Posted on by michaelwconrad

Two Brief Cases of Note

Like most of you I have social media on multiple platforms. I often consider that one day I will die and I hope that I haven’t done or said anything on these sites that would misrepresent my life. I have a real fascination with peoples final posts, here I have changed/omitted certain names and places in the interest of respecting the privacy of the departed and their loved ones.

CASE 1: 

It was the day after Halloween 7 or so years ago. I was living in a midsize city just North of San Francisco. The city was small enough that it didn’t have a ton of crime, but just big enough so that it wasn’t incredibly uncommon it to be the setting for several murders a year. 

I lived in a duplex, sharing a wall with one of my best friends. The house was in an area we called The Grid which happened to be where the bulk of our friends lived in during that era. Now most of us have been priced out of that county, but at the time every third house would be home to friendly faces. Ours was one of the more frequented spots to hang out, in part due to its centralized location, and in other part due to our rather inviting street facing porch. We would sit on that porch for hours at a time, sometimes with so many of us there that it was standing room only.

Our friend Ian came through that morning, all of us worse for the wear, residual makeup on our faces to punctuate the dark circles under our eyes that resulted from the late night and celebratory libations from the previous evening. Immediately after greeting us Ian told us of a mysterious situation going on a few blocks over on the lawn of the Junior College. He claimed to have seen a body.

“I doubt that. Musta been some drunk kid KO’d over there.” I said with a skeptical sneer, Ian had a level of charming gullibility that made his report a bit less than airtight.

“No dude, he was dead, cops are already swarming over there.”

I hopped up asking the others if they wanted to go check it out, all wisely declining. I’m not the kind of person who typically goes out of his way to see such vestiges of mortality, but a body in the middle of the expansive JC lawn was too compelling for me to resist. It couldn’t have been a murder, the middle of the lawn was not where such an act would be committed and the last place one might think to drop off a corpse. It must have been an overdose or something, while the town had its share of homeless folks, death from exposure was unlikely.

I made my way up the few short blocks to the main street, directly across from it was the lawn, and sure enough, in its middle several members of law enforcement patrolled the area and were actively hanging crime scene tape around what was obviously a body, covered by a pristine white sheet. There were several other community members around speaking in hushed tones. Most remained on the far side of the road near me, afraid they might be barked at by law enforcement should they get too close.

Most seemed clueless looking on, but several from the crowd who had arrived on the scene earlier described a man face down on the lawn. Some described blood, but their tone wasn’t entirely convincing. Oddly the police had failed to cover the feet of the victim, which remained sticking out of the bottom of the sheet. He was wearing very new looking black and red Nike sneakers, they were gaudy and reminded me of the kind of shoes some folks take extreme steps to prevent from getting dirty. These were not the kind of shoes one wears to walk over the soggy lawn on the JC, not when there was a perfectly good sidewalk a few yards away. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened… were the reports of the blood true? The whole scene captured my imagination and as I walked back to the porch I made a note to follow up on the reports of this that were likely to start hitting the internet by later that same day.  

This wasn’t the first murder victim I had ever seen, but the memory of this one was striking, I suspect it was due to the fact that the shoes communicated something about the individual I could relate to. No, I have never been a shoe person, but it seemed to me to be a young person’s interest to indulge in such things. I suspected that the person under the sheet was of similar age to me, and when online news reports started to come in my suspicion was confirmed. 

The reports were limited and vague, as these things tend to be. One thing that was made clear in the articles I found was that this was not a homicide investigation. Various social media comments confirmed (at least in a rumorous way) that there had been a good deal of blood on the scene. No guns were recovered, according to reports, so it seemed to me that this was likely a suicide, with a knife or razor being the means with which the grisley act was committed. All of this was very unscientific, but I was interested in unspooling the narrative of this young man’s final days.

I managed to pull up his Facebook before someone took it down. His privacy settings were almost nonexistent so I had access to all he shared in the years he had kept it active, and what I found was a very troubling story indeed. The young man was convinced that he had stumbled upon a government conspiracy, one that reached all the way to the top. He was calling upon angels to protect him as he exposed the misdeeds of those whom we trust to keep society up and running, hopefully with the interests of the people guiding them as they made choices and passed laws that we were all to adhere to.

