Eclipse of the Heart

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.

It’s not warm when she’s away.

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone

And she’s always gone too long

Anytime she goes away.

(Ain’t No Sunshine, Bill Withers)

Just So You Know

Let’s understand each other.

I’m not really writing this for you; I’m writing this for me.

And actually, I’m not even writing it for me as much as I am for Marlo. I’ll tell you about her sometime, maybe. Not right now. For now, all you have to know is that I like having her around. I like it a lot. And I want her to stay.

Forever.

But I only want her to stay if she wants to stay. It has to be her decision, her own free choice. The thing is, she can’t freely choose to be with me if she doesn’t really know me. So that’s what this is about.

I want her to understand who I am, what I’ve done, and why. All of it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m just going to tell it as honestly as I can. I don’t want to make any excuses, justify anything, rationalize anything. I’m not looking to censor or soften, exaggerate or embellish, or make myself come off any better than I am. On the other hand, I’m not apologizing for anything, either.

But I’m also not stupid. Writing all this down is a little risky and that rhymes with whiskey and I could use one. I’m changing some of the names — mine, for example — and places, little details like that. Little things that don’t really matter. I know all about statutes of limitations.

In going back over things, trying to fit all the different pieces together so they make some kind of sense, I discovered one thing for sure: I’ve got a lousy memory.

With this kind of thing, you can’t go by feelings. Some things that happened twenty or thirty years ago are so vivid they seem like yesterday. And sometimes yesterday feels like a thousand years ago.

I don’t know about you, but if it weren’t for particular events in the world that serve as markers, I’d never be able to figure out where what happened or when or in what order. I remember such-and-such and that had to be at this time, because I remember a certain thing happening at the same time. Sometimes it’s a major event - lots of people say they remember exactly what they were doing when President Kennedy was murdered. But often it’s a movie that was around or a song that was popular at the time. Something like that.

I don’t know, maybe that’s the way you remember things, too.

Hell, maybe that’s how everybody does it.

Maybe, when I’m done writing all this up and I show it to Marlo, it’ll be too much for her. And she’ll leave, get as far away from me as possible. I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I’m either the absolute best man for her to be with, or the absolute worst.

Tough call.

Either way, I’d rather she leave because she knows me than stay because she doesn’t.

So it is what it is what it is.

PART ONE

Somebody, somewhere

In the heat of the night

Looking pretty dangerous

Running out of patience

(Passion, Rod Stewart)

CHAPTER ONE

DWI

Imagine you’re on your way home from a big family dinner with your parents and your husband’s parents, plus a few siblings and their kids too, all to celebrate the birth of your new baby girl. Your husband has drunk a few toasts tonight, so you’re doing the driving. Your two sons, ages three and five, are in the back seat, for some odd reason behaving like perfect little gentlemen. Your baby is cradled in your husband’s arms and he coos to her in a slightly inebriated way that makes you chuckle.

You’re only two blocks away from home. You stop at a red light, wait for it to turn green. When it does, you check left and right and then you start into the intersection.

You have no idea where the other car came from or how it came up on you so fast. There’s just the sudden glare of headlights, the jolt of the collision, the ear-wrenching scream of twisting metal.

The next thing you become aware of, you’re in the hospital, a half dozen masked-and-gowned strangers darting around you like honey bees. You can’t feel your legs.

While the trauma team fights desperately to save your life, your husband and two sons are already on their way to the morgue. Your baby, having been sheltered by your husband’s body, is miraculously unharmed and in the care of a pediatric nurse. The driver of the other car has suffered only a broken finger and a minor cut on the forehead requiring four stitches. Still reeking of alcohol, he is being treated by an ER resident.

It’s more than you can bear.

The loss breaks your heart, and if it weren’t for your infant daughter who still needs her mother, you might find a way to assuage your grief — permanently. Your parents and your husband’s parents, despite their own grief, are at your bedside in shifts virtually every minute of the day and night. Like the ghosts of Christmas past. Friends come by too, God bless them, but you scarcely notice them. When the doctors tell you that you will probably never walk again, it hardly seems to matter.

You learn that the other driver has been charged with DWI — driving while intoxicated — and vehicular manslaughter in the second degree. He faces as much as 7 years in prison or as little as 5 years on probation.

