Where should I start?
Perhaps by saying this is a letter I wish I’d written in my cell, a letter I should have sent twenty-three years ago, after the final time you came to visit me, when at last I understood how much it hurt you that I seemed to have no reason for what I did to Hannah Jensen. Of course, if you were able to read this letter now, you might still decide I had no reason, or insufficient reason, at least, and certainly that’s true.
The first time you came, sitting across that jail table from me with the visitation show going on all around us, you asked me why I did it and I said there wasn’t any particular explanation. I’m sorry, that was a lie. The truth is I didn’t want you to know everything that happened, not at the time, and the awful thing is, now that I do want you to know, you won’t understand—the kernel of you that remains seems unable to comprehend anything anymore, not even on the good days, which are becoming rarer and rarer with each one that passes.
I wish I could cure you, reverse the erosion. I wish I could bring you back.
You were the first person I truly loved. I don’t find meaning in most things, but this means something to me. I love you and I always will.
However, you know only half of what I did. If you’d known the rest of it, if you’d known what I’m about to tell you, what would you have thought? What would you have done? Would you have stuck by me? Because knowing there was someone on the outside who was still in my corner was what kept the fight burning inside me those first two tough years, and you needed the fight in that place.
The only other person who knows the whole thing is Hannah.
There you go. There is more to this story than meets the eye.
But I want to make one thing clear from the start. This letter isn’t any kind of defense. I’m not attempting in the slightest to excuse or mitigate what I did to Hannah Jensen in 1982. What I did that day was wrong, there is no gray.
However, the reality is there are more than two sides to most stories. Truth is seldom a lens, truth is a kaleidoscope, and I have my truth too.
There’s something else as well—another reason to write this letter now, the explanation for why I first came looking for you after not having seen you for twenty-three years. I’m getting married. Or at least, I think so, I haven’t actually posed the question or even bought the ring, because speaking to you seemed like the right thing to do first of all. I suppose I was hoping that, as well as listening to my confession, you might offer me your blessing. I thought if I told you everything, you might give me permission to find a second person in the world to love.
Anyway, now I will tell you the story as if you were never a part of it, as if you were never there, because the way you are now, your mind irreversibly lost in a fog, I suppose in some sense that’s true.
* * *
HERE’S MY FIRST TRUTH—MY daddy beat me, that’s just a fact. Oh, but this isn’t one of those lines from the courtroom—Your Honor, I only done what I done because my daddy done beat me. No, this truth is just one of the colorful beads in the tube.
If I was lucky it was strap and nothing but strap, but sometimes the buckle snuck in. Occasionally the buckle was the whole point. Or sometimes my daddy, his liquored fingers finding nothing under his belt loops, would curl up his hands and make fists. Although saying all this, having a father who hit you wasn’t exactly uncommon back then.
Attitudes change. My daddy was born in 1948 in the great state of Texas—remnants of state pride being the reason why he insisted we call him Daddy, even though people laughed at us openly for doing so. He grew up in the city of Beaumont, living in an age when everyone chewed tobacco, smoked unfiltered, and merrily lit up their small boys’ behinds. Bred for a lifetime of poverty, he was raised among swamp and oil and knowing the back of his old man’s hand. Only my daddy’s life took a sharp turn when, fourteen years old, his momma died, hospitalized for tuberculosis before succumbing to pneumonia. This would’ve been 1962, the year my daddy was bused more than fifteen hundred miles northeast to live with an aunt, his momma’s sister, in Queens, New York, and although his geographical influences may have shifted, my father’s credo remained forever stuck in that swamp.
He didn’t do well in New York, left school at sixteen and worked for a while fixing roofs and digging clams before, aged eighteen, he decided to join the army. He always spun you the American hero version, that he was a patriot who signed up to do what was right. However, if you listen to my mom, who enjoys talking about him now that he’s long dead, she’ll tell you my daddy was classic draft bait—blue collar, single, and poor. If he hadn’t signed up they’d have pulled him in anyway. Better to stick up your hand.
She also likes to say she fell for his Texas charms—before laughing and throwing back another Beam.