His photographs were another story. Yes there were the typical uploads of conspiracy minded types There were images of Masonic origin, hidden symbols in film and tv. There were codes and ciphers that made little sense. There were even images of the World Trade Center complete with breakdowns focused on their rate of collapse and what was portrayed as incongruous math to to bolster the idea that the destruction was not in fact due to the impact of the commercial airlines. Along with these, and other half cocked conspiracies were images of angels, both from the Renaissance masters, as well as newer images put together by someone with Photoshop skills and a penchant for lens flares. These images were far less interesting than the ones of the man himself.

His pictures, mostly solo selfies, showed what appeared to be a happy, well kempt 20 something. His eyes looked deep and meaningful, his hair was always perfectly cut and maintained, and his smile was wide and generous. Many of the pictures had inconsequential settings, the bathroom, seated in front of a computer (clear from the illumination of a screen), and in what I could only imagine was his yard, on the grass. He didn’t express his fears in these pictures. In checking the time stamps, one shot would be uploaded of him grinning like a child at Chuck E. Cheese with a caption saying “Just kinda feelin’ myself lol” and moments later he would post in text “The Illuminati designed DC in the shape of a Luciferian star, look it up, they got no love for us.” 

The warnings were just the start though, often he would lead in with such a thing, and then spiral into more and more dire personal anecdotes until hitting a fever pitch with posts about black cars following him, and feeling like he in danger for getting too close to the truth. The following day, or sometimes even in the midst of a paranoid flurry he would pop in again with a selfie, smiling, “Just got blessed up over at Avenue Barbershop by my boy Chuy!”

It all seemed to start for him maybe a year or two prior, beyond that his Facebook had the usual stuff, pics of food and cars, family photos, a couple memes that struck me as very typical. There was little to indicate that his future was one of great fear, terror so great that he would seek the aid of angelic forces to keep the men that hunted him at bay. 

At the time I worked in the mental health field, so I had some education about this kind of thing. I have never been the type to fully disregard anything as simply delusional thinking, but it was hard not to land on that when reading his posts. I wished that he had found help and that his smiles wouldn’t have been buttressed by concerns for his safety and the dark forces that were undoubtedly taking their toll, real or imagined. I wondered where his network was, noticing that the likes on his pictures and posts had been in steady decline over the past few months. He was alienating everyone with his wild ideas. He was scaring away the people who loved him, or maybe they were turning a blind eye because they were embarrassed about the kind of person he was becoming. We all notice in our own lives that our friends rally when we are on the upswing, when we’re in the struggles it can be a really lonely place… but this guy had almost completely spooked off everyone. 

I noticed that no one had written on his page anything like “Damn, I heard the news about ______, I love you man, Rest In Power.” or some other lightweight remembrance. If he had alienated his people I could understand not showing up pulling out your hair and weeping, but not even a simple “You will be missed.” It really made me wonder. He had a fairly typical number of friends for the site, what had this guy done that was so horrible as to not attract a single mourner?

As I closed my investigation I began to wonder if I had found the right guy, and then in his recent uploads I found undeniable proof that it was him. Unlike his other pictures this one had a lengthy bit of text. It went on at length and how he had found the links he had been looking for, how the secret empire had its claws firmly set in the small city we lived in. He named certain elected officials and members of law enforcement as instruments of this Satanic cabal that ran the world in secret. He cited a number of police shootings and the victims and painted a portrait of suppressed information and police misconduct. He did all this while calling on Michael and Gabriel and a number of other Seraphim to protect him as he continued to pull the veil. He said the Illuminati would eliminate him out for speaking up. He said his days were numbered, and that he was working to make peace with the fact that he would be killed by the police for doing what he was doing. After this lengthy piece of text there was a shot of his new shoes, those black and red Nikes I had seen on the lawn of the JC. The post script stating simply “These the boots yer boy gon be sportin’ when they take me.”

CASE 2: 

I had become a fixture in the Boston punk and hardcore scene in the early 2000’s when I made a hasty retreat from my childhood home 30 minutes North in Southern New Hampshire. I was in bands, played a ton of shows, booked out of state bands, and went to concerts almost nightly. For several years this was my life, music. During this time I made a lot of friends and even more acquaintances that I would see regularly at the same venues and basements that were home to such affairs. It was during this time that I met this guy who I will now call Jon.

Jon was older than me and if I’m being truthful he seemed a bit out of touch. He was into a lot of the same stuff that I was, but his eccentricities forbid me from ever considering him someone I really had an interest in knowing better. He was a weirdo, but he was close with a number of my friends, and seeing him so often we came to engage in friendly terms. He was at many of the parties I attended, always loudly gregarious. At shows he would dance wildly before the crowd was even warmed up, he was a real individual and he literally wore it on his sleeve.

