A few times a year — no set schedule, no set genre — I publish a short story for free online at www.scottwilliamcarter.com/story. Most of these tales are a bit, well, irregular in other ways too. My specialty, you might say! A brief introduction and the story are below, as well as well as where you can buy it if you’d prefer to read it in print or as an ebook.
The story remains online until the next one is published. If you’d like make sure you don’t miss one, subscribe to my newsletter at www.scottwilliamcarter.com/news.
Introduction to “Creative Vice”
JULY 2026 – I don’t know where all my stories come from — sometimes it’s nothing more than a title — but I have a pretty good sense what sparked this tale of a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who returns to his Oregon hometown to work the crime beat for his local newspaper, only to come face-to-face with someone from his past who forces him to confront hard truths about himself. Years ago, I did a ride-along with a local police officer. It’s something a lot of police departments offer as a free service (I think the hope is that community members develop a deeper appreciation of the work that cops do), and I highly recommend everyone, not just writers, do it at least once.
On that night, the officer made an arrest very much like the one detailed in this story, and it always stuck with me. Months later, I ran into an old high school friend I hadn’t seen in the years, parked outside the park where I’d gone for a walk. I asked him where he was living and he pointed at his car. “Here,” he said. Life had taken a turn for the worse and he was currently homeless. That was enough to get me writing. It’s important to note that both the police officer and the old classmate in this story bear little resemblance to either of the real people I mentioned above. The city of Rexton (which shows up in a lot of my fiction, including my latest mystery, One for the Monkey) is also made up, though it is loosely based on Salem, Oregon, the place I currently call home.
“Creative Vice,” which appeared in the November-December 2022 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, is also available for purchase in The Goon and the Glass Swan collection, if you prefer to read it that way. Enjoy!
Creative Vice
by Scott William Carter
It was Rick’s idea. Spend a week doing ride-alongs with a cop friend of his, a good way to get acquainted with the city. That I was originally from Rexton, that Rick, of all people, knew this full well, having been my friend since we met the first day of high school in Mrs. Martin’s creative writing class, not two miles from where we both sat, did not dissuade him at all.
“Yeah, but I know you, Chris,” he said, after I argued that I was hardly new to town. “You’ve been in California a long time—what, fifteen years? You don’t think like a writer who lives in Oregon anymore.”
We were sitting in his office and it was raining so hard I could barely hear him over the splatter on the concrete patio. It smelled like printer toner and burnt coffee. The brass clock on the wall read half past eight and only a few people remained in the newsroom outside his office.
It was a cold November Wednesday, a couple months before a pandemic started raging across the country and a year before Trump was ousted from office.
“I come back every Christmas!” I protested. My socks were soaked and my toes were numb and it brought back everything I didn’t like about living in Rexton. “You know that. We even have dinner sometimes. I know this town.”
“We haven’t had dinner in years.”
“Oh, come on. It was just last December.”
Chuckling, he jotted a name and number down on a yellow sticky note, which he handed to me. “His name is Tom Brady. Not the football player, obviously. And don’t mention that. It’s kind of a sore subject for him, especially since he’s a huge Seahawks fan. Look, it’s just a week. You may be from Rexton, but you’ve never worked the crime beat here.”
“I worked it at the Los Angeles Times. It’s just a tiny bit bigger, you know.” I held my fingers an inch apart.
He ran a hand through his black hair, not nearly as much hair as I remembered, and not nearly so black, so he may have been right about how long it’d been since we’d had dinner. “Yeah, but how long ago was that? You didn’t work for the paper long. You were doing your Hollywood thing a long time before you … well, you know.”
I nodded, feeling my cheeks burn. I hated that he saw me this way, as some kind of charity case, as a burnt-out husk of the guy he once knew. I wanted to keep arguing, but I knew I couldn’t. He’d never insist, he’d never tell me this was an order, not a request, but I could see in his eyes that it was.
“It’s just a week,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Be good for you.”
“Right.”
He chuckled. “Don’t screw this up, Chris.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just messing with you. How’s Amy, by the way? She find work yet? You know, my wife’s cousin is a dentist in Silverton. He might be able to hook her up.”
I stared at him, trying to keep myself from sprinting out of the room to take the elevator down three floors, a big building by Rexton standards, and hustling through the rainy windswept streets until I found a dingy bar where they’d never tell me I’d had too much. Just messing with you. But he wasn’t. He was deadly serious. And Amy? Jesus, that was not someplace I wanted to go, even with him.
Don’t screw this up, Chris.
I looked at the sticky note. “I’ll call him tomorrow,” I said.
* * *
“Meth is the big problem in Rexton,” Tom Brady said, as we rattled over the rails on 13th street. “I mean, it’s the big problem everywhere, right, but it’s really bad here in the Willamette Valley. We thought we’d beaten it back twenty years ago and now it’s back with a vengeance—all that cheap Mexican meth flooding our streets. And almost all the low-level crime is because of the Tweakers.”
He shot me a glance, as if trying to see if I might be offended. In the dark patrol car, his ruddy face was awash in shadows, his uniform badge glinting blue in the glow from his dashboard computer. He was a huge guy, bulky, with the kind of thick neck that made me think of the heavyweight fighter Mike Tyson. That was a good description for him. Like a white Mike Tyson. He didn’t look anything like Tom Brady the football player.
