Chapter One

TOKENTOWN, 1962

So this is where my story started. And if you have the slightest bit of curiosity about what was the truth behind what happened in this town of ours, you'd want to hear it from me. I'm the only one who can tell you the truth, you know. The real tragedies all struck in the 80's, but I'll probably set up a background first. Because if you don't know what the conditions were like, I doubt if you'll be able to understand anything that happened later.

So do we begin then? Good.

It was the usual routine for my parents, from home to work then back to home. They used to work real hard, those two. She worked as a nurse in one of those small hospitals and he used to work in some bookstore as a janitor. Life for those two was never out of the blue, always predictable, always the same. They'd go to bed at ten in the night, wake up at around six or seven. Then there was breakfast, a bath after that perhaps, and before you know it, back to work.

They lived in one of those old clusters of houses we used to have back in the time. There were these small rows of nice little homes lined up on the outskirts of the town. And although the places themselves were not spacious enough for a family to live in, the both of them got along pretty well. They were happy with what they had, at least I thought they were. We had a small kitchen, one bedroom, one living room, one bathroom and that was about it. There was a small garden in the outhouse and we used to have deer prancing around from time to time to eat whatever little vegetation grew there. Now sometimes the deer got annoying as well. But when their little children used to come and play around, then we took no offence to their activities. They were one of the very few animals who'd warmed up towards the human intervention in their natural habitat, mainly because both my parents never refused to help someone in need. Then it didn't matter if that 'someone' was just a hungry deer. Everybody got to eat, and everybody had to share.

They'd never thought about having a kid, my mum and dad. Hell, there was hardly enough money for even the both of them to get along. How were they gonna bring a child into the world without knowing where to get the money for that child, huh? They already had a small family with the deer in the garden, and though they only got to meet that family once or twice a week they were quite content with it. There was no need for a kid of their own to come around.

But these things are never planned are they? Something unexpected always tends to happen and before you know it my mother was gonna be having me in nine months. I couldn't wait to get started. Perhaps it was my excitement then that lead to me being born two months earlier than I was supposed to.

I wasn't your ordinary kid. And you could tell that the very moment I came into this world. I was underweight, I cried a lot more than I should've, I didn't feed properly, and I had to spend the first week of my life in a glass box that was something called the 'incubator'.

I wish I could say that everything became alright after that and we all had a jolly good time. But that wasn't it. See as a kid you don't know just how much you're parents are going through, and that's because you're selfish. All you really care about is your timings and your tantrums and your wants and your comfort.

There wasn't enough money in the house to keep it going. By the time I was six months old I'd spend most of my day in a cradle or on the ground trying to learn how to crawl. Can you believe that? Six months old already and couldn't even crawl. I was such a disgrace.

They'd named me Alexander after my grandfather who lived in Sicily back then. I liked my nickname Alex a lot better than my real name, but I ain't had no choice over who called me what. How did it matter anyways? Now I know what you're thinking. Italian kid, Italian family, must be fluent in the language right? Didn't work that way. See, my parents came to Tokentown a year after they got married. And this city's miles away from Italy. My father had to learn English because they wouldn't give him a job without that. My mother had to learn English because no one in the hospital understood what she was saying if she was speaking in Italian. And time is a weird thing. In just two years my parents were more English than Italian and that was just something that stuck.

We had a couple of neighbours who were immigrants too. They'd come from the more English speaking part of the world so they did help my parents out a lot. Beautiful family they had. And God knows what a coincidence it was that they had a daughter the same year my parents had me. But we'll come to that later.

When I was six months old, I was just starting to get a hang of what the world around me was actually like. My Dad used to leave before I woke up and my mom used to be looking after me most of the time. I had no idea what she kept herself busy with when I was asleep, but I think she used to knit a lot. That and she used to spend time with the deer whenever they came around.

It was one of those cold winter mornings and my dad had just left for work when I woke up. My mom was outside in the backyard doing something, and the moment she heard me crying she came inside to find me awake. She'd left the door to the backyard open though, and so one of the baby deer shyly wandered into our house. It was probably trying to hide from the cold. And that was the first time I ever saw another animal besides a human being in front of my eyes. It was very friendly too, much friendlier than people anyways.

