy about the Euro. Of course the girl had no idea what Euro were, but they sounded important enough. She thought it best to ask the monkeys for some directions, as they seemed rather intelligent. This was her undoing. The monkeys didn’t notice her until she was almost upon them. But, because they were talking monkeys, they didn’t respond to being startled like the average monkey would. They did not make for the nearest tree to seek refuge in its heights. They just casually turned their heads in a drunken wave of imbalance, as one of them stood up, pointed a finger, and said with the utmost inebriation, “Who goes there?�

For the next five minutes the girl just stood watching them while the monkeys rolled around on the ground in hysterics. Martini glasses were crushed, smoking jackets sullied, lungs heaved in an attempt to maximize the vocalization of hilarity. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The monkeys sat up, attempted to straighten themselves, and turned to the girl. The monkey that had initiated the laughter spoke first.
“What, may I ask, are you doing wandering the wilds at this hour child?�

The girl, having never spoken with a monkey before, decided to skip the pleasantries and get straight to the point.

“I’m looking for the land of diamond trees,� she said.

She thought he was rude, to say the least.

“I see. Well, you might try going that way,� and pointed off into the darkness with a long finger.

She followed the finger. And the monkeys went on to a new topic, the possible sale of arms to Taiwan.

As morning broke the girl was still wandering the jungle. Having stopped to ask several other monkeys for assistance, she had been sent off in a variety of directions. She was exhausted. She found a clearing and decided to get some sleep.

The man woke up in his hotel room. He washed, ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and returned to his room. As he was sitting there gazing out at the bay, he noticed a car-rental agency brochure on a nearby table. He picked it up. And that’s all it took. A 1976 Honda Civic was at the front door of the hotel in less than twenty minutes. Because it was a rather cheap rental agency, he could actually afford it. He spent the better part of that day driving around the south coast. He drove past nice hotels and white sand beaches filled with sunbathers. He drove past a variety of tropical gardens and golf courses. And then, as if it were any surprise, he decided to go back to the hotel.

The girl awoke to the sound of two voices. Opening her eyes, she immediately realized that the voices were those of monkeys. They seemed to be discussing whether or not she was dead. One thought she was, the other did not. Just as the girl opened her eyes, the two monkeys were debating whether or not to poke her with a stick in an attempt to ascertain her condition. The girl, fearing what might happen, thought it best to get to her feet. Their reaction to this was split.

One yelled “Ha! I told you so!� and the other yelled “shit.�

The girl yelled “Shut up,� and so they did. But her attempt to get accurate directions from them was just as pointless as it had been from the other monkeys. They sent her northwest instead of south, figuring she might wander into Abunta territory and be eaten.

The Abunta were the last remaining cannibals. Although few in number, they held a section of the jungle along the northwest coast of the island, some distance from the girl’s own village.
She headed off, leaving the two monkeys arguing. Having walked for the better part of the evening towards certain death and digestion, the girl once again made the mistake of stopping to ask for directions. Only this time the monkey that she encountered wasn’t interested in playing games with her.

He simply said, “You see that big star up there?� pointing skyward. “Walk towards it.�

The girl thanked the monkey and went on her way. The monkey shook his head and muttered to himself. The star in question was known as the Big Nunga Nunga. No one knows why it was named that, but that’s what they’ve called it for centuries. The Nunga, which is its shortened name, is the largest star in the night sky. The ancients believed that if you were to get in a boat and sail towards the Nunga then you would burst into flames and be destroyed for being stupid enough to travel that far out to sea.

The islanders never sailed south in fear of its wrath. Of course, the girl was relatively safe because she was on land. Or so you would think.
In the tropics there is nothing more enrapturing than the moon. But the man, and the fish, were both captivated by the light that it cast on the water below. How it made the sea seem mysterious and altogether alluring. Under this spell the man decided to go for a drive, which was very much out of character for him. This was very much against himself. Then again, so was going on a vacation with absolutely no preparation or planning. Nevertheless, he walked out to his rented Honda Civic, got in, and hit the highway. The drive across the southern coast was quite beautiful according to the brochure, perhaps even more so with the moon in play.

Four miles down the road there was a blind corner. In his newfound state of unfamiliar excitement the man sped towards this corner free of concern. Some distance to the north of that curve, a girl was angrily tromping through the jungle, convinced that the Land Of Diamond Trees was an elaborate lie. I would love to tell you that the man and the girl did not arrive at that corner at the same time. Life is mostly cruel, you see. She didn’t feel anything. Neither of them did.

The explosion was seen across the bay by hundreds of people sitting out on their lavish hotel balconies. Some even thought it was some kind of traditional island-fire-ceremony-thing. Americans, most likely. Eventually a Dutch couple had the common sense to pick up the phone and tell someone.

