Paranoid Park

by Blake Nelson

  I got up and walked to the front of the class. Everyone was, like, wow, all the cool skater guys are going to the principal’s office.

  I didn’t feel very cool. I was scared to death. My legs felt like they might buckle at any moment.

  I tried to clear my head as I walked the empty hallway. Behind me, Christian came out of biology. I waited for him. It reassured me to see him. He was one of the most popular boys at our school. Nothing bad could happen to him.

  “What is this about?” he said when he saw me.

  “Who knows.”

  “Probably going to complain about skating behind the cafeteria again,” he said.

  We walked together in silence to the principal’s office. One of the other skaters appeared, a guy named Cal (for “California”) who had also been summoned. He was very worried. He didn’t do well with teachers, or authority, or anything, really.

  We all went into the office. Mrs. Adams seemed a little on edge. The whole office seemed a little amped somehow. This wasn’t a good sign. Jared came in. The other guys dribbled in. Paul Auster was chewing gum and was told to spit it out and got in an argument with Mrs. Adams. But something was up, something bigger than gum or skating behind the cafeteria.

  When the seven of us were assembled, Mrs. Adams led us behind the counter and down the little hall. We passed the principal’s office and arrived at a small conference room none of us had ever seen before. Inside, a man stood at a round table. He smiled at us pleasantly. He wore a sports coat and slacks. He had thick black hair, a thick neck, a thick head. In front of him was a briefcase and one of those little notebooks like reporters use. There was something hard in his face, though, something that gave me a chill down to my toes.

  When we were all inside the room, he directed us to sit around the table. We each found a chair and sat.

  Mrs. Adams told him he could have us as long as he wanted. He smiled and thanked her.

  He closed the door and introduced himself. His name was Detective Matthew Brady. We could call him Matt. He was here investigating a murder that occurred downtown near a skatepark. The police department wanted to make some contacts within the skate community, in hopes of solving the case. He was visiting various high schools in the area and talking to skateboarders who might be able to help.

  I didn’t flinch. I didn’t do anything. It was easy, with the other people there, to just sit and do nothing. Paul Auster looked guilty. So did Cal. Cal’s face turned red.

  “So first, let’s go around and do names.”

  We did that. People told their names. People were scared, you could see it in their faces. You could hear it in their voices.

  “So what exactly are you accusing us of?” said Paul, out of the blue.

  “Nothing,” said Detective Brady. “Nothing at all. None of you are suspects. What we’re trying to do is get a better understanding of the skateboarding community.”

  “It’s not a community,” said Paul, irritably. “It’s not like we know each other.”

  I was shocked he was talking like that to a police detective. He would make himself a suspect.

  “No, I understand that,” said Brady. “Let me give you the background. We have a possible murder situation. The deceased was found on train tracks, just outside the central train yard downtown. Now the train that was involved in the incident, before it gets to the yard, passes near the Eastside Skatepark.”

  “Paranoid Park,” said Paul. “Nobody calls it Eastside.”

  “Exactly,” said the detective. “We think it’s possible that if this was a murder, someone from Paranoid Park could be involved. The problem is, as we have discovered, Paranoid Park is a unique place. There’s a very diverse group of people there, some of whom are hard to track down. So we’re trying to talk to people like you guys, to see if we can better understand what goes on there.”

  “You want names,” said Paul Auster.

  I couldn’t believe he said that. Neither could Christian Barlow, who said, “Bro, he didn’t say that, chill out.”

  “Well,” said Detective Brady, “I might need names at some point. But what I need first is some background.... All right, who here has been to Eastside-or, I mean, Paranoid—Park?”

  At first I was afraid to raise my hand. But all around me, hands went up. Mine went up, too, slowly, cautiously.

  “Great,” said Detective Brady. “You all have. That’s just what I was hoping for.”

  It was like a class, like a small AP class where everyone has to talk and the teacher expects you to have an opinion. Detective Brady did that on purpose, I suspected.

  Actually, the situation was easy for me. I was one of the lesser skaters in the room, so it was totally natural for me to keep quiet. I sat, strangely calm, and watched the other guys talk about the various skateparks, the difference between “Streeters” and “Preps,” etc. I tried to speak every once in a while. I would attempt to agree with something, and someone else would interrupt me. I managed somehow to believe the “part” I was playing: the clueless new guy who wanted to help, but didn’t know much. It made perfect sense that I would mostly listen.

  Then Detective Brady got more specific. Was anyone at Paranoid at any time during the weekend of September sixteenth and seventeenth?

  Now, no hands went up. I looked over at Jared. He tentatively raised his hand.

  “Yes, Jared?”

  “We ...” He pointed across the table at me. “We went, like, a week or two before that. During the day.”

  “What day?”

  “I don’t remember. Tuesday, maybe,” said Jared. He was a little scared now. You could hear it in his voice. “And actually, we planned to go that weekend, but we didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you?” said the detective. Suddenly he focused on me. He wanted me to talk.

  “Uh ...” I stammered. “Well, we ... Jared ... wanted to go down to Oregon State.”

  “So you did that instead?”

  “I did,” said Jared. “I went by myself. He stayed here.”