It was a week after I’d started at the Register. We’d only barely left the station’s parking garage but my back was already killing me. Mercifully, it was no longer raining, a drizzly stretch that had lasted over five days, but the temperature had also dropped enough that I’d slipped on a patch of ice coming out of Mom’s house that evening. If my back hurt this bad after only a few minutes in the seat, I couldn’t imagine riding around with him for a week.
“Right, the Tweakers,” I said, jotting a note in my spiral notebook to make him feel like I was taking him seriously. I’d never done meth, booze was more my thing, but I’d tried just about everything else at least once. He’d been talking nonstop since we shook hands but it was all I could do not to think about how good a few drinks would make my back feel. “You think maybe we can pick up some coffee at some point?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “we’ll get some from the county lockup. See, a lot of people think it’s the homeless committing the crimes, and the numbers don’t lie, but most of the homeless are either mentally ill or drug addicts, so it’s all related. That’s why I’m not a big fan of people trying to decriminalize drugs, like the bill that just passed here in Oregon. Sure, these people need treatment, but it’s hard to stop drug-related crime if we’re telling people drugs are okay.”
I knew I shouldn’t argue, it was going to be a long week if I made things tense, but I couldn’t help myself. “Well, Portugal did something similar back in 2000,” I said. “And they didn’t find that drug use or drug-related crime increased.”
“Portugal?” he said. “Oregon isn’t Portugal. You’re spending too much time with those California liberals. Didn’t Rick say you grew up in Los Angeles?”
“Actually, I grew up in Rexton,” I said. I almost added, a few blocks from here, but I wasn’t sure I wanted Officer Brady to know I grew up in the area locals called Felony Flats. He might think I was a Tweaker, too … which I guess I was, of a sort. Instead I laughed and, hoping to change the subject, said, “It has been a while, though. It’s why Rick thought this would be a good idea. I appreciate it, by the way.”
Brady waved his hand as if it was no big deal. “Well, I’m sure a lot has changed. Rick said you directed some movies or something. Anything I would know?”
“Screenplays, actually.”
“What’s that?”
Inside my leather jacket, my phone buzzed. I didn’t look. I knew who it was, the same person who’d been calling, texting, and emailing me the past two weeks. Amy. Always Amy, my girlfriend of almost five years, the one who’d seen both my meteoric rise and my rapid fall.
Of all the mirrors that reflected back my own failure, looking into Amy’s eyes had been the most revealing—and the hardest to bear. She believed in me when no one else did. She said I’d always be unhappy unless I was doing something really creative, and I just needed to get my foot in the door with Hollywood again. She’d even gotten me a job offer. One of her patients, a woman who adored Amy as most of her patients did, was the showrunner on Joey Knows!, a Nickelodeon production about a teenage girl who could read minds, and this woman said she’d hire me to be a staff writer. As a favor to Amy, of course.
I told Amy I’d rather go back to journalism than work for a brain-dead sitcom with an exclamation point in the title and a laugh track for an audience too stupid to know when to chuckle on their own. She said I was being elitist and that I was going to be miserable unless I was working as a screenwriter. She said I might be able to lie to her, Rick, everybody, but not to myself.
What I didn’t tell her was that I knew she was right, but the real problem was I couldn’t bear the thought of standing at the foot of the mountain again, and a staff writer on Joey Knows! was definitely at the bottom of the mountain. Every day I toiled there would be a reminder of how far I’d fallen.
And so I ran, as far from that mountain as I could get, back to Rexton, back to my mother’s, called Rick, convinced him to hire me even though he really didn’t have the budget for it.
“I’m a writer,” I said to Officer Brady. “I write screenplays. Or at least, I did. Now I’m a journalist again.”
“Oh yeah? Tells you what I know. I thought the director wrote the movie.”
I laughed. “Some directors do. They change the scripts so much you wouldn’t even think they’re yours. I was lucky, though, at least with my first movie. What you saw on screen was pretty much what I wrote. You ever seen The Pact? It starred Tag Deerhorn and K.C. McIntire? About a group of teenagers who kill a bully who was terrorizing one of them?“
I looked at him. We were passing under a streetlamp, so it was easy enough to see his face, and I could tell right away that he didn’t. “Maybe,” he said. “I think … Yeah, I might have caught it on HBO a couple years ago. There was a teacher that came back as a zombie, right?”
I grimaced. “Actually, that was Teacher’s Pet. A different movie.”
“Oh, right! Yeah, that was a good one.”
“It was, yeah. I think it was a Steven Crown adaptation. I don’t think he wrote it, though. I think it was adapted by—”
“Had me right up to the end! I mean, having the teacher come back from the dead and, like, take over the dog’s mind. That was something!”
“Yeah.”
“So you wrote that?”
“No, no. That was Steven Crown. I mean, it was based on one of his novellas.”
“What’s a novella?”
“Well, it’s … it’s a short novel.”
“Why don’t they call it that, then?”
“I … I don’t know, actually. Maybe because that’s two words instead of one?”
“Oh. Yeah.” He chuckled and tapped the steering wheel. “Good one there, Carpenter. Rick said you were funny. Real quick, he said.”
“Sure.”
“What else you write?”
