Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders by Christopher Goffard.
Title: Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders.
Author: Christopher Goffard.
Genre: Non-fiction, articles, journalism, true crime.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2018.
Summary: A collection of 15 articles, by a staff writer of Los Angeles Times. The Accusations sees a woman going through a nasty custody battle with her ex when she accuses him of a brutal and violent attack and rape, but the further the investigation gets, the less the woman's story lines up with the truth. In Healing Sergeant Warren, a man who saves one of his friends in an explosion during a mission in Iraq, faces guilt, shame, and PTSD as he tries to heal with the help of intense VR exposure therapy. Riders looks at the lives of drifters who jump freight trains as a lifestyle, through a sweet but ultimately tragic love affair of a young couple enamored with freedom. The $40 Dollar Lawyer follows a fresh-out-of-law-school young man who is forced to take the Public Defender job, and grows into a confident and capable lawyer and defense attorney over the consequent year as he gains pride and faith in his job. The Choice is a story of a family that flees from Aleppo to Turkey during the Syrian Civil War, but when the mother moves to Sweden in hopes of eventually bringing the family and children, requiring daily blood transfusions, over as well, she faces difficulties with immigration and hope. In The Hidden Man, a gay U.S. soldier struggles with and keeps his identity secret for years, afraid of losing his life and livelihood, but has a chance to stand up for his full identity when "Don't Ask Don't Tell" comes under debate again, during Obama's election campaign. The Prisoner looks at the lives of children of those on death row, through Shawn, a 13-year-old who has only known his father in prison, but wrongly yet vehemently believes he is innocent, and will come home one day. In Framed, a petty and small occurrence leads to an inexplicable vendetta that causes a couple of wealthy lawyers to plant drugs in a car of a local beloved elementary school volunteer and PTA president, which leads to years of tangled litigation. In The Exile, an aged Black Panther in Tanzania exiled in his youth from U.S., dreams of his Kansas upbringing and pledges the last of his life to philanthropy and showing the orphans he has adopted the ocean and the expansity of the world. In The Rookie, discovering his older sister's body when he was just a child and watching the police struggle selflessly to find her killer, inspires Jeremy to become a policeman himself. In Border Warrior, a man vehemently opposed to the Bush administration and a member of Minutemen, a group who patrol the U.S./Mexican border trying to catch refugees, feels more and more disconnected in values from his fellow vigilantes. In Dirty John, a 59-year-old given up on the prospect of finding love again falls deeply for a man that sounds almost too good to be true, but what starts as a whirlwind romance quickly devolves into fear, violence, and lies, when she finds out he is far from who he claims he is, and his social and romantic resumé is as long as it is terrifying. In The Deserter's Son, haunted by and seeking pardon for his father's desertion in WWII, a Vietnam war vet tries to enlist in the navy at 60, obsessed with redeeming his father's shame. In How She Found Him, an elderly dying Vietnamese woman travels across the world to Los Angeles, to find her son, whose letters stopped coming four years ago, against unbelievable and seemingly insurmountable odds. Old Men and the Sea looks at the hobby of building boats, dominated primarily by older single men, who race against time at the end of their lives, hoping to eventually die sailing their own vessels.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ I thought journalism would be a good job for someone without mean to see the world. Reporters never had to apologize for their curiosity, and I always wanted to know more than it was strictly polite to ask.
♥ I begged for reporting assignments, which got me work at a small weekly, then a small daily, then bigger dailies, and-in the twenty-two years since that first job-access to crime scenes, courtrooms, judges' cambers, ERs, morgues, the living rooms and back porches of innumerable strangers, the makeshift genocide courts of Rwanda, the birth of a nation in South Sudan, the denizens of Skid Row and the Los Angeles River, death rows in Florida and California... and to the people you will meet in this collection.
When I interview people, I try to make myself small, colorless, forgettable, the better to channel them. The pronoun "I" makes no appearance in my stories. My interests are subordinated in the service of others' stories. This is, of course, a kind of illusion, in the same way no documentary film captures objective reality: every angle in every scene is a choice, a function of the artist's special obsessions. These stories are an oblique map of my own.
♥ Articles are the miracle of daily newspapers, without which the froth-speckled cadres of the punditocracy (who are too busy to do much reporting) would be helplessly lost. They are why reporters are among the first people dictators line up against the wall.
But articles don't care if you read them all the way through. They are resilient. They can be amputated at the knees and survive. They are designed that way, with the important stuff at the top. They don't work on mystery; they are meant to dispel it as soon as possible.
A story is a different life-form. A story is an experience. Like a movie or a song or a poem, the good ones allow you to live inside other people's skulls for a little while and to touch the quick of their terror and grief and longing. Stories care about textures, about the coldness of the jail floor, not just about the charges that put you there. They care about the courtroom smell that won't come out of your suits, not just about the verdict. If they work, they augment our reservoirs of empathy and make us a little less lonely in the skin and provide a frisson of recognition that is akin to telepathy.
Stories insist you finish them and hold you in a headlock until you do. They do this not by relying on pretty packaging, or digital razzmatazz, or fake gravitas, or appeals to good-citizen guilt, but because they withhold their mysteries, which means they don't make sense until you finish them, and the last paragraph-even the last line-is often the most important. The nitty-gritty is not promiscuously surrendered but cunningly withheld, and deviously parceled out.
♥ A pair of runaway kids huddled together against the onrush of adulthood. A Marine haunted by his father's desertion from World War II. A mother who must leave her children to save them. An exile seeking redemption in a bus to the sea. A brave soldier whose memory has warped and twisted into a bludgeon to torture him. A lonely man in thrall to a childhood picture, building a boat to oblivion. A woman seeking love, who finds a predatory creature expert at its mimicry.
If you're familiar with that last one, which is the title story of this collection, or may be from the podcast I made or the TV series it inspired. A writer who claims to dislike unexpected attention is approval a lying writer. In this case, I'm mainly glad it brought you here.
~~from Introduction.
♥ He learned a rule about surviving lockup: Never take a daytime nap, no matter how tired you are. Because you might not sleep that night, and you'd be left for hours in the dark of a cold cell with only your thoughts and your fear.
♥ Leiderman, one of his defense lawyers, thought it was not enough that the government dropped charges. He wanted the criminal justice system to recognize Gonzalez's innocence affirmatively.
There is such a thing as a declaration of factual innocence, he explained to Gonzalez. A judge can grant it. It is exceedingly rare-so rare that many cops and lawyers go a career without seeing one. It means not just that prosecutors couldn't make a case against you but that you didn't do the crime.
