Chase Darkness with Me

by Billy Jensen

  “One day, I was out sick from school,” he began. “And when I came back the next day, my friend Paul wasn’t there. I asked the teacher, ‘Where’s Paul?’ And she said, ‘Paul’s gone.’

  “She told me he was running in front of the school bus when he dropped his lunch box. And he ran back to pick it up. The bus driver didn’t see him. And the bus ran him over.”

  My dad’s face changed.

  “He was there one day. And then I came back to school, and he wasn’t there anymore,” he said as he tucked me in. “And it was like everything was normal, but my friend was gone.”

  Dad never took me to church. The only spirituality in my house was the two posters he had tacked on the wall of the family den. One was the poem “Desiderata,” which begins, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.” The other was a quote from Coolidge: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” Heaven was not a place my dad believed in. The idea that if a person didn’t believe in a certain god they would be left out of heaven, no matter how just and good a life they might have led, was something Dad could never reconcile. He wanted to believe but couldn’t.

  “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” he told me.

  I was six.

  By the second week of the bedtime story, he told me about the day his brother convinced him to steal a fishing tackle box from Modell’s department store, and how he got caught and all his friends got away and he was sent to juvie. He told me about the gangs he was in, the Asphalt Angels and the Jesters, how they would rumble with other gangs from neighboring towns, and how they would decide on the rules before each fight—skin, sticks, knives, but never guns.

  He told me about the time in high school when he mouthed off to the gym teacher and the teacher actually punched him in the face. “I came home and told my father, and he took the side of the gym teacher,” he said, his anger long ago replaced by his new responsibility to protect me.

  Then he was caught throwing spitballs in the cafeteria and for the rest of the year was forced to sit at a table with a bunch of older girls. Each day, he asked one of the girls if she was going to finish her lunch. He finally got up the courage to ask her to a movie, one of those beach movies. But he made the date for the daytime and blushed when they arrived at the theater and realized that the matinee was different from the evening show. He sheepishly followed my mother to their seats, and they watched the cartoon Gulliver’s Travels by the Fleischer Brothers.

  By the third week, he told me how he ran away from home when he was fifteen, stealing his father’s rare-coin collection, buying an ID off an older, tattoo-covered greaser named Chris Keer, and hopping on a Greyhound for Los Angeles. Halfway through the trip, he felt bad and mailed the coins back, but he made it to LA. He went straight to Hollywood and Vine, which he had heard on the radio was the center of the universe, and got a job parking cars at a restaurant. When they discovered his real age, he was fired and went to work selling encyclopedias door to door. He sold one set.

  He told me how when he was in LA, he traveled south one weekend to Tijuana and went to a whorehouse, determined to lose his virginity. He remembered that, inside, there was a line of men just waiting around, yet there were plenty of available women in the room.

  “I asked the guy in front of me, ‘What is everyone waiting for?’ He told me ‘The best girls are upstairs. They are busy. We’re waiting for them to come back.’” Dad told me about how he waited and picked the girl he wanted.

  “Okay, bedtime.”

  After a month in LA, he returned to Long Island. But he was never going back to live with his family. He lived hand to mouth, on friends’ couches or on the street. One night, he was walking through TSS, a department store in Levittown. “I saw a sweater that I liked. I put it on, over my shirt, and started to walk out of the store. I’m on the escalator, and this woman comes up behind me. She grabs my arm with both her hands and says”—my father clenched his teeth—“‘Move, and I’ll break it.’

  “I stood there, waiting for the escalator to hit the floor. Waiting. Waiting. And as soon as it did, I flung her off me. Whoosh!” He threw his arm in the air. “She went flying.

  “I started running toward the front doors of the store. I was twenty feet away when this guy ran up to me. I didn’t think. I just reeled back and bam! I punched him right in the face.” The guy tumbled into a rack of clothes.

  “Turns out he was an off-duty detective,” my dad said.

  By then, I was far too wired to even think about sleep.

  Dad was arrested and taken to the precinct. There, he gave his name as Chris Keer, the name on the ID he had purchased before he ran away to Los Angeles.

  But the police were familiar with the real Chris Keer—he had been in trouble before and had arms full of tattoos. They knew my dad wasn’t him.

  He said they ran his fingerprints through the FBI and got nothing. Then they tried a different tactic: they went to the media.

  “They ran my picture in Newsday,” he told me, “with the headline DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?”

  He said his parents saw the story and told the police that the man in their custody was actually a fifteen-year-old boy named William Jensen.

  He was sent to Nassau County Jail. They offered his parents a deal—he could do a year in prison with the adults or two years at Coxsackie, which was then the youth reformatory where New York City and Long Island sent their bad boys. My dad begged his mother to let him go to the adult prison. But she refused, and he was shipped upstate.

  The next week, my bedtime stories got a lot more graphic. Dad told me tales of fighting in the yard, of shivs, of fibbing that he was from Brooklyn so he would have tougher friends than the Long Island kids, and of playing a lot of chess.