Anyway, whatever the reason my daddy signed up for the army, sign up he did. He received his orders to report to Fort Dix, where he was put through sixteen weeks of training, which were followed by a few weeks leave, including at least one night in the company of my mom, it’s safe to conclude. Next, the army packed him off on a boat for a month-long ride to hell, as he always told it. However, my daddy’s hell ended up being no more than a seven-week stopover. After months of training and those thirty-one nights on a military transport ship, exactly fifty days after he arrived, late June 1967, he was medevacked out of Vietnam with a gut shredded by shrapnel and a wild dose of the Saigon clap.
At this point, I must’ve been steadily unfolding in my mom’s belly for eleven weeks or so, not that she had any idea I was there, mistaking her first bouts of morning sickness for fears concerning her boyfriend’s well-being. Later bouts of nausea, she supposed to have been triggered by news of his injuries.
So, a little further down the line, I was born, January 2, 1968, the first of two sons, my brother, William, arriving twenty months later—on the very same day that Ho Chi Minh died, September 2, 1969, as it happened. I do believe this was the achievement in life my daddy was proudest of, the propitious timing and flourishing of his second seed. Henceforth, my brother’s birthdays became a kind of double celebration, the day always prompting misty retellings of my daddy’s war stories. His favorite tale was all about the time he shot a Viet Cong while the goddam gook was crouched down hopin to enjoy his mornin shit. Whenever he told the story, he took great delight mimicking the look on the Viet Cong’s face as he strained to move his bowels, exaggerating the eyes by stretching them out with his fingers, while exhaling in an apparently Asiatic manner—Aaaah-sole, aaah-sole, aaah …—and then he’d break off halfway through the third iteration, making a gun-shape with his hand and slamming down his thumb with a loud exclamation of bang! After that he’d spit something out like, Now we gonna see if you can shit metal, Charlie. Funny guy.
Anyway, because this was the only war story my daddy told with such cartoon levels of grotesquerie, I’m more than a little convinced this was the only Viet Cong he ever actually killed.
At any rate, however many men my daddy killed, and in whatever state of grace he found them, something had left him unsated. Or maybe his brief stint in Vietnam just turned him into a guy who went looking for trouble and found it in all the predictable places—a nose for whiskey and fistfights, he spent his nights downing Four Roses and throwing his knuckles around. If he couldn’t find a man to fight? Well …
You might have thought that, what with my having a baby brother, the burden of my daddy’s mood swings might eventually have been shared. However, little Billy was, to use the word the doctors employed when informing my parents of their baby’s condition, a mongoloid. I remember how, growing up in the 1970s, gradually the terms mongolism and mongoloid would be heard less and less and the term Down syndrome used more and more, but human niceties and linguistic fashions were something to which my daddy never subscribed. However, he did have principles—little Billy was disabled, and he never laid a serious finger on the son he referred to as The Pug.
Anyway, none of this felt unnatural to me, I wasn’t unlucky or mistreated, this was just the way the world turned.
I spent the first ten years of my life growing up in a narrow green-painted apartment in Woodside, Queens, our walls being pretty much the only greenery I’d ever experienced until, not long before my eleventh birthday, we moved upstate to Roseborn, Ulster County. I don’t remember which of my daddy’s short-term jobs was the stated reason. No doubt he didn’t last long in it because every brief period of employment in Roseborn came to an end after some kind of trouble. He worked in body shops, fixed farm machinery, built fences, plowed drives, painted houses … He was good with his hands. Hilarious, huh? Anyway, when my daddy wasn’t working, he got into even more fistfights than usual. You know that phrase, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? The townspeople of Roseborn looked at me like I was trouble a long time before I was anything like it.
The nicest thing my daddy ever did for me was steal a bicycle. He told me it was salvaged. Anyway, that bike got me out of the house plenty, as far away from my daddy as I could pedal for as long as possible. Win-win.