I almost said Faraway and Forever, because I knew he’d know it, everybody knew that movie, and some part of me wanted to impress good old Officer Brady, but even so, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It wasn’t my movie. I wrote the original script, I’d been paid a hell of a lot of money for it, but so many other screenwriters had a go at it that by the time it actually got into Mr. Bigshot Director’s hands there was hardly anything left of my original story except the title.
And of course that was the one that went on to become a blockbuster and get nominated for a slew of awards, just narrowly missing the Best Picture Oscar that year, which was a good thing. If it had actually won, I might have killed myself instead of going on a two-week bender that was really the beginning of my fast track descent into Hell. And eventually rehab. And eventually here, in Rexton, riding shotgun next to good old Officer Brady.
“Oh, I wrote a few things,” I said, “but not a lot was produced. Got paid well, though.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t produced?”
“I mean, it wasn’t made. Happens all the time in Hollywood.”
“You mean, you get paid for writing something even if no one makes it?”
“Yeah. Actually, that’s true of almost all screenwriters, even most of the very successful ones.”
“Huh. Just seems weird, getting paid if no movie was actually made.”
“Well, we still do the work.”
“I guess. It just seems like, you know, if a writer wrote a book but didn’t actually make it into a book, a real book, then they wouldn’t expect to get paid, you know? If it was just sitting on their computer. You see what I’m saying?”
My face felt warm, and I heard the tension in my voice as I grew defensive. “We do a lot of rewrites, too. Something’s not quite working in a script, they bring in another writer to fix it. Only a tiny fraction of scripts actually get greenlit by a studio, and even then, things fall apart, or they can’t get the actors they want, or … There’s a million reasons. If you write it completely on spec, of course, you don’t get paid, but there’s not many screenwriters that can afford to do that. Got bills to pay, you know.”
“Sure, I get it.”
But he didn’t. I doubted he even knew what on spec meant, and that was fine, I didn’t need to explain myself to Officer Brady, especially since I was a journalist now, not a screenwriter.
Yet for some reason I still felt the need to impress him. He was looking at the road, scanning the tract houses with the flaking paint, the chain link fences infested with ivy and junipers, and the occasional tireless car up on cinderblocks, the part of town Mom and I lived in after dad took off when I was three. This was before Mom married an estate lawyer just after I fled for California, a guy who died just a few years back, leaving her everything including the house that abutted Shady Oaks Golf Course. A nice place. A much better life. Not my kind of place, but nice, and good for her.
But this part of town, where I now rumbled over the potholes with Officer Brady? Felony Flats would always be my childhood. It was a black hole exerting its gravitational pull on me. I wanted Brady to know that I’d achieved escape velocity once, and maybe, after I got my feet under me, I would so again.
“You ever see Faraway and Forever?” I asked him.
His eyes lit up. “Oh sure! Everybody has seen that movie. Wow! Cooper Coleman was amazing. You wrote that?”
“I did,” I said, and I should have left it at that, but I couldn’t help myself. There was still some part of me that just couldn’t take credit for words that weren’t mine: “The original script, anyway.”
“The original script?”
“Yeah. It went through some changes.”
“How many changes?”
“You know. Rewrites. Normal stuff.”
Brady laughed. “That had some great lines in it. I remember when Cooper, you know as the sheriff, he chased the bad guy into the library, looks right at the dude and says, ‘If you want to check out a book, you’ll need your library card.’ And then, pow! He shoots him right through that encyclopedia.”
“Yeah.”
“That was good stuff! The look on the sheriff’s face. You wrote that, right?”
“Um … No, not that line.”
“Oh. But you came up with the library part?”
“Well … Actually, I had that scene set in a coffee shop. But there was still a shootout—”
“A coffee shop?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know how the library card line would work if it was in a coffee shop. Were there books in the coffee shop?”
“No. But, the way I wrote it—”
“What about the scene where he hid under the bed when the bad guy’s girlfriend gives birth and there’s like ten mob guys in the room with machine guns? You wrote that?” Brady slapped his knee. “Man! That was some seriously funny shit. That was yours, right?”
I was about to say no, because I didn’t, of course I didn’t, there was hardly anything in that piece of crap that was mine. Yet something about being in that patrol car with the heaters running full bore and the shadows in Officer Brady’s eyes and the crappy neighborhood I grew up in passing by the windows, abandoned shopping carts, rusty bikes, a cat pawing through a garbage can, it was all there, the horror of my youth, I felt something break inside me, a little thing, like a thread that was keeping my integrity from falling into the dark void at the center of me where everything else had gone. It snapped and that was it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I wrote that. Good stuff, huh?”
“It sure was! It was awesome!”
“Thanks.”
“But why are you here?”
“What’s that?”
“I mean, back in Rexton. You write something that good, I figure you should be living in a big mansion in California. Why are you back in Oregon?”
“Well—”
“Oh, crap. It’s Bigfoot.”
“Bigfoot?”
“There’s a warrant out for him—parole violation. I gotta bring him in.”
As he swerved the cruiser to the side of the road, I thought maybe he was making a joke. Ha, ha, let’s arrest Sasquatch. Even when I saw the shirtless hairy guy on a bicycle coming our way, I still thought Brady was messing with me. The guy really did look like Bigfoot, he was so hairy. In fact, when I first saw him, I thought maybe he was wearing a fur coat, the hair on his chest was so dark and thick.