  He got out of Coxsackie, hid from the draft, got hooked on heroin, kicked the habit, then learned how to paint houses, married my mother, and eventually started his own business with the goal of giving me the life he had always wanted.

  It was a wild tale, and it stuck with me long past those elementary school bedtimes. As a teenager, I remember going to the library to find the article of the mystery man wanted for punching a detective in the face. I believed my dad’s story, but I just wanted to see it in print. I went through spool after spool of microfiche but didn’t find it.

  Throughout the story, one thing was clear. Dad never had a best friend. Someone he could tell stories to. Someone he trusted above all else. So he made one—me. And we did everything together.

  Every carnival he saw being assembled in a church parking lot on his way home from work? We were there the next night. Every cool playground he noticed with a rocket ship jungle gym or giant slide? We were there that Sunday. Every movie that looked completely inappropriate for an eight-year-old, from Stripes to Animal House? We went. When wrestling got big, we were at Madison Square Garden when Hulk Hogan won the belt and at the first WrestleMania with Mr. T and Cyndi Lauper. We would head back home from Penn Station, Dad letting me pick out a comic book from the newsstand to read on the train. But I would never read it because we spent the ride back talking about what we had just seen. (“Did you see when Ali punched Piper!?”) Because that was what best friends did. Same when we drove to Shea Stadium or Nassau Coliseum, listening to doo-wop or the Beatles. When the demented final chords of “Helter Skelter” ended with Ringo shouting “I got blisters on my fingers!” he told me about Sharon Tate and how Charles Manson’s family attacked her and cut her baby out of her womb and wrote the word pig on the walls in her blood. The cutting-the-baby-out part turned out to be urban myth, but it all stuck with me.

  My parents let me stay home alone for the first time when I was eleven. They left me with two Stouffer’s French bread pizzas, the remote cable box, and instructions not to burn down the house.

  They didn’t say anything about what I could or couldn’t watch
on TV.

  That first night, I sat transfixed on the floor, chewing my poorly cooked pizza and learning about my impending doom. The Man Who Saw Tomorrow was a documentary on HBO about Nostradamus, the Frenchman who supposedly wrote hundreds of quatrains that predicted the future. The booming voice of Orson Welles told of the rise of Napoleon. The rise of Hitler. The rise of a blue-turbaned tyrant in the Middle East, launching missiles to start World War III, one of the nukes landing with a deafening crash in the center of New York City.

  But that wasn’t what freaked me out that night. World War III? The end of the world? Those events, I thought, were inevitable.

  What freaked me out was the man on the grassy knoll.

  We got to the part about the Kennedy assassination. I watched as the president rode in his limousine in Dallas, smiling and waving to the crowd. Then I watched his head explode. Jackie climbed onto the trunk to collect pieces of his skull. But then the camera zoomed into the bushes behind her and showed an outline of what looked like a man sitting among the leaves, holding a rifle.

  Nostradamus had apparently predicted that there would be an assassin in front of the president.

  Apparently, no one else saw him that day. But I saw him. Or at least I thought I did.

  “There’s a guy with a rifle! In the bushes! He shot the president! I have to tell someone!” I yelled in my head.

  That Monday, I marched into the school library and asked for every book they had on the Kennedy assassination. I spent the next forty-five minutes poring over autopsy reports.

  I went back the next day. And the next. And the next.

  “Can I have all the Kennedy assassination books?”

  Soon, the librarian would see me coming and I didn’t even have to ask. Today, that might have gotten me on a watch list, but back then, I was just the skinny kid obsessed with blood-spatter patterns and magic-bullet theories.

  After a month of spending my lunch period inside Dealey Plaza, I came to the conclusion that Nostradamus was probably a fraud. It took a few more years for me to conclude that Oswald probably acted alone. But along the way, I graduated to the Son of Sam and Manson murders. I devoured Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, and Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil, about the Cotton Club Murder and Arlis Perry’s rape and brutalization inside the Stanford University church, where her attackers inserted a three-foot long altar candle inside her and shoved an ice pick in the back of her head.

  My mother lent me that book after she read it.

  I didn’t have anything to rebel against when it came to my parents. My mom gave me true-crime books, and my dad was my best friend.

  As my dad was molding and shaping his own mini me, he was certain I would grow up and take over the family house-painting business. He was so sure of it that he never thought that I would do anything else. But sitting in the seats at Shea, listening to me rattle off Mookie Wilson’s on-base percentage, it occurred to him that maybe he should start saving money for college.

  I never became the rough-and-tumble brawler my dad once thought he was building. Instead, I became a romantic. A devotee of the Smiths and the Cure, Sisters of Mercy and Depeche Mode. Pining after a girl, writing goth-drenched poems I would never show her. I was the boy in the back of the class with the weird haircut, a folded-up copy of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell slipped into the pocket of my thrift-store overcoat, which I wore over my leather jacket, which I wore over my denim jacket, which I wore over an army surplus shirt, which I wore over a The Queen Is Dead T-shirt.

  My armor. Every layer. Anything to hide me from the world and my skinny arms from the sunlight.