♥ Sometimes Gonzalez wonders how much worse things might have gone.
What if he had grabbed breakfast in Las Vegas before boarding his flight? He wouldn't have needed that bagel in Simi Valley so he wouldn't have gone to the bank for cash, and wouldn't have been caught on security cameras.
His alibi evaporates and he's in prison for life.
At the end of the day his mind automatically replays his movements, hour by hour, because it was his ability to do that that saved him. After his release he developed the habit of meticulously documenting his whereabouts, eliminating time gaps that might leave him vulnerable.
If he's in an airport or a 7-Eleven, he makes sure the surveillance cameras get a good look at his face. Anytime he can swipe his credit card and sign his name, even to buy a pack of gum, he does it.
He fills his wallet with receipts and the world with a conspicuous trail.
He feels most vulnerable when he is asleep, when, for six or eight hours a night, no cameras are watching, no witnesses are marking his presence, and no one but Louis Gonzalez III can say with certainty where he is.
~~The Accusations.
♥ The bomb, hidden beneath a thin layer of gravel, was made of 155-millimeter artillery rounds, probably leftover munitions from the disbanded Iraqi army. To maximize carnage, it was attached to a propane tank. It did not detonate the moment the truck's right front wheel depressed its pressure plate.
Warren passed over it, unaware he was experiencing his final moments as a personality he recognized. It exploded right below his friend, the fragments shredding the fuel tank and floorboards.
♥ His war ran together as a blur of concussions, villages, dirt roads, checkpoints, bazaars, Humvee cabs, mess halls, bunkers, mortar attacks, raids, twenty-one-gun salutes, eulogies.
His knuckles went white on the wheel when he spotted a box or pile of trash discarded on an American freeway: That's were bombs hid. Selecting clothes for his civilian life, he made it to the changing room at Nordstrom before panic overtook him. At Wal-Mart, his hands turned clammy, his mouth dry; he abandoned his shopping cart.
He checked and rechecked the locks on his Costa Mesa apartment. He wrapped himself in a fog of pot and alcohol. He snapped at his parents until they were scared to approach him. He pushed away a girlfriend he had once longed to marry. Years of hard muscle melted off his frame.
To explain the feeling that lived inside him, he pointed to his midsection, where what he called "this crushed thing" resided like a great tumor.
"Like I know the reality about the world," he said, "and it's not good."
He was adept at hiding his torment. He had a level gaze, disarming smile, and easygoing charm, which he deployed like blast walls.
He looked for ways to fix himself. He bought a diesel-fueled Chevrolet Silverado, because the smell of diesel hurled him back to the horror of watching Stephenson burn and he was determined to make himself unmade by constant exposure.
He enrolled in psychology classes at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, hoping to understand his damaged mind. But he struggled to keep his voice from shaking in class. The former infantryman who had led men into battle now sat anxiously, watching the door, in a roomful of college kids.
When people asked about the war, he sounded like a man recounting a video game he just happened to have played. "We were driving," he would say. "We were hit. My buddy got burned up."
One day he volunteered to drive his seventeen-year-old brother, Logan, to the family's house on Lake Mead. His parents balked. They no longer trusted their binge-drinking son. He pushed his way out of the house and sat in his truck and shook.
♥ Warren went to a Veterans' Center. They offered group therapy. He didn't want a roomful of ex-soldiers to see him broken and helpless.
He went to the therapist who served his college. The therapist had no training in dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.
He went to the VA hospital at Long Beach. A staffer told him it would be months before he could see a PTSD specialist one on one.
He spotted a flier on the wall. It offered an alternative. He could volunteer as a test subject for a pioneering treatment. Veterans would be asked to throw themselves into their single worst memory, to relive every sight and sound with the help of full-immersion goggles and earphones... and then do it again... and again...
"How do I get started?" he asked.
♥ Warren can't shake the feeling that somehow, some way, Stephenson blames him for what happened. Because they don't talk about the bomb, Warren can't be sure.
If anyone asks, Stephenson will say Warren saved his life. It's the same thing Warren's mother always tells him: Scotty was lucky you were there.
Warren doesn't believe it. His memory has bent and twisted in strange, punishing ways. The chaos of that day has congealed into a narrative of his own incompetence and weakness.
..[The therapist] asks him to imagine the situation in reverse-he is burning, and Scotty can't help.
Warren considers it. As a child in an evangelical Christian household, he was raised with a strong awareness of a God forever disappointed by his shortcomings. One day God would ask for a sacrifice, he knew, and he'd have to be big enough to give it.
Would you blame Scotty, if the roles were reversed?
That's different. God expects me to be perfect.
During his seventh session in the little room, Schulte asks:
"What if you do run into the burning Humvee?"
Warren thinks about his buddy laden with 120 pounds of armor, knives, bulging pouches, ammunition, and equipment.
He thinks about his own bulky armor.
He thinks about his disorientation and pain, and the chaos of the truck's interior.
And he realizes what would happen if he somehow got inside through the flames. He would prevent Stephenson from escaping.
"We would have both died."
♥ He knows he will have to confront other terrible memories-such as the day his platoon called in rockets on the enemy and he found a dead girl and her dead mother amid the rubble.
He is crying when he asks his mother, "What did I accomplish over there?" He is still crying after she repeats the answer she always gives: that he saved Scotty, and it is enough.
~~Healing Sergeant Warren.
♥ Crudely inked across her fingers was the word "sourpuss," advertising the side she liked to show people: the rebel and sometime dope fiend who bristled with free-floating anger.
But he saw another side of her too: the frightened runaway who, like him, found a tramp's dangerous, hand-to-mouth life less terrifying than the adult world.
♥ Trains run through the heart of the American story, a symbol of industrial prowess and physical vastness and unfettered movement. For the broke and the discontent and the wanted, they are also a place to disappear, a mobile refuge where nobody cares where you're going or what your real name is.
♥ Everywhere, he found kids like himself. In a new town, they could point out the best trash bins and missions. "You don't need money out here," he says. "You don't need anything. You have the greatest time in the world, but when it gets down there, it's really down there."
♥ On her Myspace page, she rhapsodized about tramps and trains and said her religion had become "the countryside, the outdoors, the dirty folk."
♥ "Believe it or not, life is pretty much the same everywhere you go," Stephen says. "You get up and go to work and come home."
He keeps telling his son to think about the day when he can no longer drift on a young man's charm, when his dad's no longer around to bail him out.
