At any rate, at one point, when I was married and living in a modest neighborhood in South Minneapolis, the Chung brothers and Gilbert Borocha showed up at my house with what I assumed were stolen tools and lumber, and began to cobble together a version of a serviceable flophouse in my garage. This project—carried out by some combination of my old friends, generally whichever ones weren’t incarcerated or roaming aimlessly around the country committing crimes that would eventually land them back in prison—went on for almost two years, and over time these accommodations became quite elaborate. A presumably stolen portable outhouse appeared in my backyard, stashed behind my garage, and remained there for more than a year. From this little clubhouse off the alley, my friends were free to come and go as they pleased. Perhaps needless to say, this arrangement was difficult to square with my wife and neighbors. I’ll admit it also made me somewhat nervous, but none of my friends ever seemed to stay for any extended period of time, and they never—so far as I was aware, at any rate—caused trouble in the neighborhood.
Then one morning six years ago, I woke to the hysterical racket of crows, and from my kitchen window saw Randy Chung crucified to the picnic table in my backyard. He’d been stripped to his appalling bikini briefs and shot once through the head, apparently (this was determined later) in my garage and sometime before he was nailed to the table. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that it’s difficult for a respectable man’s reputation to survive that sort of scandal. Anybody who has ever made the mistake of keeping questionable company, and allows himself to become however tangentially embroiled in such an ugly incident—which was, of course, all over the local news—learns only too well that though a man can be officially exonerated, he can never again be perceived as truly innocent.
Two characters with whom I was entirely unfamiliar were eventually arrested and convicted for Randy Chung’s murder, and the motive was allegedly some grievance over a drug deal gone bad. I felt terrible about the whole thing, of course. Randy was a simpleton, a quiet guy with a sweet disposition who had spent his entire life tagging around with his older brother Slim. What happened to him was horrifying, and literally beyond the range of my comprehension. And from a purely selfish standpoint, the real shame of it was that at the time I was in the midst of one of my phases as a respectable man, of which there have been several, each of them in their own way reasonably satisfying and successful.
I had never, unfortunately, been able to sustain any of them for long. In the aftermath of Randy Chung’s death, my wife filed for divorce and our house was put on the market and sold.
The older I got the harder it was for me to understand why it was I had such a hard time playing the part of the solid citizen. Because—honest to God—it’s always been easy enough for me to slip into that role. I’ve held three different teaching positions at junior colleges in and around the Twin Cities. For a time I successfully sold advertising for a Christian radio station. Characteristic for me, I’d taken the job out of desperation and found the work easy and, to some extent, satisfying.
Before my present marriage I’d been married twice, both times to wonderful, attractive, and modestly successful women, each of whom to this day maintains a life of the utmost respectability. I also had a teenaged son, made insolent, his mother assured me, by my erratic presence in his life. He was now playing in a band, Lounge Abraham, which, based on the tape I had received in the mail, was a very loud and angry proposition. The last time he came to visit I was stunned to see that he had acquired a tattoo on his arm—he is sixteen years old, which seems to me entirely too young for that sort of thing—that read, “Death to the Great Satin.” I was, of course, quick to point out what I felt was an inexcusable misspelling, only to learn that this was apparently an ironic tattoo, an allusion to a handmade T-shirt worn by some infamous psychopath who had shot up a California schoolyard with an assault rifle some years ago.
I couldn’t pretend to understand my life, but I can tell you that I’ve always had legitimate money in the bank. I’ve never missed a car payment, and I’ve now owned three different homes, and would have turned a tidy profit on the first two if it weren’t for complications related to my failed marriages. That said, crash landings and forced reinvention had long been my stock in trade. I can’t tell you how easy it is to burn down your entire life and build a new one from the ground up. The hard part, of course, is to keep the damn thing standing. I’d always felt the key, though, was to do the demolition work yourself, or at least to never let go of the illusion that your self-destruction was purely your own work. It was a point of pride; I never wanted to give someone else the credit for ruining my life. I’d be the first guy to admit that I’d made plenty of bad decisions, but they were my decisions, even when my arm was being twisted so far behind my back that I was practically on my knees.
I’d been coming around on this philosophy, though. Maybe it was a copout, but by this time it seemed plenty clear that I’d allowed these old friends of mine to ruin my life—by not knowing better than to have taken up with them in the first place, certainly, and also by virtue of the fact that I’d never properly distanced myself from them and their behavior, even at the point—which was admittedly long since past—when it became clear that they were all irredeemable. Hell, by this time they’d ruined several of my lives, every one of them perfectly decent, with all the usual trappings, responsibilities, and satisfactions.
Francis Greer was the most complicated of my old friends. He was easily the most intelligent, the most cunning and untrustworthy. Greer had been in prison when Randy Chung was murdered in my garage. In the intervening years I had married Greer’s sister, which was a complicated story in and of itself. I’d known Janice since we were kids, and had an on-again off-again relationship with her going back almost twenty years. The fact that she was helplessly related to Greer (and felt a genuine affection for him) had already created numerous problems in our relationship. Every time Greer got out of jail or needed something he was certain to show up on Janice’s doorstep. Between his two prison terms and a handful of stints in county jails and workhouses, I had long since lost track of his criminal offenses, which always seemed to be compound infractions that ranged from driving under the influence and all manner of moving violations (improper registration, failure to provide insurance, suspended license, stolen plates) to automobile theft, receiving of stolen property, possession and distribution of narcotics, burglary, and parole violations.
Greer had, by this time, spent nearly a third of his life behind bars and he had apparently always approached prison as the ultimate leisure. I’ve said that he was intelligent, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t come out of prison the first time speaking Latin. Over the years he had read more books than I would ever have the time for, had supposedly translated poetry from Spanish, and had spent so much time in prison weight rooms that it seemed like no matter where I went I was sure to encounter a photograph on the refrigerator of a half-naked Greer flexing his muscles.
Thanks early on to our old friendship and later to my relationship with Janice, Greer had maintained a running correspondence with me in the years that he was away. Once, while I was teaching at a junior college in a suburb of St. Paul, he had tried to scam me into signing off on some non-existent coursework he needed to complete a degree. My refusal to do so had resulted in a serious strain in our friendship, and his letters to me became increasingly hostile and condescending.