Inside These Walls Page 9

  I might as well skip ahead to the month in which everything unraveled. Up until that point, there was nothing in my relationship with Ricky that would be worthy of including in a book. I worked for a dentist in San Jose, and after Ricky was fired from Spectrum he asked to get his old job back at the Circle K, which the franchise owner, Mr. Choi, was kind enough to allow. Ricky was irritated, however, because Mr. Choi had started him out at his original minimum-wage salary from when he’d begun working there at age 17 rather than the somewhat higher wage he was earning at the time he left. Ricky accepted that only because of the risk that prospective employers would call Jeff Owen, the owner of Spectrum Supply, and learn of his suspicions of Ricky’s theft. It seemed better to work for Mr. Choi again for a while and move up from there.

  At some point during those in-between years, Ricky moved out of his parents’ house and into the ramshackle cottage that would become known as the Cathouse. Although it has been called a squatter’s den, he was, in fact, paying rent on the place. He shared it with his best friend, Chris Brooks, whose girlfriend Liz also lived there off and on, as their volatile relationship worked through its trials. You surely recognize these names as the other participants in the crime, along with Forrest, who stopped by the house once or twice a week. Chris worked as a flagger on a road construction crew, and he and Ricky both supplemented their income by doing odd jobs, including a little landscaping for Father George at Our Lady of Mercy, the church in which we had been raised. On weekends at the changing of the seasons you could often find Chris and Ricky hauling mulch and planting flowers, spraying the good Father’s precious rosebushes for aphids and other such work.

  The house was not far from the dentist’s office, and so I took to using the place as my base camp for feeding strays and coaxing them into carriers so I could take them in for neutering. Over time we had quite a few cats hanging around— I’m not sure how many, but admittedly more than the neighbors would like. Long before the crisis they already referred to it as the Cathouse, and even amongst ourselves we sometimes called it that.

  Sometime in July that year, Chris and Ricky got into a car accident on Stockton Avenue. They were on their way home from a bar in Ricky’s car, with Chris behind the wheel because he was the more sober of the two. Chris went through a red light and hit a woman in a Cadillac, and while the injuries were all minor, there was quite a bit of damage to the woman’s expensive car and Ricky had no insurance. She began sending threatening letters to him through her lawyer demanding that he pay the costs for her repairs and emergency room expenses. I found this almost as asinine as Ricky did, because Chris had really been the one responsible, and it must have been costing this woman at least as much to pay the lawyer as it would to just cover the repairs herself. She was an older woman, and I think she believed she was teaching a young person to take responsibility for his actions. She couldn’t have known where that would lead, but it’s difficult not to resent her role in it, even so. Ricky never cared the least bit about money. Truthfully, it was one of his flaws. I can’t imagine he would ever have committed the actions that followed had it not been for her threats of legal action.

  One afternoon I walked to the house after work and found Chris and Ricky sitting on the front porch steps. Ricky was smoking a cigarette, which was unusual for him, and when I kissed him I could taste that he had also been smoking marijuana, which was not so unusual. It bears mentioning at this point that I was really no fan of Ricky’s best friend even before the accident in question. Chris had been in the Navy for two years after high school and walked around with this jaded, cocky, pool-hall attitude, as if he’d seen the whole world and considered every human interaction to be a game of poker. He didn’t like black people, and he loved large breasts, and these two items comprised about fifty percent of his efforts at conversation. There was a sort of Batman-and-Robin dynamic to the friendship, and alongside him Ricky took on the role of the beatnik bohemian in a way I felt stifled him. Because of the death of his sister, he had come of age in a family where his grieving parents alternately lavished him with resources and desperate love, then shut themselves away in their mourning. This produced an insecure teenager with a lot of spending money, nearly endless freedom and no respect at all for authority, followed by an adult who was slowly struggling uphill against the obstacles that upbringing had thrown in his path.

  Though I was initially attracted to Ricky because he had a free and easygoing spirit that I lacked, over his time with me—and I know this is difficult to believe, given his notoriety now—he had made great strides toward behaving like a responsible adult. He paid his own rent, had stopped mooching off his parents and had turned around some of his red-flag substance use—drinking during the day, the occasional line of cocaine with Chris— that had troubled me early on. In some ways I was very young inside my mind, too, so it was easy to forgive his slow crawl toward respectability. But because Ricky and I felt mutually protective of each other, I believed his friendship with Chris Brooks, which was intensely brotherly on a level approaching the romantic, rewarded him too much for his immaturity.