This was a time in hardcore when fashion was moving away from the jockish appearances of the Youth Crew era, and was drawing more from Mod culture than anywhere else. I found myself wearing “girl jeans” and polos, huge faux fur lined parkas, and allowing my dyed black hair to hang to one side in a look that would become more identified with Justin Bieber in a decades time, and become a cartoonish reflection of what I considered hot shit at the dawning of this new millenia.

Jon owed his look more to gutter punk or industrial sensibilities. He would cut his hair into these wacky nonsense styles, half shaved, with a strange patch here and there. He wore a ring in his nose that had to be 00 gauge, lips pierced all over, eyebrows, cheeks, on his body spotty home done tattoos visible through his fishnet tanks. He had sewn bizarre patches in strange places on a rancid military surplus jacket. His boots that seemed comically large and he smelled like a dumpster. He was one of a kind, so unique in fact that I struggle to convey his appearance because any description sounds almost rational, but I assure you it wasn’t. His attitude was similar, Jon didn’t care when the party started or ended, he had his own clock, and at shows if he was enjoying the bands he could give a flying fart if the energy of the room was there, he had his own engine. I have to repeat these bits because everyone has their moments, for Jon it was his default setting.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t leave Boston gracefully. I told a lot of people off, feeling like I’d never see them again. I didn’t mind burning a few bridges on the way out. I felt like my move was allowing me to speak truths that the folks I was leaving behind had been wanting to say but couldn’t due to being stuck in the same scene with those who needed to be humbled. Even the folks who would have maintained a friendship with me were met more often with unanswered phone calls and more unanswered internet messages than even the most steadfast could persist in the face of. I didn’t like who I had become in Boston and the move would serve as a soft reset, a means of personal reinvention, and a renewal in my journey to find out who I was.

Years later, things looped around and even some of the folks I was rude to found their way back into my social media circles. Time is the great healer, and a lot of the stones I had thrown were forgiven, many of them having done the same, or at least having developed the worldly quality of knowing that different seasons of life have different weather patterns. I hadn’t done anything too rotten, and nostalgia for the good times and all those shows and all that magic helped heal the wounds I may have caused as a self righteous kid.

It wasn’t as if we spoke all the time, someone would pop up, friend request, chat a second, and now you’re in my feed and I’m in yours. You know all about me that I find fit to share and I know all about the stuff you wish to share. We leave out a good deal, but most of us are pretty open about the good and the bad, and it felt good to see where life had taken my old friends. Most were doing really well, so well in fact that I often wondered what they thought about Boston’s Prodigal Son, who went to sunny California and spent the better part of a decade in some of the deepest depressions he had ever known. I was still doing the same shit, and most of them had nice careers, kids, and had moved on from those old fanciful dreams we shared. Most were contented to live good, wholesome lives and not worry about creation, or late nights and impossible dreams.

I never got a friend request from Jon (naturally) and I had all but forgotten about him until a mutual posted about his death. He has died AT A SHOW. Any idea I had about being the one true lifer dissolved in an instant. Here it was, proof that Jon was the real one and I was a fraud. This was something I had already begun to suspect years earlier when my interest in maintaining social stature by being en vogue began to give way to a mindset less concerned with such things. In shaking such aspirations I was able to reflect more clearly on certain people with queer tastes and understand that these were the real punks, and that all the posturing and posing I had done was quite the opposite.

When I became interested in punk I had very little information about what it all meant. The definition was added to as I went along, and with each new piece of information my prejudices as to what was and was not punk became more and more constrictive and antithetical to what attracted me to the lifestyle. For example, in the beginning I made no delineation between hippies and punks. It seemed to me that it was about counter culture, rebellion against the imposed status quo of the mainstream. When I got word that punks and hippies were in fact diametrically opposed, I threw in with the punks, they had better music. This kind of foolish thinking narrowed my scope to a pin hole. Folks like Jon missed that memo and as a result they were able to skip, what for me was an important part of the identity I had assumed in the name of rebellion. I had to build walls around myself, lock myself into a dogmatism so that I could execute on the greatest skill that punk ever taught me, the one where you initiate the most important rebellion one can undertake. This great revolution is the one that takes place in our own hearts when we realize we have become the bad guy.