  I painted my room black with jagged white lightning stripes and wrote poems and song lyrics on the wall. I hated my handwriting, so I asked Dad to use his rock-steady hands to write them.

  Dad looked past the melodrama. He was just a house painter helping his son fulfill his vision of sleeping in a black room with a David Bowie lyric scrawled on the wall.

  My bedroom was absent of all light, save for those jagged white lines, giving it a jittery, spinning effect like I was sleeping inside one of those balls of simulated lightning you could buy at Spencer’s Gifts. I would drift asleep to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

  In the fall of 1990, I walked into a cream-colored room on the seventh floor of Myles Standish Hall residence at Boston University, lay down on the long, narrow mattress, stared up at the ceiling, and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

  A few weeks later, Dad came to visit with two gallons of black paint and helped me cover my dorm room in darkness, accompanied by those jagged white lines, to make it feel more like my angst-drenched bedroom from home. He may have never understood why I was all gothed out, but he always did everything he could to make everything all right for me, including coming back up when the school year ended to paint the room back to its original, inoffensive beige.

  He also didn’t quite understand what his $80,000 was going to be paying for when I told him what I wanted to study.

  • • •

  On the first day of college, I was locked out of two of the classes I wanted to get into and wandered into a religious studies class. At the end of the first week, the professor invited anyone who was interested to listen to a talk later that evening. The topic would be “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

  From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Jesus, every hero was following in each other’s well-worn footsteps, he explained, going through the same trials, delivering the same rewards.

  “Even Luke Skywalker.”

  “Wait, what?” I sat up. “Skywalker?”

  That night, I walked into a wood-paneled room on Bay State Road along the Charles River and took a seat in the middle of a dozen or so wide-eyed undergrads and the handful of bespectacled grad students.

  I sat there looking around the room, trying to figure out if the speaker was among us, when the professor walked in and thanked us for coming. He pulled a VHS tape out of its sleeve and jammed it into a VCR sitting under a boxy TV at the front of the room.

  What the hell? I thought to myself. We’re going to watch a movie?

  After some cheesy synth music and 1980s-era computer graphics, an old man appeared on the screen, sitting in a chair surrounded by tall bookshelves.

  “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us.”

  The man, who I would soon learn was the legendary mythology professor Joseph Campbell, continued.

  “And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

  Holy shit, I thought to myself.

  He continued on, going through Hercules and Moses and Buddha and Christ. Departure. Fulfillment. Return. And adventures in between.

  His interviewer, Bill Moyers, asked him about the cantina scene in Star Wars.

  “That’s my favorite,” Campbell answered. “Where you are, is on the edge… The first stage in the hero adventure is leaving the realm of light which he controls and knows about and moving toward the threshold. And it’s at the threshold that the monster of the abyss comes to meet him.”

  I wanted in. I wanted all of it. The dragon’s blood. The Iroquois princess. The song of nature. I could ring the bells of the cathedral and slay the minotaur.

  Let’s figure all this out! I shouted in my head. Boil all this noise and religion and psychiatry and philosophy down to the essence of what we are supposed to be doing as human beings.

  Maybe I was in the middle of the existential crisis that comes with every freshman year. But I thought I had found my calling and declared classics and religion as my major, with a focus on mythology.

  But the romanticism of myt
h could not hold back the true-crime instincts of my childhood. Four years, one bachelor’s degree, and $30,000 in student debt later, I managed to shoehorn crime into my studies and found myself in grad school at the University of Kansas with a scholarship to investigate new religious movements. New religious movements is the academic way of saying cults, and I was gravitating to the cults that were posing the biggest threat to law enforcement at the time: the Christian apocalyptic movement. With names like the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, the Church of Israel, and the Order, many of them shared affiliations with the Aryan Nation, had a lot of guns, and viewed The Turner Diaries as a blueprint for an upcoming race war.

  There were a lot of these cults out there. And there were a lot more unaffiliated criminals who were going after the same thing, like the guy who blew up a truck full of weaponized fertilizer in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City in a misguided attempt to overthrow the government. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in that attack, including 19 children.

  I was becoming well-versed in these Christian apocalyptic cults, and after the bombing, I wrote to the special agent in charge of the Kansas City bureau of the FBI, asking if they needed any help in the area.

  The form letter I got back from Supervisory Special Agent William M. Chornyak asked me to fill out the enclosed preliminary application for special agent position, along with a background survey and qualifications questionnaire. It included a gentle warning that “the position you are considering as a special agent in the FBI is very competitive.”

  In order to apply, you had to have worked full-time at the same job for at least two years. My teacher assistant position instructing classical mythology wouldn’t qualify, so I started working forty hours a week at a Play It Again Sports in Kansas City. I would study cults, teach myths, and play on the KU hockey team during the day, then sell sporting goods every night and on weekends.

  I took the sample written test and aced it. The physical requirements were a different matter and had me running through Kansas wheat fields every day, trying to get my one-and-a-half-mile time down to the required sub-twelve minutes. The last stumbling block was my eyes. Agents were required to have uncorrected vision not worse than 20/200. I would have to get Lasik.