You want me to leave you alone, Andrés? I don’t believe you. There are things you know that I will never know. There are things you’ve seen that I will never see. You’ve been used, abused, raped, and pushed around. Your pain’s become the only light you know. You want to punish yourself. You think your life has to be a tragedy. I know that goddamned song—I’ve hummed more than a few bars of that tune myself. You tell yourself you’ve killed a man. You tell yourself you deserve to pay. Leave me the fuck alone, Dave.
You tell yourself you hate me. Why not? Rich gringo rides in on his well-bred, paid-for, expensive white horse and saves poor Mexican boy. I’d hate me, too. I’m everything you never got to be. Deep down you know you’re smarter. I know that, too. The accidents of birth—I wind up rich, and you wind up with what? We wind up living in the same neighborhoods we were raised in. You spit on all of this.
I’d like, someday, for you to call me friend. I mean to earn that office. Grace, she taught me that. Whatever office that we hold, we’d damn well better earn it.
We can’t applaud what he did. That’s how the DA put it. So who’s applauding? This isn’t a play. Andrés is not a vigilante. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. He wasn’t making public policy. He went crazy. Did you ever think about what made him crazy? Prosecutors make me fuckin’ nuts. They want the same ending to every story—crime and punishment. They spin such easy plots.
I spoke to Al Mendoza. Andrés just went off on this guy. I’ve thought and thought about it. Andrés isn’t a bad guy. He’s not. Whatever this guy, Hart, did to him, it was bad. That’s what I think.
And Mr. Hart, you could have saved yourself. You could’ve called the cops. No cops, you kept repeating, no cops. So what’s the deal? You could’ve saved yourself. You could’ve driven to a hospital. You could’ve gone to a doctor. You went to college. LSU. And then to Yale. There was alcohol in your system. You went home, got drunk. Scotch, the bottle half empty in your new apartment. And then you died. Some would say that you committed suicide. You could be alive today. You hurt Andrés. I’ll find out how. You bet your dead ass I will.