He was broad-shouldered, too, just as I would have expected Bigfoot to be, but as soon as he was closer I saw that there was no depth to him; turn him sideways and there was more hair to him than skin and bones. He had what Amy called “the Jesus look,” although a very unhealthy version of one, his face disappearing inside an unruly brown beard and an oily mane that both clumped and scattered, like dreadlocks coming undone.
His tight jeans had holes in the knees and mud stains all over the legs. He was barefoot, and his enormous feet, like hairy snowshoes, could barely stay on the bike’s pedals. The bike was a kid’s bike, way too small for him, and the style, with that long yellow banana seat, was one I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. He bobbed and weaved as he rode, and it was any wonder he didn’t fall off, he looked so off balance.
Only when Brady put the cruiser in park and partly opened his door did I realize he wasn’t joking. The guy on the bicycle was still half a block away, but he slowed when he saw the police car.
“You stay put while I arrest him,” Brady said, keeping his gaze fixed on Bigfoot. “Damn idiot—this is the third time I’ve arrested him this year. Last time was for exposing himself to a woman at the 7-11. Can you believe that shit?”
Brady stepped outside, cold air blasting into the cruiser before he slammed the door. The guy on the bike had already gotten off, stumbling onto the weedy area near a crumpling Winnebago covered by a blue tarp. Brady approached him with one hand up, one hand on his holster. They were about the same height, but Bigfoot was probably half the weight. A shaggy beanpole.
Bigfoot looked at the Winnebago, as if thinking about diving inside. I gripped the armrest, my heart rate kicking up a notch. I’d been on plenty of ride-alongs over the years, so I should have been used to this sort of thing by now, but no matter how many times I saw an officer confronting a perp, it never got old. There was always the possibility of something big happening—a fight, a shooting, something.
But, like usual, there was just some animated talking, then the two of them walked back to the cruiser. Brady didn’t even cuff him. He just opened the back door and directed him into the seat, which Bigfoot fell into, arms and legs bending in all sorts of weird ways. I was separated from him by a wire mesh.
“I can’t leave my bike,” Bigfoot was saying, as cold air again rushed into the cruiser. “I can’t just leave it here, man, somebody might steal it.”
I knew that voice.
That was my first thought. For a guy so big, one might have expected a low, Charlton Heston-like rumble, but this one was nasally and high, kind of weaselly. I tried to discern his face through that swarm of hair, but all I could see was a flash of dark eyes and grimy skin. I didn’t recognize him. He was bobbing his head as if in tune to a song only he could hear, looking up at Brady. He smelled like marijuana, beer, and Chinese food all at once.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Brady said. “That thing’s not worth five bucks.”
“No, no, no, man, I can’t leave it. Can’t you throw it in the trunk?”
“It won’t fit. Sorry.”
“Aw, man. Can’t you, like, put it in my place? It’s only down the street here. See the yellow house. I live above the garage, man. Can’t you just put it inside? I don’t want nobody to steal it.”
“Bruce,” I said.
I said the name even as it popped into my head. They both looked at me. Bigfoot—or the guy I’d known in high school as Bruce Garwood—brushed his mop of hair away from his face and leaned toward the mesh. His face was gaunt and covered with the kind of thick grime found at the bottom of a tub, but I saw the Bruce I’d known under the mask of his misery.
“Chris?” he said. “Chris Carpenter, that you, man? Shit, I can’t believe it.”
“You know him?” Brady said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bruce said. “We like went to high school together. Shit, man, it’s been like forever. Jesus, what are you doing here? Man, we had some good times back then, didn’t we? It’s good to see you!”
I was at a loss for words, something that rarely happened to me. They used to call him Bruce “Bigfoot” Garwood, not because he resembled the mythical beast but because he literally had size fourteen feet. Those huge natural flippers, when paired with his long arms and broad shoulders, came in handy in the pool. He’d been a star swimmer, anchoring a state championship both his junior and senior years, which also landed him a full-ride scholarship to Yale. Some people even thought he might have had a shot at the Olympics.
He’d also been a raging asshole.
At least to me. And to Ricky. And to any of the people who hadn’t been part of the peppy popular crowd. To call me a friend was laughable. He’d been two years ahead of us and I still had a vivid memory of him picking me up when I was a freshman and shoving me into a locker. Even after I’d interviewed him for the student newspaper, he could never remember my name.
“Hey, man,” I said.
“Wow!” Bruce said. “It’s like a blast from the past! I heard you went on to make movies like Steven Spielberg, man! That’s so awesome!”
It was a strange feeling, knowing Bruce “Bigfoot” Garwood had heard about me. I should have felt vindicated, I suppose, but I didn’t. I just felt sad.
Right then, my phone buzzed again. It had to be Amy. It was her modus operandi, after all. She always called ten minutes after the first attempt, but she never left a message the second time. In the tight space, the sound was loud enough that it made Bruce jump.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Oh, just … nobody, really.”
Bruce laughed. “Probably Stephen Spielberg, right? You should take it. He wants you to help make the sequel to ET.”
“No, no, nobody like that,” I said. Then, I don’t know why, but I added, “It’s just my girlfriend Amy. She’s—she’s still in L.A. She’s just, you know, checking up on me.”
