I just finished Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I'd
heard it was the best mystery of the past year, which seemed like a good reason
to read it. Its mystery, one where telling you anything about it is doing you
no favors, it would only spoil the surprises the author has for you. So I'll
tell you a story instead.
A year or two back I reconnected with lots of friends from the old days, here on Facebook. Sometimes I say things that are indiscreet, and while reminiscing I wondered if anyone had heard anything about one of the old crowd. I'll call him Brian. I said that Brian had turned out to be a sociopath, and last I heard was doing time in Colorado.
One of the people who read that sent me a private message, asking about it. I was regretting what I had said, because not only was it indiscreet, I was wondering if it was true.
Brian was my brother's age, and for a year or two in grade school they had been best friends. Nearly ten years later - he hadn't gone anywhere, but when they reached junior high they drifted towards other friends - he resurfaced as part of an extended circle of friends. Not long after I started at the cab company Brian was hired as a driver. He wasn't much of a driver, only eighteen or nineteen, and ... he was a junkie. Despite the things you may have heard, not all junkies are instant, pathetic zombies. An article I read recently said that the addiction rate for heroin was around 30%, much worse than coke, even worse than alcohol, but not quite as addictive as tobacco. Seems right. Picture trying to flush something down a drain that doesn't want to go down. Some people try heroin a time or two or even three, and then just give it up. Some sink quickly, and in no time at all are nodding and scratching and ready for skid row. But others get hooked, quit, get hooked again. It's a cycle, and you never know: will they finally go under, or will they make it back, just a phase they went through? Brian was like that. He wasn't the only junkie driving for us back then, and as long as they didn't get high while working, it wasn't a problem. Frankly the pot smokers were the ones I worried about; some of them would get high while driving.
So, he was a junkie, and he borrowed money from time to time, running it up to a few hundred before I stopped loaning him any. I was always a soft touch. But he wasn't the only junkie, and certainly not the only person who owed me money and never paid it back. I was surprised when I heard he was in jail, not the jail part, but because they told me it was armed robbery, and that wasn't his style when I knew him. He was the con man type.
So why did I flippantly tell people he was a sociopath? I think Brian really did want my approval; I think that was sincere. At the same time I was a target to be manipulated, for a loan now and then, and of course, on the weekends, I was his boss, to be gotten around. He was always very friendly, whether telling me how he was too sick to come to work the day before (undoubtedly a lie), or about all of the kinky things he and a chick that roomed with a couple of other drivers did one night after a party. (The details were borderline too good to be true, but just plausible enough to be inspiring.) But there was something about him that tripped my alarm. I would watch him closely while he talked to me, and his face seemed like a mask, a very sincere, warm, friendly mask, but just a little too wide-eyed and open and honest. And it seemed as though behind those wide open friendly eyes there was another Brian studying me to see how I was reacting to the things he was telling me: was I buying it?
That's all pretty flimsy, just my reading of his character, and forty years later I was regretting what I said. If he really had been locked up out west, he still could have had thirty years of being a reformed character, husband, father, upstanding citizen.
The friend who contacted me, wanting to know why I had called Brian a sociopath, was a classmate of my brother's and Brian's, from the same grade school. About the time Brian left the cab company, and I lost track of him, this guy and Brian ran into each other, and were in the process of re-establishing their friendship. Then one day Brian called. He was kind of chuckling, the way you would about a funny thing you saw the night before on Newhart. It seems he and his roommate argued. The argument was trivial: the Bears' chances that season, or whose turn it was to take out the garbage. The word "dissed" hadn't been coined, but if it had Brian might have said: "My roommate dissed me." And because the roommate had dissed him: "What could I do?"
What he did was get up the next morning and fix himself bacon and eggs. Then he went into the roommate's bedroom, where he was sleeping, and poured the hot bacon grease on him.
Anyway, read Gone Girl. I think you will find it memorable.
Gone Girl
A year or two back I reconnected with lots of friends from the old days, here on Facebook. Sometimes I say things that are indiscreet, and while reminiscing I wondered if anyone had heard anything about one of the old crowd. I'll call him Brian. I said that Brian had turned out to be a sociopath, and last I heard was doing time in Colorado.
One of the people who read that sent me a private message, asking about it. I was regretting what I had said, because not only was it indiscreet, I was wondering if it was true.
Brian was my brother's age, and for a year or two in grade school they had been best friends. Nearly ten years later - he hadn't gone anywhere, but when they reached junior high they drifted towards other friends - he resurfaced as part of an extended circle of friends. Not long after I started at the cab company Brian was hired as a driver. He wasn't much of a driver, only eighteen or nineteen, and ... he was a junkie. Despite the things you may have heard, not all junkies are instant, pathetic zombies. An article I read recently said that the addiction rate for heroin was around 30%, much worse than coke, even worse than alcohol, but not quite as addictive as tobacco. Seems right. Picture trying to flush something down a drain that doesn't want to go down. Some people try heroin a time or two or even three, and then just give it up. Some sink quickly, and in no time at all are nodding and scratching and ready for skid row. But others get hooked, quit, get hooked again. It's a cycle, and you never know: will they finally go under, or will they make it back, just a phase they went through? Brian was like that. He wasn't the only junkie driving for us back then, and as long as they didn't get high while working, it wasn't a problem. Frankly the pot smokers were the ones I worried about; some of them would get high while driving.
So, he was a junkie, and he borrowed money from time to time, running it up to a few hundred before I stopped loaning him any. I was always a soft touch. But he wasn't the only junkie, and certainly not the only person who owed me money and never paid it back. I was surprised when I heard he was in jail, not the jail part, but because they told me it was armed robbery, and that wasn't his style when I knew him. He was the con man type.
So why did I flippantly tell people he was a sociopath? I think Brian really did want my approval; I think that was sincere. At the same time I was a target to be manipulated, for a loan now and then, and of course, on the weekends, I was his boss, to be gotten around. He was always very friendly, whether telling me how he was too sick to come to work the day before (undoubtedly a lie), or about all of the kinky things he and a chick that roomed with a couple of other drivers did one night after a party. (The details were borderline too good to be true, but just plausible enough to be inspiring.) But there was something about him that tripped my alarm. I would watch him closely while he talked to me, and his face seemed like a mask, a very sincere, warm, friendly mask, but just a little too wide-eyed and open and honest. And it seemed as though behind those wide open friendly eyes there was another Brian studying me to see how I was reacting to the things he was telling me: was I buying it?
That's all pretty flimsy, just my reading of his character, and forty years later I was regretting what I said. If he really had been locked up out west, he still could have had thirty years of being a reformed character, husband, father, upstanding citizen.
The friend who contacted me, wanting to know why I had called Brian a sociopath, was a classmate of my brother's and Brian's, from the same grade school. About the time Brian left the cab company, and I lost track of him, this guy and Brian ran into each other, and were in the process of re-establishing their friendship. Then one day Brian called. He was kind of chuckling, the way you would about a funny thing you saw the night before on Newhart. It seems he and his roommate argued. The argument was trivial: the Bears' chances that season, or whose turn it was to take out the garbage. The word "dissed" hadn't been coined, but if it had Brian might have said: "My roommate dissed me." And because the roommate had dissed him: "What could I do?"
What he did was get up the next morning and fix himself bacon and eggs. Then he went into the roommate's bedroom, where he was sleeping, and poured the hot bacon grease on him.
Anyway, read Gone Girl. I think you will find it memorable.
Gone Girl
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