I wondered how many other incredible people I had dismissed or alienated with my dumb rules and expectations. I felt ashamed about how vapid and shallow my attitude had been. I had traded in the exclusivity and elitism of my small town’s social cliques and had upgraded to being the one drawing up designs for a brand new caste system. I had become a part of a problem that got me into punk and hardcore in the first place, and now from my imagined place of esteem, I had appointed myself gatekeeper to a counter culture that mirrored all the worst parts of what made the social piece of public education so foul. Jon had apparently been immune to that toxic trap. Maybe if I had access to his perspective I wouldn’t have felt stuck in that old imagined identity, but then I might would have missed out on the important growth that takes place when you burn down your former self like a hated effigy.

Jon was not a drug user and had no diagnosis of heart issues or anything like that, at least as far as I can tell. People have a way of indicating such things, even in brief memorials. He just went to a show, like we had all done so many times, and died, right there on the dancefloor. He wasn’t assaulted or struck by a stagediver. He didn’t OD in the bathroom, and according to all records of the night he hadn’t even seemed unwell, right up until his very end. I don’t know what killed him, an aneurysm? Sudden heart failure? Something mysterious had taken this man and I had so many questions. Again, I would use social media to investigate.

I plumbed the listings on Facebook and I found him. He didn’t have privacy set, so like in the case of ______, the man on the lawn, I had access to a good deal. Unlike the man on the lawn, Jon’s facebook was loaded with mournful friends recounting memories, sharing their grief, and saying all the things they wished they had said to him, or would love to say to him once more. Jon was someone that everyone loved, because there was little to not love. He remained true to himself, something I had scoffed at when I was masquerading as one whose authenticity circumstantially was what everyone else wanted. It felt like such a joke, this guy I hardly knew died knowing who he was and even as I type this I am still peeling away layers of an old facade to find an honest expression of the universe I carry around in between my ears.

When I got to his final post I found myself smiling unconsciously as I read it. Jon really was a great and beautiful enigma and I had missed it. The last post was about the show. Some band from long ago was doing a reunion and he was looking for friends who would like to join him. He recalled a number of previous performances of theirs that he had enjoyed 10-15 years prior before their long pause. He was really excited to see them and to feel that wondrous feeling again, to feel young and to dance and to be free. He closed the post with something brilliantly prophetic.“If I don’t come back from this show it’s because I’ve fallen into the Time Tunnel. I’ll be back in 96’ dancing with myself in the past- forever.” 

Posted on by michaelwconrad

Guilty Bullets

I can’t imagine you will think well of me after what I am about to confess. Truthfully I’m not doing this to clear my conscience, I’ve made peace with the fact that I did some rotten things when I should have known better. I suppose I’m sharing this in an effort to create a more honest representation of my young life after the previous posts. Make no mistake, I was a thoughtful and sensitive child, but I was also a dumb kid capable of doing things that make me cringe in retrospect.

I had a partner in this, an older kid from around the corner. I was 12 at the time which would have made Shawn 15 or so. He was a big, rough kid who would have made a fine addition to our small towns struggling highschool football program, but Shawn had asthma that kept him from most forms of athletics. I was sensitive to this plight and when he would get gassed out I would hang back with him while the other kids in the neighborhood ran around, uncaring about the fact that medically Shawn couldn’t keep up. I say I did this out of empathy, but I was also using this opportunity to win favor with someone who normally would have dismissed me as a potential friend due to my age and nerdy qualities.

Shawn was cool, “wicked cool” as we would say, he was also a royal shithead. He had fought with my older brother, blown up toads with fireworks, taught us all kinds of “facts of life” stuff we had no business knowing, and was generally a bad influence. He was just one of those shitball kids who would later grow into a shitball man. As far as I know he’s still in that same neighborhood, in that same run down house, catching the occasional charge for dope slinging; really taking advantage of the opioid crisis that’s devastating huge portions of Southern New Hampshire. Like many quaint small towns across America without much going on, heroin has become the Great Pastime for once thriving commuter cities not far from major metropolitan areas.

Shawn grew to like me in those younger years, he taught me how to throw and catch, allowed me to look at the pornography in his tree house, he even once invited me to walk to the school to watch a baseball game with him. I became so excited by the idea and the permission granted by my mother (who, frankly seemed relieved that her bookish kid had an interest in something other than dragons) that I ended up not being able to go after all when I started throwing up all over myself. It was nerves. Similarly, not too many years later when I was to attend my first concert I became very anxious thinking that I would surely lose my virginity there. I had all of these strange notions about how life worked due to my sheltered upbringing. My parents exposed me to a lot of stuff, just not the stuff that would end up defining me as an adult, like film, music, and art. I had no idea that baseball games were boring, and that going to a punk show is not how one typically gets laid.