As an aside, fire ceremonies had been banned in the 1920s after half of the island was consumed by flames. Strangely enough, the fire was caused by a village idiot who wandered into the jungle with a torch and fell asleep. You see, the crazy bastard actually thought he could teach monkeys how to speak.

Emergency crews were alerted and those with a taste for the macabre decided to go have a look. After hitting the girl, the man lost control of the car and went straight off the road’s shoulder. Having burst through a flimsy wooden guard rail, the Civic plummeted several hundred feet to the rocks below. It sat there, crushed upside down into the rocks, and exploded. The man’s body was blown out of the wreck into the sea. The ocean water flooded through the hole in our friend’s head. Miraculously the fish survived the accident, and though elated that their captor had the decency to perish in such a grand body of water, they were nonetheless killed by its salty contents.

The girl, on the other hand, was discovered by a monkey in the bushes on the side of the road. Left with little choice, as he was a decent sort of fellow, he did the only thing he could do. He walked out of the bushes and over to a group of bystanders. He then stopped, cleared his throat, and said:

“Excuse me, but there happens to be a young woman over there in the bushes and I believe her to be quite dead.�

All of that, by the way, in perfect English. This phenomenal event in human history was, of course, never reported simply because the people that the monkey chose to address were members of a Korean tour group. All of whom cared only to speak Korean.

For a fleeting moment in time the only two people on earth with holes in their heads found each other. They just got the timing wrong is all.

You will be dead much longer than you will be alive. This is the truth of things. Better get used to the idea. The lives of men and women, cats and dogs, birds and fish are merely hiccups in an endlessness that will never be fully realized. You are here now and will be gone in some years, months, perhaps even days or hours. The execution of this plan will never change, despite the fact that you will do your best to convince yourself otherwise. You merely feed off the scraps of words and wares consolidated by those that came before you. You are a thing void of structural integrity. Like anything built or born, you will eventually succumb to either the weight of the world or the weight of walking it. This is the only thing you ever need come to terms with. That eventually you will be lost. They will lose you. You will be forgotten and never heard from again. And no one will ever know the story that was your life.

We started out standing up. Crawling, though commonly misconstrued as a mode that precedes upright maneuvers, came later. To everything there is an unseen direction that is both unfelt and unimagined. Some might call it fate. Others, with less aptitude for things philosophical, might call it dumb luck. I don’t know that we ever thought it anything more than our lives playing out within the expected parameters. Maybe, in some other place, we would have possessed the smarts to know the difference. But the streets of our youth were paved with a sort of numbness that tricked the mind into believing that the world was something other than a globe that truly existed if one had the gumption to just keep walking. It was as if we were East Berliners, confronted by both a wall and an outer force that was greater than ourselves combined. So we remained there, walking those streets, idiots of impeccable loathing. And, as a product of that place and time, I’m lost for the kind of language that one always hopes will offer a momentous beginning.

It happened rather suddenly. It happened because everything needs to begin somewhere and, without being able to pinpoint that beginning, how is one to ever know when it began at all. There are those beginnings that creep up on you slowly and there are those that adhere to the usual guidelines. In the case of this story, it was neither. Like I said, it happened rather suddenly, which means that it was neither slow nor traditional.

It just happened.

Picture a set of concrete stairs located behind a large school. On those stairs hundreds of kids spent countless hours of their lives smoking, drinking, and whatnot. Most of the time there was mundane conversation. Some of the time there was just silence. It was during one such silence that Bibs Stettner’s body came plummeting from the roof of the school to impact on the landing at the foot of those stairs. At the time there were some fifty or sixty kids out there and to them it was as if his body simply fell from the sky and slammed into the concrete. And no one said a word. Not because they weren’t troubled by the fact that Bibs had just killed himself but because, for the first time in the history of those stairs, the silence was something other than mundane.

When the police came to gather up Bibs’s body I just happened to be walking through the doors that led to those stairs. I had been in class, off in some other world, not paying any attention as usual. It consumed me as I walked through the halls, deafening me to the whispers of Bibs’s suicide. So I walked outside, cigarette in mouth, lighter to cigarette, and found myself directly in front of his half-covered body. He was lying there looking at me. I lit the cigarette and blinked. He did not. I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my life. But the strangest of them all would have to be standing over my brother’s dead body wondering what I was going to tell our mother when I got home. “Bibs is dead and I failed math again.� It seemed to me then that my big brother was still looking out for me, even in death. Thanks Brian. That was his real name.

There I was, cigarette in hand, gazing into my brother’s dead eyes. Everyone on the stairs, realizing that I had not yet learned of his death, suddenly started shouting at the authoritative figures in my vicinity to cover his body. One of the cops decided to yell at me instead. So he said “Get away from there, kid!�

So I did.