But Steven Kuntz has given the lecture before. He knows that life in a squalid boxcar strikes his son as less intimidating than an adult existence of obligations and bills. He knows that nothing he can say will prevent his son from vanishing again soon, leaving home for the tracks that lead anywhere else.
~~Riders.
♥ He wanted to be a prosecutor. Everyone knows they get the respect, the prestige. Even his shrink told him so. Charley's view of public defenders reflects stereotypes of harried idealists and rumpled, inept clock punchers. For years, he wondered why anyone wanted the job.
"How do you feel about defending people you know are guilty?"
"It's not my job to prove they're innocent," he replies. "It's the state's job to prove they're guilty."
A good answer, untouchable, but he's far from a True Believer. He hasn't heard of Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case that ensured free legal representation to the indigent. All he knows about the job he's asking for, really, is what most people know: You represent poor people accused of crimes.
"What you learn in three years here, it's going to take ten to fifteen years somewhere else," he adds. He has heard this, and it sounds good. It also happens to be true.
♥ He rotates in the mirrors, thinking, Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer. He's immature in too many ways to count, but right now he looks like someone to reckon with. He can successfully impersonate an adult. No one has a reason to laugh at him now, at least until he opens his mouth. He fears he will stammer.
The courtroom, he already knows, will not conceal the flaws of a fledgling adult. Most people get to shed their callowness out of the spotlight. Most people don't do what he's about to do.
He leaves the store with a nice blue suit and a nice gray. A good start, but they're just extra skin, really, holding together a walking welter of anxieties. The clothes don't eliminate his sense of being an impostor. He isn't sure what will make that feeling go away, or if it ever will.
♥ This is First Appearance Court, and these are the just-busted, all lined up and waiting to appear via video link with a judge who will apprise them of their charges.
There are hard-core muggers and sad-eyed vagabonds, bar-room brawlers and businessmen who hit their wives. There are crackheads stripped of their pipes, pores oozing poison. They are tired and irritated and foul-breathed and demanding to be let out and are convinced, somehow, that their twenty-seven-year-old assistant public defender should be able to do more about it.
Soon, many of them will empty bank accounts or mortgage homes to hire private defense attorneys. Many others, if they're poor enough or lie about being poor enough, will pay a $40 application fee and be assigned a PD.
Rookie PDs pay their dues here.
♥ From the defense side, it's easy to despise what seems an air of privilege and hauteur around the opposing table. The young prosecutors believe God is on their side. They relish their power over delinquent kids only slightly their juniors. They possess the sheen of the effortlessly charmed, of straight-A students and future politicians. They aren't driving to work in ratty cars.
Or at least that's how it feels from across the room. It doesn't help that whereas PDs look like ordinary people, by and large, their state attorney counterparts are uncommonly good-looking, the kind that used to make classmates feel weird or fat or gangly. Beating the state becomes sweet on so many levels.
♥ After that, he feels different. He senses he has learned something crucial, though he's not sure exactly what. Maybe that he doesn't need Anthony Lopez whispering in his ear. Maybe that the other side may be as raw and scared as he is.
♥ He barely has time to sleep, much less clean his office. Fungus is growing on the bottom of his coffeepot. One of the law books on his shelf sits upside down.
In January, his desk calendar still says December, and a coffee stain covers a whole week. His courage is bleeding away. He dreams he's losing his hair. His girlfriend wants more time. His clients don't say thank you. The green case folders keep piling up. What's it going to be? Somebody, nobody.
♥ "The fish on the wall that's mounted-that mouth is always open," he likes to lecture people who talk too much. "What does that tell you? Keep your mouth shut."
♥ When he started, Charley believed a lot of what his clients told him. By now, he knows a PD hoping only for innocent clients, or even a handful a year, is in the wrong line of work. What he's defending, after all, is the presumption of their innocence. Still, it would be nicer if they didn't talk to the one guy on their side as if he were an idiot.
♥ Not negotiating pleas, not arguing before a judge, not drafting motions-no, in the hierarchies of criminal law, the jury trial is the first and last index of achievement.
A jury trial is an infinitely complicated beast, demanding mysterious and unquantifiable talents never measured in the many law classes Charley botched or the bar exam he repeatedly flubbed.
♥ "Life is not the rose, it is the thorns" was his dad's favorite saying. Part of why Charley slacked off in law school was rebellion against his dad's firm hand. But in the end he knew he was daddy's boy. Stubborn, scrappy.
♥ Now and then he still feels the twinge, the old ambition to be a prosecutor. That's war he wanted more than anything, during those rock-bottom years after law school. To run with the top dogs. Then he thinks about it and feels sort of disgusted with himself, that he'd even consider changing sides, because he has discovered that so much about being a PD suits him.
He was never part of the in crowd, never never preordained by money or pedigree or looks to succeed. He still doesn't get many "thank-yous" from clients. He doesn't get cards and flowers, the way Lily McCarty does. But he likes being a thorn in authority's side. He likes swinging a sledgehammer for the accused. Some of his clients are bad people, plain and simple. But he was never under the illusion that he couldn't be where a lot of them are, save for a fork or two in the road.
~~The $40 Lawyer.
♥ His sisters stayed in touch with friends from home on social media, but he decided to sever ties with Syria. He kept getting word his friends were being killed. He didn't want to know.
When he closed his eyes and tried to remember the Aleppo where he grew up-his school, his street, where he played, the way home-he drew a blank. He had a theory.
"It's like a firewall. If I think about this, maybe I'll miss Syria. And I don't want to. I don't want to look back, so I can go forward," he said. "I turned my back to everyone I knew. I think that's the most evil thing I did, trying to protect myself."
♥ She was one of 30,583 Syrians to apply for asylum in Sweden in 2014.
♥ Her face appears on their smartphone in their Turkish living room. Their faces appear on her Samsung tablet in her Swedish kitchen. They spend hours that way, in a melancholy simulacrum of togetherness. Often they don't talk at all, just watch each other's routine chores.
♥ During Ramadan this summer, she found it impossible to keep the fast required of Muslims during daylight hours, because just about all the hours were daylight hours in summertime Scandinavia. When night came, it was like a hand passing quickly over your face.
♥ "Nothing can make me happy here," she says. It is a feeling of being amputated; half of her is somewhere else.
Every spare moment, she Skypes her family.
♥ There is no chance of going home. On her tablet, she calls up photos of Aleppo-what it was, what it is.
The great mosque, its minaret smashed.
The great bazaar, burned.
The Old City where she grew up, rubble.
