Free I Was There the Night He Died by Ray Robertson

kill my buzz. “So why are you out here then?”
    â€œMy dad’s funny that way, you know? He’s not really down with the whole getting-high-in-the-house thing. What’s your excuse?”
    A good question. A good reason to take another toke and change the topic. “I saw someone yesterday.” We both wait for what’s next. I lift my head in the hope that the icy wind will help clear my head enough to finish my thought. “On your front step. He looked … suspicious.”
    â€œFedora? White overcoat? Moustache?”
    â€œYou know him?”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œNot really?”
    â€œIt was my dad.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œYeah. Oh.”
    The girl deserves to have the last word, even if it’s only Oh . Sara and I had an understanding when it came to each other’s relatives: I’m allowed to criticize my family; you’re not. You’re permitted—expected, even—to commiserate with my complaints; only not too enthusiastically. But it’s not acceptable for you to pile on with your own objections. This wasn’t an arrangement arrived at without a certain amount of antecedent loud trial and error.
    â€œWhat’s on the playlist tonight?” I say. I hadn’t noticed whether or not she has her iPod with her, but odds are yes. No one under the age of twenty-five, it seems, dares go anywhere anymore without being armed with either a cell phone or an iPod or an iPad or, more often than not, some combination of the three. When I was a kid, we all dreamed of one day growing up to be just like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, happily weighed down at the hip by all of our phasers and communicators and everything else needed to kill the bad guys and keep us in close contact with the good ones. Three decades later, I don’t even wear a watch, three keys hanging from a plastic Siemens’ keychain that my dad gave me my only adult concession. Thankfully, dreams don’t always come true.
    â€œI thought you didn’t like music,” she says.
    â€œI never said that.”
    â€œOh, right. It’s just music made in the last twenty years you don’t like.”
    â€œThat’s not true.” And it’s not—it’s more like the last thirty years, roughly around the time of the fourth Ramones album—but I resent the insinuation of incipient old-fogeyism anyway. Even dinosaurs have feelings.
    â€œReally,” she says. “Who died tonight then?”
    I don’t ask her to repeat herself; turn around on the bench instead to better determine whether she really said what I think she just did.
    â€œIn the book you said you’re writing. The one that’s not a novel. Isn’t that the deal? That some ex-roadie or somebody else like that that you made up talks about a bunch of different musicians that he somehow just happened to be there with when they kicked off?”
    I swivel back around and decide not to tell her the topic of tonight’s disquisition, and not just because it’s a dinosaur’s right to graze wherever he pleases. Talking about a book in progress sucks away its oxygen, fills up with contaminating chit-chat the brain-breathing empty spaces it requires to flow and sow and grow. Sometimes Sara would casually ask me what I thought about this or that subject, and I’d excitedly answer that I was writing about that very thing in the book I was working on, so for now could only say it was an interesting question I hoped to do justice to in my novel and that maybe we could talk about it after she’d had a chance to read what I had to say. To which she would usually reply that she’d really just prefer to have a conversation with her husband and not have to wait for publication day. To which I would usually get us talking about something else. Good manners get in the way of good art.
    â€œNo one you’d know,” I say. “No one you’d find