I liked living in Roseborn. Although Queens was a much bigger place, it felt somehow smaller, everything squeezed down to neighborhoods from which you never broke free, but in Roseborn I could ride my bike anywhere on the streets, along the dirt trails outside of town and all the way up to the Swangum Ridge. It was wide open country, a place where a child could have secrets and fantasies, a place for building hidden forts. You could shape your own world up there in the mountains, even if there were only two of you doing the dreaming—me and Tricky.
Tricky’s real name was Patrick McConnell. (I think you met him only a couple of times.) I suppose I gave him that nickname because part of me must have realized there was something dark and evasive about Tricky. Most of the kids at school used the innocent moniker Patch for him, but I guess they didn’t see in Patrick what I saw, that he might have seemed like a quiet kid, only that was all just a front. I could always tell there were secret wheels turning inside his head. Patrick didn’t keep his own counsel because he had nothing to say; quite the opposite, it was because he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking. However, everyone went for the misdirection, the quiet kid act, and to my mind at least, that was his trick.
Anyway, the truth about me and Tricky is the first reason I wanted to be his friend was jealousy, and it might sound stupid, but this is absolutely true—I was envious of the way he rolled up his shirtsleeves.
My first day of school in Roseborn was the start of sixth grade. I was the new kid in town, so no one spoke to me, but that was fine, it gave me time to size everything up, a chance to identify who I might want to befriend.
Everyone came to school in hoodies, sports jerseys, sweaters, or T-shirts, but Patrick McConnell came to school in clean white shirts, button-downs that were as bright as the teeth in whitening advertisements, clean cotton as crisp as hotel linen, and every day, Patrick had the sleeves of those shirts rolled up just past his elbow. Now this might not sound like much to be jealous of, I’ll admit, but something about the way those cuffs were folded spoke to me about everything missing from my life, because this wasn’t a technique you were born with, someone had to show you how to roll and fold something so neatly, so crease-free. Hell, maybe you even needed a special kind of shirt designed for sleeve-rolling. I spent a few quiet weeks just breathing him in, marveling at those revelatory shirtsleeves.
Our mom was vaguely Catholic, taking me and little Billy to Mass maybe once a month (although we knew our place, we weren’t good enough to go to Sacred Heart, where the McConnell family prayed alongside the more important burghers of Roseborn), and I had one good white churchgoing shirt in my closet. Getting home from school one afternoon, a little way into the first term, I took that shirt from my closet and snuck off to the bathroom, the only room in our house with a mirror, pulled off my tee, buttoned up the shirt, and proceeded to fold and roll the sleeves. Only, by the time I’d flipped the cuffs twice it was already creased as hell. I started again, but the result was the same. While Patrick’s folded shirtsleeves were as smooth as a priest’s collar, whenever I tried to roll up my own sleeves, after a few turns it seemed some wrinkle was already there and there was nothing I could do but repeat it.
The next day, while we were all sitting in English class waiting for the teacher to show, I turned to Patrick and said, Hey, Patch, I like your shirt.
Patch looked at Jonny the Spin, Jonny the Spin looked at Patch. No one said anything. I could tell they were trying to figure out whether I was being sarcastic or just plain weird. I was used to that.
Christie Laing, a few seats farther behind, said, Hey, did you hear that everyone? Weird Matt is a faggot for Patch.
My name’s Matthew, I said to her.
Fag-hew, said Christie, her goons letting out a squeal.
Matthew, I said a bit harder. She didn’t come back from that. I’ve never found a situation where a clever line worked better than firm intent.
How’d you do the sleeves? I asked Patch.
His axis of glances with Jonny the Spin tilted back and forth a little more.
Rolled them up. He shrugged.
Nice, I said.
The teacher came in.
* * *
I’VE NEVER KNOWN HOW TO make friends. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. In the end, my friendship with Patrick McConnell came down to dumb luck.
Christie Laing had a cousin, a boy in eighth grade called Ryan McMahan, who was known to most people at school as Ryan McMeathead, the football team’s one-man wrecking ball. By the age of fourteen Ryan had developed a linebacker’s neck and immense puffed-up arms. The Laings and McMahans were the northern equivalent of my daddy’s side of our family, purebred hicks and Republican down to the bone.