It is not his first DWI arrest.

Or his second.

Or even his third.

It is his sixth.

The prosecutor explains to you that previous arrests mean nothing in court — only previous convictions can be considered, and he has never been convicted. He supplies all the king’s horses, knows all the king’s men, and they always make sure he gets off again. On two other occasions he has injured innocent people — thank god, not seriously. This is the first time he has killed.

It’s a long time before the case comes to trial — almost a year. You learn that the man’s lawyer will very probably work out a plea bargain with the prosecutor’s office. He will be required to voluntarily enter an alcohol rehabilitation program — this would be his third time in such a program. After that, he would be on probation. He would serve no time in prison. In as little as five years he could be completely free.

In five years your family will still be dead.

You consider filing a wrongful death action in civil court. But he has enough wealth and enough power to be represented by one of the largest and most prestigious legal firms in the country. The prospects of winning are poor, and they would drag the case on for years. And years. And you don’t feel you have that much strength left.

Then one day you’re going through some of your late husband’s things. An idea comes to you, and you suddenly find you have a purpose. A reason, if not to live, at least to delay dying. Something that, for the moment, anyway, dulls the sharp edge of your pain. You begin to make subtle inquiries. It takes a while, but eventually, it leads you to The Judge.

And that leads to me.

-II-

I met her at her parent’s home in the Vista Terrace area.

Her parents were out.

I guessed she was around thirty and, in happier times, had been a very attractive woman. Now, her blue eyes were sunken in shadow. They had the hollow look of having cried all the tears they were capable of crying, never to cry again. She seemed frail, not because her body was small and weak, but because it was no longer animated by living spirit.

She led me to a sunny spot on the porch — she had become very adept at managing her wheelchair over the course of the last year — and invited me to sit down. She held a small book on her lap like a sleeping kitten. I couldn’t see what it was.

I would like to hire you, she said simply.

I nodded that I understood.

I don’t know how much you know — or what you need to know…

I let her tell me the whole story in detail. It was painful for her, but in a distant way, and she got through it as if describing the result of a disappointing sporting event.

You know, I told her, Sometimes people think that taking a step like this will make everything better somehow. It won’t.

My husband was a teacher, she said. "Tenth grade English. Do you know Edgar Allen Poe?

I did.

He was my husband’s favorite author. I always thought he was too — creepy — myself. I found this among his things. She held up the book. There was a bookmark in it. Do you know where?

I didn’t.

The Cask of Amontillado, she said. Do you know that story?

I did.

In it, Poe sets out a formula for revenge. The person being punished has to know who’s punishing him and why he’s being punished. And he has to know that there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.

Can you do that? she asked.

I told her I could.

Then I definitely do want to hire you, she said. I don’t know what you charge for — your services. I have my husband’s life insurance money. She told me the amount. Is it enough?

You’ll be needing that, won’t you? I asked. You’re going to have more expenses. Your daughter will need…

My parents will take care of Sherie. She pronounced it Share - EE. Rhymes with Paris and it’s all comin’ here to River City.

And the way she said that, her tone, told me she didn’t plan on needing the money personally. Her grief had carried her away from living like a riptide pulls even the strongest swimmer gradually away from shore. Now she was caught in the undertow of soul-sapping despair and she was too exhausted to strike out for the surface.

Also, there’s some coming from the sale of… our house. That should bring…

If I can help you with this, I said, I’d like to be a little flexible on the fee. It’s hard to know what the expenses will be. Suppose we wait until it’s done, and I’ll bill you then. I can guarantee it won’t be more than the insurance money. Is that agreeable to you? You just pay whatever fee I ask afterward?

All right. Do you want a — retainer — now?

Not necessary, but thank you for asking, I said. Just give me your hand on it.

We shook hands. Her hand was cold and limp. It reminded me of a little girl, in another life, whom I pulled from floodwaters a few minutes too late.

-III-

I went right to work on it.

But there was no particular hurry. I had plenty of time to study the subject, learn his patterns and routines. I already had a sense of how this should be handled. It was just a matter of ironing out the details.