"Even I can't understand what's happening. It will take a generation to repair," she says. "My life is just a memory. I carry it on my tablet."
♥ It is unwise to speak Arabic too loudly in public, he says, because there are enough people in Turkey who don't like Syrians to make it dangerous. Once, he says, men attacked him at a train station and shocked him with a Taser.
He reads psychology texts online to understand human motivation. He thinks of it as a matter of survival, a way to protect himself. He has read that raising your elbows when you speak disarms people, as does a big smile, so he practices these.
"I give the friendly signs, so people don't think of me as an enemy, so I don't have to fight, because physically I'm weak," he says. "Because I'm Syrian, I'm always in danger."
~~The Choice.
♥ In basic training at Fort Still, Oklahoma, people knew Hill as the spindly, guarded kid who quoted Scripture and never cursed. One night he found himself on fire watch with another recruit, who began to cry and confessed that he was gay.
Hill didn't know any gay people, but he knew they were definitely not tough enough for the US army, and so he said, sternly, "You can't be here." Soon after, the gay soldier was gone.
More than anything, Hill wanted to love women and have kids.
♥ One day, he argued with a boyfriend outside a coffee shop. A drunk called him a faggot and snarled a threat. He was accustomed to absorbing ugliness. But now he was a war veteran, trained in hand-to-hand combat, and this was a public street in a country he nearly died for.
He confronted the drunk and let him throw the first punch. Then he knocked him to the ground, pinned him facedown, and pummeled his spine. It would have been easy to cripple or kill him. His friends blinked in shock. He walked away frightened of himself. He'd never allowed himself to hit someone in anger.
♥ The Army drills were easy-by now he could outrun and outlift many of his peers-but the loneliness was hard. He invented girlfriends and endured endless talk of the female anatomy. Every year, for two weeks, he encased himself in a shell to survive. "Like dipping myself in concrete," he would say.
♥ The debate yielded "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which was billed as a compromise but would result in the discharge of more than 14,000 gay service members over the next eighteen years.
♥ September 2011 should be a month for celebration. The military brass have retreated from their objections, and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is officially ending.
&heart; Would you consider revealing your identity? Hill doesn't need time to consider. There's no chance. He has too much to lose.
Snyder reminds him that they are now married, and that it would not be hard for his command to discover this, and that if the ban is reinstated, he will be kicked out anyway.
He wakes for his 5:00 a.m. run. The blast walls seem closer than they were a week ago. The base is shrinking as America ends its nine-year occupation. He has survived his second war, and soon he will fly home, the same furtive, frightened man who arrived.
He thinks of the gay recruit he helped drive from the Army. He thinks of the drunk he might have killed. He thinks of how he clawed the pink sticker off his car. He thinks of hiding under the escalator.
In the subject line of his next email to YouTube, he writes: I have reconsidered.
♥ Some soldiers told him they were surprised, some said they kind of suspected, and some confessed to leading their own secret lives. The initial awkwardness has been replaced, mostly, by a sense of exhilaration and possibility. He knows there must be soldiers mocking him, but the dynamic has shifted, and now they are the ones hiding.
~~The Hidden Man.
♥ But then he wakes, on the bunk he shares with his kid brother, amid his Hot Wheels and Florida Marlins pennants, under walls pinned with prison Polaroids and the sketch his dad sent home of their dream Chevy with flames licking the sides.
He wakes and he's back, a lonely thirteen-year-old facing a protracted version of every kid's direst dread-the prospect of a parent's death-with this special torture: He knows who will do it, and how.
♥ He loves his mom, Cherie, who is raising him alone on her Wal-Mart salary. He loves his seven-year-old half brother, Kyle. And he loves his dad, Samuel Jason Derrick, who loves three hours north in Raiford, in a cage at Union Correctional Institution. Shawn lists his idols as Michael Jordan, Jeff Gordon, God, and Prisoner No. 097494.
♥ Shawn learned that he was twenty-nine days old when his dad was arrested. He learned that Pasco sheriff's detectives never got his dad's confession on tape, never found the submerged knife or the bloody shirt-gaps in the science that didn't seriously trouble prosecutors, judges, and jurors, gaps that Shawn embraced as proof positive of a frame-up.
There were details Shawn didn't learn. That his father rode with detectives to the murder sceen and showed them where he lay in wait for Sharma, that he led them through the woods in search of the discarded items. That he wept then he confessed and told detectives: "I'm an animal."
♥ A father on death row has to choose between two bad options. One is to distance himself from his kids, sparing them pain later. The other is to stay involved in their lives, knowing a death warrant awaits. Is it better to have a father whose extinction hovers on the horizon, or to have no father at all?
♥ "People want so much to hope," says Margaret Vandiver, a professor at the University of Memphis who studies the family dynamics of death row inmates. "And what's the alternative to hope? 'They're going to kill your father one of these days'? How do you bring up a child telling him that?"
Parents don't. Instead, they hammer this message: Just hang on. Death doesn't necessarily mean death. Over and over-twenty-one times since 1972-people have come home from Florida's death row, for reasons ranging from outright innocence to severe legal errors. That fuels the belief that however long the odds, anyone can come home.
The children of the condemned are snared between mutually hostile worlds: the world of the parent they need in a thousand simple and complicated ways, and the world of murder, evidence, and the official stamp of condemnation by judge and jury.
"How can a child understand his own position in society when his loyalty to his father puts him at odds with society and the state?" Vandiver says. "There are two separate realities here, and there's no way to reconcile them except by saying, 'My father is innocent.' But what if the evidence is overwhelming that he is not innocent?"
♥ What obligation does the state have to the children whose parents it undertakes to execute? Does society owe some kind of help to the innocents who live in the psychological wreckage of the death penalty?
..Clint Vaughn, one of the detectives who coaxed a confession out of Derrick, doesn't blame the system for damaging Shawn. Derrick did it-first by murder, then by lies. Vaughn believes that Derrick, and only Derrick, can rescue the boy: by looking him in the eye and saying, I did it. This is what I don't want to happen to you.
♥ Cherie tells her son, gently, that he shouldn't put his life on hold, that the odds against his father are long.
Should she have encouraged his daydreams for so long? She saw no alternative to hope, but hope, she has learned, can impale you like a stick; she has been feeling much better since giving it up. If she doesn't warn her son now, who will?
"I guess it's something I should have been more open about through the years," she says. "Of course, Jason's not going to tell him he's never coming home."