  “So you went to Paranoid?” said the detective, turning back to me.

  I felt my face turn red. “No ...” I said. “I ... didn’t want to go by myself.”

  “What did you do instead?”

  “I ... drove around for a while. And then I went home—”

  “Paranoid isn’t a place you want to go by yourself,” interrupted Cal. “It’s kinda dangerous.”

  “I go by myself,” said Paul, defiantly. “People only mess with you there if you mess with them.”

  “I’m just saying,” sputtered Cal. “It has a reputation.”

  “Were you there that weekend?” the detective asked Paul.

  “Nah,” Paul answered. “But I go there. I’m not afraid of it.”

  “Did anyone else go there, at any point during that week?”

  No one had.

  Detective Brady wrote this down. We talked some more, about other places people skate, which places had more Streeters, which places were more Prep.

  After about forty minutes, Brady checked his watch. He had another high school to go to. He wrapped it up, giving each of us a business card and telling us if we heard anything to contact him.

  “Skateboarders have a bad reputation in this city,” he said. “You guys could do a lot to improve that if you could help us out.”

  Nobody seemed that enthusiastic. But Brady understood. He shut and locked his briefcase.

  The meeting was over.

  The seven of us headed straight for the restroom when we left the office. The bell was about to ring anyway; none of our teachers would expect us back.

  We scattered around the boys’ room. Jared sat in a sink, Christian leaned on the windowsill, Paul Auster sat on the heater by the door.

  “What is up with that guy?” said Cal. “Why does he think we know something?”

  “Who is he even talking about?” said Christian. “I didn’t hear anything about a murder.”

  “I never saw a co
p interview people in a group like that,” said Paul Auster.

  “That was seriously weird,” I said.

  “Why do they even leave Paranoid open?” said Cal. “It’s so skanky.”

  “Because it’s the best skatepark on the West Coast,” said Jared. Everyone shut up for a minute. “And now they probably will close it. And nobody good will ever skate in Portland again.”

  “How do you figure it’s the best skatepark?” asked Cal.

  “Any idiot knows it’s the best skatepark,” answered Jared firmly. “It’s been written up in every major skate magazine. Do you think Skate City has ever been in Thrasher?”

  “There’s chicks down there, too,” added Paul.

  “Yeah, Streeter chicks,” said Christian. “With Streeter diseases.”

  “Hey, if you got a condom it doesn’t matter.”

  “Unless it’s crabs.”

  “Or scabies.”

  “Or lice.”

  “Dude, crabs is lice.”

  While the others talked, Jared turned to me. “So you didn’t go down there that night?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “And you went home? I thought you went to my house?”

  “I did ... but I ... that’s what I meant. I went home to your house.”

  Jared accepted my explanation. “Pretty weird, though. We were almost there that night.”

  “Yeah, but it didn’t happen at Paranoid. It happened at some train yard. It was, like, a half mile away.”

  “Huh,” said Jared. “How do you know that?”

  “That’s what he just told us.”

  “When that skinhead got stabbed,” Paul Auster told everyone, “his friends supposedly hunted down the guy and killed him and threw him in the river.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Cal. “He’d just float back up.”

  “Not if you put chains and cement around his ankles.”

  “Yeah, but eventually your ankles rot and your bones disconnect and the rest of you comes up to the surface.”

  “Or if they drag the river.”

  “Yeah, or if they dredge it, or whatever,” said Cal. “My brother knew this guy who used to do that. They’d find, like, cars and refrigerators and stuff. He said they found a leg once.”

  “Now I want to go check out Paranoid,” said Paul. “See what’s up. I wonder if everyone’s freaking out.”

  “There’s probably cops swarming all over down there.”

  “Maybe not,” said Jared. “You saw that guy. It looks like they’re trying a different approach. They’re going for the psychological trap.”

  “Yeah, all that ‘we want to better understand your community’ crap. How stupid do they think we are?”

  “Yeah, like cops ever trust skaters. We want to help you with your reputation. Sure, you do!”

  “Yeah, how about that time you beat the crap out of those guys down at Suicide Stairwell for no reason? Were you helping us then?”

  Everyone laughed. Paul Auster stuffed some gum in his mouth. “Frickin’ cops.”

  That night I went home and found my aunt Sally in my kitchen. “Your mother went to stay with your grand-mother tonight,” she said. “She’s upset and isn’t feeling well.”

  I didn’t see why we needed Aunt Sally around. It wasn’t like we were totally helpless. At least she made brownies. That’s what my aunt Sally always did when she got stressed.

  Henry was sprawled in the living room, watching the big TV. I went upstairs to watch the news. I always watched the local news now, the long one at five thirty that had the most stuff on it.

  I closed the door in the upstairs TV room. I turned on the TV and turned down the sound. The big story of the day was the new Trail Blazers coach. He was in trouble. He’d helped his players cheat in college and lied about some business deals. Now they were firing him. They showed him at a press conference lying about his lies.

  Then the murder came up. They had a new graphic for it. Instead of the train tracks they’d been using, the little picture beside the woman’s head now was a skateboard. Underneath, it said “Paranoid Park Murder.” I crawled closer to the TV screen and turned up the volume slightly.