Anyway, Shawn kept coming around, while I was rarely allowed to leave the yard for extended periods this didn’t prevent Shawn from joining us in wiffle ball, or pitching around his Nerf football, one with a tail on it that would allow even an untrained arm to cast out long bombs that would spiral through the air like we knew what we were doing. My little brother, 5 years my junior would even be able to join, and along with him we added my direct neighbor Sammy.

Sammy was a pretty wild kid, foul mouthed and seemingly aware of life beyond his young age. He, like my brother, was barely old enough to be attending elementary school. He was the kind of problematic kid that had a spot with us only for lack of other viable options. There were plenty of kids around, but the aloof qualities that have been cited as the defining characteristic of my generation were already apparent in my local peer group. The other kids had stuff to do indoors that didn’t involve sweat, itchy grass, and hanging with the refuse of the neighborhood. For all I knew these kids had been instructed to stay away from me, perhaps through osmosis I had acquired the same reputation that Shawn was already developing in that little loop of stubby homes on the hill. 

Sammy didn’t have the kind of parenting that might protect him from kids like us. He and his parents lived with his grandmother and grandfather, but we rarely saw them. I had heard rumors that his father had shot a man a few years back. His grandparents seemed kindly enough, but they didn’t want us running on their grass, so my yard became the place we would do our thing. We were fenced in on one side, the backside barrier was a line of impossibly tall pine trees, with a bushy hedge on the other side. This backyard was all boxed in by the house and the garage that housed the hens. It was in many ways a perfect place to play, generally flat and soft enough that if you fell (and you would fall) the grass and soil would absorb much of the impact.

We did have the ongoing issue of fouling the ball off over the fenced side. The fence didn’t exist as part of our yard, it was a town requirement as there was an inground pool in the neighboring yard, owned and maintained by a woman named Michael, just like me. She was ok, but if we popped a foul and jumped the fence to retrieve the ball she would dress us down, admonishing us for trespassing. She rightly feared the lawsuit that would follow one of us falling in the pool and dying, or some other concern that seemed outlandish to us in our youth. She would tell us to knock and have her grab the ball, but if we were to take that approach we would have been at the place constantly. We ended up moving to the other side of the yard, but then the delight of a “homerun” became a collective groan from all as one of us would have to be elected to knock on Michael’s door. Eventually we tried to agree to a “no homers” rule that Shawn refused to follow, saying it was impossible for him to pull his swing, he was just too strong. Really though Shawn was the only one who would have needed to adjust, the rest of us too small and unrefined to hit a homer with any regularity.

Sammy desperately wanted to be respected so he was constantly jockeying for position, mostly by picking at my little brother Steven. He knew he couldn’t get away with much if he were to come at his older, bigger, playmates like Shawn and I, so Steve became his target. During football he would get rough with him, he would cuss him out, and at times get bold enough to try his hand at Steve in fisticuffs. Steve didn’t need anyone to defend him, already significantly bigger than Sammy (Steve now stands at 6’7” and had a beard fit for the Viking warship) and handy with the fists from having two brothers who would periodically test him in martial combat. But, being that this was my brother and that Sammy was just some shitbird kid that we hung out with out of some compulsory need to round out teams; I didn’t cut any slack and would often end up whooping on Sammy to remind him of his role in our backyard hierarchy. Shawn seemed to really enjoy such moments, egging on both sides equally until it became physical (usually briefly, with wrestling and choking being the primary violent engagement) and Sammy either retreated home or would cool his jets.

We all knew that Sammy, like Shawn was asthmatic. While Shawn got by with a couple puffs off of his inhaler, Sammy had this whole mask situation he had to do a couple times a day it seemed. It looked like an oxygen mask from TV and would puff out thick, milky, plumes of vapor. He needed to wear it for several minutes and more than once we left him behind, youthful impatience not allowing even a few moments delay once plans were set. If we did go out we would have to scamper off home by the time the streetlights came on, so time was a commodity we couldn’t spare, even if it meant leaving Sammy out entirely.

I don’t recall Sammy ever losing his wind like Shawn would, maybe that mask was something Shawn really could have used too, or maybe Sammy was just so damned determined to find his place in the pack that he refused to ever allow us to see such a thing. Sammy was actually kind of a bad ass now that I look back on it, a real turd maybe, but he was tough as hell.

