All the Lives He Led-A Novel Read Free

washout, but I didn’t really care. I had better things to do with my time. Specifically, I spent most of my time on the street, hustling bucks in the Big Apple.
    I don’t like to talk too much about that period in my life.
    That isn’t conscience speaking, exactly. I was doing a lot of illegal things, sure, but so were the ten thousand other kids, refugees like me or even the local-born, who roamed the city’s streets, working pretty much the same scams I was. Panhandling. “Guiding” the tourists, or anyway the dumber ones among them. Hanging around the side-street bars to roll the most nearly paralyzed of the drunks as they staggered in the general direction of their hotels.
    That wasn’t particularly profitable. Even drunks didn’t carry much actual currency, and what can you do with cash cards that are keyed to the owner’s sweat chemistry? There’d be jewelry, maybe, if you could find a fence who wouldn’t cheat you and then turn you in anyway. But at best the profits were small.
    But I did what I had to do to get them.
    Let’s face it. I was a mean little turd. The only thing that I can say in my defense is that I hadn’t chosen that life. It was just the only life that was available for me. When I watched those old-time kid shows on the screen—that is, the pre-Yellowstone ones, all of them about well-washed boys of about my age who had moms who packed them lunches and went to parent-teacher meetings for them, and, especially, had dads who went to the office and brought home presents for their kids—well, while I watched those old shows I really wished I was in one of them.
    But I wasn’t. If Yellowstone hadn’t happened I might have become one of those kids once, but Yellowstone did happen and I wasn’t. And at least I had the sense to stay away from the kid terrorist groups that were getting organized about then.
    Well, all right, maybe I didn’t always stay totally away, because there was this one time that happened when I was about eleven. That one was a biggie, all right, although it wasn’t actually about anything that was going on in the city of New York itself. What it was was this terror bunch that called themselves the Crusaders for the True Bishop of Rome. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew what they had done. They had firebombed the Sistine Chapel when the cardinals were supposed to be electing a new pope there. According to the news, they killed three of the cardinals, but it didn’t make much difference. Old Jerome II got elected anyway. So, going home that night on the hydroferry, about six of us kids were talking about it, and one thing I said must have rung a bell.
    A neighbor kid named Artie Mason pulled me aside when we got to the Staten Island dock. “You sound like a man with principles,” he told me—an assessment that really took me by surprise. I don’t just mean the bit about having principles; it was also the first time anybody had ever called me a man. “Would you risk your life for something important?”
    “Depends on the money,” I said, being a smart-assed kid with, really, no detectable principles at all. It was the wrong answer for Artie, I guess. He dropped the matter. And a couple of weeks later he was missing from class. From all of his classes. Permanently. It wasn’t until nearly five years had passed and I heard he was in the Southeast Alaska Correction Center—residence limited to suspected terrorists—that I figured out what the question was that he had been going to ask me.
    That’s the way it went. Petty crime is what kept us going. I didn’t do as much as some of the others. I didn’t sell drugs, especially the old harmfully addictive ones like heroin or cocaine. There wasn’t much of a market for them when somadone came along, but I didn’t actually sell even that. Well, I mean I didn’t sell it myself. I did stand lookout while dealers sold any amount of their somadone smokes or salves or licky sticks or whatever the fashion was