The first thing he said to me was how did I like the girl he had been with at the party, and I said, “Nice,” and the second thing he said was, “I ate her for the first time last night.”
I thought Jonah was an asshole and he – not to put too fine a spin on it – thought I – being a law student with a judge for a father – was, at best, a pussy and, at worst, a fag; but we were both friends of Max’s, and The After was Max and Billy’s bar; and later – not too much later – after Max’d been committed and Billy’d been stabbed to death and Pumps had driven off a cliff and Saul’d blown his cheek out with an M-14 and I was a continent-width away, I heard – maybe from Arlene – Jonah was in Allenwood for smuggling drugs and guns.
I hadn’t thought of Jonah in years – decades – until five minutes into my morning meditation, so I Googled. He had died six months before, no wife, one son, the other 50-plus years a blank; but the next link was a court case (E.D. Pa.), and his felonies had been over-blown, two counts of dealing 235 grams of meth, dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct, like the unavailability of the informer, a young woman, in and out of loony bins.
But that’s not why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you because the assistant U.S. attorney was one of the two other guys in my first year study group, and the second was the assistant D.A. in State College who prosecuted my favorite cousin Milton for a bogus possession with intent to distribute.
Talk about something whispering, “Running with the wrong crowd.”
And not meaning The After, no matter how big an asshole Jonah was.