The subject — I’ll call him D.M. — was Caucasian, male. Age 52. Height: six feet. Weight: 225 lbs. Eyes: blue, Hair: brown, straight, hairline receding. Divorced for nearly six years, he had a son, 16, away at a boarding school, and a daughter, 18, in college, both of whom lived with his ex. His drinking had been a major cause of the break-up. His alimony/child support payments were much more than most people pull down in a year, but that was just chump-change to D.M.

He was represented by Kline, Williams, Goldman and Associates. This was a firm with former judges and governors and senators on the letterhead and current judges and governors and senators among their clients. D.M. could afford them, had been their client a long time, and knew some of those past and current judges, governors and senators personally. He’d gotten out from under previous DWI incidents with a combination of sharp lawyering and simple bribery.

D.M.’s company was not far from the top of the Fortune 500, and awash in tax-payers’ money for the development of a new fighter plane. I guess the old ones didn’t kill fast enough. The project was currently $100 million over budget.

Guys like D.M. never do time.

He had a substantial life insurance policy; his children were the beneficiaries. Since the divorce, he’d sold the family palace and now lived in a luxury townhouse in a nest of luxury townhouses called Kingsmoor Armes.

Yeah.

Armes. With an e in it.

His townhouse had two floors, kitchen, dining room and sunken living room on the first floor. Bedroom, study and master bath on the second floor.

D.M. was a whiskey drinker and judging from the dead soldiers in his garbage, it didn’t seem as though recent events had nudged him toward sobriety at all. At least he drank the good stuff. Single malt, lovingly crafted in the Highlands.

His Mercedes had been totaled in the accident. That left him with just a Lincoln and a BMW. I wondered if he would drive even though his license had been suspended. It didn’t surprise me to discover that he did.

I had to arrange a few things, but it was all relatively easy.

The security where he lived was an expensive joke. There are only two security devices that matter. The first and best is a large, loud, well-trained dog. You can’t scare a dog, you can’t fool a dog and you can’t bribe a dog. You can kill a dog, of course, but that’s not so easy to do, either.

The other security device to respect is a gun if it’s a .38 caliber or heavier and if it’s in the hand of a person who’s ready, willing and able to use it effectively. That narrows it down considerably. A lot people would be better off throwing the damned gun.

Alarm systems and security services are generally a grand waste of money. They might make you feel safer. But so might hiding under the covers.

I let myself in and found the subject alone in his study. I used a stun gun to temporarily disable him, and then taped him up, careful to tape over his clothing to avoid leaving any trace on his body, though it probably wouldn’t matter.

I then explained to him who I was and why I was there. In a strange way, he seemed almost to have been expecting me. Maybe his conscience was bothering him and he knew he had it coming. Maybe he was a fundamentally decent human being, as are most people. Maybe he was also an inveterate fuck-up — as are most people.

Or maybe he was a psychopath who was incapable of feeling empathy, or remorse, didn’t give a fuck about the little ants he casually stepped on, and he was just trying to play me.

But I don’t play that easy.

Not anymore.

He could have quit drinking, but he didn’t. He could have quit drinking and driving, but he didn’t. He could have pled guilty, but he didn’t. He could have voluntarily made some arrangement to care for the family of the man he’d killed, but he didn’t. Now the Piper was due a staggering sum, but he, himself, had called the tune again and again.

I was the Piper’s collection agent.

Expecting me or not, as soon as he was able to talk, he tried to cop a plea, as I suspected he would. He offered me money. A lot of money. A whole lot. He offered me anything. Name my own price, he said.

Too bad.

He could’ve used that money to take care of the people he’d hurt, picked up the medical bills, at the very least. Lots of things he might have done to make whatever amends he could make. Now it was too late. All that money in his wallet, all that money in his safe, all that money stashed in overseas accounts where he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it. And it was as good to him now as toilet paper.

It was tragic.

And I told him so.

I force-fed him his favorite brand of whiskey until he passed out. Then I got some more into his stomach with a tube. Not too much. I had calculated how much to use, given his bodyweight.

I wrestled him outside, put him in his Lincoln and drove out to the spot I’d selected. It was a hairpin curve at the bottom of a hill, overlooking a steep escarpment. It was picketed by rickety guardrails, about as adequate to the task as were elderly bank guards. It was a dangerous spot even for a driver who was cold sober.