  “... Area police continue to focus on an unauthorized skatepark underneath the Eastside Bridge, known by locals as ‘Paranoid Park.’ The unsanctioned skatepark is about a quarter of a mile from where the body was found. Police say a community of homeless youth have been known to loiter in the area....”

  They had video footage from Paranoid. A guy with his shirt off did a front-side grind for the camera.

  “Meanwhile, police continue to interview people here at the park, as well as local teenagers....”

  There was a short bit of video of a college girl who had obviously never been on a skateboard in her life. She had a tie-dyed shirt and a nose ring; she probably went to Reed. “Eastside Skatepark is part of this community,” she said. “It’s organic to its site, and we have to value that....”

  The newswoman added that the police still considered the incident a possible homicide.

  The weather came on. I turned off the TV and went to my room. I had homework to do. I hadn’t studied for anything in weeks. I couldn’t let my grades completely nose-dive; it might arouse suspicion.

  But I couldn’t do homework. I opened the book, stared at it, but my brain wouldn’t focus. So I lay on my bed and got out the card that Detective Brady gave each of us.

  DETECTIVE MATTHEW BRADY

  PORTLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT

  HOMICIDE DIVISION

  Along the bottom was a phone number and a Web site and an anonymous phone line to call in tips. I wondered if Jared would turn me in if he knew. I wondered if Scratch would turn me in. Maybe there was a reward. Would someone like Scratch turn me in for a couple hundred bucks? Probably. It didn’t matter. They would catch me in the end. Or maybe they wouldn’t. The world was so random. One of the things I’d seen on the Internet was that only a third of murder cases were ever solved. And this wasn’t even necessarily a murder. It might still only be an accident.

  Detective Brady returned to our school a couple days later. An announcement from Mrs. Adams called Jared Fitch to the principal’s office. I knew immediately it was Brady. From my science class I could see part of the faculty parking lot. I couldn’t see a police car. He probably didn’t have one anyway; he probably had an unmarked. I still knew it was him.

  I sat in my class. I could feel the pressure of Detective Brady on the school grounds. Would he call us in one at a time? Probably. Adults loved the one-at-a-time approach. Maybe he just wanted information. It made sense. Who would know about Paranoid Park better than skaters? Or maybe they got Scratch and he confessed and told them the murderer was a Prep, a nice kid from the suburbs. And now they were hunting that person down.

  I stared out the window. I imagined riding to the police station, my hands cuffed behind my back. That would be fine with me. It really would. I was done. There was no point now. My life sucked so much, I might as well get caught.

  I smiled as I thought that. I almost started to laugh. A week before, I had been so scared I was pissing myself. Now, with a homicide detective a few hundred feet down the hall, I was thinking, What are we having for lunch today? I wonder if Dustin liked his board? I wonder how many years I’ll get in prison? I was like, dude, whatever. I didn’t care. I was sick of worrying about it. Whatever happened, happened. Go ahead, Brady, I thought. Bring it on.

  The bell rang. I walked to Jared’s locker to see what was up. He wasn’t there. I saw Cal in the hall. He grabbed my arm. “Is that detective guy here? Is he gonna call us all in?”

  “How would I know?” I said.

  “Man, I hate things like this.”

  “What do you care? You didn’t do anything.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I hate cops.”

  “When have you ever dealt with cops?”

  “I dunno. You know what I mean.”

  I walk
ed away. I went to my next class. And then about halfway through it, there was a new announcement. It was me this time. My name. My name and no others.

  I was to report to the principal’s office. Now.

  I walked slowly, calmly through the empty hallway. I felt proud of myself in a way. I was handling this. I was dealing with it.

  In my mind, I rehearsed my story. We had planned to go to Paranoid, then Jared bailed to party with the girl at Oregon State and I drove around. I went back to Jared’s and spent the night. Then I went home the next morning.

  That was my story and I’d stick to it. If they busted me, they busted me.

  I walked into the office. Mrs. Adams led me around the counter, through the hall, and into the same room we’d been in before.

  Detective Brady sat reading some papers, making notes. He sipped a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I watched him more closely than at the first meeting. He looked tired today. I wondered how old he was. Thirty? Thirty-five? I also noticed he had a redneck haircut—no sideburns, too short on top. He was probably from the East Side himself.

  “Hello there,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “Have a seat.”

  I did. He told me he was talking to everyone individually. He wanted to make sure he had his paperwork together. He went through my info, checking my name, my address, my age. It was all the same as before.

  “Sorry to take you out of class.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “So. Anyway. I talked to Jared and he says you almost went to the Eastside Skatepark the night of the seventeenth. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said. I suddenly felt dryness in my throat. I tried to remember how freaked out Cal was. Even someone who was perfectly innocent would feel nervous talking to a homicide detective. So I was fine. I was a little nervous, but that was natural.

  “So you ... drove around that night?”

  “Yes. I ... well ... we went there another time and I was ... well, I thought it was cool and everything, but it was pretty hard-core. I’m not that good of a skater, so I didn’t want to go there by myself.”