Time Heals Nothing

Psycho Joe wants my blood. He’s angry for the way Cornelius and I ended our friendship with him. So angry that he’s threatened our lives. While traveling back to Minnesota during the Winter Break, an email popped up on my phone. It was an alert notifying me that Psycho Joe had sent me a message through Facebook. Thank God I was stopped at a wayside when I read it, because if I had seen it while driving I likely would’ve veered off the road. The subject line: long time. The message: it’s been awhile.

I left my mom’s house that day with a full pack of cigarettes for the road. From Wheaton to Rochester—about a 4 ½ to 5-hour drive—I smoked six or seven cigs. From Rochester to my apartment—two hours, at most—I finished the pack. That message really stressed me out. I figured this Facebook message was a way to strike fear into me, let me know that I’m still on his shit list.

While we were all still in college, one of our friend’s sister worked with Psycho Joe at a health food store. When we found out, I wondered if he would try to find us. At that point, I felt guilty and ashamed about what I had done, but I didn’t want him to confront me. I figured he was angry, and I figured right. The first time he talked to her about us, he said, “I want to kill Dan and Cornelius.”

I hadn’t heard from him firsthand since Cornelius and I had played another friend’s graduation party the summer after we graduated from college. Our friend’s cousin, who happens to be friends with Psycho Joe, was the party and must have told him that we were there, too. The next day, Cornelius and I both got phone calls from Psycho Joe. When I saw his number on the Caller ID, I reverted back to my teenage self and let it go to voice mail. The second the light indicating a message began blinking, I checked the message. It was ten to fifteen seconds of maniacal laughing. I erased the message and tried to put it out of my mind, though Cornelius and I would talk and stress over it for the next few days.

The last time I had seen Psycho Joe was at College of DuPage, nine years ago. I was walking up the stairs in the Student Center; he was walking down. It was a passing period in the afternoon, so the area was crowded. When we crossed paths and made eye contact, his lips curled into smile that seemed to say, “If it weren’t for all the people around, I’d shove you over the railing.”

When I got back to my apartment in Minnesota, one of the first things I did was text Cornelius to tell him about the Facebook message. He agreed with me: it was creepy. We traded messages trying to figure out what it meant and what I should do. During this exchange, Cornelius told me he heard that Psycho Joe had recently gotten out of jail. This didn’t help matters. One of the reasons we stopped hanging out with him in high school was because his behavior seemed on par with that of someone bound for jail. The phone calls years ago felt like a scare tactic. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to do with this message. If he had been to jail, who knows what he’s capable of doing. Maybe it was a way to get his feelings off his chest, some sort of rehabilitation and he was going about it in a socially awkward way. Or maybe some horrible things happened to him in there, and now he’s looking to take out his rage on those of us who have wronged him. Not knowing was stressing me out the most. So I decided to respond to his message with, Yeah, it has been.

The way we ended our friendship with Psycho Joe has pretty much tormented me ever since it happened. We all had been good friends during our freshman and sophomore years at West; but during the second semester of that second year, we were noticing several disturbing changes in Psycho Joe that made us rethink our friendship with him. First off, he was getting really into the fact that his friend, J.J., was a Gangster Disciples legacy. J.J.’s dad or uncle happened to be a high-ranking member of the gang in the early seventies. Psycho Joe thought this was great and began associating with other people in the area that wore the GD colors and who, at the very least, acted as though they were in the gang. Psycho Joe knew how to form his hands into all the gang signs. He made Xeroxes of them, placed the pages in a binder, and one night he showed Cornelius and me the whole thing. The way he explained the numbers and which way to point, it seemed like he was trying to recruit us.

I didn’t really think that he was going to join a gang. We lived in a pretty well to do suburb, and the chances of him breaking in seemed slim. What worried me was the idea that the boredom of living in an area where kids resort to petty crimes might cause him to one-up the taggers and the destroyers of mailboxes by committing more violent crimes. I had my reasons for feeling this way.

One night at the Baja’s—this clearing along the Prairie Path where underage kids partied—Psycho Joe tossed back a mouthful of Percocets and tried to pick a fight with this Indian kid who was older and twice his size. The reason: the Indian kid had an ongoing tiff with J.J. Psycho Joe got his face kicked in pretty bad.

After that, he began bringing weapons, pot, and scripts (that he had illegally) to school. At one point, he asked me if I’d stash a quarter ounce bag of weed and his butterfly knife in my locker because he had already been caught with drugs in his. He began telling Cornelius and I about the people he was hanging around when he wasn’t with us. Usually they had some sort of gang affiliation and access to drugs that I’d never consider taking. It all became too much. We were fed up with him and came to the conclusion that we needed to stop hanging out with him to avoid the consequences of his actions.

He was no longer going to West by our junior year. Why, I’m not sure, though I’m guessing it had to do with the locker searches. But that didn’t stop him from calling us. And instead of telling him that we didn’t want to be his friends anymore, instead of trying to find out why he was on a path of self-destructive behavior, we simply stopped answering his phone calls. When we’d see his number on the Caller ID, we’d let it go to voice mail. When our parents would tell us he was calling, we’d say don’t pick it up. If it was too late and they had already picked up, we’d tell them to say we weren’t there.

I can imagine how damaging that would be for someone to go through. When you think you can count on someone to be there and they’re not, it’s heartbreaking. I know we didn’t go about it the right way, but what the hell did we know? We were sixteen and dealing with some pretty heavy shit of our own. We didn’t need the added worry of getting in trouble by proxy. We felt that distancing ourselves from him was the only choice. Still, I’m not proud about the way it went down.

Psycho Joe’s response to my Facebook message rubbed me the wrong way. It said, so what is dan dewolf up to these days? If we were sitting in the same room while he said this to me, his delivery would be condescending and filled with suppressed anger. He’d be leaning back in his chair with one arm slung over the backrest, one leg crossed over the other. He’d have a shit-eating grin on his face. I think this because he didn’t say, what are you up to these days. And because nothing in his past would lead me to believe that he’s genuinely interested in what I’ve done, unless it somehow gave him insight to my misery or it provided useful information for attacking me when I least suspected.

For years I’ve had dreams where he’d make an appearance. It’s the same situation every time. I’m running somewhere with a group of friends, though they’re people I can’t identify. We’re not exercising or anything. It’s like we’re really excited to get somewhere else. Right when the group takes off, Joe appears. He’s not visibly angry, and he’s not out for a fight. He looks broken, like he just wants answers, an apology. So I say I’m sorry. I try to tell him I didn’t know any better, and that there was no excuse for ditching him. He doesn’t accept my apology. He doesn’t say anything. When I wake up, my chest and arms feel inflated with rotten air, and I have trouble sleeping the next few nights.

I tried to sound oblivious to our past when I responded to his second Facebook message. I wondered if he would air out his grievances, allowing me the chance to explain or even apologize. But I still feared that he might do something to my mom’s house if he knew I still lived in the area. I said, “Working and going to school in Minnesota. How about you?” I can only assume he figured my response was insincere. Maybe he thought I was patronizing him, or maybe he was upset that I didn’t try to tell him off. Who knows, maybe he was upset that even responded in the first place. But he didn’t send me another message after that. There were no requests for an apology or explanation, and he didn’t take the chance to tell me I was awful friend or a bad person. I’d like to think that he’s decided to let it go, that he’ll stop carrying this anger toward us. But that might be a selfish thing to think. Who knows? He could be working on an epic response. He could be trying to track me down as we speak.