There are several advantages to having your brother hurl himself off of a roof. 1: You get to leave school early. 2: You are not expected to return to school until you’ve had enough time to overcome your grief. There are several disadvantages as well. 1: Your parents get divorced because one’s an alcoholic and the other blames them for their son’s suicide. 2: Your father decides to move to Oregon and your mother’s too hammered most of the time to support you so you get sent to live with your grandmother.

I spent the better part of three weeks at my Nan’s before deciding to go back. Most of that time I spent messing around with a girl named Penelope Fynn. At the time I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with fooling around with my dead brother’s girlfriend. I do now, of course, but I was much hornier then. I never really knew what made Penny seek me out at my Nan’s. But she did.

I returned to school on a Monday. I remember that only because of the song and the fact that I agreed with it. Besides it being a Monday it was also the last week of the school year, which meant that come Friday I had nothing to do but get loaded and sit around at the pool with my friends. Back then that’s what kids did during the summer where I grew up. They hung out at pools. If you think about it it’s a rather brilliant place for teenagers to go. Everyone’s already half naked. Who could ask for more? Our pool had pretty much everything you could ask for in an outdoor aquatic facility. A concession stand, a huge grass lawn behind the diving boards where most people spent their time rather than in the water, and it was conveniently located next to a large park—which meant that if you wanted to get some privacy, for whatever, you could. The lawn area behind the boards even had fire pits and picnic tables. It makes me wonder why any of us ever bothered to go home at night. During my final week at school I spent most of my time daydreaming about a lazy summer wasted lying around on that lawn. That, and trying my best not to grab Penny’s ass in the hallways for fear of someone noticing.

John William Wick was, at the time, my best friend. He was also my brother’s best friend. We shared a best friend. Wick didn’t go to school with us though. He started going to university when he was sixteen. He was a mathematical genius. Not exactly the wisest man I’ve ever met, but a genius by and by. Two days after his seventeenth birthday he was offered a job by a huge aerospace firm. The job paid $250,000 a year to start. It would take my father almost twenty years to make that kind of money. Had Wick lived to actually start the job, I’m sure I would have enjoyed driving around with him in some fancy sports car and hanging about with supermodels and strippers and such. But Wick drowned in the pool that summer instead and I would be denied all the things that come along with having a wealthy, genius friend. It’s my lot in life.

That summer Wick had decided to spend July in the neighbourhood and August at some math camp. It was called CALCULOT, if you can believe it. Maybe Wick would have been Merlin had he not died. He always wanted to be Merlin. Nonetheless, we started our summer by going to the mall on one of our quarterly shoplifting sprees. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to clothe yourself for an entire summer in a little less than thirty minutes of breakneck theft. The fact that Penny came along only added to our success. Penny was rather beautiful, you see. While she had the clerks and salesmen swooning over her, Wick, Billy, and I robbed the place blind. Two knapsacks, one magnet for removing security disks, and one lookout. That’s all it took. There used to be four of us, of course, but obviously Bibs was preoccupied with the immensity of death. And as I said earlier, you are dead much longer than you are alive. So it must be quite an undertaking.

The spoils of our excursion were plentiful and spirits were as high as could be expected. Billy and Wick came away with numerous items of worthlessness, as usual, and I ended up getting a couple of new shirts, some shorts, a clock radio, two records, and a pair of sneakers.

You know, I’ve always loved that particular name for shoes. Think about it: sneakers. It makes you wonder who exactly will be sneaking and why. Perfect for a guy like me who, on average, spends more time sneaking through life than not. Maybe that’s why I still wear them, even as an adult. Then again, maybe I should just grow up and get some loafers. I could steal them in my sneakers. That’s what I do for a living, you see. I’m what they like to call a career criminal. And they wonder how people like me get started. It’s called the economics of poverty.

So that’s how the summer of 1985 kicked off. No different than the summer of 1984. Except that Bibs was dead, of course. Actually, that’s a pretty major difference, isn’t it. Thinking back on it I’m always reminded of something that Billy often said that summer. He’d say “if Bibs was here he’d know what to do.� It was true, you see. My older brother had a gift for getting the rest of us out of tight spots. I remember one time when we were down at the markets and some drunk bikers decided to give us a little scare. Instead of keeping his mouth shut Billy started to mouth off. He was a rather lippy guy. But Billy was big for his age, so he could usually back it up. But not on this particular occasion. The bikers started to get rather angry and came to the conclusion that the best thing for our Billy was a good beating. So that’s what they started at. And that’s when my brother’s talent kicked in. While the bikers were attempting to pin Billy to the ground, Bibs went over to their bikes and started pushing them over, one by one. This angered the bikers, but it also meant that their attentions were now focused on my brother. Billy, knowing what Bibs was up to, bolted, at top speed, down the street. Dumbfounded, I just stood there like an idiot. My brother, on the other hand, received the beating of a lifetime. He spent two weeks in the hospital, though he never bothered to tell the police who had put him there. Some months later we were all at a party at the ravine and a biker came over to my brother, patted him on the back, and gave him a beer. “You’re alright kid,� was all he said. That was Bibs’s way of making sure we were alright.

