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.