He took a breath. Went quiet for a moment. Whenever he did this, I knew he was busy checking his anger, trying to come up with the most plausible answer, one that might carry me into the next topic or question.
“You live on that side of the line,” he said. “I live on this side of the line. You look at a case from the victims’ and law enforcement’s point of view. You’re trying to understand why a person did this based on what society has pushed down your throat. The cases are black or white. There’s no color. And right or wrong may not even be part of the case.”
“Killing is wrong,” I said. “Putting away killers is right. That’s what it comes down to for me. You knew it was wrong. You knew taking a life was wrong, morally, ethically, whatever. You knew that you’d hurt people and go to jail for it.”
“I did it, anyway. Because”—and, as always, we were back to January 20, 1990—“I’d gotten away with it in the first place.”
22
FEELS LIKE FIRE
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable
condition.”
—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
EVEN DECADES AFTER LIVING IN AN AVERAGE-SIZED, SPLIT-TO-BACK, ranch-style home about twelve miles northeast of Hartford, the thought of driving down Susan Road (I still pass by it often) and into the neighborhood where I’d spent seventeen years of my life, beginning at the age of twelve, summoned images and memories I did not ever want to face again. To make that trip, I knew, would take me right back, despite how well-schooled I now was from sitting in my living-room recliner, taking in an Oprahfied version of self-analysis and psychobabble purporting how one should confront his past if he wanted to move beyond the pain. Even so, as I dredged up the nerve for the first time in over a decade to drive by my old Susan Road house, located in what is a residential, typical suburban Connecticut neighborhood, complete with the “babbling brook” running through the backyard (a comment I will never forget our real estate agent sharing the day we trekked from the city—East Hartford—to the “country”—Vernon—to look at the home), it felt as though I’d entered a tunnel, dark as the Milky Way, a million voices, like blurry stars at warp speed, screaming words I couldn’t understand, pointing out all I’d done wrong during a period of my life that, at times, feels as though someone else lived it.
Staring at each house leading up to ours, as I drove slowly and took it all in on that afternoon, it struck me that this was the same neighborhood where my parents decided to divorce (months after we moved in); where my first wife told me that I, too, would be divorced; where I drank my first beer, a Haffenreffer forty-ounce Private Stock (skunky as swamp water, piss warm) out of a slime-green bottle and threw up on the curb after having a McDonald’s milk shake Mom had delivered to me (“Are you all right,” she asked, knowing damn straight I was drunk, “you seem a bit off?”); where I first heard Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” on vinyl as a twelve-year-old; where I locked myself in a bedroom the size of a closet one summer and learned how to play guitar; where, as a na?ve young boy, after asking what the word meant, I got Dad’s version of hypocrisy (“You see that family,” himself un-religious, “they go to church on Easter and Christmas only—they’re hypocrites”); where I learned to drive; where I first fell in love; where I brought up my two boys and then Mark and Diane’s two boys I won custody of through probate court and raised (with the unselfish, dedicated, loving, and humbled help of my first wife); where I became an alcoholic; where (while standing on my porch after a funeral) I asked a friend how the hell our best friend could have blown his fucking brains out over a woman (the same road where, years later, after she told me she was leaving and wanted a divorce, I parked in the woods at the end of our cul-de-sac, a six-pack and half pint of brandy between my legs, and contemplated placing the garden hose in my hand from the tailpipe into the window and joining him); where I decided to quit high school the day I turned sixteen (and my mother said it was okay, as long as you work); the same neighborhood where I got into my first real fight (with blood—mine—involved); where I started smoking and writing; where we hung out on the corner (without mini iThings in our pockets and talked the Doors and which member of KISS was the most feminine and what the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “That Smell” was really about, at the same time not worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, but only that moment of that day); where I got so high from smoking a bong as big as a lab experiment I swore off weed altogether; where my neighbor (an older kid who bought us beer) spent a summer with his stereo speakers leaning against the screen of his bedroom windows and blasted Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ with Disaster” record (and whose sister was later stabbed to death by her husband); where I sat in my living room and unknowingly watched the birth of reality TV and true crime (as O.J. Simpson was chased down the highway in his white Ford Bronco by cops, fans, and the media); where I first heard Kurt Cobain had shot himself and Freddie Mercury had died of AIDS; where I saw green bombs explode on my TV at night in Baghdad like a video game; where I learned that burning pine in a woodstove will ignite the roof of your house and cause a scene; where I played cards with my first wife one afternoon at the kitchen table and Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” played on the radio (Google those lyrics) as she sang it out loud and I had no idea until years later she was singing to me; and the same neighborhood, the same house, the same kitchen, where I explained to my brother Mark, after he’d returned from shopping one night, that the woman he loved, the mother of the three children they’d been unable to parent for years, the same woman he’d been estranged from, but still loved, and was possibly pregnant with their fourth child, had just been murdered.
This was the Memory Lane I had not wanted to drive down.
*
READING THROUGH JESPERSON’S MANIFESTO gave me a clear sense of how he blames everyone around him for not only the decisions he’d made, but the consequences those decisions had on his life and the lives of others. Putting his inherent, obvious narcissism aside, in the first volume Jesperson never speaks of any love or concern for his siblings, his mother, certainly not his father. It reads as though he is being attacked from all sides, by everyone, for everything, each person around him with some sort of hidden, set, secret agenda, not to mention a collective conspiracy to spoil and disrupt his life.