When Shawn's mother began dating her coworker, Shawn decided immediately that he loathed him. Grumbled when his name came up. Stalked off when she mentioned him spending the night. Let his mom know in no uncertain terms where he stood on this. Kept asking: What are you going to tell Dad when he gets home?
~~The Prisoner.
♥ In her mid-thirties she married Bill, a towering, soft-spoken blues musician and restaurateur who made her feel calm. She spent years trying to get pregnant, and when it happened her priorities narrowed.
"I became afraid of spontaneity and surprises," she said. "I just wanted to be safe."
In Irvine, she found a master-planned city where bars and liquor stores, pawnshops and homeless shelters had been methodically purged, where neighborhoods were regulated by noise ordinances, lawn-length requirements, and mailbox-uniformity rules. For its size, Irvine consistently ranked as America's safest city. It was 66 square miles, with big fake lakes, 54 parks, 219,000 people, and 62,912 trees. Anxiety about crime was poured into the very curve of the streets and the layout of the parks, all conceived on drawing boards to deter lawbreaking.
For all that outsiders mocked Irvine as a place of sterile uniformity, she had become comfortable in its embrace.
♥ If charges were ever filed, their lawyers told them, the DA's office has assured them of advance notice.
This would allow the Easters to surrender at an appointed time, with bail already arranged, and they could be in and out of booking quickly. They would avoid the pinch of handcuffs, a luxury available to people with money and good lawyers.
♥ Some time ago, he says, he met a woman and developed a romantic interest in her. He asked her out. They made plans. Then came the cancellation he half expected, expressed in four words:
"I just googled you."
~~Framed.
♥ He pushes through his screen door into the brisk morning air. A slightly stooped, thickset man with long, graying dreadlocks, he moves unsteadily down the irregular stone steps he built into the sloping dirt. He makes his way past the enormous avocado tree, past the horse barn with its single slow-footed tenant, Bullet, past the shaded dining pavilion.
His four-acre compound bustles with visitors, many of them preparing for a memorial service for Geronimo Pratt, a former Panther who died in his farmhouse down the road, his affairs untidy, his ill unfinished, his death a sharp message to O'Neal not to put off the paperwork any longer.
Most of O'Neal's big dreams have faded over the years, or come to feel silly. Like beating the forty-two-year-old federal gun charges that caused him to flee the United States. Like the global socialist revolution that he was supposed to help lead. Like returning home to the streets of his Midwestern childhood. Like winning citizenship in his adopted African country, and the prize that's eluded him on two continents: the feeling of belonging somewhere.
♥ He plants them before documentary footage about his life. It's easier than explaining the whole story himself. Where would he start? His childhood in segregated Kansas City, Missouri, where the amusement park admitted black kids once a year, a day so cherished that they went in their Sunday best? Should he start with the stabbings and shootings in the projects where he grew up?
..To the FBI, the Panthers were homegrown terrorists who romanticized lawbreaking with overheated Marxist rhetoric. To O'Neal, who founded the Kansas City chapter of the party in early 1969, it represented a lifeline out of an abyss of drugs and aimlessness. He blazed with purpose: End racism and class inequality, fast.
♥ Around that first crude brick structure, the fugitive improvised a little island of hope. He built a small recording studio for musicians and workshop for artists. He gathered cast-off computers and invited locals to come learn. He sank a well and opened the spigot to the village. It was, as he saw it, in the spirit of the free breakfast program he'd run as a Panther.
"He's had a chance to grow in a way that very few people get here," says his brother Brian O'Neal, fifty-eight, who lives in Kansas City.
Had he stayed in the States, Pete O'Neal believes, he'd be long dead from a shoot-out or street fight.
If exile saved in, it has also meant a life in which the sense of being a stranger never goes away.
"There's always a feeling of not being completely part of this culture. I know I am of a different tribe," he says. "People like me here, they love me, but I'm always other than."
♥ He regards his complex of bunkhouses, workshops, and classrooms as "socialism in microcosm," he tells the students, though doctrinaire Marxism left him disillusioned. People, he concluded, are radically selfish.
Have his views on violence changed?
"I don't have the particular type of courage that would allow me to turn the other cheek."
♥ He remembers discovering the ocean.
He was in his late teens, a heartland kid who believed his fearful precinct of Kansas City was the center of the world, its ugliness and bigotry a true picture of the world. It is why, to his mind, violent revolution looked logical and inevitable.
Then he arrived in California to report for duty in the Navy, and turned his head and saw the Pacific. His breath was caught short by the immensity of it, all that blue stretching out into other lands, other stories. It was the start of a decades-long lesson that the world is bigger, more complicated, and interesting than his little plot of bitter experience ad led him to suspect.
♥ One day soon, he hopes to take the children southeast across the country to the Swahili Coast, with its coral reefs and pale sand and bright-painted old dhows. He planned to do it over Christmas, but a new pill regiment left him enervated. And money was short.
He'll need $2,000 for diesel fuel, food, tents. He hates to beg but believes the trip will be the culmination of every good instinct he's ever had-"The highest point in my life," he says-and he's calling in ever favor.
His blood pressure, alarmingly high, keeps reminding him to be quick. "I could hear Geronimo say, 'We got a place reserved for you, come on down and keep me company.'" He told his friend no. Not yet.
In his sleep, the lions give chase. In the morning, he stands dreaming before the bus. They're running into the Indian Ocean, a man without a country surrounded by children who have barely seen theirs. He gives them the gift of an enlarged world, before his ends.
~~The Exile.
♥ The kingdom of his childhood was the spacious sky-blue house at 70 Wayne Way. His father built it on a cul-de-sac in upscale Lake Padgett Estates, on a drowsy block of neat lawns and tidy sidewalks, a street untraveled by random evil.
♥ Jonathan Michaelis, a psychologist and expert in childhood trauma, says it's natural for a child who grows up with a real-life bogeyman to be drawn to the strength a police officer represents.
Comic book heroes are invincible. They wield the talismans that banish evil, the powers that whittle nightmares down to size. They are other people's safety. To a kid, here in the real world, a man who wears a five-pointed star might be the closest thing.
♥ Not long ago, he was a teenager who liked action flicks, girls, and Ybor City, the speed and flash of his yellow Mustang. He's pretty much the same now, except in cop gear he's never invisible. Drive down the street, people stare. Walk into a store, people stare. He is Authority. He is other people's safety.
♥ Like their old place on Wayne Way, the Colhouers' new home is a picture of suburban security, on a drowsy block of neat lawns and tidy sidewalks.
