Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

someone quote from them now, I want to crawl under a chair and hide. Ultimately, it is only my bad taste that has been immortalized.
    *  *  *
    T he evening following our last day of school, Brian stayed at my house and we ordered pizza to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation. We sat at the kitchen table eating and watching the occasional person walk past on the darkened street outside. When I informed him that during the course of the day I had met a girl and we’d found ourselves attracted to each other, his curiosity was piqued. I told him her name, Laura, thinking he’d have no idea who I was talking about, but he surprised me by saying, more than once, “Are you
serious
?”
    It turned out that he saw this girl and her two sidekicks on an almost daily basis, because one of them, Ashley, lived on the street directly behind him. That set the tone and daily routine of our entire summer. Every single day after Ashley’s parents left for work, Brian and I would head straight over to her house, and all five of us would spend the day watching music videos or passing the hours in her backyard pool. The third girl’s name was Carrie, and before the summer was over Laura and I broke up and Carrie and I paired off. Brian and Ashley were an item all summer. There was something magickal about that season and the small group the five of us formed. When the summer ended, so did we.
    We didn’t meet them often on the weekends, because that would have involved the hassle of dealing with parental figures. We kept in constant contact by phone, but had no in-the-flesh meetings. Instead, Brian and I would spend the weekends ice-skating at a nearby shopping mall, riding around the streets of Memphis with his older brother, or watching videos and talking. That was the summer of much talking.
    I also got my first job, and it was one of the most horrendous experiences of my life. I woke up one morning and decided I was tired of being broke and penniless; it was time for me to join the workforce.
    I started by putting in applications at all the usual places that hire teenagers—grocery stores, fast-food joints, Walmart. No one was hiring. Then one day I remembered a small seafood restaurant next to the highway. I had never been inside the place, and I was growing desperate because potential employers didn’t seem to value the exceptional intellectual giant who was presenting himself to them. The seafood restaurant was my last option.
    I stepped inside the place one afternoon, and it was so dark that it took my eyes a minute to adjust. The floors were bare concrete, and the tables were small and covered with red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloths. The cash register stood a few feet away from me, and sitting on a bar stool next to it was a small, gray-haired, humpbacked man. He seemed to be engrossed in paperwork of some sort. I approached him and asked if this fine establishment might be hiring. He looked at me for a moment in a way that would lead one to believe he was calculating shrewdly, then asked, “Can you start tonight?” I responded in the affirmative, and he told me to show up at five o’clock.
    I returned home elated. I had a job and would soon be able to afford whatever I wanted. The future was wide open and my mind was filled with possibilities. Reality would soon smash my youthful idealism.
    When I arrived at five I was told that I was the new busboy. My uniform was an apron that looked as if it might have once been white in previous years. I distinctly remember using my fingernail to scrape off pieces of eggshell that were cemented to the front of it. After putting it on I was shown to the kitchen, where I witnessed a vision from the very bowels of hell.
    This restaurant was the only place on earth I’ve seen that was filthier than prison. You could have literally vomited on the floor and no one would have noticed it. They would have stepped over the puddle and kept right on walking. The place was family-owned, and the family consisted of a father, mother, and three children. The hunchback who hired me was the father.
    The mother was a 250-pound lump who never made eye contact with anyone and never spoke a word. She was filthy from laboring day and night in this kitchen. The three children—two boys and a girl—were hell spawn. The youngest, a boy about two years old, wore nothing but a pair of filth-caked underpants. The older son, who was about three or four, usually wore shorts but no shirt or