UNCLE RAY

“I want to know everything.  I want to know it all. It’s better to just know. So, if you are going to give me half of the story, or the highlights, I am not interested. I am here because I figure you have nothing left to lose and no reason to lie. I am here because I want answers, yes. But I want answers about things you may not even know I have questions about. Is that OK? I need to know that that will be OK.”

He nodded. He looked back at me and he looked like a limestone statue of what used to be a man. He seemed taller than you would imagine from the newspaper articles, broader than I had remembered and meaner than anyone I had ever seen.

 “Are you still affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood?” I asked and gestured toward his forearms.  I looked down at his arms covered in tattoos – mostly done in prison or someone’s garage – and wondered if he could remember what they all represented; if he could even read them anymore, or if he cared too. They had meant something at some time, but now?

“No,” was his flat answer.

“Do you regret the tattoos then?”

He chuckled under his breath, “No. I have got bigger demons, honey.”

He must have caught the startled look that I was trying to hide, “Is it OK to call you that?  I guess that was over the line, right?”

“I do not know what is over the line anymore. I do not even know if a line exists.”

“You and me both,” he said and scratched his neck revealing even more tattoos hidden under his arms and on the sides of his head.  He was covered, almost completely.

“Do you remember what they all mean?”

“Are you really here to talk about my tats?”

“I am just here to get to know you…”

“OK, well these,” he gestured all over his body with a flourish I would not have expected from him, “they are not me. You should know better than to judge a book by its cover.”

“They just struck me as interesting but they seem not to be of interest to you,” I said feeling nervousness begin to swell and spill over in my stomach. A standoff was brewing. His eyes were dimming. "I just want to consider your life’s progression, how you have changed, you know – “

“You want to know what made me this way. You want to know if I was born this way. You want to know where it all went wrong. And, you have a right to want to know. So, let’s just get it out there, shall we?”

Oh shit. Here were the cards I had been hoping he’d tip but so feared, as well. I did not respond so he spoke.

“I was born different.  I know that for sure. I do not know what is different exactly or why. But, I know that I am not wired like most people – like you or your aunts or your grandmother.”

“What about my mom?”

“Well, see, that’s the thing. She was born with it too. She was born with the desire to light the whole world on fire but no fucking idea why. Some of us are born comfortable in the skin of strangers and easily move about life with a callous distant sociopathic view. Why do you think that is?”

“Why do I think what is?” I was always uncomfortable when people asked me questions like that. ‘Why do you think that I am the way that I am?’ As though I even know in the hell that I am.  That truth died with my mother. I have come to realize that. 

“Well, do you think I am a sociopath?”

“How should I know?”

 “You are not a bit like her, you know that?” He paused. I stared at my notebook as though there was a portal to another dimension between the blue lines. I couldn't bring myself to look up at him. He seemed to understand. “I mean it,” he said and then nothing more on the topic.