I might as well skip ahead to the month in which everything unraveled. Up until that point, there was nothing in my relationship with Ricky that would be worthy of including in a book. I worked for a dentist in San Jose, and after Ricky was fired from Spectrum he asked to get his old job back at the Circle K, which the franchise owner, Mr. Choi, was kind enough to allow. Ricky was irritated, however, because Mr. Choi had started him out at his original minimum-wage salary from when he’d begun working there at age 17 rather than the somewhat higher wage he was earning at the time he left. Ricky accepted that only because of the risk that prospective employers would call Jeff Owen, the owner of Spectrum Supply, and learn of his suspicions of Ricky’s theft. It seemed better to work for Mr. Choi again for a while and move up from there.
At some point during those in-between years, Ricky moved out of his parents’ house and into the ramshackle cottage that would become known as the Cathouse. Although it has been called a squatter’s den, he was, in fact, paying rent on the place. He shared it with his best friend, Chris Brooks, whose girlfriend Liz also lived there off and on, as their volatile relationship worked through its trials. You surely recognize these names as the other participants in the crime, along with Forrest, who stopped by the house once or twice a week. Chris worked as a flagger on a road construction crew, and he and Ricky both supplemented their income by doing odd jobs, including a little landscaping for Father George at Our Lady of Mercy, the church in which we had been raised. On weekends at the changing of the seasons you could often find Chris and Ricky hauling mulch and planting flowers, spraying the good Father’s precious rosebushes for aphids and other such work.
The house was not far from the dentist’s office, and so I took to using the place as my base camp for feeding strays and coaxing them into carriers so I could take them in for neutering. Over time we had quite a few cats hanging around— I’m not sure how many, but admittedly more than the neighbors would like. Long before the crisis they already referred to it as the Cathouse, and even amongst ourselves we sometimes called it that.
Sometime in July that year, Chris and Ricky got into a car accident on Stockton Avenue. They were on their way home from a bar in Ricky’s car, with Chris behind the wheel because he was the more sober of the two. Chris went through a red light and hit a woman in a Cadillac, and while the injuries were all minor, there was quite a bit of damage to the woman’s expensive car and Ricky had no insurance. She began sending threatening letters to him through her lawyer demanding that he pay the costs for her repairs and emergency room expenses. I found this almost as asinine as Ricky did, because Chris had really been the one responsible, and it must have been costing this woman at least as much to pay the lawyer as it would to just cover the repairs herself. She was an older woman, and I think she believed she was teaching a young person to take responsibility for his actions. She couldn’t have known where that would lead, but it’s difficult not to resent her role in it, even so. Ricky never cared the least bit about money. Truthfully, it was one of his flaws. I can’t imagine he would ever have committed the actions that followed had it not been for her threats of legal action.
One afternoon I walked to the house after work and found Chris and Ricky sitting on the front porch steps. Ricky was smoking a cigarette, which was unusual for him, and when I kissed him I could taste that he had also been smoking marijuana, which was not so unusual. It bears mentioning at this point that I was really no fan of Ricky’s best friend even before the accident in question. Chris had been in the Navy for two years after high school and walked around with this jaded, cocky, pool-hall attitude, as if he’d seen the whole world and considered every human interaction to be a game of poker. He didn’t like black people, and he loved large breasts, and these two items comprised about fifty percent of his efforts at conversation. There was a sort of Batman-and-Robin dynamic to the friendship, and alongside him Ricky took on the role of the beatnik bohemian in a way I felt stifled him. Because of the death of his sister, he had come of age in a family where his grieving parents alternately lavished him with resources and desperate love, then shut themselves away in their mourning. This produced an insecure teenager with a lot of spending money, nearly endless freedom and no respect at all for authority, followed by an adult who was slowly struggling uphill against the obstacles that upbringing had thrown in his path.
Though I was initially attracted to Ricky because he had a free and easygoing spirit that I lacked, over his time with me—and I know this is difficult to believe, given his notoriety now—he had made great strides toward behaving like a responsible adult. He paid his own rent, had stopped mooching off his parents and had turned around some of his red-flag substance use—drinking during the day, the occasional line of cocaine with Chris— that had troubled me early on. In some ways I was very young inside my mind, too, so it was easy to forgive his slow crawl toward respectability. But because Ricky and I felt mutually protective of each other, I believed his friendship with Chris Brooks, which was intensely brotherly on a level approaching the romantic, rewarded him too much for his immaturity.
That afternoon I walked past Ricky and into the house, leaving him on the steps with Chris. Inside was the sort of dark, filthy pigsty one would expect out of two stoned bachelors. The glass bong was out in the living room—that was Ricky’s preferred method of smoking marijuana because he believed the water filtered out the impurities—and some of the cats were nesting in piles of laundry in the downstairs bathroom and at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen sink was sloshed with bong water. An open peanut butter jar, bags of potato chips, a loaf of Wonder Bread spilling from its package and the remainder of a chocolate cake with its frosting roses removed spoke of the feeding frenzy that had followed the boys’ smoking session. The entire place smelled of litter box, weed, and stale tobacco smoke, and the only thing that made it tolerable was the contact high I was achieving merely by standing in it.
Then I noticed a bit of order in the madness, in the form of several sheets of paper arranged on the dining table. This table had no chairs and was overflowing with giant tubs of protein shake powder, ashtrays, one of Liz’s tennis shoes and a general assortment of trash. Yet these papers were arranged neatly and afforded space of their own, so I walked over, tugged the chain for the light—it didn’t turn on, however—and peered down at them. United States District Court, Northern District of California. Alice Myers, Plaintiff, v. Richard Rowan Jr, Defendant. I stepped back outside.
Ricky had finished his cigarette and was sitting with his head in his hands. I rested my arm on his shoulder and played with his hair a little. “That stupid woman just won’t lay off, will she?” I said.
He replied in his Bob Marley voice. “Stupid woman don’t know what life is really worth,” he said. It was a twist on a line from a song.
“Dumb bitch,” Chris said.
You’re the one she ought to be suing, I thought angrily. “It’ll work out,” I assured Ricky. “The court will see you don’t have any money. At worst they’ll garnish your paycheck for a while. And I’ll drive over and pay the electric bill this afternoon. We’ll get the lights back on, at least.”
He nodded, still cradling his head in his hands. “You deserve better than me,” he mumbled.
“This wasn’t your fault,” I said, and it took all the self-control I possessed not to turn to Chris and fire off, It was yours.