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freshmen, but I never had any problems, thanks as I now know to Dad. I heard all the Kasso stories, most of which were just hysterical rumors. But one was true—Kasso was probably on drugs when he committed the murder. There was a boulder by the scene where he, or someone anyway, had tried to scrawl SATAN LIVES . But he spelled it wrong; it read SATIN LIVES.
    We had an assembly when school started that year to talk about drugs and watching out for one another. There was a big sheet hung in the hallway by the principal’s office and we were told we could write whatever we liked on it, as long as it was positive. No pentagrams, no band names, nothing like that. I wrote, Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? from On the Road. My English teacher that year, Mrs. Hartman, congratulated me on my “apropos epigram.” I ate lunch in the library every day, so it was easy for me to look up apropos once I figured out how to spell the word.
    My mother went through my records and tapes, demanding answers. “What’s this?” she asked. “More heavy metal?” It was Van Halen’s 1984 .
    “Mom, that music’s on the radio all the time! It’s not Satanic. There’s even an angel on the cover,” I said, probably whining, definitely embarrassed.
    She snorted. “An angel! That’s just the Devil’s way to lure you in.” The Stephen King paperbacks went into the trash, so did The Savage Sword of Conan back issues. She had her hands on Desolation Angels too, but my father slid into the room and grabbed her wrist, my hero. “Mary. Maria. That one’s fine. That one’s okay. It’s a college-level book.”
    I read a lot of college-level books. They were still allowed; fantasy novels, Dungeons & Dragons , Freddy Krueger, Rambo, that was all contraband. I started reading real books, literature, more intently than ever, so looking back I guess I don’t mind. My parents, ever overprotective, didn’t want me to go away for college, or even to the city. “Between the mulignan in the projects and the fruitcakes in the Village, you’ll end up a vegetable if you go to NYU,” Uncle Peter said. My father told him not to talk that way at the table, but he agreed with the sentiment.
    So I went to Hofstra and did well, then hit the road. I did a lot of scut work—janitor; a baton-twirling Wackenhut security professional for a town dump in New Jersey (my surname helped); out to Chicago as an SAT tutor; then on to California to work in a bookstore. And I wrote. I always wrote. I got over romanticizing poverty, and the road, but I never got over Kerouac. Like the book says, I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
    I got a few things published too—poems in a haiku journal, stories in Oakland Hills Review and one in a C-level men’s magazine about D cups that ran the occasional lurid fiction feature. It was called “Satin Lives,” that story, and it was about a thinly veiled Ricky Kasso. I’d turned into what Uncle Peter called a “real smart-ass” and over late-night coffees during Christmas when I visited for a week or three I let my father know what I thought of his work. My mother was already in bed. Cooking for forty fat cousins and their kids always took a lot out of her, especially after the lumpectomy. Nobody would lift a finger to help her either, not even me, I’m ashamed to admit.
    “I don’t hurt anyone, Petey. If not for me, there’d be a lot more people hurting, I’ll tell you that much,” my father said. “It’s what we call property rights . There’s a lot of money to be made hauling trash on Long Island. People here are pigs; they certainly generate enough garbage. The island used to be beautiful, all trees and little towns. Now it’s just a hundred-mile-long dump for hamburger wrappers and toxic waste. A lot of people want in on sanitation, and I keep everyone happy, working a certain territory.”
    “And if someone steps out