Other Lives
by Jonathan Chopan
I
You were eight the year your mother was murdered. He'd kill ten more prostitutes, over the next two years, before they'd find him, The Genesee River Killer. Your father, by the time I'd met you, had remarried. The year they caught that man, we were ten, playing in your basement when you told me. I'd been making a joke of it, the guy who'd killed prostitutes. His capture and confession were all over the news that year. I was saying how it was no wonder — with a name like Arthur Shawcross — he was a serial killer.
"My mom was his first victim," you said.
II
I lived a few blocks from you. Your father was jobless and your new mother was a bank teller. My father was a janitor and my mother was a nurse. We were city boys, playing baseball without real bases and playing tackle football without equipment.
During the summer, we swam in your pool. Your new mother, who all your friends-myself included-thought was hot, always seemed agitated by us.
Again, in your basement, you told me, your father had been married five or six times, he'd had fifteen kids, and you didn't think, not for one second, that either of you would be here much longer.
You were right. By sixth grade, you were gone. I hung out with you only one time after that. We were fourteen and I spent the night at your father's apartment downtown. When I got there you told me he was in his bedroom with his girlfriend, and that the living room, which doubled as your bedroom, was where we'd be sleeping. We were bored and looking for trouble to occupy us.
So we drank. We wandered Rochester's streets, and you told me one day you'd be just like your daddy. "Just like him," you said.
We were still boys. We were getting drunk. I didn't think much about what that meant. I only knew that when we got back from our walk the TV in your father's room was blaring, and you and I couldn't stop laughing, and my mother, when she found out we'd drank, never let me go back.
III
I was in my first year at college the last time I saw you. Home, in Rochester, for the summer, I'd heard from someone I'd worked with that your father had died of AIDS, that he had, in those years before your real mother had been killed, pimped her out for drug money so he could get high.
I walked into Schaller's, the burger joint on Ridge Road, just a block down from where I worked. There you were. I was with a group of neighborhood friends, guys like me — most of them — who had gone off to college, who were home working summer jobs, who were here looking for food before late-night drinking. You were the same wild-eyed kid I'd spent that night with years ago. The same curly haired kid whose pool I'd swam in summers before.
But your eyes seemed glazed over, like shiny marbles. And I didn't know what to say.
You stuck out your hand. "How are you?" you said.
I told you I'd gone to college, I was doing well. I didn't want to ask how you were. I'd known guys who'd worked at that burger joint. None of them ever planned on leaving home, or doing anything other than drinking or snorting things with the money they'd made.
What I remember, about that night, was what my friend Ralph said when I got to the table: "You didn't expect that, did you?" But I did, and when you mentioned your girl, the second baby on the way, when you said how hard it was, life, when you were working to feed babies and stay sober, I didn't have it in me to ask about your stepmother or your old house or even your father.
It wasn't the questions I didn't ask, and it wasn't the guilty silence that followed. When I let out that nervous laugh, that must have been the part that hurt the most.
Jonathan Chopan is pursing an MFA at The Ohio State University. He is currently working on a collection of essays about class and family set in Rochester, New York.