So what with Patch being smart and neatly presented and having a lawyer Democrat for a father, he quickly became a target for Ryan McMeathead who had this fun game he liked to play where he’d fold and fold pieces of paper into thin strips, about three inches long, bend them into U-shapes, wet their ends, and let them dry out on a radiator until they turned hard as rock. Between lessons he’d sneak up on his victims with a rubber band stretched between thumb and forefinger, slip one of those hard U-shaped pellets over the band, draw the thing back and snap!
Patrick was one of his prime victims. The seat of his pants, crack! The cartilage at the back of his ear, thwack! His neck right above his shirt collar, blam! That time he snapped Patch on the neck, the welt stayed there in furious red for three whole days.
Like I said, I always thought there was more to Tricky than mere shyness, and what happened next made me want to become Patrick’s friend even more, because goddammit if the button-down boy didn’t go away and make his own pellets.
I guess McMeathead had driven him so mad, he didn’t even think it all the way through, he just snuck up on McMeathead in the hallway and loosened his pellet so hard against the back of his skull, smack, you could’ve heard the hollow thud from several miles away. McMeathead screamed and started running around like a balloon losing air while Patch stood there in shock, unsure what to do until McMeathead stopped yelping and dancing and turned on him—
You are a motherfucking dead man, McConnell.
At which point, Patch ran. He ran straight down the hallway and then out the school doors, zoom, pursued by McMeathead and his cohorts—Meatbrowski, Meatchini, O’Meatneck—but Patch was a lightning bolt compared to the lumbering meat-pack and they never got close to him. Round and round the sports fields they ran until Patch pulled a spin move and sprinted straight back to school, out of breath and trembling slightly when he sat down for geography.
It seemed like the whole room was in shock.
Way to go, Patch, I said, though he didn’t acknowledge me.
Unfortunately, however, that wasn’t the end of the McMeathead story. The world tells you to punch a bully on the nose and he’ll leave you alone, and isn’t that precisely what Patrick had done? The world knows less than shit.
Patch did a pretty good job of sneaking around for the rest of the day, avoiding the pack, staying well away from their meat lockers, but in homeroom, the day after his act of defiance, Christie Laing handed him a note. I didn’t see the words, but everyone in the room knew what it said. Day, time, place.
Patch went pale and started to shrink like a sack of grain with a hole slashed in its belly, and then word got around between lessons. Behind the bleachers, lunchtime.
I could pretend that I came up with a plan right away, but the truth is I never made one.
A few hours later, I followed the small group of boys that ushered Patrick toward his fate, the large crowd that had gathered parting to let Patch into its ring.
I was pretty tall for my age, plus I was thirteen years old already, having been held back a year at school in Woodside, so it wasn’t hard to find a spot from which I could see. I stood at the back of the crowd watching McMeathead in front of his pack, moving his fat head in circles. Ten yards away stood Patch, a kid two years Ryan’s junior and weighing in at a hundred pounds less. How was any of this fair? Patrick had chalked up a solitary act of retaliation in return for how many provocations? Nine, ten? A dozen?
You ready to settle this one on one? said McMeathead.
One on one? Patch was half the guy’s size and shaking in terror. He moved his lips, but nothing audible came out.
McMeathead put his hand to his ear and laughed. This here was The Ryan McMeathead Show. In daily conversation he employed the vocabulary of a coloring book, and yet when it came to fighting talk, McMeathead was fluent.
Hey, kid, you know what? he said. I’ll make you a promise. I won’t go easy on you.
The pack snorted.
Patrick’s arms went stiff, his fingers spread wide at the ends of his hands. Look, he said, I’m really sorry, OK?
Correction, said McMeathead, you will be. Now, you want some more time to piss your little pants or are they all good and pissed? At which point McMeathead started his slow lumber forward, flexing his fists in front of his huge barrel chest.
Like I said, I never came up with a plan, but there was a sense of anger running through me that began somewhere in my gut and then started to grow. As the anger got closer to my skin, it turned to rage, and the rage was electric, the rage needed to burst out from within.