Like I said, Billy Quon was a lippy guy. He was the only Chinese guy in our neighbourhood. His family owned the only Chinese-food restaurant in our neighbourhood, chose to move there because they figured it was safer than downtown. This, of course, was not true. The downtown core of the city included Chinatown.

As it turned out, Billy became an instant target when he moved to the neighborhood simply because no one had ever been given the opportunity to use something like race against someone. Those were the rules, you understand. It didn’t matter if you had big ears, bad skin, a funny name, stuttered, or were Chinese. Something’s going to be used against you if it can be. It’s a test of character and nothing more. Billy’s hard times ended, of course, the first time he cleaned the clock of someone that chose to racially slur him. After that he was cool by us. You see, it never really mattered much to me or Bibs or Wick. To us Billy was just another kid who had to go through the motions before he could be let in. And like everyone else, I suppose, he got his fair share. These days things just don’t work like that. And you wonder why no one knows who they are anymore.

Penny, unlike Billy, was not a loudmouth. She didn’t need to be. She was beautiful. Beautiful girls don’t really need to say much. They can get what they want by flipping their hair around and such. Penny knew this, so that’s what she did. My brother fell prey to her hair-flipping in 1984 and remained her captive until his death. I don’t think that Penny ever thought of Bibs as her boyfriend though. He was just someone to hang around with. Penny was very much like that, you see. All about adventures and scandalous behaviour and such. She thought it made her mysterious.
Turns out it made her crazy. A crazy slut. I could never quite figure out why she chose to mess around with me after Bibs died. She was always closer to Wick, I had thought. I would discover later that she had remained close with Wick during our time together. The tragic thing about it was that Wick truly loved the girl. Penny was incapable of love. Being the genius that he was it must have seemed like the world was coming to an end when Penny finally told him that she had been sleeping with me. I would never get the chance to tell him that I was sorry though. After a night filled with the strangest occurrences of my life he would drown himself in the pool. He was not an altogether wise man, as I said. Just good with numbers.

But at the beginning of that summer we were both in the dark, Billy missed Bibs, and Penny was busy with two new lovers. No one was dead, save my brother, and the possibilities seemed endless to me. It was some weeks after our shoplifting extravaganza that Billy found the briefcase in the bushes behind the pool. He had been messing around with Karen Walsh again. And for Billy it was a rather difficult affair. Mr. Walsh, it seems, really hated Chinese people.

Some might say that the briefcase was the root of all evil. I disagree. Penny Fynn’s reputation was the root of all evil. They say that hindsight is twenty-twenty and will kill you every time. If so, I wish it would hurry up and get me.

So there I was, or we were, sitting on the lawn at the pool. Penny was having a great time rolling about on her front with her top off, teasing every male in a 500 foot radius with her rather large tits. I was sitting there munching on Popeye cigarettes—before they changed the magic formula and made them taste like shit. Wick, who had opted to sleep in that afternoon, was not present. Billy came marching out of the bushes with Karen Walsh, jumps the fence, and comes strolling over with this thing. It was an odd sight, I must say. After all, Billy was wearing blue Adidas shorts and nothing else. Add a briefcase and a girl that hasn’t realized that she’s got her bikini bottoms on insideout and you’ve got yourself one strange picture. Sitting down, Billy smiles up at Karen as she heads towards the change rooms and then turns to me with this look on his face like the world’s not really a bad place. This makes me worry, of course. Billy, who is never without his rigid façade, does not smile near anyone who might take it as a sign of weakness. I’m a little confused. Then it dawns on me that he’s got a briefcase on his lap. It had not escaped Penny.

“Where’d you find that thing?� she said.

Trying to do his best not to make a big deal about it, Billy doesn’t look at her directly and responds, “I think we should go to Wick’s place.�

This is odd. I’m beginning to wonder if Billy hasn’t done something wrong. But neither of us argue with him. Penny, because she loved that sort of thing, and me because, well, that’s what I did. I went along.

So we left the pool and walked the seven or so blocks to Wick’s house. As usual, neither of Wick’s parents were home. His father was at work. His mother was out screwing our gym teacher. The two had become close during the Cub Scouts Father-Son camping trip of 1980 that Mr. Wick was unable to attend. So Mrs. Wick decided to take her son instead. The rest is suburban melodrama.

