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 naïve, 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 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.