Except this time, visible from one end of the block to the other, there's a shiny green and white car parked in their driveway, with a big gold shield and the word SHERIFF on the side. Says Jeremy: "Anyone in their right mind wouldn't mess with a house with a police car at it."
It's a message he's been looking for a way to send since he was eight years old:
This family is protected.
~~The Rookie.
♥ Most of the time, Kennedy says, he's alone out there. Apart from a zeal for tighter borders, he shares little philosophically with his confederates. A lot of Minutemen lean toward Republicanism and Christianity. Kennedy leans toward Buddhism and socialism, and still keeps Mao's Little Red Book in his dashboard.
"I'm the most isolated guy," Kennedy says.
♥ He never married, and although he has two kids, he knows little about them, which he calls "one of the biggest heartbreaks I have," a loneliness especially sharp around the holidays. He believes he might have made a mark on the world had affirmative action not thwarted his chances.
♥ Still, he waits. He scans the desert with his goggles. The desolation reminds him of dreams he used to have of nuclear annihilation. After the bombs fell, he sensed he would be one of the survivors. "This is like the postapocalyptic universe," he says. "It's a battlefield. Sometimes you can't think of a reason to go on."
He waits. Smokes. Scans. The temperature drops. He wants to participate in history. He wonders what it would have been like at Antietam or Gettysburg. He imagines he would feel right at home with Spartacus's army of rebel slaves.
♥ By 11:30 p.m. it's clear that the operation is lost. The border-jumpers have evaded capture, at least for now-slipped into the east or back into Mexico. He turns the key in his truck and rolls down the hill. "It's really more of a protest than it is an operation," Kennedy says. "It's my only way to give Bush the finger."
♥ Soon, Kennedy is back in his truck, rolling out to another lookout. It's 1:00 a.m. He talks again about Alexander Hamilton, whom he considers a hero of freedom, and of Che Guevara, whom he considers a hero of the poor, and of the occupation of Iraq, which he considers a profit-driven assault on the world's powerless, and of his bone-deep, nearly uncontainable hatred of Bush. His brain teems with names, connections. He believes he can hold his own against a lot of college-educated types.
"And no one wants me!" he says.
He scans the desert. Nothing stirs.
♥ Of late, he's been thinking of a change. Maybe going east. Maybe joining the antiwar movement. Maybe finding something else on the border. He has skills-electronics, mountaineering, survival. He's heard about a volunteer group called the Border Angels. They are vocal opponents of the Minutemen. They are the enemy. They supply water to immigrants who risk their lives in crossing. He wonders if they can use a man like him.
~~Border Warrior.
♥ In her big Irvine warehouse, among the vases and mirrors and other decorative bric-a-brac, stood shelves of color-coordinated hardback books-aqua, navy, gray, brown-because books made nice furniture in perfect homes.
♥ Soon Debra and John were quietly looking for a place together. They found a $6,500-a-month house on the boardwalk on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. She put down a year in advance. He didn't want his name on the lease. Tax problems, he said. They'd known each other five weeks.
..He kept begging her to marry him, and she kept resisting, until she couldn't. In early December, she was driving to Vegas on business, and he was tagging along. Why not drop by the courthouse?
The ceremony was in a plain room with a plant-covered trellis. He chuckled a little as he tried to get the ring on her finger. They celebrated with lemon-drop martinis. They had known each other less than two months.
♥ She didn't press him any further. Questions might puncture the dream.
♥ She watched him inject testosterone. He said this was for his kidneys. She watched him pop OxyContin. He said this was for his bad back.
♥ In early March 2015, Shad called Debra and reminded her that he'd lost his mom, and he didn't want to lose her too. He said, "What if he isn't who he says he is? What if he isn't an anesthesiologist? What if I could prove to you he was in jail, and not Iraq?"
Her response would stay in his memory: "Even if it wad true, I wouldn't care, because I love him."
♥ Who exactly had she married?
The answer, she learned with apprehension that crept up on her and then came in a flood, lay in piles of documents he had made no effort to hide.
They told a story of a former nurse anaesthetist who became hooked on surgical painkillers and lost his career. Of a con man who took nasty pleasure in the mechanics of a dark craft he had mastered, and who seemed obsessed with humiliating anyone who defied his will.
From 2005-2014-from about the time he got out of prison in Michigan for drug theft to the time her met Debra Newell in California-he had seduced, swindled, and terrorized multiple women, many of whom he had met on dating sites while posing as a doctor, court records showed.
"You are my project for years to come," he wrote to a Porter Ranch woman after allegedly suggesting-in an anonymous letter-that he had raped her and taken photos while she was unconscious.
"This I promise. Do you think I joke? Every breath I take will be to ruin your surgically implanted life. Thanks for the pictures!" He described his planned campaign against her as "my masterpiece."
In another case, according to court records, a forty-eight-year-old Laguna Beach woman said she had been recovering from brain surgery at a San Diego hospital when she awoke to find Meehan standing over her bed. He said he was her anesthesiologist.
They dated. She said her family had millions. He suggested she transfer money into his account, to hide it from her estranged husband. She balked. He sent intimate photos of her to her family, and wrote: "You're in way over your head on this one. Make it happen and I walk away. If not, I will be your nightmare."
Police began investigating, and when they searched his Riverside County storage unit, they found a Cold .38 Special. Binoculars. GPS units. Ammunition. Heavy-duty cable ties. Syringes. A pocket saw. A bottle of cyanide powder. Eight cyanide capsules.
"A treacherous, cunning and very manipulative person who uses fear and intimidation as a means to control and coerce his victims," police called him.
As John Meehan awaited trial in the Orange County jail in late 2013, an inmate reported that he was offering $10,000 each for the murders of two Laguna Beach detectives, plus five other potential witnesses against him, including several ex-girlfriends and his ex-wife. His philosophy: "With no witnesses, there is no trial."
To the detectives, one of whom described him as "a ticking bomb, capable of unpredictable violence," the threat felt real enough to request a restraining order. But the jail informant refused to be a witness, no charges were filed for murder solicitation, and the restraining order was denied.
Meehan pleaded guilty in February 2014 to stalking the Laguna Beach women and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was out that summer, but jailed again for violating a restraining order against another woman he had threatened.
He walked out on October 8. He met Debra online two days later. By the time they married in December 2014, three separate women around Southern California had standing restraining orders against him; in recent years, at least three others had requested them.
"He threatened to leak nude pictures of me if I did not give him money," wrote one woman.
"He was choking me, telling me if I tell the police anything else he'll kill me," wrote another.
"He told me once he was obsessed with me. And I am VERY afraid of him," wrote a third.
