Writer's note: The title was taken from a post on the girlfriend's facebook page.
Roughly 7:30 a.m. I was about to leave the house for work, teaching school children. Liana, her head just up from the facebook of her Android phone, told me there had been a murder in our hometown. The 69-year-old woman was the grandmother of a young man Liana’s 20-year-old brother, _______ , had known since childhood.
Some summer days, they would play together every day. This boy with a diagnosis of ADHD and a few other things like ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), was one of several kids in _______'s inner circle. Like a revolver, this boyhood friend was among a recurring set of actors who dropped in and out of that gang of kids occupying the trailer park.
“I wonder if he did it,” Liana said.
“Please tell me you don’t think the kid is that f'd up,” I answered.
Cops saw the woman’s car burning at the corner of 120th and Hopkins-Switch roads. The kids were in another car and a police chase with speeds in excess of 100 mph ensued into the next county. If I were still a reporter at the daily newspaper where I cut my teeth on journalism, anger and beer, I would be covering this story. Fueled on cigarettes and frustration, I would be calling, leaving messages for and interviewing law enforcement officials from three jurisdictions and the prosecutor’s offices of two counties. That’s how it was in Arkansas City.
How was the woman killed? By what method? Is there a weapon in evidence? What charges are being filed? What is the motive? How did the car catch fire? How did they get the other vehicle? Who did it belong to? Was it a robbery? A robbery gone bad? A crime of passion? What was the relationship between the two subjects? Was there any relationship between the suspects and the victim?
The officials would give me their stock BS answer: “It’s still under investigation.” Or they would tell me they didn’t know, another piece of bullcrap they were taught to say in cop school. I would get a few bits of information beyond the press release, and if I was lucky I’d make a successful end run around a stonewaller and get some piece of information someone else was holding back on.
That was one of my other lives, one I lived back when these two homeless teens were toddlers.
Love and stability
Around 4:30 p.m. I’m pulling into the Andover public library. (I have a side job, writing part-time for the weekly newspaper in this town. The editor, my friend Adam, would tell you I’m helping him out. I feel he’s the one helping me.) Cell phone rings. The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” – that’s my ringtone. Liana’s name flashes across the marquee of the screen.
“Well, he did it,” she says. “They arrested him and his girlfriend. They were both homeless, living in the Tulsa area. I hope it comes out that the girlfriend did it and he didn’t know what all was going on.”
I want everything to make sense
“Think it will come out that she abused him when he was a kid or something and that prompted this?”
People who know this 19-year-old say grandma’s house was a safe haven. His life was so messed up and she was the one person who gave him love and stability.
“So the young man may have killed the one friend he had in this world?” I said.
The woman was a special needs teacher in the Wichita school district. She was active in her church and community.
“I didn’t know you would get so depressed,” Liana said over the phone as I walked into the library, preparing to print off some of my blogs and check facebook, thinking about my Grandma Mac, whom I lost when I was in high school.
Thinking about some of the sins I’ve committed in my life.
“I always enjoyed the thrill of being a reporter and going on the trail of sex and murder,” I said. “But I also went home, dejected, questioning the decisions I’d made and if I’d done the right thing and served society and the First Amendment and all. I liked the dichotomy – the fun, the rush, but also the sadness and wrestling with my conscience.”
We ended the conversation with my telling her I would be holding her and the kids a little tighter when I got home.
Back in my car. Westbound on K96, toward Wichita and visiting a client for my second job. No way I can resist calling Adam.
“Yeah, it’s like our ME at the AC Traveler would say, ‘Any day you have a murder, it’s a beautiful news day. When you have murder and sex, it’s a gift from God,” I said.
Adam is back at the office of our flagship paper, multi-tasking between work, talking to me on the cell and my wife on facebook.
“It’s totally killer,” I say, caught up with the young man rhythm of the reporter life. “What an ironic word to use. Oh! And speaking of killer, I got this awesome CD in the box, Jerry Lee Lewis.”
“Nice transition,” Adam says.
“Transition?” I respond. “Brother, I learned writing and reporting under Les Anderson at Wichita State. I was baptized in the fires of Ark City.”
More laughs from Adam.
“This CD rocks,” I say. “Guest appearances from Mick Jagger, Kid Rock, Willie Nelson. They cover that old tune from the Stones ‘Sticky Fingers’ – ‘Dead Flowers.’”
I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon and another girl can take my pain away
Laughs and black humor will roll ceaselessly into the night until early hours when existentialist drama hits slap-dash upon my face like the ghost of Jesus meeting me on a Carolina road.
Sons of Adam, daughters of Eve
I was sprawled over the bed with my son, Sam, reading the second installment of C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books. We would put another chapter away before I tucked him in, before saying prayers for the night.
“And that’s why the Witch is always on the lookout for any humans in Narnia. She’s been watching for you this many a year…”
I stopped after the paragraph, asked my boy if he had any ideas on what the symbolism meant. Then I told him what my grandpa Mac told me as a boy, quoting the book of Job, talking about how the devil went to Heaven, God asked where he’d been and he answered, “From roving about the earth.” I told him how the Bible says satan is after you like a roaring lion, yet my boy felt no discomfort. He’s so at ease, as if he could walk through the valley of the shadow of death, confident that he would return safe and whole.
Years ago, it was my resolve that if I had kids, I would impart to them that sense of peace so elusive to me. No mindfucks about eternal damnation and some archaic vision of hell below us to alienate him from God. My grandpa told me about this medieval hell, but he meant well. The old man is totally in my heart now.
In pre-dawn hours, I exchanged several facebook messages with my friend Jackson, an old reporter friend in South Dakota. He told me about meeting the reporter, by this time an old man, who wrote this book – a play-by-play of covering the Charlie Starkweather killing spree over the badlands, alongside a girl he saw twirling a baton on her front lawn.
Ride of a lifetime
I had watched “Glee” with Liana and Kenzie that night, while folding socks. Two of the characters tracked down a transferred student, hell-bent on bringing him back to the fold.
“Even homeless people are on facebook,” one of the characters said.
The homeless girlfriend’s facebook page was public. Said she’d been arrested for
“perifanelia and posession haha.” There were pictures of her boyfriend, glazed-eyed, lit joint fixed between fingers, smoke emanating from his lit up mouth. Her stash – sprawled over several pictures.
“So first and hopefully last run in with the jail spent a whole five days hahah it sucked but it opened my eyes,” she wrote.
Someone tried to make connection with her.
“U need to call me”
And:
“You need to learn to call your sister. Grandpa said he got a call from the county jail yesterday but, he couldn't understand the phone system and it hung up before he could pick an option.”
disconnection
"Im ugly, fat, uncaring, selfish, stupid, ungreatful , a bitch, whore, cunt…And many more (: anyone wanna add to my list."
She wrote about depression, beat herself up with other people’s words, listed vampires as an interest. Religion: “idk what is right.”
":had a ride of a lifetime.... of course like everything else it was CRASH AND BURN!!! :) i hope you burn in hell :) a ride of a lifetime.... of course like everything else it was CRASH AND BURN!!! :) i hope you burn in hell :)"
