My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (35 page)

But if Justin and Anastasia had vowed to off themselves together, I asked John, why the lag time between her death and his? John’s not sure. But he knows that hours after Anastasia’s body was discovered, Justin walked into a gun store, bought a shotgun, and was eventually found in the countryside, an hour away, having taken his own life. After a long, emotionally draining, on-again, off-again relationship filled with two years of vicious squabbles, the troubled teenagers were dead, both at the hands of Justin, John Allen believes, just as the cops had suspected for years.

I share John’s take with Byron and he drops his head. “I’ve always understood why other people would think it was Justin,” Byron says. “But he was my best friend. My
best friend
. I knew him better than anybody. And I’m telling you, for the longest time I couldn’t imagine that he could’ve been capable of hurting her, of hurting anyone. I simply didn’t believe he could’ve done it. I gave it real thought, plenty of times over the years, and in the end I always ruled it out completely.” He lifts his head to look at me, welling up with emotion, his voice going soft. “But you know,” he says, “there’s nothing else that makes sense. I still can’t accept it myself, I can’t say, ‘Justin did it,’ but if that’s what other people believe, I can’t try and argue with them.”

There’s something incredibly moving about Byron’s loyalty to Justin and the faith he still clings to in his friend, even though it may have been Justin’s actions that have doomed him to a decade—and counting—in prison. While I know it’s neither here nor there, I tell Byron about a dream I’ve often had of Justin writing a suicide note in which he admits he’s killed Anastasia, and hiding the note in a book on his shelf. In my dreams, I explain to Byron, I’m always clawing apart thousands of books—a whole library full—searching for Justin’s confession.

Byron looks at me, unsure, it seems, how to respond. “That’s nice,” he says at last, drily. “I guess that would be helpful. Let me know if you find it.” He rubs his cheeks, looking from me to Peter and Evelyn, who by now have been drawn into our discussion.

“We may never know exactly what happened to Anastasia,” Byron goes on, wearily. “All I know is that I didn’t do it. But some way or another, I really believe one day the truth will come out, and everyone will see that I’ve been innocent all along.” He flashes a strange, sad smile, and looks around the room at the other inmates huddled around neighboring tables with their own families, the guards at the front of the room, killing time themselves, the giant classroom clock hanging above the door, and the yellow wall where the painted mountain range used to be. He slumps back in his chair, and spreads his arms wide. “For now, though, I’m here.”

*

Evelyn cries softly in the backseat of my van all the way to Lathrop, where we always stop for Subway. It’s the saddest sound in the world, but I know there’s nothing I can say to relieve her heartbreak, though I try. Byron’s sentence has become a sentence for her, too. She’s told me that she longs to move home to Germany, but would never leave the area while Byron’s still locked up. She’s his anchor, and her weekly visits are what keep Byron going strong. Yes, he’s got other friends and loved ones on the outside, but I can’t help but wonder, in dark moments, how he’d fare if Evelyn ever got too old or sick to visit him at Crossroads, or if she passed away. It hurts to imagine just how alone he’d be.

We grab subs and punch it south, driving in silence straight to our show at the Record Bar in Kansas City. Peter hauls his guitar and sound equipment inside, and while Evelyn helps me set up a table with our
Found
books and Tshirts and CDs, my brother plays the Bon Jovi song “Wanted Dead or Alive” to the empty room to warm up his voice. God, I think, what a beautiful fucking song. I head back to the van to put my stack of found notes in order and get some drinking done.

An hour later I head in, more bent than usual. The place is packed. Evelyn’s at a table in front with Napo, Byron’s old cellmate Pablo, and ten other friends of hers and Byron’s. I pick up a couple more drinks at the bar, get up on the microphone, and do what I do. Each found note and letter I read to the crowd feels doubly piercing, and when it’s Peter’s turn to perform, he seems to sing with more emotion than ever. Throughout the show, I’m on the edge of tears.

Before we’re finished, I find myself making a half-drunken impromptu speech about the injustice of Byron’s fate and pleading with the crowd to check out his website and spread the word. I pull my hat off my head and get it going around the room, collecting money toward Byron’s legal expenses.

Afterwards, Evelyn gives me a hug, and tells me she loves me, and I tell her I love her, too. We say goodbye. Me and Peter pack everything up and square up with the club owner, and I head around the corner to another bar to hang out with two girls who work at the local public radio station while Peter crashes out in our makeshift bed in the back of the van.

