Read I Was There the Night He Died for Free Online Page A

“And then you swallow it as best as you can, just like I did, and that’s that.” She hands me her joint. “Now you try.”
    As a last resort, read the instructions—or get someone who knows what they’re doing to show you how. By my second attempt, I swear I’m stoned. As if on cue, it starts to snow: large, lazy flakes fluttering, falling, softly landing. The girl, swinging in her seat, wordlessly hands me back the joint and I puff and pass it back to her. I watch the snowflakes—falling harder now and blowing sideways in the escalating wind—illuminated underneath the street light.
    â€œA Petri dish of hysteria,” I say.
    The girl looks at me, but I point until she sees what I’m staring at, joins me in looking at the frantic activity beneath the light.
    A long moment later, “You’re right,” she says.
    I nod, benignly accepting the compliment. Poetry isn’t big words saying not all that much, isn’t flowery fakery stitched together to remind the reader to LOOK AT ME, I’M A POET. Isn’t supposed to be, anyway. Poetry is a magnifying glass that makes the stuff that makes up the world come closer so that the reader can see it better and know it better and live it better. Even the bad stuff. Maybe even especially the bad stuff.
    â€œDid you just make that up?” the girl says.
    â€œMake what up?” I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone.
    â€œâ€˜Petri dish of hysteria.’”
    â€œOh. No.”
    â€œOh,” the girl says, obviously disappointed. She takes her hands off the chains of the swing and folds her arms across her chest.
    â€œIt’s from my first book.”
    The girl stops swinging; unfolds her arms and turns to me. “You wrote a book?”
    â€œI wrote that book in … 1997. At least that’s when it was published.”
    â€œYou’ve written more than one book?”
    Even taking into consideration the brain-baked banter that ordinarily goes along with what we’re doing, this is a little too mush-headed much. “I write novels,” I say.
    Not I’m a novelist or I’m a writer because you’re only a writer when you’re actually sitting in front of your computer writing. Only amateurs and over-prized professionals call themselves writers . Right now I’m a forty-four year old man sitting on a swing set getting stoned with a teenage girl.
    â€œIf you’re a writer … why are you here?” she says.
    Here means Chatham . “I was born here. I grew up here. This was my parents’ house.”
    â€œYou’re just visiting.”
    Visiting. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. “Sort of. It’s complicated.”
    â€œI didn’t think anything about Chatham was complicated.”
    That’s all Chatham is, I want to say. That’s all anyone’s hometown is. But that’s what novels are for, scarcely saying in 80,000 words what everyone else thinks can be summed up in eight.
    â€œYou don’t seem like”—or look like or sound like—“you’re from Chatham,” I say.
    â€œMy father came here for his work last year.” Nose nearly in the air, “I’m from Toronto.”
    â€œReally? Which part?”
    â€œOakville.”
    Which probably does impress her Chatham classmates who don’t know enough to know that Oakville has about as much to do with Toronto as Bogota, New Jersey has to do with New York City. But let her have her hometown haughtiness. Growing up in a small town is bad enough—being parachuted in at eighteen and knowing what you’re missing is probably worse. “What does your dad do?”
    â€œI have no idea.” The girl appears almost proud of her ignorance.
    â€œYou know your father came to Chatham for his work but you don’t know what he does?”
    â€œI didn’t say that. He’s a lawyer. I said I don’t know what he does. Or