  That afternoon I walked past Ricky and into the house, leaving him on the steps with Chris. Inside was the sort of dark, filthy pigsty one would expect out of two stoned bachelors. The glass bong was out in the living room—that was Ricky’s preferred method of smoking marijuana because he believed the water filtered out the impurities—and some of the cats were nesting in piles of laundry in the downstairs bathroom and at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen sink was sloshed with bong water. An open peanut butter jar, bags of potato chips, a loaf of Wonder Bread spilling from its package and the remainder of a chocolate cake with its frosting roses removed spoke of the feeding frenzy that had followed the boys’ smoking session. The entire place smelled of litter box, weed, and stale tobacco smoke, and the only thing that made it tolerable was the contact high I was achieving merely by standing in it.

  Then I noticed a bit of order in the madness, in the form of several sheets of paper arranged on the dining table. This table had no chairs and was overflowing with giant tubs of protein shake powder, ashtrays, one of Liz’s tennis shoes and a general assortment of trash. Yet these papers were arranged neatly and afforded space of their own, so I walked over, tugged the chain for the light—it didn’t turn on, however—and peered down at them. United States District Court, Northern District of California. Alice Myers, Plaintiff, v. Richard Rowan Jr, Defendant. I stepped back outside.

  Ricky had finished his cigarette and was sitting with his head in his hands. I rested my arm on his shoulder and played with his hair a little. “That stupid woman just won’t lay off, will she?” I said.

  He replied in his Bob Marley voice. “Stupid woman don’t know what life is really worth,” he said. It was a twist on a line from a song.

  “Dumb bitch,” Chris said.

  You’re the one she ought to be suing, I thought angrily. “It’ll work out,” I assured Ricky. “The court will see you don’t have any money. At worst they’ll garnish your paycheck for a while. And I’ll drive over and pay the electric bill this afternoon. We’ll get the lights back on, at least.”

  He nodded, still cradling his head in his hands. “You deserve better than me,” he mumbled.

  “This wasn’t your fault,” I said, and it took all the self-control I possessed not to turn to Chris and fire off, It was yours.

  “It’s everything,” he said, “everything,” and even in my protectiveness toward his feelings, I couldn’t play dumb. We both knew what my mother thought of him, after all. She had been generous in her attitude toward him for a long time, but now thought Ricky was essentially a bum, and I was anxious for him to stop proving her right.

  But after the summons, things only got worse. He went to Father George in the hope of getting extra work to cover the mounting bills, but he and Chris had just put in the fall garden the previous month and Father George claimed to have no additional work for him. This annoyed me as much a
s it did Ricky, because I felt the man should come up with something for him to do. Ricky was asking for honest work, and God knew—whether or not Ricky did—that Father George could have stood to pay a few pennies on his personal karmic debt by helping out a young man in need. But it was not to be, and twice Ricky came home from the rectory empty-handed.

  One evening he and I were sitting beside each other in the plastic chairs of the Laundromat near his house, waiting for his laundry to dry and sketching in our respective sketchbooks. It was what we always did at the Laundromat, and since I was right-handed and he was a lefty, we could sit shoulder to shoulder in a cozy way and still draw without any trouble. Often I drew portraits of whoever was nearby; Ricky typically created stylized, graffiti-like designs, usually of a large-eyed, small child in the midst of a gritty street scene. Our perspectives on art were always quite different—almost opposites, really. I enjoyed drawing portraits of children’s faces, detailed flowers and the like; if my work had a unifying theme, it was to say, See, in spite of everything, the world is filled with beauty. Ricky’s, by contrast, seemed to focus on the strange or unnerving quality of any given thing and exploit it. I agreed with him that art need not be moral, but I never traipsed through the outlands of what that meant, whereas he did nothing else.