Wick was still in bed, though alert enough to notice the briefcase the second that Billy came through his bedroom door. As it was, his superpowers were focused on Billy’s briefcase and, to a lesser extent, Penny’s briefcase.

“What the hell is that?�

“What’s it look like. It’s a fucking briefcase, isn’t it.� Billy replied, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“I realize that it’s a fucking briefcase, moron. What are you doing with it?�

We sat there for the better part of a half hour listening to Billy tell us how he came across the briefcase. Billy and Karen had decided to venture further into the bushes than usual because they had been victims of several intrusions in the past. They walked a while and found a decent spot. So—yada-yada-yada, oh-god, oh-Billy, oh-Karen, and all that, and then OUCH! What the…and voilà, one slightly beat-up briefcase is discovered. By that point Billy wasn’t about to continue with things. There was, after all, a briefcase sticking in his back. According to Billy, there were also a lot of pine needles sticking in his ass as well—a point that he mentioned several times.

I was relieved. I had been worried that he’d stolen it from someone. Such actions were not beyond Billy, you understand. Having studied it a little during the walk over I had come to the conclusion that it couldn’t have been there for very long. It looked new in spots, even though it had been stained by the dirt. As the story came to an end, Billy hoisted the thing up onto the bed. We all looked at each other as if something truly grand was hidden in it, like money or plane tickets to Hawaii or something. But that was not the case. Had it been money I doubt that Billy would have bothered to tell any of us about it. He would have kept it for himself. But that wasn’t the case. There wasn’t any money in the briefcase. When Billy threw the top back I remember feeling curious but, at the same time, quite worried for some reason. It contained several handguns.

Everyone’s reaction to the guns was different. Penny thought it was quite cool. I said nothing. Billy just sat there looking like he’d discovered the atom bomb and was overly anxious to use it. And Wick, well, Wick was furious.

“What the fuck are you thinking, bringing these things into my house!� he said. Billy’s excitement vanished immediately.

“Jesus Christ Billy! These things were obviously put there for a reason! Don’t you think that whoever put them there had the intention of going back to get them?� Again, Billy said nothing.

This was where Wick’s rather enormous brain started to produce harmful emissions. Billy would never have thought things through enough to have reached that conclusion, let alone suspect that the guns had been buried there for a reason. Of course it all seems rather obvious now but, as I’ve said, we were young. But that didn’t stop Wick from launching into a lengthy attack on Billy. That was Wick’s specialty. He operated at a world-class level when it came to demeaning others.

The abuse lasted long enough for Wick to start repeating himself while Billy just sat in silence. Had it been anyone else, Billy would have levelled them without question. For as I’ve said, Billy was rather large for his age. But Billy would never dare take a shot at Wick. It just wasn’t done. People were afraid of Wick. Unlike Billy, Wick usually detested thugs and their brutish methods of resolve. Wick never bothered defending himself if, and when, he was faced with brute force. Instead, while he was getting a thrashing, he would utter one simple sentence: You had better kill me. The last time I heard Wick say it he was being pummelled by Darren Politnakov. Two weeks later Darren’s German shepherd was found cut into four separate pieces in a garbage can in his carport. On top of the dismembered canine there was a note. It read: I told you. So that’s why no one bothered with Wick. He was, at the worst of times, far more diabolic than most people dare even consider. Billy knew this. So he said nothing. He loved his dog too much.

The belittling ended only when Penny intervened. She thought there was no point in belittling Billy because he had already removed the briefcase. She offered a solution to the dilemma that was satisfactory to all involved. She told Billy to put the briefcase back. I must admit, it wasn’t like Penny to make such a suggestion. Usually she was the one who enjoyed seeing just how far something dangerous could be taken before it got out of hand. Handguns, it seems, were the exception.

We left Wick’s soon after and returned to the pool. The plan was to wait on the lawn while Billy returned the briefcase and then hang around for a bit to make sure that no one had noticed anything. But by the time we reached the pool, Billy had let his imagination get to him. He convinced himself that the owner of the briefcase would come after him. He believed they would track him down for taking their guns. And he wouldn’t shut up about it. I had never seen Billy that scared before. He was actually convinced, due to Wick’s belittling insights on the matter, that something rather bad was going to happen to him because of it.

Wick, who loved to crush people psychologically, just made matters worse. Instead of telling Billy to shut up, or to not worry about it, he decided to fan Billy’s fears. So we sat there, on the lawn, for an hour or so listening to Billy freak out. And all the while Wick kept injecting little snippets of unrealized terror into Billy’s fantasies until Billy refused to go back into the woods at all.

