But like me, Trevor was small for his age and picked on. Life in California was hard; the kids slept on floors and in closets. “I’d been getting in a lot of fights and losing them,” Trevor told me, “getting bullied a bit, and I figured my dad could help with that. I asked to move back. That’s probably why I stayed with him even when it was bad. I was trying to learn to be tough—a man.”

“Dad always had a short fuse,” Laurel said, remembering doors ripped from their hinges and walls riddled with holes his fists had made. “It was terrifying.”

As he grew older, Trevor grew melancholy. At 15, he seemed depressed, lethargic, and numb. By the time he turned 19, Laurel says, it seemed as if his spirit had been crushed. “You asked me if he was angry,” Laurel said. “And I said no. But there was more to it than that. There really wasn’t permission for him to be angry. Showing anger would have escalated hostilities with my father and alienated my mother even more. Anyone in his situation would rightfully feel angry. But Trevor’s anger was turned inward and manifested itself as depression—except, as you know, in a peer situation where he felt an injustice was done to him. Then he unleashed his emotions, and all the injustices he endured were focused and targeted on—well—you, I guess. You and the other kids he fought with.”

“My father didn’t punch me often, but because the threat was always there, it was always horrifying,” Trevor said the next time we talked. “He was a very angry, irrational man. He wasn’t a drunk, but that somehow would have given him an excuse or the hope of a cure. He was always there for me. And I do love him. I learned a lot from him. He’s definitely the reason I read so much. But the anger without reason is what got me in trouble, because if there are always consequences, then there’s never a consequence. I just did whatever I wanted, and eventually I became very comfortable with violence.”

I could relate, and told Trevor so. But while he and I had both grown up violently, I’d run away—dropped out of high school and moved to New York City. Trevor had stood his ground, and he’d grown so used to the violence that the very threat of it now made him feel safe. (Trevor’s father told me that, eventually, he realized that he was scaring his son. He sought counseling and matters improved considerably.)

“It’s funny,” Trevor said. “I never talk about this stuff with friends. It’s passé to whine about your childhood. And here I am, telling the country.”

“It’s good,” I said. “It’s good to talk about this. When my dad lost his job, we moved into our basement and rented out the house. The parents of the family we rented to were drunks. When the rent came due, their daughter would show up to fool around with me. I remember they had a water bed.”

“When I climbed on top of the whale, it felt like a water bed,” Trevor said.

And then he told me something else I’d forgotten. “We only fought five or six times,” he said. “I only remember two. Once, when you almost knocked over the bookcase. The other one was in front of the blackboard. You were swinging at my body, fighting with everything you had. As if you were trying to kill me.”

“Trevor,” I said, “I probably was trying to kill you.”

I, too, had been a bully all along.

The first panic attack came on my flight back. Cold sweats, and fears no pharmaceutical could conquer. The shock of the injury had begun to wear off. My hand began to hurt, and I began to feel claustrophobic. When I closed my eyes, I saw the faces of other kids who’d hit me and others that I’d hit—faces I’d spent my adult life forgetting.

The stewardesses looked suspiciously at me. I felt suspicious, scared of the things I felt stirring inside me and sorry for so many things I’d done.

I’d like to tell you that something lifted then—that the poisons worked their way out of me. That I bought myself a motorcycle, joined a boxing gym, and reconnected with my own savagely authentic self. But the only thing I’m reconnected to is a sadness I haven’t felt in years. And the only thing I’ve learned is that Trevor will always be there beside me.

“Memory is a funny thing,” he wrote a few weeks later, after my panic attacks subsided. “If you tell a story the same way enough times, you actually start to remember it that way. What I should have done before meeting you again is, I should have written down everything I remembered. Now my memory is tampered by your presence. But you seem very much the same, your mannerisms and expressions. You’re very much the same person. And we’re very much the same. It’s funny: You’ve got your intellectual life in New York, and I’m at the top of lowbrow culture in Oakland. But if we had to, we could switch. I could go back to school and join your society. You could learn to ride a bike, and fight, and join mine.”

“Trevor’s drunk, btw, this is Kay,” the next line read. “He had a great time with you. He’s trying to kill me!”

Alex Abramovich lives in New York City

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