At the bar, the girls ask me more about Byron, and I try to impress them by telling them about my visit with him earlier in the day—having a friend in prison serving a life sentence, I imagine, makes me appear more edgy and hard-core than I really am. For half an hour, I keep downing drinks, ranting on and on about Byron’s situation, explaining everything in explicit detail. The girls listen raptly, asking questions here and there, moved, it seems, by my devotion to him. Finally, one steps out to smoke a cigarette, and I quickly fuck everything up with the other. I try to kiss her, and she drops her chin and turns away, and I end up kissing her glasses instead. “I’ve got a boyfriend,” she says. “Sorry. You should’ve gone for Celeste. She’s single. Hold on, I’ll be right back.” She joins her friend out on the sidewalk in front of the bar, and when they come back in, they say they’ve got to go, they’ve got an early start at work the next morning.

“Okay,” I tell them. “Scram. I’ll get the tab.”

“Thanks. We’ll see you next time you come through town.”

I head for the van, crank her up, pound a bottle of water, half of another, snap the radio on, and head for the highway. It’s a long haul to Nebraska, and we’ve got another show the next night. Recently, on the road, I’ve been tuning in to the
BBC News Hour
’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan. I wonder, with so many young Americans dying cruel deaths overseas, will anyone care about one kid rotting away in prison who’s very likely (but not blatantly) innocent?

All of a sudden, on the edge of town, I see a sign for the Truman Road exit. I pull off the highway, and at the end of the long ramp find myself stopped at a traffic light—the same light, I realize, where Anastasia leapt out of Justin’s car that night after their fight, twelve years and one month ago. Across the way is the Amoco station where the mechanic worked who’d seen her storm away, toward Lincoln Cemetery. I hang a right and cruise past a row of eerie, run-down motels. Misshapen men in groups of two and three peer back at me from each parking lot. A few blocks down, on the left, I spot a high stone arch over a tiny dirt drive leading up into the graveyard where Anastasia was killed. All these visits to Kansas City, and I’ve never come to check the place out. My heart accelerates into a cantering beat. I’m spooked but drawn in.

The gravel road winds its way through the cemetery, and somewhere halfway around the loop, I pull over, kill the engine, and climb outside. It’s intensely dark and quiet. The sky has rained itself out, but in the trees above me, raindrops gently patter from leaf to leaf. I pad my way twenty feet from the road, find a seat in the damp grass between a pair of headstones, and lie back, curled in my coat, staring up into the darkness.

This could be the spot where Anastasia was found, or maybe it was another part of the cemetery close by, it doesn’t really matter. I feel plagued by the mystery of what happened to her that night, ripped up, torn asunder. I mean, it’s the fucking future already. Technology won. There are few mysteries left in the world—we know who’s calling our phone when it rings; we know how to sew a soldier’s leg back on, or Skype with someone in Mozambique, or play with remote-controlled cars on Mars; if I want to, I can text ChaCha and find out how fucking poison-arrow frogs make their fucking poison. Why can’t someone tell me with absolute certainty what happened to Anastasia?

I find myself a little choked up, not for Byron, not for Evelyn, nor for Justin’s family, or Robert WitbolsFeugen, but for Anastasia herself. She was shot while facing her attacker. She had to know what was coming. Did she hear the sound of it? Did she see the flash of light at the tip of the muzzle? I know what Anastasia’s voice sounds like from the brief, haunting audio clips that her family has posted on her memorial site, and as terrible and disturbing as it is, I can’t help but imagine the sound of her letting out a cry as her killer stepped close. Even if she’d entered a suicide pact with Justin, in the moment before he pulled the trigger, it seems to me, she might have wished for him to call it all off. I think of Justin, or whoever killed her, and how damaged they must have been to have done what they’d done, their cold amazement in the moment after. It’s all too much. I’m shredded, squeezed, incensed, and I feel like screaming from anger and sorrow. In the trees above me, owls hoot in the night.

A figure steps toward me in the darkness, a shadow in the shadows, accompanied by the sounds of sticks breaking under its feet, and I sit bolt upright and start scrambling backwards, heart clanging, my breath caught in my throat. “Who’s there?” I say sharply, jarred by the fear in my own voice.

“Dude, what the fuck.” As soon as I hear him speak, I realize right away it’s only Peter, and sag back on my elbows in relief. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asks. “Don’t you remember, we’ve got a radio thing? We’re supposed to be in Omaha by noon.”