That was just six months after I was born. That was 1962.

One day my dad came home from work looking all flustered and distressed over something. He wouldn't eat, he wouldn't drink, he wouldn't even go to sleep. Turns out they'd fired him from the janitor job because he showed up for work late. I mean that was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard of. Firing a janitor because he's not on time? However it wasn't until later that I found out my dad used to be late because of me because I used to keep everybody awake all night with my crying and whining.

He found work somewhere else about a week later. He was a cabbie I think. But both he and my mom knew that as long as she was staying home, there wasn't going to be enough money coming in.

So she had to work. We had some neighbours, the ones who'd helped my parents learn English. They had a baby girl about my age too. And her mother was a housewife so she had no problem taking care of me while my mom went to work. She in fact insisted upon it. You don't find people like that no more. The kind who'd just take time from their own schedule to look after somebody else's kid.

But those people understood our situation. And they were very kind about it.

My mother didn't start work until I was eight months old, of course. By that time my weight had come to normal, I wasn't crying and troubling anyone all the time, and I had gotten a lot less annoying. I was an ordinary kid. Finally.

So dear Mrs. Rosenthal had no issues with me. My mom used to leave me at her place from seven in the morning till four in the noon, by which time she'd come back from her hospital shift. I'm actually surprised that I stayed for about nine hours with a complete stranger, though they weren't so much strangers. I and Mary loved to play with each other, which was what kept us busy most of the times.

Mary Rosenthal was a girl who'd been born, by pure co-incidence, the same year as me. She was a couple months older though, but just as clueless as me as to what we were doing in this world. I remember the first time we grabbed each other's fingers. That was probably the first time in my life when I'd felt that I probably wasn't the only kid in the universe. Her hands were just as tiny, her crying was just as frequent, the silly faces she made were just as silly as mine, so I think that was actually the time when I got the idea of there being other people like me. It was a bittersweet feeling though, you want to be the only one of your kind but you also don't wanna be lonely all the time.

I wouldn't dwell too much on my childhood years, because I don't want to start with all the hardships and the difficult times that all of us had to go through, for there were plenty. We used to fall short on rent, some days the water supply would be cut, other days something would be wrong with the electricity, there was never any shortage of problems. But I never remember my parents having backed out from any of them. Neither did Mary's. Nor did anybody else's. We were all one strong community.

By the time I was eight, Mary and I had known each other for about seven long years. There was a sense of inseparability between us, and we had no idea it even existed when we were together. But I knew there was something special about this girl. She was all I wanted to be with.

Mary's father was a security guard for one of the banks. His pay wasn't nearly as much as you'd expect it to be, and how they managed to raise a family from all that I'll never know. In my house though, the main wage earner was my mother, because the hospital job paid a lot better than the small taxi job that dad had. I never had to think much about the money problems, it was all kinda taken care of by my parents. But I knew one thing. Money was a luxury. I look at the world nowadays and I see things. I see people gambling away cash like there's no tomorrow, I see men showering money on strippers just for an extra lap dance, I see people spending truckloads of money for absolutely vile reasons.

But it's too soon to tell you anything about that. Let's go back to the years when my life was still in its innocence and everything seemed nice.

TOKENTOWN, 1970

Now where were we? Oh yes, money. I never knew what money was until I was in my adolescent years. The main reason for that was probably because I didn't just see a bundle of cash lying around in the house here and there. Every single dollar mattered, and so there was nothing that could just be kept without being accounted for. My parents never discussed money around me. It was either after I'd gone to sleep or after I'd left for school. It was mostly after I'd gone to sleep because by the time I left for school my father would already be away at his job.

I liked school. I ain't gonna bother you with what all I enjoyed and what all I didn't, it's probably the same for all the kids anyways. We all love the playgrounds and the lunch breaks and stuff like that. What most people hated were the studies, but I didn't mind them. A lot of the boys had other friends whom they'd talk and share their food with. I however, only had one person. And believe me, she was all I needed.