“Oh, is she like an actress? I bet she’s a hot actress, right?”
“All right, you two,” Brady said, “I hate to break up this little high school reunion, but I still have to arrest Bruce. But I’m sure you’ll be released tonight, it just being a parole violation.”
“I didn’t really miss my meeting,” Bruce said. “It’s a misunderstanding is all.”
“Yeah, well, you can take that up with the judge. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’ll put your bike in your apartment for you, okay? I can at least do that. As long as you’re giving me permission?”
“Yeah, yeah, that would be great! Key is under the Buddha statue.”
“Okay,” Brady said. “Come on, Hollywood. Regulations don’t allow me to leave you in the car with him, so you got to come with me. You want to call your girlfriend on the way, that’s fine.”
“No, no, ” I said, “it’s nothing urgent.”
Reluctantly, I got out of the car, Bruce excitedly thanking both of us as if we were doing him a favor. I was still kicking myself for mentioning Amy.
My breath fogged in front of my face. Brady took his bike and wheeled it toward the yellow house, me laboring just behind, trying not to limp. I heard a man and a woman arguing in a house across the street. An old woman sat smoking on a covered porch. Televisions lit up almost all of the windows with a flickering blue glow. I smelled moldy leaves, grilling hamburgers from the bar on 12th, and chimney smoke.
“You guys were really friends, huh?” Brady asked.
“What?” I said. “No, no, not really.”
“Then why did he—”
“I don’t know why he said it. I mean, we were classmates, but that was it. I didn’t really know him.”
“Oh. Hey, you know, I was thinking about what you said. About doing your writing and getting paid but not having the stuff made.”
“Yeah?” I felt queasy even going down this conversational road again.
“Yeah, I just wanted to say I was thinking it was kind of like me.”
“How so?”
“Just that I arrest a lot of guys, guys like Bigfoot, and it’s just a revolving door, you know? They’re right back on the street doing the same crap. Feels kind of pointless sometimes. But I just do my best, you know? That’s all I can do. If I do my job the best I can, I figure that’s enough, right? Kind of like you with the writing, even if nothing gets made. Here, help me carry the bike up the stairs.”
I didn’t know what to say in response to his comment, so I was glad we’d reached Bruce’s place. The wooden stairs behind the garage were slick and coated with leaves, so we had to be careful. I was in so much pain that sweat broke out on my brow, but I wasn’t about to wimp out on Officer Brady. I realized, as I gripped the rusty metal bar behind the banana seat, that he didn’t know Bruce “Bigfoot” Garwood’s real history, or the bright future that once lay before him. To Brady, this was what Bruce was, where he belonged.
Something occurred to me. There might have been a story for the Rexton Register in this, a “whatever happened to” feature about the fallen golden boy, a tragic Icarus-like tale of flying too close to the sun. Something. I’d find the angle. There had to be a hell of a story to explain how the son of a heart surgeon, who lived up on Sunridge Drive with all the other one-percenters, had ended up shirtless in the back of a patrol car with nobody knowing who he was.
The stone Buddha statue was at the top of the stairs, in the corner. Brady, leading the way with one hand on the front wheel, put down his end of the bike and found the key. He unlocked the door and then we were inside—a one-room flat with a dirty kitchen, a Murphy bed, and the rest of the room packed with the kind of musty, seaweed-colored furniture that wouldn’t have made the cut even at the Salvation Army thrift shop. It smelled like booze and sweat and day-old pizza and a million other odors that hit both of us like an olfactory eighteen wheeler.
“Dear God,” Brady said, “the dude should open a window once in a while … Oh, crap.”
“What?”
He pointed at what amounted to a coffee table, a wooden door propped up by a pair of five-gallon paint drums. On top was a Buck Rogers TV tray, coated with fine white powder and a plastic bag filled with the stuff. “That’s meth,” Brady said. “Now I gotta book him for possession, too. Since he invited me in, it’s totally admissible.” He shook his head at me. “If he’d just put the crap away, I never would have seen it. I’m afraid your little reunion with your friend will have to wait. He’ll be in jail at least overnight.”
“Like I said, he’s not my friend,” I said.
“Too bad this didn’t happen in January.”
“What do you mean?”
“That law I told you about, the one that just passed — he’d just have to pay a $100 fine instead of going to jail.” Brady laughed. “Dude just can’t catch a break. Man, timing is everything isn’t it?”
* * *
Three days later, after another long evening shuttling around town with Officer Brady, I knocked on Bruce’s door. Nobody answered. It was a clear Friday night, even colder than before, and the leaves sticking to his stairs gleamed with newly-formed ice. My mom’s red Mustang was parked along the street, lit up under a streetlamp where I could clearly see it.
I tried knocking again. Still no answer. I knew from the police blotter that he’d been let out on Wednesday. I tried a third time, waited a long time in the frigid cold, then finally started back down the stairs. I was almost there when I heard the screech of brakes and then there he was, pulling to a stop just as his front bicycle tire banged into a metal garbage can.
He looked up at me, face shrouded by all that hair, eyes gleaming in the moonlight like someone peeking out of a bush. He was wearing a shirt this time, a bright yellow Hawaiian number, and black Nike exercise tights that had a hole in the right knee. He had a brown paper sack rolled up under one arm, and when he saw me, he tucked the bag closer to his body.
