“I Was Childhood Friends with a Cold-Blooded Killer”

The first time I ever got high, I was on an eighth-grade school outing: two stops, the first at Cranberry Glades, a nature preserve in Hillsboro, West Virginia, the second at novelist Pearl Buck’s birthplace, five or six miles away. I don’t remember much about the second stop because I was thoroughly wrecked by the time I got there.

I hadn’t planned it that way, but in retrospect I’m not surprised. Eddie Fields* always had a way with words, and his voice had a wheedling, insinuating quality that could coax you into doing things you never thought you’d do. He’d induced me to climb out the window and wander the night streets on sleepovers. More than once he’d persuaded me to steal a pack of cigarettes and smoke myself sick. That day he convinced me to slip away after the teacher’s headcount. “Just for a minute,” he said, leading me to a secluded pocket of forest, where he produced a joint. By the time we caught up with the rest of the kids, I was stoned out of my mind.

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That was Eddie for you, always two or three years ahead of the rest of us in his vices, always persuasive, and always a little bit dangerous. I knew him well — well enough to know that he had a mean streak, anyway, though I could not then envision what he would become.