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By Root 777 0

brutal sentence—ten years—for what I must admit now doesn’t seem like that dreadful a crime. And yet I would have had him executed for it when I was fifteen. It could not have been more disgusting to me. Even now, when I am almost as old as he was then, I find myself as embarrassed as a teenager to write down the details. He was a worker of wonders! He expanded the world’s possibilities! He was a wizard! He was teaching me to be just the same as him! I wanted to be him! Well, he got ten years (and served seven) for a grubby little tax dodge. How measly was this wondrous expansion of the universe? His partner in wonders, Chuck Glassow, owned a chain of mid-market grocery stores and had, for many years, been successfully claiming reduced revenues for tax purposes by gathering up newspaper coupons that hadn’t actually been used in his store. Unsatisfied by the tax relief he had won with this game, he had my father print fake coupons with higher discounts and for products that didn’t actually have coupons, further reducing the store’s apparent revenue and tax liability. That was it. The marvel of it all. Glassow got five and was out in two, and Dana only ever admitted being angry at him, never at Dad. But I took it as a betrayal—of us, of the ideals and philosophy he taught us—and my anger scoured my insides, burned my love for him out of me, ablated my heart’s interior walls.

When I came home from baseball practice Dana was on her bed, her eyes bruised from crying, her knees drawn up to her chest under that Errol Flynn poster: The Tragedy of Arthur! Held Over! she had added as a handwritten banner diagonally across the top. I was raving: “He’s a criminal, and that’s all he is! All that talk about art and love and wonder. He’s just a low-life!” Dana started to defend him, but I was in full howl and would not hear a word for him. “You’re the one mourning this!” I shouted. “He’s not coming to your show, is he?” (Adolescent disappointment is so common because the opportunities for damning parental absence are berries on a bush: if not her sculpture exhibit, my baseball game, her recital, etc.) She didn’t say anything, finally, and the pleasure of being angry and right was (and still is) a delicious brain-chemical cocktail, and a moral license unrevokable until the mood passes. “He’s a bastard for doing this to you,” I nobly concluded. My sister crying harder and harder proved that I was right and that I was helping.

The next day was the last of the school’s short fall baseball season, and my anger was the star. I took it out on Doug Constantine, my on-again, off-again best friend since I was six years old and the son of Ted Constantine, persistent prosecutor of my father. My anger was equally unjustifiable and natural. The proximate cause was a collision over a fly ball, me wheeling back from second base, Doug coming in from right field, both of us knocked to the ground with the ball dribbling behind us, two runs scoring, game over. Later, I told him that he’d been typically unwilling to back off where he wasn’t needed while he screamed—screamed—that I was a pig, that nothing was good enough for me, that I had to be loved for everything and by everybody, had to snatch up everything.

The most remarkable element of this—far more remarkable than two friends shrieking at each other, then pushing each other, then wrestling, then swinging hard at each other’s faces in a locker room while other friends and teammates circled around to watch, none of the twenty boys tempted to step in and end the flailing fisticuffs—was the display of the fractured adolescent mind. Here were two promising young men who could do trigonometry, speak French, recall dates of presidential elections, map atoms, analyze Hemingway and Twain, yet neither one of them could have accurately said why he was fighting his best friend. Both would have cited a common display of baseball clumsiness, but they would have been wrong. I was angry that his father had imprisoned mine and that my father probably still thought I was the snitch; he was angry (to carry on the baseball