“Hey, man,” I said.
Inside that cloud of hair, I saw him blink. “Cary send you? I’ll pay him in a week, I promise.”
“No, it’s me, Chris Carpenter. Don’t you remember? We met in Officer Brady’s car on Tuesday—or re-met, I guess.”
“Oh!” he said, relaxing his shoulders. “Oh, Chris! Yeah, that’s right! What’re you doing here, man? You come to shoot the breeze, talk about old times?”
“I tried calling,” I said, “but the line was disconnected.”
“Oh, man, sorry about that. I guess I forgot to pay the bill. That’s okay, though. I’m glad you just stopped by. You want to come in? It’s so good to see you, man!”
“You want some help with your bike?”
“No, no, I got it, man. Just be careful cause all the ice. That your ride down there? Shit, that’s a nice car. My dad had a Mustang once.”
I wasn’t about to admit it was my mom’s car. “I remember your dad having a lot of nice cars,” I said. “Didn’t you drive to school in a Corvette sometimes?”
“Yeah, yeah, a ’67. That was a truly sweet ride, man. He even gave it to me in the will. Shit, I wished I still had it. But I had to pay the rent, you know?”
There was a lot to unpack in what he just said, a whole story, really, and I felt myself getting more excited about all the different angles I could take. Golden boy athlete goes to Yale, Dad dies, boy’s life goes down the drain, turns to drugs, ends up here … As I followed him into the apartment, I debated about where to start, and realized that I hadn’t even told him why I was there.
“Hey Bruce, one thing,” I said, closing the door behind us. The room looked just as disheveled but it smelled even worse, as if there was a toilet somebody had forgotten to flush. “I’m actually here for two reasons. One, just to say hi, but two, because I might like to write a story about you.”
Bruce brightened. “Oh yeah? Like a movie?”
“Well … Right now I’m thinking a feature in the Rexton Register. I’m a journalist now, you know, and—”
“I think it would make a great movie.” He bobbed his way into the kitchen, more bounce in his step as his voice rose. “I mean, there’s a lot of twists and turns in my life, man. If I were you, I’d like, you know, take some creative vice so you can go forward and put a happy ending on it.”
“License.”
“What?”
“Creative license. I think that’s what you meant.”
“What’d I say?”
“Creative vice.”
“Did I?” He laughed. “That’s funny. Creative vice. Man, see, I’m interesting even when I don’t try to be. That’s like you, man. You’re a screenwriter. It’s your creative vice. You’re hooked on it.” He moved some plastic containers full of something moldy and rotten. As thin as he was, he was still a big guy, and there was a jittery looseness to him that made me feel like he might knock something over at any moment. “But yeah, man, whatever. You working for the paper, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“And you want to hear my story?”
“I do.”
“Like right now?”
“Like right now.”
He clapped his hands. “All riiiight! Let’s get to it. You want some coffee? Water? Milk? Wait, the milk is spoiled. I might have some tea …”
I told him I was fine. He poured himself a glass of water and settled into a camping chair, one near a television I hadn’t even seen because there was a print of the Mona Lisa on its side in front of it. Someone had inked a big handlebar mustache on Mona Lisa with a black marker. He directed me toward the seaweed couch, and when I sat in it, I kept on sitting, my rear end sinking until my knees nearly touched my chin.
I asked him if I could record him on my iPhone. He told me that was fine. I took out a spiral notepad to jot some notes. He was talking before I even got my pen out, starting his story when he arrived at Yale. It was all going well, he said, until a few weeks in there was a girl who led him on at a frat party but then claimed he raped her. His dad got a lawyer and it was going to go to court, where Bruce insisted he would have been proven innocent, but then she agreed to accept a financial settlement to drop the charges. It was all very hush hush, but Bruce felt vindicated. Of course she was after money. Girls like that always were.
“And then I was back on with the team,” Bruce said, his water glass bouncing up and down so much that water splashed onto the threadbare carpet. “It was going well. We had a hell of a team! But then some assistant coach must have put steroids in my orange juice, man, because I tested positive at nationals. Can you believe that? And then I was off the team. Just like that.” He tried snapping his fingers, but it made no sound. He tried again and managed it, but it was a feeble snap.
“They had a zero-tolerance policy?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. Kind of. I mean, there was some other stuff about conduct determinal to the team.”
“Detrimental, you mean?”
“Yeah, yeah. Detrimental. That’s right. It was all bullshit. It was me just horsing around with the guys, you know. Nothing serious. But a few of those guys are total sissies and they take everything personal.” He dropped his head and put his hand to his lips, holding it sideways as if sharing a secret. “Just between you and me, I think quite a few of them are faggots. I think they got into swimming just to see hot guys naked in the shower, know what I’m saying?”
The more he talked, the more I felt like a hole had opened up underneath me. The story I’d hoped to write, about the star high school athlete bound for the Olympics who’d been derailed by his father’s death, was already falling apart. I should have known better. Bruce “Bigfoot” Garwood was exactly who he was in high school: an arrogant, entitled asshole who’d been blessed with great genes but no moral compass whatsoever. Nobody wanted to read about this guy. Even for a newspaper feature, it was way too depressing.