I don’t remember much about what happened next, just a few flashes of flesh and a humming in my ears that changed pitch whenever McMeathead landed a blow. In every fight I’ve had, and I’ve had my share, it’s as if you move into a shadow world, a bubble forming around you, a place in which all of life becomes simplified, existence reduced to a single question—
How far are you prepared to go?
I’ve always known my answer to that question.
How far am I prepared to go? I will go further than you. However many weapons you’re willing to bring, I will bring more. However low you go, you will never dig deeper than me. I will win, because what this will cost me in pain, I will pay. My resources are limitless, I will always outbid you and I will never back down.
As soon as your opponent understands this, you have him defeated.
No one held me back, no one pulled me off. I don’t remember much. At the end I was standing and Ryan McMeathead was down.
* * *
I WENT TO A RESTROOM to wash his blood from my hands along with some of McMeathead’s skin, which was stuck under my fingernails. Every now and then, someone would open the door, perform a rapid one-eighty, and the door would close again.
When recess was over, I headed back to class, but Patch wasn’t there. I found out later he went to see the nurse, threw up in front of her, and got himself sent home for the afternoon. As for the other kids in our class, no one was looking straight at me, as if it were one of those schoolyard games, because every time I turned my head the children in that part of the room froze like statues. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the sense of power, the feeling of respect. Now everyone knew my potential.
Only potential isn’t worth all that much when five of them come at you from behind. It happened right after I stepped out of the doors at the end of the school day. They dragged me off to the side of the building, up against the wall, four-fifths of the meat-pack pinning each of my limbs to the brickwork, leaving Ryan McMeathead free to do whatever he wanted, his fat hands making fists, his arms swinging and swinging.
I closed my eyes and waited for it to end.
* * *
IT WASN’T THE WORST BEATING I’ve ever had, some bruising and swelling, nothing broken, although bad enough I would have to take the next day off school.
It was only me and Billy when I got home, me being my brother’s de facto babysitter much of the time. Little Billy cried when he saw me and tried to stroke my bruises better, the way he often did. Several hours later, when I saw headlights swinging over the broken blinds of the living room, our mom being dropped off after her workday at the Blue Moon diner, I snuck off to bed.
Fortunately my daddy was passing through one of his brief phases of employment, so I didn’t have to see him the next day. Three days later, when he noticed my faded wounds, I was able to say to him, Yeah, but you should see the other guy.
He liked that and chuckled.
But when my mom saw me the morning after it happened, she gasped. Oh, Matthew, she said. Oh, baby, this is the last time, I swear it, I promise. (How many times had it been the last?)
No, it wasn’t him, Mom, I said, just some dumb kids at school.
Mom looked relieved and then fussed over me all morning, seeming to enjoy the chance to tend to some wounds, my daddy never letting her touch him after one of his brawls. It’s nothing, Lucille, lucky fuckin shot, that’s all. She heated tomato soup and fed it to me, wiping my chin while I struggled to swallow, and kept bringing me ice wrapped in a dishcloth while we watched her daytime shows. When she left for her shift at the diner in the afternoon, I fell asleep on the couch.
I was woken up by a knocking at the door. When I looked out the window and saw it was Patch, my first thought was not to answer, embarrassed to see him standing outside our run-down shack of a home, barely better than a trailer, Patch looking church-neat in his shirtsleeves.
I opened up, Patch looking at me, horrified and confused.
Fucking cowards, I said. Jumped me from behind, needed five of them.
Oh, shoot, he said. You OK?
I will be, I said. How about you?
Me? he said, sounding shocked. I mean, good, but … Look, the reason I came here, about what happened, I just wanted to say—
Hey, I said, interrupting as fast as I could, you wanna come in?
Sure, he said, nodding uncertainly. When Patch stepped inside, you could see he was looking for some kind of doormat on which to wipe his feet, but then, finding nothing, he crouched down and started untying his laces.
Don’t worry about it, I said.
Patch pulled off his shoes anyway. That was the start of it all.