crying.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
“Are the assailants gone? You said there were two?”
I glanced outside, but all I could think of was Ryan, the trouble he was in. Why had he been so stupid? I was hemorrhaging internally for a kid I wasn’t sure I even knew.
For my son.
“Sir, are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“A squad car is on the way. Did you see the assailants?”
“What?”
“You called them kids.”
“I did?” The air shimmered around me. My instinct screamed at me to protect him, but was that right or wrong?
“Can you describe them? Did you…” She paused.
Ten seconds. Twenty.
“Sir? Are you there? Sir?”
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
by Brad Zellar
For years, every time I drive up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights I’d start feeling like I had the barrel of a gun jabbed in the small of my back. If I hung around the place long enough, I knew damn well I’d eventually have that gun between my teeth, and every night when I went to bed I’d lie awake with the taste of iron and oil in my mouth. I grew up out there in the Heights, and my old neighborhood was the bit I’d never been able to spit.
Whenever I made that trip over the last couple decades I’d always had better things to do, and this particular occasion was no different.
I have to think hard here about chronology, because some things from that day are still a little muddled in my mind. This, though, would have been a Saturday. Francis Greer, ringleader of the neighborhood cabal of my youth, and my brother-in-law of several years, had been released from prison a day earlier, and I had every reason to suspect that, while an unwanted guest in my home, Greer had stolen two tickets to a production of
I was seething that morning, and I’d had a spat with my wife Janice over the incident. Her natural inclination was to take her brother’s side in our frequent disagreements regarding his behavior. Janice had gone to work pissed off, Greer was unaccounted for, and I had a day to kill. I’d driven out to the Heights to poke around on the off chance that I’d run into Greer, and to pay a visit to my mother. She wasn’t home—my best guess was that she’d caught the free shuttle to the casino with some of her neighborhood cronies—and pulling up to the curb in front of her house had only served to bring back all sorts of bad memories. So that, at any rate, was how that day had started.
I’ve always known damn well that when you’re lost, the first thing you should do is turn back around, but even the most conventional wisdom is useless to man who is constitutionally incapable of adopting it. I’ve always been a plunger. I just keep going, allowing myself to be carried along and blindly hoping that I’m going to eventually end up right back where I started. And oddly enough, that’s exactly the way it always seems to work out for me, even though right back where I started is precisely the place I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from.
A little useful background: From a very early age Francis Greer had presided over a sort of neighborhood academy of lawlessness, to which I was something of a helpless conscript. There were a bunch of us out there in the Heights, boys of around the same age who had grown up together. We were—thanks, I suppose, to the accident of geography and the influence of environment—an uncommonly tight group all the way through high school. Francis was a persuasive character, with a certain transparently criminal charisma. All through our childhood and adolescence he progressively upped the ante on our illegal exploits until there was no longer any pretending that we were just playing around.
Alone among this group of characters, I should have known better. I was from the good side of Central Avenue; the other four primary members of our little gang were from the other side. Two of them, Slim Chung and his younger brother Randy, lived in the trailer park in Hilltop with their mother Dolores, who was in a wheelchair. Greer lived with Janice and his parents in an apartment building adjacent to the trailer parks. Gilbert Borocha, the patsy of our group, came from a big family and shared a room with a couple siblings in a little house a few blocks south toward downtown, off the avenue, right at the edge of a railroad switching yard.
I recognized from a very early age that my life was substantially different from those of my friends. I grew up in a modest split-level home in a 1950s development. My father was an unambitious small-fry lawyer with his own storefront practice on Central. Every day he wore a suit and carried a briefcase to work, and he drank as much as he worked. Whenever I asked him what he did for a living, he’d say, “It’s not important,” and I never had any doubt that he believed this to the very core of whatever was left of his heart. He’d been a junior associate in a big firm downtown, but after years of being passed over for a partner position he’d apparently gotten the message and bolted for his nickel-and-dime private practice.
My mother is a decent woman, a privately pious housewife, and once upon a time she could actually muster a passable imitation of cheerfulness, at least in comparison with the mothers of my friends. She was tight with my older sister, who was my only sibling. Growing up, I always had whatever I needed, and got most of what I wanted. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I had no excuses.
By the time I went off to the University of Minnesota, every one of my neighborhood pals had acquired juvenile criminal records of varying lengths. Somehow—and to this day I consider this the one miracle I may be given in this life—I managed to avoid the sort of serious trouble that would make such a mess of the lives of my friends. I had—as my mother would say—scrapes with the authorities, and my fair share of close calls, but I always exercised a certain prudence that was, I fully realize, essentially rooted in cowardice. The other members of my little gang were nothing if not imprudent, and after a certain age my primary role in their criminal enterprise became one of the consulting accomplice before and after the fact. I was the smart one, the confidante, the kid who always had to be in at a decent hour.
That didn’t, of course, save me from the clutches of my chums, or, eventually, their predations. There was that old history between us, and for a very long time, perhaps naturally, I retained a soft spot for the people I knew as children. I also lived in a pretty serious state of denial for years; I was basically naive, and didn’t want to know the details of what Greer and the others were doing. To fully understand the extent of their crimes would have forced me to acknowledge the uneasy truth I had spent most of my life resisting. And the sad fact of the matter was that I had never been very successful at making friends once I left that old neighborhood behind.
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