  On this occasion he had sketched a beach scene, with palm trees framing the water and two children, a boy and a girl, building a sandcastle as a vendor walked by pushing a cart with a picture of two Popsicles on the side. It was an oddly idyllic drawing for Ricky, without any dark subtext that I could see, so I laughed in surprise when I glanced at it. “What’s this?” I asked.

  He said, “It’s Cancun. What do you think?”

  “Looks nice. We should take a weekend there.”

  “Weekend, hell,” he said. “We could drive down there and live on the beach. Sell sand dollars to tourists by day, then make love under the stars.”

  “Sounds brilliant,” I said. He had a jokey tone, and I was playing along.

  “What do you say to next weekend?”

  I laughed and said, “I’ll clear my schedule.”

  Then he wrote MARRY ME, KIRA across the sky above the water. He erased KIRA, wrote CLARA instead, and drew a waving banner around it, then a small airplane, as if it were a message trailing behind a biplane. He nudged my shoulder, and I just pushed him back a little harder than he had pushed me. “You need a ring for that, buddy,” I said. I know that seems unromantic, but coming from Ricky this was not very meaningful. He toyed with asking me in these lighthearted ways, and other times he would go into monologues about how silly it was to put love under contract. I think eventually he would have meant it, but at the time I couldn’t take him seriously.

  That weekend rolled around, and on Sunday I was about to leave for noon Mass when I received a call from Clinton’s wife, my sister-in-law, Susie. I told her I’d have to call her back. She sounded agitated but reluctantly agreed that it could wait until later that day. Ricky’s birthday was the next day—he was turning twenty-four—and we had a fun evening planned with Chris and Liz, so I knew I wouldn’t get around to returning her call until later, but I let it go.

  That evening we all piled into Chris’s car—it was a ’79 Plymouth Horizon, which forced the backseat passengers to hunch over like potato bugs—and drove to Champion’s to play pool. Forrest met us there with some other friends from his band and Ricky had two or three beers, but it was just enough to put him in a fine mood. It had been weeks since I’d seen him so cheerful and relaxed, which caused me to feel more at ease, too, since he and I were so tied to each other that way. The bathroom at that place was a closet-like space at the end of the hallway, just one for the whole place. It was a dimly little, yellow-walled room. I wasn’t surprised when he followed me there, because he had been drinking and probably needed to relieve himself, but when I tried to come out and let him have a turn he pushed me back inside in a play-wrestling sort of way and locked the door behind us. Under normal circumstances I would have been less accommodating, but it was his birthday and he’d been in such a sour mood for weeks. I remember the room’s particular light, the shifting shadows and citronella glow, and the faint cloying floral of the air freshener. When he lifted me up and pulled my legs around his waist, I felt his affection and his strength, and those things always appealed to me. The whole time he had me against the wall other customers banged on the door and rattled at the knob and he kept laughing about it. When he finished he made more noise than usual, just for show, and I punched him on the shoulder and cursed at him for that, which made him laugh more.

  Not long after that we parted ways with Forrest and got back in the Horizon. As soon as Chris climbed into the driver’s seat he pulled out his baggie of cocaine and began chopping a line with his credit card onto a cassette tape box. “That is much too small for that purpose,” Ricky observed in a jokingly prim tone. “That’s like coke for a tea party.”

  “It’ll do the job,” Chris said.

  I wasn’t surprised or concerned by this, as I saw Chris do it every day, but I was surprised when Ricky switched seats with Liz, taking the front passenger seat as she moved to the back, and asked Chris to pass him the coke. Though he used to do this occasionally—truthfully, we both had— he had stopped after he overdid it one night and had an episode in which his heart raced so badly he was afraid he would die. Because his sister had died suddenly of a heart-related issue, anything of that nature was especially frightening to him, and I hadn’t seen him use it since then. But now he sidled up to Chris, stuck the rolled-up twenty in his nose and snorted two lines up each nostril.

  Chris laughed with delight. “You’re a fucking anteater, man,” he said, and Ricky rubbed his nose and replied, “Seize the day.”