Penny and I were beginning to construct scenarios of our own. Maybe they’d find out who was with Billy and deal with the rest of us just as harshly as Billy was certain they’d deal with him. The only one who didn’t seem worried was Wick, who was having too much fun freaking everyone out. It placed him in a position of control, and Wick loved it.

It was finally decided that both Billy and Wick would go into the bushes together and put the case back. Billy felt more comfortable going back in with Wick, and Wick wanted to make sure that Billy didn’t screw up and put the briefcase in the wrong place. The two of them got up, jumped the fence, and headed into the woods. This left Penny and I waiting on the lawn. Neither of us spoke. We waited there for the better part of twenty minutes before Penny decided to go in and see what was taking them so long.

At the beginning of this story I made reference to fate. Having spent years trying to reconstruct that afternoon in my head, and subconsciously scanning the pool grounds for a particular face, I have come to the conclusion that this entire story was the result of nothing more than perspective. After spending the better part of ten years in search of a reason the only thing I’ve discovered is that sometimes things happen for no particular reason whatsoever.

Penny was gone for about twenty minutes before Billy resurfaced at the fence. Of course, by that point, Billy was happier than a pig in shit because he’d put the briefcase back without complication. He had a big, shit-eating grin on his face. He flopped down onto the lawn beside me and proceeded to babble on about a variety of things while I sat there wondering where Penny and Wick were. Ten minutes later they reappeared. It was right about then that I figured I’d missed something because the two of them were in hysterics. Billy slapped me on the knee and said rather loudly:

“Oh ya, I forgot. You’ve gotta go in there. Penny found something that’ll crack you up.�

Hesitantly I got to my feet but was curious.

Billy rolled over on his back and yelled, “Oh would you just go. It’s not going to bite,� after which he just started laughing.

I went over and jumped the fence. Wick, who was trying his best not to double over, passed me.

“You are not going to believe this,� Wick said.

By that point I’d forgotten about the briefcase and everything else I’d been thinking about. It seemed that in a split second, our summer was back to normal. I walked over to Penny, who led me into the bushes by the hand.

The hilarious event in the woods that day involved two people that we knew, Tammy Richards and Mike Chatlin, one of those inseparable couples that everyone loves to hate. When Penny and I came upon them we immediately realized what all the fuss was about. The two of them were stuck. But what made it truly hilarious was that Mike was positioned behind Tammy and they were scrambling around like some deformed crab trying to break free of one another. I must admit, it remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

It all seemed resolved, but it wasn’t. I have spent years trying to remember who was at the pool that day. I remember certain members of our school’s defensive line being there. Most importantly a boy named Rick Zelleniski. Penny had turned down his advances on a number of occassions. Rick was the type of guy who acted before thinking.

During the week that followed, talk of the briefcase lessened. By the next weekend everyone had forgotten it altogether. There were more important things to concern ourselves with. Namely Jared Walsh’s party.

Jared Walsh was the elder brother of Karen and the most well-known guy in the neighbourhood. His popularity stemmed from the fact that he was the sole dealer of narcotics and in tight with the local bikers. This was, of course, because he worked for them. But most kids were under the impression that Jared was a member of the gang, if only a junior one. This was false, as I would later discover, but it didn’t stop Jared’s friends from running their mouths off about how they were in with the gang and protected by them.

We were all rather excited about the first big bash of the summer. The Walshes’ backyard backed onto a deep ravine that could be reached by going down a steep trail. They were known as ravine parties. The parties followed a routine: everyone would show up around nine, they’d light a bonfire at around ten, and the first of numerous fights would break out around midnight. Without fail, every ravine party ended with a fight. The last party of the summer of 1984 ended with my brother fighting Randy Givens. It was the last time I remember him using his talents to get one of us out of trouble. On that occasion it was me.

It was hot, there was a light wind, and an unexplainable feeling of ease on the streets. It was the kind of night where everyone let their guard down a little and didn’t mind bending their usual rules. This meant that the bikers at the party didn’t walk around intimidating the kids and the kids didn’t spend the entire night worrying whether or not the bikers were going to start something. Traditionally the bikers didn’t bother showing up until after midnight, but there had been talk circulating that week that they were supplying a keg and would be there from the start. It really didn’t trouble anyone, except for maybe Wick, who had never much cared for them to begin with.

The plan that night was to meet at the party, this was to avoid having to wait around for Penny while she lamented over her wardrobe. Wick had given up on trying to convince her that it didn’t matter. After all, the party was being held in a ravine. Not only is it difficult to see more than three feet in any direction after dark, but half an hour after you’ve started drinking who really cares what you look like. But Penny insisted that she look her usual, stunning self. We agreed to meet her there.