I pulled him over behind the wheel, left a whiskey bottle in the front seat with him, steered the car toward the drop, and bailed out just before it went over. If he survived the combination of alcohol poisoning and the crash it would be the most impressive act of god since Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea. That kind of miracle doesn’t come cheap.

I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

I limped up the road — I’d cracked my damn knee on the pavement vaulting from the Lincoln — to the place I’d left a borrowed motorcycle and rode it to where I’d left my rental car.

Then I went home and put ice on my knee.

-IV-

She was sitting on the porch, the bright sun making her skin almost glow. She opened her eyes when she heard the floorboards creak faintly under my feet. I pulled up a chair and sat down beside her.

It’s done, I told her.

At that moment, she seemed to become almost weightless. I had the feeling my announcement had cut her tether and I was about to watch her leave her body and float away. She was relieved the way a dying person is relieved to know that everything is squared away and they’re free to go.

Thank you, she said.

You’re welcome, I said. Now there’s just the matter of my fee.

Of course. I have the insurance money. Just tell me how much you want and how you’d like me to….

What I want, I said, is an invitation.

I beg your pardon?

An invitation. From you, personally. I want to sit beside you at your daughter’s high school graduation.

What?

"I’ve never been to one. I’d like to see what it’s like. That’s my fee. You did agree to pay me whatever I asked. That’s what I’m asking."

She looked completely bewildered. And irritated. I was pulling in her tether.

I don’t believe you’re the kind of person who breaks their word, I said. Am I wrong?

No, she replied icily after a long pause. No, you’re not.

I didn’t think so.

I was wrong about her having cried all the tears she could cry.

Maybe it would have been kinder to take the money.

When the moon is in the seventh house

And Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then Peace will guide the planets

And Love will steer the stars.

(Aquarius, From the American Tribal Love-Rock musical, Hair)

CHAPTER TWO

EL PASO SQUEEZE

They say you never forget your first time. I know that’s true for me. The first time, I was just a kid, not quite eighteen. It happened like this.

It was 1968.

Hell of a year, 1968.

The whole world had its bowels in an uproar. The war in Vietnam was in full swing, with the Tet offensive launched by the North Vietnamese in January. We wouldn’t find out about it for a while, but in March, American soldiers under a Lieutenant William Calley, murdered around five hundred innocent people, including elderly, women, children and infants, at a place called My Lai.

It was the year that women’s libbers engaged in symbolic bra-burning to protest the Miss America Beauty contest. At the summer Olympics in Mexico City, two African-American medalists raised their fists in the Black Power salute during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at their award ceremony. It was the year that civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis; and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed in California.

To most, if not all, of this I was completely ignorant. I was off doing my own thing, as a minor rock-and-roll hero, living every teen-age lad’s fantasy life.

I’d quit high school at 15. It was a pointless waste of time for me and I think they were just as glad to be rid of me since no one seemed to notice I was gone. My parents were oblivious. So with just my Gibson guitar, my instinct for survival and a great set of fake ID’s for which I’d paid a bundle, I hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more.

Before you could say Jumpin’ Jack Flash ten times fast, I was living la dolce vita, getting my money for nothing and my chicks for free. During the day, I was a martial arts gypsy working out at different dojos - karate, ju jitsu, aikido, tai kwon do, moo goo gai pan, you name it.

At night, I played rock ‘n’ roll and made an obscene amount of money doing it, too.

Sometimes, I pulled down more in one night than my old man made in a week as a pick-and-shovel jockey. I had a little apartment that was a palace compared to the places I’d grown up in. I had a ’57 Chrysler convertible, with fins the envy of your average Great White shark. I had cool clothes. And let’s not forget the part about chicks for free.

Thanks to my part-time room-mate, Stede, I had access to a steady supply of grass, too, though frankly, I always preferred hooch to hash. Chacon a son gout, daddy-o. So it was a sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll merry-go-round, and you might think I’d have been content.

And indeed, for a time I was.

But lately, I had fallen into a deep existential funk. It was largely due to a lingering spiritual hangover, the sour taste in my soul left by the Democratic National Convention.

