Prologue
Fucking Mexicans.
I can hear them in the next room, watching the Price is Right.
“Ese, you out of your mind? $300 for a washer/dryer? You loco, hombre.”
“Jinga tu madre, that shit is cheap.”
It’s been going on like this for a week, maybe ten days. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been sitting in this cell. Part of the problem is that I just keep replaying the last month to figure out where it all went fucking wrong. Really wrong.
Whenever I would see people on the 6 o’ clock news, I always thought, ‘How can you be so fucking stupid?’ You hire a hit man to off your wife. You embezzle $300,000 from your company. You tee off on the noisy upstairs neighbor with a 5 iron. It’s fucking obvious you’re going to get caught.
Yet, somehow, these people keep doing this obvious shit and actually have the audacity to look fucking surprised when the cops show up and they get tazed on the front lawn in front of their wife and kids.
Now I know.
You want to know the secret?
It’s not sexy, but it’s 100% true. Unfortunately, I know exactly how it happens, because it happened to me. It’s hard to believe that a month ago I was graduating law school, had a job, had a girlfriend, had a whole life.
And now it’s all gone. And why?
Little mistake by little mistake. That guy with the 5 iron? What you don’t see is all the shit that happened before he blew up and broke six of his neighbor’s ribs. The act itself is merely the result of dozens of tiny, incremental mistakes that shift your reality to such a degree that the guy that started out is not the guy swinging away without yelling ‘fore.’ No, he’s a changed man. And the really amazing part is after the act, he’s immediately changed back, staring at his neighbor howling in pain, and the 5 iron in his shaking hand thinking ‘how the fuck did I come to this?’
Little mistake by little mistake. That’s almost always the answer. Most people are rational reasonable actors. They tend to do the right thing. But somewhere in the loop of life, you can get stuck with feedback. The sound hearing itself, amplifying itself, and hearing itself again until it reaches a crescendo of mind splitting proportions. And when it’s all over, all you had to do was shut the amp off. But it never occurs to you once you get stuck.
At least it didn’t occur to me.
No, I listened to that feedback and ignored the consequences. At least I didn’t get tazed. Well, maybe getting tazed would have been better than getting blown to hell and back, but that’s merely a matter of opinion.
And I continue to look back. Where was it that I could have made the decision to avoid sitting in this cell with a bunch of Mexicans laughing at me and saying ‘No Ingles’ motherfucker? Now that I look at it, there were a bunch of exits off of this particular highway. And why didn’t I take them?
Because of a girl. Well, three actually, but as usual I’m getting ahead of myself.
So I’ll go back to the beginning.