The three of us showed up at the ravine at around nine and immediately went our separate ways. Billy, as expected, found Karen and disappeared for the remainder of the night. That left Wick and myself wandering aimlessly while we unknowingly waited for the same person. I spent the better part of two hours mingling with a variety of people, all of whom offered their condolences about Bibs. I hadn’t been prepared for it, to be honest. There was still a part of me that thought Bibs was hiding out, playing some horrible trick, but that was just me being a little brother I suppose. Wick, on the other hand, hated mingling with what he called “the riff-raff.� He didn’t go to school with any of them so he didn’t have that unusual connection that exists between people that see each other every day but don’t really know each other. So he sulked. He sulked until he got good and liquored. And then he started with the stories.

Even though Wick didn’t go to school in the neighbourhood everyone was familiar with his genius. He was kind of a local legend in a way. No one from those parts was ever all that smart or educated so Wick was a big deal. This meant that everyone looked at him either like he was from another planet, or like he was made out of gold. Either way, Wick got off on it. So when he got drunk, especially around people he didn’t know, he’d charge up that big brain of his and start with the stories. Because if there was one thing that Wick could do better than anyone I’ve ever met, it was talk. Most of the stories were nothing more than elaborate jokes and fictions but, as expected, a small group of people soon gathered around him to listen. Two hours later it was as if he was a rock star. There’d be twenty people sitting and standing around listening to the guy say the strangest things. You wouldn’t believe what it did to the ladies. It was like Spanish fly or lemon gin.

The hours passed and Wick was well into program sixty-seven. The fact that Penny hadn’t arrived didn’t seem to faze him much. His ego in clover, he was in no hurry to lose his audience. I, on the other hand, had nothing better to do with my time than pace around the perimeter looking for her. It was quite possible that she’d already arrived and was keeping both of us in suspense for the sheer pleasure that it gave her. I wish that had been the case. Penny would eventually show up at the party around midnight. And when she did the party would come to an abrupt end.

I remember the look in her eyes more than anything. Her clothes were dishevelled, her face looked like a Halloween mask, and both of her knees were skinned and bloodied. But despite these things I remember her eyes. She was in shock, so they fixated on nothing. Her left arm held against her chest, she walked awkwardly past various groups of party-goers like she was looking for something. She stopped, slowly turned in a three-sixty, and then proceeded to sit down on the ground. Everyone, and everything, stopped. No one moved, no one said anything. It was as if the air was instantly frozen by some unexpected, accelerated ice age. We all just stood there looking at her, watching her breathe in and out, trying to turn off the effects of the booze and drugs. They say that there are situations in life that can sober even the most inebriated of people. This was one of them.

After what seemed like ten minutes of complete immobility, all at once people started to surround her. The bikers, who like to take charge of such situations, continued to further confuse their image by showing both compassion and total outrage at the same time. Had it been one of their own girls, I doubt they would have cared. But this wasn’t one of their girls. This was a girl from the neighbourhood. Their compassion and outrage stayed within the confines of the ravine. None of them were about to go looking for revenge on Penny’s behalf. She wasn’t with them, so it wasn’t their business. It was our business. And they knew that. So after they put her in a lawn chair and told the majority of the people at the party to go home, they left Penny to us. There was myself, Wick, Jared Walsh, Andrea Schmidt, Sandra Hill, Jerry Reid, and Corey Haight.

The first order of business was to get Penny into the Walshes’s house and cleaned up. The girls tended to this, with Wick trailing them. The rest of us stayed with Jared in the basement and attempted to figure out what to do about it. The popular consensus was to keep it amongst ourselves. Involving the police was always a bad idea. Had we known the extent of Penny’s ordeal I’m sure we would have picked up the phone, but we didn’t know. The older boys thought it best to get in their cars and cruise around in hopes of finding or hearing something that might make sense of it. I decided to get on my bike and ride up to the arcade to see what I could find. I would be gone for almost two hours. Two hours was all it would take.

The only guy to remain with Penny at the Walshes’ was Wick. He was upstairs when we were all down in the basement. And because of that he was unaware of our plans. As it turns out, Wick would be the first to find out what had happened to Penny. He would also be the first to act.

Having been put in Karen’s bed, Penny floated in and out of consciousness for a while before coming to her senses and requesting something to drink. The girls left her with Wick and went into the kitchen to make some tea.

Penny had left her house at around nine-thirty. She walked to the market, bought some cigarettes, and then started down the hill towards the Walshes’s. On her way down she decided to cut through the park, a route that usually took ten minutes off the walk. She was in the neighbourhood, after all, and was therefore not that concerned with her safety. While walking past the stands at the baseball field someone called her name. It was Rick Zelleniski. Rick and his buddies were camped out in the back of several pick-up trucks, drinking beer and talking. Penny, never one to pass up the opportunity to make some boys squirm, decided to go over and say hello. And that’s how it happened. Simple as that.