I had grown up in and around Chicago and knew it to be a corrupt and brutal place. But the city had out-done itself on this one.

That August, ten thousand political demonstrators — most in their teens and early twenties — came to the Windy City to protest the war in Vietnam and to voice support for Eugene McCarthy, an out-spoken critic of the war, in his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Some people then — and some even now — refer to these protesters as hippies, or yippies or far less charitable terms.

But that’s not true at all.

A hippy was a drop-out, someone who disdained social and political conventions, trying to resolve inner conflicts and attain spiritual peace, usually with the help of consciousness-altering drugs. Drop out, tune in, turn on.

These demonstrators weren’t drop-outs; they were more like push-ins. They were idealistic activists who were deeply concerned about the future of their country, and had the courage to take to the streets to change the world into what they thought it should be instead of what it was. They wanted to end the war, make the government more representative of and responsive to the people, ensure justice for the powerless and disenfranchised.

They were the best of their generation, my generation.

I wish I could say I had been one of them.

But I only went to Grant Park on that sultry August night to get laid.

I had met a girl named Heather who was a couple of years older than I, and who was deeply involved in the peace movement. I feigned political interest only for its aphrodisiac effects.

I didn’t know a thing about the issues. But I did know that when cops show up by the busload, backed up by the National Guard, and they put on their gas masks and take off their badges and their name tags, then nothing good was going to happen after that.

Truth is, once the cops charged into Grant Park, it was such complete chaos that I only have blurry impressions of what happened — extra blurry because of the tear gas. Just a few mental snapshots. I do recall one guy, one of the demonstrators, to whom I took an immediate disliking. He had longish, scraggly hair and wore an OD green army jacket and was talking a lot of incendiary bullshit. Why he was aching for a confrontation, I didn’t know, considering that the tactical odds were clearly in favor of the Pigs — derogatory slang word for police that they more than earned on that day. In any case, there was something wrong about this guy and I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. A short time later, it was this very guy who brought down the American flag that flew near the fountain, giving the cops the flimsy pretext they needed to attack.

I remember that just before the police moved in on us, someone nearby said, Come on, this is a peaceful demonstration. They can’t just attack us for no reason…

File that under famous last words. Right after Custer’s shout-out to his men at The Greasy Grass: Hurrah, Boys! Now we’ve got ‘em!

The cops came raging in, swinging their riot clubs wildly, indiscriminately.

They beat people who tried to protect themselves by covering their heads with their arms; they beat people who didn’t try to protect themselves. They beat people who put their hands up. They beat people who lay down on the ground in submission.

I saw them beat a guy in a wheelchair.

I saw them beat a clean-cut young veteran who was proudly wearing his medals at the time.

I saw them beat a girl who looked so pregnant she might’ve given birth any minute.

They went after anybody with a camera, too, smashing the cameras, pulling out the film to expose it. No evidence, see. That kind of back-fired on them. Bad idea to piss off the press. Back when we had a press.

There were a bunch of med students there, not as part of the demonstration, but as volunteers who had pledged to render first aid to anyone — protester or policeman — who needed it, should there arise a need. They wore whites so that they could be easily identified.

That turned out to be a big mistake.

The cops went after the medics in particular. I saw three cops beating one medic who was curled into a tight fetal ball on the damp grass near the fountain. Beat him long after he lay limp as a pile of old rags.

I stood in the middle of it all as if I were invisible, at the center of the storm, watching the devastating winds swirl around me. I was too stunned to move, to think, even. Some part of me couldn’t believe what I was seeing, didn’t want to believe it.

Then two burly cops ran past me, almost knocking me over. They were chasing a young girl. One of them caught her by the hair and she fell to her knees. They dragged her by her hair over to some bushes and started swinging their clubs. The sound of that first stroke hitting her head was like the sound of a hammer hitting a side of beef.

I saw one of those cops reach way up high to cock another swing, and the next thing I saw was somebody’s foot connect with the cop’s crotch from behind. The cop let out a grunt and forgot all about swinging his club.

His buddy turned and looked right at me.

Somehow, I had lost my invisibility.