I'd also befriended this kid called Sal, and yes that is short for Salvador. Used to live in the same colony as me and Mary. He was a nice guy. I remember having met him for the first time when I was eleven. He was one of those 'doesn't like to play sports' kind of people. Luckily, I was one of them too. We were both sitting in different corners while the other kids were playing football and stuff, and this guy just happened to catch me eye. I went over and introduced myself, and before I knew it we were having lunch together. I��d told Mary to excuse me for the day, and she didn't mind, considering that she had friends of her own.

Now just because we didn't like to play sports doesn't mean we were weak. It didn't even mean we weren't athletic or anything. As you'll see later, I got a lot of compliments for being a 'handsome guy' and so did Sal. Well I got them more often, but it's not like I like to brag about it or anything.

So there was this thing that happened when I was fifteen. Remember Mary's father? He was a security guard if I recall correctly. Now this guy used to work hard. And I mean real hard. And so he didn't deserve what I'm about to tell you next, but it happened anyways.

It was around ten in the night, so there weren't any witnesses as to what actually took place there, but the story goes something like this. The bank Mr. Rosenthal used to guard was a really isolated little place somewhere north of the city. Now out of nowhere, two guys with guns in their pockets show up and start asking for money. But this guy, he was a man of integrity. You ask him to guard a bank, then he's gonna guard the goddamn bank.

He didn't come home that night. By the time it was two in the morning Mrs. Rosenthal was in our house, wailing and moaning about her missing husband. We didn't find him until later in the morning of course, when people actually discovered his body with all those bullets in them. And some people told us in the morning that they'd heard gunshots fired at ten thirty. And nobody walked out to investigate, can you believe that shit? Not a single person investigated the thing. Nobody. They just left a dead man on the road in the middle of the night to be discovered in the morning.

I mean that's what the world has come down to. If I were to shoot let's say a stockbroker today, nobody would give a shit. Hell, nobody would even know who the poor guy was.

Everything changed for us after Mr. Rosenthal's death. His wife would sit by herself and cry for long hours. It was terrible. Finally my parents decided that she was lonely and needed some company. So they moved in with her to her house. And they trusted me to take care of Mary.

We both were fifteen at the time. Now it was not like my parents were living at Mrs. Rosenthal's house or something, it was just that they would spend most of their time over there. And Mary would be over at my house with me. She said she didn't want to see her mom sad, so she preferred not seeing her at all.

She really loved her mother. More than I loved mine perhaps, but I wouldn't wanna say that with certainty. After we were home from school Mary and I would often relax at my place before studying. At times she used to cry so much in my arms I would run out of things to say. She missed her father, her mom was depressed, and she had no one to look after her. What was she gonna do? Keep her troubles to herself? You know that doesn't help. Not when your father was killed by two armed bastards who didn't have the courage to face him like men and shot him thrice in his back.

So she turned to me. I was the only person she could count on, and frankly I usually loved being that person. But sometimes her sadness overpowered my ability to console her. What was I gonna say? That I'm sorry it happened? Everybody in the colony was sorry it happened. But I used to look at her, this beautiful girl, and I used to see tears in her eyes and it used to break my heart. She was the bravest person I knew, I'm not kidding. If ever I got in a rough fight at school, she'd be the one to tell me to stop crying like a girl all the time and knock the poor son of a bitch out.

I'd never seen her like this before. When we were kids we used to visit the playground and both of us would always fall off the swings. And it was always her who'd dust off her clothes like nothing had happened and get back on. And here she was, crying against my shoulder because her father had been taken away from her by unmanly scoundrels.

If there's one rule I've always followed my whole life, it's this: You wrong me, you get wronged. You hurt somebody I care about, I hurt you worse. You get treated like you deserve.

But that came a little later. I couldn't do anything to avenge her father then, I didn't know how to do that. All I could do to help was stroke Mary's golden hair when she cried to me. That's all I could really do back then.