Penny remembers Rick punching her in the head and hauling her into the back of one of the trucks. She also remembers that it was Rick, and another guy named Sean Wilson, that raped her for sure. She was conscious for those two. As for the others she couldn’t say. When she was examined by a doctor the next day it was determined that she’d been raped repeatedly in both her vagina and her anus. When she came to she was face down in the parking lot almost completely naked. The rest is disturbingly obvious. In a state of shock, and with a broken arm, she put on what remained of her clothes and started hobbling towards the ravine. She doesn’t remember that part either. But she did remember telling Wick who did it. She also admitted to Wick that she’d been sleeping with me and that she meant to stop sleeping with me. And as I’ve said, Wick loved the girl. Halfway through Penny’s recounting he left.

Wick knew just where the guns were. His only fear was that they’d been removed. When he left the Walshes’ house he went to the pool, some seven blocks away. At about that time I was trying my best to find out if anyone had seen Penny earlier that night. I was in the arcade talking to Tony Hickox when Rick Zelleniski and the rest of them came in. They were drunk, rowdy, and bent on giving everyone a hard time. So I decided to leave and go back to the Walshes’s to check on Penny. Two blocks into my journey a car ghosted up beside me containing Corey Haight and a couple of others. We talked a little before they sped off and I rode back only to sit in the Walshes’ basement and wait, unknowingly, on Wick.

There wouldn’t be much more to tell if I were to say that the guns were gone. They weren’t, of course, and Wick wasted little time with it. Having taken them out of the briefcase he discovered that only one of the guns, a .44, was loaded. So he took it and left. For the better part of an hour Wick must have wandered around trying to find Rick and Sean. Eventually he went to the arcade. It was closed by then, of course, as it stayed open on Fridays and Saturdays until 2 a.m. After that, kids usually loitered around outside until they got bored and went home. Wick showed up at around 2:45 and shot Rick Zelleniski and Sean Wilson dead.

Wick went back to the pool. He put the gun back in the briefcase, the briefcase back in the ground, broke into the pool, slit his wrists with a pocket knife, and jumped into the water. To this day I’m not exactly sure what drove him to do it. Maybe it was the thought of spending a lifetime behind bars. Maybe it was because he realized that Penny would never truly be his. Maybe it was because she had been sleeping with me. I’ve tried to convince myself over the years that the latter was not the case, but I always find myself factoring into the blame. It’s more comforting than being removed from it.

I remember sitting in the Walshes’s basement when Jared came in and told us that Wick had shot Rick and Sean. Of course the story was immediately embellished. To most of the neighbourhood Wick became a hero. The general feeling was that Rick and Sean got what they deserved, despite the fact that they were unarmed. From what I could gather from those that were in front of the arcade that night, Wick’s actions were both instantaneous and without emotion. He simply walked up to them, pulled the gun, and fired. They found his body floating in the pool the next morning. There was a note in his pocket, the white paper soaked red. It said—“fuck all of you.� That was all.

The rest of the summer of 1985 saw two other incidents occur that are of note. The first was Billy’s death, which happened August 27th. After everything that transpired that July it seemed comical to me that he should die. I was forced to spend several weeks in the hospital because I fell victim to a nervous breakdown, or so they say. Under the circumstances I’m not going to deny that I wasn’t in need of something along those lines. The breakdown, that is. But in all fairness to the randomness of things Billy was wholly responsible for his own undoing. He got high on some pills and walked into traffic in the middle of the night. There’s nothing I can really say about it except that had nothing happened prior to his death, he probably would have died anyway. Who’s to say. The only thing that’s for certain is that all three of them will be dead much longer than they were alive. As will I eventually.

The second thing was that Penny lost her mind, landing her in a mental institution for the rest of her life. She was sitting at the dinner table with her folks when, all of a sudden, she started stabbing herself with a fork. I’m told she did some damage before her dad was able to pin her to the ground. It seems that the events of that night are not so easily forgotten by some compared to others. Penny’s reasons are better than most, I’m afraid.

So that’s all four of them. My whole life wrapped up in incomplete people. One from the sky, one in the water, one on the ground, and one with fire in the head.

I finished school two years later but was not exactly the type to go on to university to become something distinguished or worthwhile. Instead I remained in the neighbourhood, worked at various jobs, got a girl pregnant, married her, declared bankruptcy, and eventually turned to a life of crime. It’s not that bad actually. It’s not like I kill people for a living. I just take their televisions when they’re asleep or on vacation. I do what most people try to do. I provide for my family and do my best not to be what most people try not to be—a bad person. It’s entirely dependent on perspectives, I suppose.

For you will be dead much longer than you will be alive. And you will have all that time to remember everything that was your life, even if no one else does. So you had better find something worth remembering and just leave it at that.