Somehow, it had been my foot.

The second cop came at me fast and hard. I ducked away from a couple of swings and fired a few kicks in return, going for the knees and the nuts, but I don’t know if I connected with much. I think it surprised hell out of him, though. No doubt, he’d been expecting an All-Pacifist Revue. In a moment of slapstick counter-point, the second cop tripped over his still-prostrate pal and fell on his ass, the two of them becoming a flailing, cursing amoeba of cop. I grabbed the girl by the arm and we hit the thorny bushes, forced our way through to the other side, putting those bushes between us and the end of the world.

Thorns tore some nasty gashes in my bare arms, but those scratches added up to nothing compared to what people were getting back on the other side.

I pushed my companion down to the ground and started crawling along that hedge, pulling her with me, staying low to avoid being spotted. I don’t know why, but I headed north and east, toward the lake.

I don’t know how long it took.

I can remember hearing the screams and shouts from all over the park as the assault continued. I tried to focus. Getting us out of there was everything. I was operating on instinct.

Then I remember suddenly stumbling out onto Lake Shore Drive, half-dragging, half-carrying the wounded girl — and I almost got run over by a big yellow taxi. The driver was a short, fat black guy with the remains of a short, fat stogie dozing unlit in the corner of his mouth and a blue Cubs baseball cap on his head.

I can imagine how we must have looked to him. We were dirty and disheveled, eyes red and swollen from the gas, the groaning girl’s face streaked with blood, her honey-blonde hair matted with it.

What the fuck? the cabbie growled, pretty much summing up my own feelings, too.

Got to get her to a hospital, man, I told him. She’s hurt. You say stupid shit at times like that.

No shit, the cabbie said. He got out and helped me put her gently into the back seat.

Get in, son, he said to me.

I’m okay.

Boollshit.

Apparently some of the blood was mine. I hadn’t been quite as clever at evading the policeman’s swings as I had originally thought. A wave of dizziness hit me then.

I got in.

What the fuck is going on?

I don’t know, I told him.

It was the truth.

At Mercy Hospital, they put six stitches into the side of my head and took the girl from the ER right upstairs, to do what, I don’t know. I have no idea what her name was; I really don’t know what she looked like, either. Sometimes I try to conjure up her face, but it’s no use. I just hope she came through it okay. I wonder if she ever wonders about me.

They wanted me to hang around for observation, but I had just assaulted a cop — with luck, two cops — and, not knowing who was on whose side, I decided to split.

Some things seem better in the morning.

This wasn’t one of them.

As I said, I had always known that Chicago was a corrupt and brutal place. I had seen cops beat people up for no reason before. But this shit was brutality way off the cop-ometer scale. No rules, no limits. I later learned that the cops would not allow ambulances into the park to pick up injured people,

Even in a war, you let the enemy come out and pick up his wounded.

The message was clear: America had declared war on its children.

Mayor Daley sent out the call for law and order. The irony of sending out the hue and cry for law and order in a city where the mafia got a taste of everything that moved, and crooked politicians and cops on the take were as common as semen stains in a porno theatre, was just the ironic frosting on a bitter cake. I think I actually laughed out loud when I heard that. It was somewhere between a horselaugh and a wail. Sometimes you have to either laugh or cry. And if you start crying, you might not be able to stop.

The real personal kicker was this: I heard it through the grapevine that the sleazy guy who had pulled down the flag was an undercover cop sent in as an agent provocateur. The whole putrid mess was a set-up. I guess that was about that last time that sort of thing ever surprised me.

After that, the entire world seemed to go sour as I fell prey to a chronic migraine soul-ache. I couldn’t seem to get the riot out of my head. I’d see people on the street, regular people doing their regular thing, business as usual, and I’d want to grab them and shake them and scream in their faces Don’t you know what happened? Don’t you care?

But I didn’t do that.

I guess I didn’t want to know the answer.

Or maybe I already knew.

My latest band, The Saints, broke up. Our drummer got drafted and our bass player was talking marriage now that his girlfriend was pregnant, and he was slowly ambling towards the musical gallows that a square job would mean. I tried hard to give a fuck, but couldn’t quite manage it. My music seemed suddenly childishly trivial and I just didn’t feel like playing silly shit for people to dance to, rockin’ and rollin’ while Rome was burning.