One day he and Steve were starting to get into it and uncharacteristically Shawn broke up a scrum between the two. Incredibly he said was sick of the violence. He had something else in mind, a more gentlemanly way to settle the dispute. 

“We’re gonna do a decathlon.” Shawn said, like we were all supposed to know what that meant. I was vaguely familiar with the term, but I didn’t actually know what events comprised such a thing. “10 challenges, 10 tests of strength, endurance, and agility. Winner take all.” What the winner would take was never questioned and would remain unidentified. It was actually a brilliant way to end the fight because suddenly the three of us were all so enthralled at the idea of a decathlon that the dispute became unimportant.

“I’m gonna be Sammy’s coach and Mike is gonna be Steve’s.” Even then I hated being called “Mike” but whatever- DECATHLON!

“We go to 10, each one is worth 1 point. Who ever wins more events is the… winner.” Shawn continued, we were all glad that he was being thorough, it seemed like he knew exactly what he was talking about and we were glad to have someone so worldly in our clique.

“Now, before we start I need a coaches meeting, you guys start stretching out, we will be right with you.” Shawn said authoritatively, then grabbed me around the shoulder and pulled me along to the side yard by the oak tree that was a haven for the hated and reviled gypsy moth caterpillars.

“I’m gonna make sure Steve wins.” Shawn said with a wry grin, quietly so the guys couldn’t hear.

“How ya gonna do that?” I said. I didn’t think Steve needed any unfair advantage, but I was all ears.

“I’m gonna wear his ass out. His asthma will get him, it’ll be cake!” Shawn said devilishly, I just smiled back, unsure of what the plan was still but not wanting to look like I wasn’t keeping up.

We returned to our competitors. I didn’t know what to do so I just had Steve stretch out, meanwhile Sammy was kicking out burpees while Shawn, as his coach barked encouragement. The burpee is essentially a form of torture, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of doing them, you too will know the torment and toll it takes. After a couple sets of burpees Shawn saw fit to initiate the first round of the decathlon, a sprint to the end of the yard and back.

Sammy was visibly sucking wind already as he lined up against Steve, and the pair took completely untrained three point positions at the imaginary starting like. Shawn counted down from 3 and they took off.

Being bigger was a disadvantage in this event, but Steve was able to trounce Sammy without issue in what may have otherwise been a pretty close race. Back at the start Steve was awarded his first point and Sammy was commanded to do a set of 50 jumping jacks.

“You’re just not warmed up yet, now beat your face!” Shawn shouted, echoing something he had heard at football tryouts. In this case “beating your face” amounted to push-ups, it was a new term for me. Once Sammy could do no more, it was on to the next part of the decathlon which was the long jump. After Steve made short work of him in that one it was immediately followed by the triple jump, and again the already exhausted Sammy came up short, in one part due to having all the gas sucked from his tank, in other part simply by being physically smaller than my brother.

The events continued on and eventually the coaching sessions became even more intense, at times with all three of us shouting at him to do more and more strenuous prep work between events. To his credit Sammy was keeping up with the demands. Sammy didn’t win a single event, and as we celebrated Steve’s gold medal, Sammy slumped under that gnarly old oak tree panting like a dog, his face blotchy with reddened cheeks, and a very pale hue elsewhere. His lips were purple and he said very little. Sammy was right there on the edge of a significant asthma attack.

I don’t feel good about this, this is just one of those things that dumb kids do prior to the development of a well defined moral compass. At the time I felt no remorse, but looking back on it this was incredibly cruel. The very thing that enabled me to forge a kind of friendship with Shawn was being taken advantage of and I was unable to see how heartless and stupid I had been to allow such a thing to happen. Sammy recovered without a major medical issue, but it did take some time for him to rise and find his legs again. 

We continued to play and Sammy, being as young as he was, never realized how he had worked over by a couple of idiots. He was happy to have been coached by the oldest and coolest among us, and that is the way of kids. We just want to be seen, and in Sammy’s case I don’t know that he got a lot of that from his father. 

I didn’t learn anything from this situation at the time, there is no great moral victory here, and on the scale of bad things I’ve done it doesn’t really rank, all’s well that ends well right? Sammy didn’t get killed by the neighborhood kids… but this is one of those memories that pops up every once in awhile and chills me in the same way a close call with a bad car accident might haunt you, a dodged bullet.

This was not the last time I would be the bullet.