Debra thought, I am going to be killed like my sister.
♥ He had lavished her with compliments, and now he savaged her looks. He had entered the marriage broken, and now he demanded half her wealth. He had been gentleness itself, and now he threatened her with "long-lost relatives" in the mob.
♥ In March 2015, as Debra studied the paperwork detailing her husband's long record of women terrorized and laws broken, she learned that he had a nickname. It went back decades, to his brief time in law school at the University of Dayton.
Dirty John, classmates called him. Sometimes it was Filthy John Meehan, or just Filthy. But mostly Dirty John.
♥ For Tonia, it was hard to make sense of any of it. She had been enmeshed in a lie the whole time she had known him. She had had a normal upbringing in a good home, and had no yardstick with which to measure this.
"My first experience with evil," she called it.
♥ He had explanations.
He had hidden his criminal record because he knew she would never have given an ex-con a chance.
He had pretended to be an anesthesiologist because he had been so eager to impress her-she was such an impressive high-powered businesswoman herself.
He could explain why police had found cyanide capsules in his desert storage until. He had multiple sclerosis, and kept the poison in case he needed a quick exit.
He could explain his cruel, threatening texts to her. It was the hospital drugs.
The restraining orders? Those were other John Meehans.
His arrest for stealing surgical drugs in the Midwest? His then wife was trying to frame him and get custody of the kids.
The claim that he solicited the murders of cops and witnesses from Orange Country jail? The fantasy of a jailhouse snitch.
His nickname, Dirty John? A mistake. He had no idea where that came from.
The idea of returning to him seemed crazy, and then less crazy, and finally a real possibility. He had her doubting what she had read-it seemed so at odds with the repentant, vulnerable John who kept writing to her in late March 2015.
"I will do whatever it takes to make your life easier," he wrote. "I can travel with you and be there for you. No more lonely nights and no more being alone. I am your husband. That means forever. There is nothing to debate. This is going to work. Forever means forever."
And: "When you are near me I want to protect you and be certain you are safe. It's a good feeling. It's just a bit odd feeling dependent on someone. Even married I never did. Bad habit I guess. I love you Deb. Nothing can take that away."
And: "God put me here for you. You can't see that?"
And: "I love you more than the entire world. Come with me to the four corners of the world."
John told her he needed her. He had multiple sclerosis, after all. She wouldn't abandon him to his illness, would she?
Debra made sure John understood that one day her children would inherit all her money. That was fine, John told her. All he needed was her. He liked to say that he would rather be with her, broke, living under a bridge, than living in a mansion without love.
..To explain why Debra Newell returned to John Meehan, in the face of so much evidence, is not easy. He had deceived accomplished women before. A PR professional. A gynecologist. A nurse anesthetist who said it was not about the brain, and added, "The heart is a different organ."
Maybe part of the explanation lay elsewhere, in the peculiar dynamics of Debra Newell's family. It was a family steeped in Christian faith and the concept of forgiveness, even taken to extremes.
♥ John Meehan bragged frequently about his supposed ties to organized crime, and claimed to trace his bloodline to the prolific East Coast hit man who had run Murder Inc. itself. It had the ring of empty boasting from a man who lived by lies.
What is believable is that he approved of the mob's way of doing business, particularly when it came to dealing with enemies. Over and over, he spoke approvingly of a cold-blooded ethos: A dead enemy couldn't suffer, so you want after their loved ones. You went after their families.
♥ John Meehan-drug addict, failed law student, disgraced nurse anesthetist, fake doctor, prolific grifter, blackhearted Lothario, and terror of uncountable women-was declared dead at age fifty-seven on August 24, 2016, four days after he had attacked Terra Newell.
Debra was numb. She and Karen were led to a room in a Santa Ana funeral home where his body lay in a long, plain cardboard box. They watched the lid go on the box and the box go in the oven. The door closed, he turned into black smoke, and that was all. There was no memorial service.
♥ Detective John told the prosecutor, Matt Murphy, that it looked like a clear-cut case of self-defensive. In such scenarios, the killer usually wound up on the run, the victim dead, dumped off a freeway or in the desert.
Blind luck, the gift of adrenaline, Meehan's drug-weakened condition, Terra's instinctive refusal to comply with his script-all of them had helped to save her.
"Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the nice person is the one that is dead," Murphy said. "Every once in a while, good guys win."
~~Dirty John.
♥ Though some historic figures, such as Robert E. Lee, have received posthumous pardon, the Justice Department's pardon attorney rebuffed Moreno, explaining that such pardons were not "established practice."
Years went by, and he kept trying. Local politicians expressed sympathy but said there was little they could do. The staffs of President Clinton and the second President Bush sent polite brush-offs.
He has been waging the campaign for so long that many of his friends and much of his family think he's delusional, a man chasing a mirage. "It doesn't mean squat to anybody," he says. "They look at you sort of cross-eyed." He can't seem to make people understand what he calls "the curse and the taint in the family blood" caused by his father's desertion, a curse that no one else can see, but which feels as real to him as a scar might be across his face.
Even his brothers, the fellow Vietnam vets, support the general goal of a pardon but don't quite understand what possesses Moreno. "If my brother thinks he can rectify history, that's great," says Artie, fifty-nine, an employee for Sequoia National Part. "But what is, is."
Moreno's oldest sister, Irene, who cares nothing for a pardon, recalls that her mother and some of her brothers, including Al, used the desertion against her father in family disputes. The term "yellow-belly" became a surefire argument-clincher, the ultimate cudgel. "It tortured my dad," she says. "I think that's one of the reasons he's doing this-to make up for his cruelty to Dad."
Moreno acknowledges that his relationship with his father was a volatile, sometimes violent one-they scuffled for years until Big Al found himself overmatched by his growing son-but he insists he's waging his campaign out of love and duty, not guilt.
If Moreno looks long enough at the enormous framed reproduction of Michelangelo's Last Judgment he keeps on his living room wall, he sees a reflection of his father in the sea of writhing bodies. A lifelong Roman Catholic, he knows the hellscape intimately. It is the day of reckoning, and the killers and traitors are thrashing about in darkness. To begin to grasp Moreno's obsession, look through his eyes at the tormented figures on his wall. Hell has a place for cowards.
♥ It would be a mistake to forget how tender Big Al could be-a man who made a place at the family table for local children even poorer than the Morenos, who sang show tunes to his girls, who scavenged golf clubs from a thrift shop and made a backyard putting course for his family out of tin cans. His youngest daughter, Cristina, remembers him simply as "an angel here on Earth."