But I still clung to the father angle. Maybe there was something there. “You mentioned your Dad’s will,” I said. “Did he die while you were in college?”
“No, no, that was after I came home. See, he said maybe I should take a year off, you know. To regroup. So I did. I came home. And we had a plan. We did, man! He said he had an angle on getting me on the team at Oregon State. But then he had a heart attack. A big one, and he just didn’t wake up one morning. A heart surgeon who died of a heart attack. Who ever heard of that? Shit.”
He bowed his head, his mop of hair veiling his face. For just a second I thought this was it, I was going to get some honest emotion out of him, maybe a heartfelt soliloquy about how his dad meant everything to him, how if he’d had just one more chance, his dad might have helped him get him on the right track.
“The timing sucked,” Bruce mumbled.
“What’s that?”
He looked up at me. If there was moisture in his eyes, I couldn’t see it, and the hard edge in his voice dispelled any thought I had that he was about to break down and get emotional with me. “The timing, it sucked big time. See, Dad married this bitch Yvette, and he left her almost everything. I mean, me and my brother and my sister all got some money, and a few things, like I got the Corvette, but it wasn’t much. It didn’t last long. Just a few years, you know?”
“Oh.”
“You think maybe she’d offer to help me? No way. She said I had to grow up sometime. You believe that? Who needs her! I’ve got some things I’m working on. My cousin, he works for this tech company in Portland, and he said he can get me on in sales. And did I tell you about my blog? I review sports movies. I hadn’t done one in a while because I got to get my Internet fixed, but as soon as I do, I’m back at it.”
Bruce went on babbling about all the different angles he’d cooked up, all the different ways he was going to get his life back on track. I pretended to jot a few notes in my notebook, but I was barely listening to him anymore.
What really separated me and Bruce “Bigfoot” Garwood, anyway? Was my attitude that much better? I was sitting here in Felony Flats right next to him. I couldn’t kid myself about where I was. Maybe my personality wasn’t quite so toxic, but I knew I was well on my way. It wouldn’t be long now.
At that moment, I heard an approaching train whistle, a few blocks over. I knew that sound well. Not all the trains were Amtraks, of course, but I always imagined they were, passenger trains ferrying people to better things, north to Washington, south to California, always something better, better people, better lives, richer, healthier, happier. Now here it was, making a special stop just to let me aboard.
But it was all a lie, wasn’t it? It wasn’t taking me to something better but instead to the past, back to that bedroom with those movie posters and mom crying in the other room and me just wishing, hoping, praying I could make something of myself so I didn’t have to end up in a place like this again.
The gravitational pull, it was so strong. I finally realized there was no escape.
“You got anything around?” I asked Bruce.
He looked at me funny. When I spoke, my voice sounded detached. I was so tired. I didn’t want to fight the inevitable anymore. Why not just let go? Embrace the real me. At least I’d have Bruce to keep me company. Maybe I could move in with him. Sleep on the couch. There was plenty of room.
“What?” he said.
“You know, to get in the creative mood?”
“Huh?”
“Come on,” I said, “you know what I’m talking about. I bet you have something in that bag you brought in.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m telling you,” I said, “there’s a real movie here, I think. I just need something to help us get the ideas flowing. Did you know I wrote Faraway and Forever? I think there’s something here just as good as that. I’m telling you.”
For a long time, he just stared at me, then he finally bowed his head. I heard the train whistle again, closer now. I craved the release the drugs would bring.
Finally, Bruce got up and shuffled into the kitchen, his back to me. I figured he was going for his stash. The train was so close I heard it rattling over the tracks. He stood like that for a long time, this tall, rangy figure in the Hawaiian shirt and the Nike exercise pants. His head was bent slightly forward, and I could just imagine him about to dive into a pool.
Then he grabbed something out of the kitchen. I heard a metallic clatter, and then there he was looming over me.
Holding a steak knife.
The knife was a pitiful little thing with a wooden handle and a rusty, serrated blade. It looked especially small in his oven-mitt hand, but it was still a knife, and quite capable of stabbing me in the heart—a heart that was now beating hard enough that I felt it all the way up in my throat.
“You can’t have my drugs!” he cried.
“Jesus,” I said, raising my arms, “it was just—just an idea—”
“If you try to take them, I’m going to cut you!”
I was in an extremely vulnerable position, glued to the couch, him looming over me as if looking for an excuse, any excuse, to jab me. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Bruce, I’m not taking anything. Just don’t—”
“Get up!”
“What?”
“Get up! Get up right now! Get off the couch!”
He feinted at me with the knife. I didn’t want to stand but I didn’t know what else to do. I got up, feeling shaky, my head spinning. He was going to kill me. I could see it in his eyes. I was dead.
“Listen,” I said. “Bruce, buddy, listen to me. I’m not trying to steal your drugs. I just thought—”
“Shut up, shut up!” He squeezed his eyes closed, then shook his head so hard his big mane whipped left and right. “I knew you weren’t stealing them! I knew that! But you can’t have them. I’m not letting you. You’re going places, man. You’re going places, and I’m not—I’m not pulling you down with me.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I was surprised, not just by his desire to protect me, but by his candor. For the first time since I’d been in his apartment, he’d been honest with me. I’m not pulling you down with me. Hadn’t I said those exact words to Amy?
