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Two characters with whom I was entirely unfamiliar were eventually arrested and convicted for Randy Chung’s murder, and the motive was allegedly some grievance over a drug deal gone bad. I felt terrible about the whole thing, of course. Randy was a simpleton, a quiet guy with a sweet disposition who had spent his entire life tagging around with his older brother Slim. What happened to him was horrifying, and literally beyond the range of my comprehension. And from a purely selfish standpoint, the real shame of it was that at the time I was in the midst of one of my phases as a respectable man, of which there have been several, each of them in their own way reasonably satisfying and successful.

I had never, unfortunately, been able to sustain any of them for long. In the aftermath of Randy Chung’s death, my wife filed for divorce and our house was put on the market and sold.

The older I got the harder it was for me to understand why it was I had such a hard time playing the part of the solid citizen. Because—honest to God—it’s always been easy enough for me to slip into that role. I’ve held three different teaching positions at junior colleges in and around the Twin Cities. For a time I successfully sold advertising for a Christian radio station. Characteristic for me, I’d taken the job out of desperation and found the work easy and, to some extent, satisfying.

Before my present marriage I’d been married twice, both times to wonderful, attractive, and modestly successful women, each of whom to this day maintains a life of the utmost respectability. I also had a teenaged son, made insolent, his mother assured me, by my erratic presence in his life. He was now playing in a band, Lounge Abraham, which, based on the tape I had received in the mail, was a very loud and angry proposition. The last time he came to visit I was stunned to see that he had acquired a tattoo on his arm—he is sixteen years old, which seems to me entirely too young for that sort of thing—that read, “Death to the Great Satin.” I was, of course, quick to point out what I felt was an inexcusable misspelling, only to learn that this was apparently an ironic tattoo, an allusion to a handmade T-shirt worn by some infamous psychopath who had shot up a California schoolyard with an assault rifle some years ago.

I couldn’t pretend to understand my life, but I can tell you that I’ve always had legitimate money in the bank. I’ve never missed a car payment, and I’ve now owned three different homes, and would have turned a tidy profit on the first two if it weren’t for complications related to my failed marriages. That said, crash landings and forced reinvention had long been my stock in trade. I can’t tell you how easy it is to burn down your entire life and build a new one from the ground up. The hard part, of course, is to keep the damn thing standing. I’d always felt the key, though, was to do the demolition work yourself, or at least to never let go of the illusion that your self-destruction was purely your own work. It was a point of pride; I never wanted to give someone else the credit for ruining my life. I’d be the first guy to admit that I’d made plenty of bad decisions, but they were my decisions, even when my arm was being twisted so far behind my back that I was practically on my knees.

I’d been coming around on this philosophy, though. Maybe it was a copout, but by this time it seemed plenty clear that I’d allowed these old friends of mine to ruin my life—by not knowing better than to have taken up with them in the first place, certainly, and also by virtue of the fact that I’d never properly distanced myself from them and their behavior, even at the point—which was admittedly long since past—when it became clear that they were all irredeemable. Hell, by this time they’d ruined several of my lives, every one of them perfectly decent, with all the usual trappings, responsibilities, and satisfactions.