I also said a fond farewell to my latest lady love, a blonde, beach-bunny dream-girl named Gretchen. Her boyfriend was returning from the Army, as manly a hero as ever a glorified shipping clerk has been, and, suffering from an unexpectedly recurrent fever of fidelity, she was stoking up home-fires, long left untended. It should have wrenched my heart, but it didn’t. When she broke up with me, I even laughed a little.

She probably thought I was nuts.

She was right, of course.

By November, it appeared that winter was coming in early and coming on strong, promising a cold more bitter than I could bear. When the wind comes off Lake Michigan, it’s like a giant razor blade coming down the street — especially the streets that run perpendicular to the lake. It’s not very much buffered by the buildings on the parallel streets either - they just squeeze the breeze into a tighter space so it blasts around the corners and cracks into your face like an icy whip. It can turn your sperm to slush in a heartbeat.

So when Stede suggested, one evening shortly before Thanksgiving, that we go someplace warm and sunny, I found it difficult to think of reasons why not. I was staggering around like a zombie with arthritis and a bad attitude, and I figured a change of scenery would do me no harm. But you know what they say: you can run but you can’t hide. Not from yourself, anyway.

I hadn’t learned that yet.

Stede already had some contacts in the great Southwest, since he was currently producing, directing and starring in the road show of Easy Rider, smuggling big bags of cannabis up north via connections in Juarez and El Paso.

On Monday we decided to split, on Tuesday we packed our meager belongings into my black ragtop Chrysler (fins like a pair of roving sharks), and lashed his bike to the back. On Wednesday morning before dawn, we were gone.

We drove almost straight through, taking turns at the wheel, scarcely taking time out to piss or choke down crapburgers at a roadside greasy-spoon.

When we hit Alamogordo, New Mexico, the desert ahead of us lay so flat and the air was so clear that I swear we could make out the glow of the lights in El Paso, eighty miles away.

The Emerald City.

Just follow the yellow brick interstate.

The newspaper in El Paso featured a little box up in the right-hand corner of the front page. It said something like, Today is the 2003rd consecutive day that the sun has shone in beautiful El Paso. They prided themselves on bonny weather. Tourism, you know.

I bought that newspaper in an all-night drugstore at about 4:30 a.m., just as we hit the city limits.

Just as it started to snow.

SNOW!

What the fuck?

They hadn’t seen snow in El Paso in 47 years. The day we arrive, they get six inches. I didn’t know for sure whether to laugh or cry, but I’m pretty sure I said fuck a lot, even for someone speaking Chicago-ese.

The El Pasonians went completely goofy over it.

Snowball fights erupted on every street-corner, involving some of the most unlikely combatants you’ve ever seen. And, of course, they had no idea how to drive on the stuff, so Stede and I spent a lot of our first day in paradise leaving people awestruck at the ease with which we got their cars unstuck.

Like: Who was that masked man? I don’t know. And I wanted to thank him…

By the next morning the snow was all gone, except as a topic of conversation. But the entire episode struck me as an omen stirred up by some malevolent deity seriously on my ass. I could practically hear him rubbing his palms together with glee, chuckling out, "You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, muthah-fuckah!"

Stede’s main connection in El Paso was a minister’s daughter by the name of Amy.

She was possibly the plainest and the nicest girl I ever met, bright, gentle, and utterly without guile. She could have been the flower power poster child. When we first met, she beamed at me so sweetly that I assumed she thought I was someone else. But I was wrong. It was just her way. It was as if when she looked at me she could see a better person than I, myself, ever saw in the mirror, and it made me a bit uneasy. Besides that, she hugged me and I’m not a big hugger. It was a real hug, too, not one of those phony hippie-handshake hugs. I recall how, at that moment, the warmth of her seemed to seep into me, the way a hot mug of coffee held in your frost-nipped fingers warms you up all over just by holding it. The pressure of her breasts against me seemed incongruous with her little girl innocence. It put a huge knot in my throat, and restless stirrings elsewhere.

Amy’s tragic flaw was that she believed that people were basically good, saw virtues in people