“I’m already gone,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m a junkie, just like you.”
“Shut up!” He was crying now. “You’re not like me. You’ve done something.”
“Why do you think I’m here in Rexton? I washed out in Hollywood, man. I even lied about Faraway and Forever. That wasn’t even my movie. They stole it from me, man. They stole it. I don’t want to play their game anymore.”
“Shut up! Just shut up! You just need somebody to lean on, that’s all.” His eyes flashed. “That girlfriend! The one who called you! What was her name?”
“No,” I said.
“Amy! That was her name.”
“She’s not—”
“You should call Amy. You should tell her you need help.”
“She’s not my girlfriend anymore.”
“She is, she is! She wouldn’t call if she wasn’t! Now get up. You’re leaving. You’re leaving, and the first thing you’re going to do is call her.”
“Bruce—”
He jabbed his knife toward me, the tails of his Hawaiian shirt fluttering behind him. I stepped back. He grabbed my bag and thrust it into my arms, pushing me backward, all the way to his door.
“I don’t got anybody, Chris,” he said. “Don’t you see? Nobody at all. But you got somebody. Call her and tell her you want to come home.”
“Rexton is my home.”
“No, it isn’t. Not anymore. Now go. Go, or I’m going to kill you, dammit!”
He jabbed the knife closer. My back pushed against the door. His eyes, so dark and wide, flashed through the smog of his hair. As he crowded near me, he was so tall he blocked the light behind him, casting me in shadow, and the knife point glinted. It was inches from my neck.
Somehow I got the knob turned. I fell backwards, grabbing onto the Buddha statue as I went, and slammed against the wooden railing. He took one step out, glaring at me, swiping at the air with his knife.
“Call her!” he screamed after me.
Then he slammed the door.
I lay like that for a long time, hugging the Buddha statue, the cold boards pressing against my back. I heard what sounded like sobbing, and I thought about trying the door, talking to him, finding our way back to just two guys shooting the breeze, but the thought of the knife stopped me.
Then I heard the train whistle again, far off now, almost gone.
At some point I stumbled down the stairs. It had gotten colder. As the heat dissipated from my body, the chill air pressed in from all sides. Not far away, inside a house somewhere, I heard children’s laughter. A raccoon darted under the Winnebago.
By the time I made it to the Mustang, I was breathing again, and my heart no longer felt like it was going to burst from my chest. When the dome light faded, I sat in the dark car, surrounded by all those houses, the houses of my youth. The past and the future. It was all here.
I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that Bruce Garwood had been right about one thing, at least. Screenwriting was my creative vice. It may have put me through the wringer, but I didn’t want to give it up. I also knew I couldn’t do it alone.
I took out my cell phone. Dialed. Waited a beat. What if she didn’t pick up? What if she’d finally given up on me?
When she answered, I knew she hadn’t. Not yet. I could hear it in her voice. It was just the word hello, but the tone said it all. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the most obvious thing and hoped we’d figure out the rest.
“I need your help,” I said.
* * *
I returned the following Christmas, more than a year later, to visit my mother. The pandemic was raging by this point. Trump was out of office. Everybody was wearing masks. It was a different world. This time I brought Amy, and she was now sporting a diamond engagement ring.
I’d been completely sober, gainfully employed, and I was starting to think my own comeback was the real deal. In addition to my work with the sitcom, I’d started noodling around with a few spec scripts. We went out for coffee with Rick and his wife, who turned out to be a fan of Joey Knows! I could even claim I wrote some of her favorite lines.
But even if I hadn’t, even if nothing I’d written ended up on the screen, that would have been fine, too. Just like Officer Brady, I was doing my best. I was finally figuring out how to be okay with that being enough.
Afterwards, I took Amy on a tour of my old neighborhood, puttering through the dark streets of Felony Flats in Mom’s Mustang with the sagging telephone wires and the cars on cinderblocks. I pointed out my childhood home. I pointed out where I used to sit near the train tracks and watch the Amtraks go by. I pointed out where I called Amy last November, the moment when everything changed.
I almost didn’t stop at Bruce’s apartment, not sure how he’d react to seeing me again, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to thank him.
There was no Buddha statue at the top of the stairs, and the man who answered the door was not Bruce Garwood. He was an old guy with white hair and a big belly that pressed against his camo shirt—a sort of beardless Santa Claus if Santa Claus had fought in Vietnam and now stood on two metal legs. He wore a blue surgical mask, and I wished I’d remembered to put on my own mask before I’d clambered up the steps, but it was too late now.
“Bruce?” he said, his voice muffled by the thin cloth. He was holding onto the frame for support. I smelled pizza and heard a football game. “I’m sorry, man. He OD’d a couple months back. Neighbor found him. I’m sorry to break the news to you.”
It hit me harder than I thought it would, probably because I never thought it would happen to him. He was Bruce “Bigfoot” Garwood, after all, star swimmer, bound for great things, and now his story had ended. I knew I’d never write it. This little tale? It’s just for Amy, a way to thank her for allowing me back into her life, and because she asked why I eventually called. It’s up to her if she wants to share it with others.
My opinion? The world doesn’t need anymore stories about the guys that didn’t make it. There are plenty of those. I used to be one of them. I might still be one of them, if it weren’t for Bruce.