But when Moreno thinks of his father, he remembers his rage, his drinking, how often he hit him and his brothers. It was the obliterating fury, as he sees it, of a man raised in a Chicano culture of machismo who could neither face himself in the mirror nor put his anguish into words.
♥ Moreno would not remember the words they exchanged. But years later he can remember the expression on his father's face, his eyes saying, The punishment goes on and on. Saying, Don't become me.
It should have brought them closer, that meeting, but it did something else. His secret exposed, his oldest son's admiration for him capsized in an instant, Big Al retreated further into booze and work and silence.
Things were different for Moreno, too, his father's blood in his veins feeling less like a gift and more like a disease.
♥ "I'm just gonna live with it," he says finally. "You've got to live with the pain. It's not gonna go away. That's just the way it is."
A few months pass. He goes on with his life, a bachelor entering his seventh decade in a one-bedroom apartment hung with Marine emblems. He does private eye work. He takes daredevil rock-climbing trips. He watches war documentaries, studies news from the Iraq war, thinks of all the Americans who went and the one who didn't.
Near him, always, a black-and-white snapshot stares. A father. A son.
~~The Deserter's Son.
♥ He could be anywhere. She had no grasp of America's immensity, though a friend who knew the country tried to warn her: It would be like finding a needle at the bottom of the sea.
Where would she start looking, in a country of 300 million strangers? Still, how could she go to her grave without trying?
So, in September, a tiny fifty-seven-year-old woman began stubbornly pushing a pair of green worn-out plastic flip-flops along the sidewalks and strip malls and alleys of Southern California, past street signs she couldn't read and storefronts she couldn't fathom. She didn't have long-just a few months before her visa expired in January, maybe less before her legs buckled or her heart quit or her cancer returned. Or her money ran out.
She had a husky voice and thick, rough hands. Her skin was the deep brown of the Vietnamese poor who spend their lives in the sun. She printed fliers with Tuan's face and stuffed them in the hands of street people and business owners and anyone who might listen.
She found her way to Little Saigon in Westminster, the country's largest Vietnamese American enclave. There, people sympathized. They gave her couches to sleep on, bowls of soup. In their own flight from starvation and violence, many had said goodbye to their families in Vietnam, often forever. Parents cleft from children was one of the community's defining stories. So was arrival in the States with little save hope.
But in other ways she was hardly familiar, this worn-looking woman who had single-handedly chased hope 8,000 miles, knowing so little, and having no time to count the odds.
♥ She searched homeless shelters and alleys, parks and strip malls. All through the land of promise, to her astonishment, the concrete was littered with human shapes crouched under reeking blankets.
She went from shape to shape, slowly lifting the blankets off ragged, hollow-eyed faces that smelled of beer, off men with tangled hair and dirty hands. They cursed in words she couldn't understand and yanked their blankets back, many of them, sinking back into their covers. Some just looked at her in bewilderment. She looked into dozens of hopeless faces. There were other mothers' sons, but not hers.
Sorry, she said, over and over. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It was one of the few English words she had learned.
♥ She ran her hand up and down his back and promised she wouldn't leave him. She would take care of him from now on. She told him that it didn't matter to her, whatever had happened, whatever he'd done. She blamed herself for sending him across the world with no one to watch over him.
Five days had passed since she rescued him from the streets, and all he would call her is "aunt," a generic Vietnamese term for an older woman, not necessarily of blood relation. Now, he spoke a word she had not heard him utter in twenty years.
Mother.
~~How She Found Him.
♥ He knows the solitude of the open water drives some people crazy, but he insists he won't be lonely out there where "you have just the water trembling." Adrift, he figures he'll do fine with the companionship of his movies and his medallion of Saint Christopher, the saint of travelers, affixed to his life vest.
He has a plan, should incurable illness come at sea. He has worked it out in his mind. He'll open the boat's through-hull valves and let the ocean in. "That will be my home," he says.
"I can take it with me to the other world."
♥ With 110 rental slots and a long waiting list, it's one of the few do-it-yourself boatyards in Southern California, even if doing it yourself swallows your savings and every spare minute.
Manager Maria Chan says sailboats are overwhelmingly a male obsession, and from what she's seen, a frequent cause of divorce. "Either the husband has to give up the boat or has to give up the wife," she says.
She remembers a man in his eighties who came regularly to visit his fifty-foot sailboat but lacked the strength or the will to build out the bare hull. For years, she says, "He just sat on the boat dreaming and didn't do anything." A couple years ago, he died alone at home, and she had his boat hauled to the junk-yard.
Then, one morning last year, she opened up the boatyard to find another old boatbuilder stiff at his workstation, his TV running. He'd been dead a couple days, and no one had missed him.
"All these loner people," she says. "No wife, no children."
♥ Before long, the two are musing about mortality. Maybe it's the color of the sky, or maybe death is the most logical subject for those who find themselves sharing a windy corner of its anteroom.
"If you get old and you have some project to do every day, you live forever," Markvart says.
"You want to know what the most fatal disease of all is?" Myers says. "The most fatal disease is life itself."
This elicits one of Markvart's favorite stories, that of a workaholic couple he knew who wasted a lifetime grabbing money with both hands and then died-a heart attack for him, a stroke for her-without children.
Myers feels Markvart hasn't exactly grasped his point, and clarifies: "Everybody dies, period."
"Fatal diseases," replies Markvart, who is known to worry about toxic airborne substances, including fiberglass particles from other boatbuilders carried into his shed by the wind. He tries not to complain too loudly, because there are so few places for a man to build a boat, and doesn't want to stir up trouble.
"Karl, I'm just saying you die," Myers continues. "It doesn't matter. You could be going down the freeway and get killed. And if you have to worry about dying, you may as well die."
♥ Markvart knows it's perilous to think too much about the day he's aiming for, when he finally lowers his boat into the Pacific. He knows it's smarter to focus on one task at a time. But when the day comes, Markvart doubts anybody will show up to see him off, because he hasn't spent a lifetime collecting friends, which is one of the reasons it will be easy to leave.
He will not bother breaking a champagne bottle, since he thinks of the ritual as a rich man's theatrics, and he's not building the perfect boat only to risk chipping it pointlessly. He will just motor out of the harbor and into the open ocean. His final plot executed, his final escape launched, he will angle his sails and point his boat north. It won't be a dramatic sight, just a stooped, smiling old man with strong hands, and a little time left, giving himself over to a boy's picture and the wind.
~~The Old Men and the Sea.