  I should have realized then that something wasn’t right, but Ricky could be impulsive, so I attributed it to that. We drove a short distance, then pulled into the worn, broken lot behind the strip mall where he used to work. All the access doors on that side were painted gray, and the buildings were just beige cinderblock, with Dumpsters and exposed metal pipes and a loading dock for the grocery store. Chris turned off the headlights but left the car running, and Ricky got out. I watched him walk up to the back of Spectrum Supply and let himself inside with a key. “What’s he doing?” I asked

  “He’s picking up his last paycheck,” Chris said.

  I knew that couldn’t be true because Ricky owed them money, not the other way around, and he had been working at the Circle K again for months by that point. But I stayed quiet because it wasn’t difficult to see that something bad was going on. I figured that if Ricky was taking more money from the register, he and I could argue about it later. I wasn’t going to fight with him in front of Chris, since Chris would take his side and my effort to talk sense into Ricky would be pointless. Yet I felt sorry for Jeff Owen just the same. He was a very decent man, fair to his employees and friendly with his regular customers, who were San Jose’s ragtag collection of local painters and sculptors. He was an inch or so shorter than Ricky, with an outdated mustache and a shy demeanor, and as a young man had been an artist, himself. He had opened Spectrum Supply as a way to subsidize his career in the arts, but over the years the balance had shifted as he became, as he put it, “married to this store.” He didn’t deserve to be robbed, not by Ricky or anyone else.

  A long time passed, it seemed like, and I began to get worried about making it home before my mother started to suspect I was doing untoward things with Ricky. It was funny— he and I had been sleeping together for years by then and had learned to please each other with the efficiency of opening up a high-school locker, yet I was somehow convinced that my mother would remain oblivious to all of that as long as I was home by midnight. Midnight was the magical hour at which cheap girls did sleazy things, and I certainly wasn’t one of those, irrespective of the fact that I had sex with Ricky in a pool-hall bathroom only an hour before. So I began biting my nails and hoped that, in his empat
hetic way, he would sense that I wanted him to hurry.

  Chris had left the car running and the radio on, with a Jimi Hendrix eight-track filling the conversational silence. At some point during All Along the Watchtower I did hear a noise that sounded like a shot. But it was not particularly jarring, because the sound was almost incidental amid the music, and could just as easily have been a car backfiring. You must remember, at that moment I thought Ricky was stealing from the register. I wasn’t listening for signs of violence, although it would be only minutes before my perception of that would change.

  Soon after that Ricky came back out, and almost before he had the car door shut, Chris began driving. Their conversation seemed unremarkable, but then I heard a metallic click and looked over to see Ricky bent over in the front seat, unloading a handgun. Now, I knew Ricky knew how to shoot a gun. I did too, because once, a month or so before he punched Clinton, he had taken me to the shooting range and forced me to learn. The gun we used had been borrowed from Chris, and I had to assume it was the same one I was looking at now. But these circumstances were nothing like those, and I didn’t want to understand what I was seeing, so I said nothing. Since I had already determined Chris was lying about Ricky picking up his paycheck, and that Ricky was likely robbing an empty store, I chose to continue to believe the store had been empty. This would not be the last time I would find myself kneecapped by cognitive dissonance.

  “But you went back to Ricky the next day,” everybody said later, “even after you witnessed all of that.” Yes, I did. I can’t defend that, except to say that I couldn’t fully undo in sixteen hours the image of Ricky I had developed over fourteen years. Jeff Owen’s body had not been found yet, because it was a Monday and Spectrum was closed, so that made it easier to remain in denial. I believe I thought that, once I saw Ricky again, the night before would reveal itself to be a strangely vivid dream—a surreal journey, sex in an odd location, a sense of dread and a sharp lingering hint of violence that ends with the dreamer feeling tremendously relieved to have woken up. I’d had dreams with each of those components before, all tossed together in random configurations. You probably have, too. It’s very easy for someone on the outside to say that if the love of their life suddenly climbed back into the car and emptied a handgun without explanation, that they would immediately seek safety, call 911 and report everything they had seen to the responding officer. And that attitude— that series of accusatory questions as to why I returned to Ricky the next day—presupposes that I knew how all of this would end. Of course, if someone had sat down with me once I returned to my mother’s house and laid out all the information that was later presented to a jury, I would have seen it all through a different lens. I certainly don’t blame that jury for convicting me. I would have convicted me, too.