Chapter One

The summer after I graduated college I was living with my mother at my childhood home, nestled in the woods of northern New Hampshire. My father had committed suicide a couple years before, and for awhile she craved my presence. I was working part time for a small construction company, but work was slow and the pay was weak and what little work came my way was unrewarding and left me feeling empty and defeated. I floated through the prime months of summer a corn husk in a yellow hardhat, wasting my time either manning a rusting backhoe or drinking straight from a handle of Old Crow by the river than ran through our property. I was alone. All of the friends I had grown up with were scattered across the country and across the globe.

My friend Ray Cassidy had enlisted in the marines and was off in some third world fighting for something he didn’t fully believe in, but that was Ray and I loved him for it. I heard from him occasionally in letters scrawled with a shaky hand, but I had never read any of them past the first word. The first word was always my name: Jack. I kept those letters in a big shoebox under my bed and years later, after he had come home with a Purple Heart and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and after I had moved out of my mothers and was living out in Northern California writing for a pulp fiction rag, I brought them out of that big box and burned them all.

Caroline Fisher, the girl who I loved, was in Paris floating along in the music scene and drowning in big bubbling vats of culture. I had only been able to talk to her in broken long distance static snippets and curt postcards that just made the distance that much more tangible. Missing her made me drink and drinking made me miss her.

I was an alcoholic that summer, someone who thought drinking first thing in the morning was a respectable activity. My mother was worried about me, especially when I started coming home from work stone dunk and stumbling. It got so bad that she stole my car keys and hid them away deep within the house. I missed two days of work and was fired. I blamed it on my mother and we had a fight that I wish I could forget. She called me a drunkard and a burden in her life and I called her a whore and yelled as loud as could, that she had driven dad to suicide and that was it for her. She broke down into tears and threw a vase at me. It hit me in the right arm and shattered on the floor and then I was packing and she threw my keys at me and I ran out to my truck and screeched away, radio blaring out country and tears pouring out of my eyes and I was screaming to Ray and Caroline and Moira, Ada, Shirley and Theo and all my other crazy lost beatdown wanderlust life companions. I needed them all then, crammed tight into my rust brown trucks tiny little cab, howling down those back roads at fifty eight and howling for the sake of being heard but they were all gone and living and I was alone and headed out towards God knows what bitter eastern end.