“Yeah, I know. I just wanted to make a little stop.” I grab hold of a tree trunk, pull myself to my feet, and slap the wet grass and leaves from my pants. My emotional reverie has quickly flared out, and I know it’s time to move on. “Think you can drive for a while?” I ask Peter.

“I guess. Give me the keys.”

I settle into the bed in the back of the van and watch out the window as we roll down Truman Road, back onto the interstate, and join the quiet stream of traffic headed west. It starts to rain again. All I can see are dark wet forests, punctuated by the occasional flash of a green highway sign, or the zillion-watt glare of a passing billboard. We could be anywhere in America. After a few minutes, I close my eyes and fall into a dreamless sleep. By the time I wake up, hours later, at some cold gas station, the sky’s already getting light, though the sun’s not up yet, and we’ve left Missouri behind.

AIN’T THAT AMERICA?

I was introduced to Anna, the British girl, one April a few years ago at a crowded, upscale bar in West Hollywood called the Village Idiot. She was a friend of a friend, which earned me the chance to chat her up without any of the awkwardness of macking on a stranger. As our conversation blossomed, I could hardly believe my luck—with her wide blue eyes, delicate nose, and genuine, radiant smile, she was easily the most beautiful girl in the room, and though she was only twenty-five, she was also probably the most accomplished. I realized, as I asked her questions about her day and she laughed and talked on in her cheery British accent, that this was the girl my friend had been marveling about and telling me he wanted to introduce me to. She’d published her first novel at nineteen, directed two prize-winning documentaries in her early twenties, and was regarded back home as one of England’s finest young creative talents. She’d come to L.A. for a two-year screenwriting program, and was set to return to London in a few weeks to finish her biography of former prime minister Tony Blair—who was a family friend—and then begin shooting her first narrative feature.

A part of me was amazed that in this bar, surrounded by a sea of gorgeous, dapper, successful men, she’d locked in with me, the small-town dude in grubby maroon pants and a Rasheed Wallace jersey, just visiting from Michigan. I had no statuettes on my desk, no house in the hills. In fact, I’d slept the last three weeks in a battered recliner on the back porch of a friend’s house near Pico and La Brea, and had been spending my days shooting hoops alone at the park and my nights putting together a zine made of trash found on the street. But she was cool like that—she didn’t seem to notice a single one of those tanned Hollywood heroes, the actors, agents, directors, and producers. And I suppose that when I drink I’ve got the gift of gab, and that can go a long way. It did that night, at least. Before we left the Village Idiot, me in my rented pickup, her with the friend of mine who’d delivered her to me (God bless you, Sam Hansen), she’d agreed to go on a date with me—an ambitious date, really—an overnight trip to Joshua Tree.

All clean-shaven, spic-and-span, I picked her up at her apartment in Los Feliz the next Friday around two in the afternoon, and we barreled east on I-10 toward Palm Springs, telling long, funny, intricate stories to each other. Anna’s generous laugh and persistent curiosity made me feel like the most interesting guy in the world. And her stories fascinated me—rivalries at school; travels in Laos; family sadnesses; Labour Party political imbroglios—all told with a mix of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and compassion, but not without a certain edge. The sweet, expressive timbre of her voice, along with the endearing accent, diction, and casual Britishisms, made for an intoxicating brew.

“I love the way you say the word ‘literally,’” I told her.
“Lit-trilly.”

She fumed, playfully defensive. “And how is one supposed to say it?”

“Lit-er-ull-lee.”

“Lit-trilly,” she said, and started to laugh. “Damn you, I lit-trilly can’t say it right!”

Focused on the road, I allowed myself only an occasional sideways glance, and instead let myself fall into the delightful swoops and swirls of her words. It was like falling in love with a stranger over the phone, except she was right there beside me, in a giant pickup zooming for the desert. This was it! At long last I’d found a soulmate, a kindred spirit, and each new, unsurpassable level of happiness I experienced was surpassed twelve minutes later, as one of us came to the end of a merry, strange, or melancholy tale and we sat in connected silence for a moment, only to be blown past once more eleven minutes later, when the next story had reached its finish. We swung off the interstate onto Highway 62, steep and winding, and ascended into the high desert, through the town of Joshua Tree, as the sun loped along, low in the sky, and radio signals faded. Soon we reached Twentynine Palms, where Anna marveled at the glut of gun stores, tattoo parlors, and barber shops (Stud Cuts, Stud Cuts #2, and Stud Cuts #3) which serviced the local Marine base, and I pointed out each trippy desert mural splashed on the sides of abandoned buildings.