Bad Energy

I was thinking of my cousin the other day. He's been missing since 2003. He was caught up in a mess with gangsters and other dregs of society.

My cousin was one of those multi-talented, never sit still, always smiling kind of guy. He was enormously popular. While we didn't mingle with our social affairs, we did play sports together. We'd meet twice a week to play tennis or something. He'd call every other day.

I saw first hand the route he was taking was beginning to head into a dark forest. He had become disillusioned with life. He never could quite go the "normal" route - something he craved for. Yet, some mysterious force was whsipering in his ear to take an alternate route to success.

It was a philosophy his father instilled in his boys. He believed in the theory of kill or be killed - literally. He owned a garage back in the day and he'd purposely put his 13 year-old sons alone at the cash at 2am "to toughen them up." They were held up a few times at gun point. My father was incensed and mortifiied. He knew his brother was fucking his boys up mentally. All he was doing was teaching them to become shysters.

And they did. My cousins always started a conversation with a, "psst."

Going straight was for suckers. That was the message.

What may have worked for two of the boys, didn't work for my cousin. Deep down, he was a soft soul. A good guy. He once told me after a tennis match, he went hunting. He shot a deer. When he walked up to it it was still alive and suffering. His father insisted he kill it. He couldn't do it. The image still haunted him over 20 years later.

He'd call me at my office every day talking to me in code. Trying to figure out how to "be like me." Be like me? Why, how hard can it be? Obviously, he was conflicted and confused? He wanted all the things of a normal life but he wanted more. I tried to help him out but he'd always close by saying, "you're wet behind the ears."

I don't know the details of exactly how he got himself in a jam but there was help. He chose to do it himself. He did go to my other uncle for help, but he's a control-freak jerk-off and turned him away. Why, I cannot say. Oddly, he avoided coming to my family, the straight shooters, for help. My father says he would have helped him. Apparently, he needed $50 000 dollars.

That's never a good thing. Unless you're opening a day care.

I still remember the day he went missing. It was a couple of days after my knee surgery. I don't know how or why, I got up and walked to my balcony and looked up at the sky. My brother in law was fixing a chair for me. "It looks and smells funny out there. Strange energy." "Looks fine to me," he responded. "Don't forget to Scotch-Guard it, Plato," I replied.

That night, I got a call from his wife, my sister, "he's missing."

I knew something was adrift.

He gambled with the wrong crowd to achieve a life he was not certain about. His upbringing almost certainly played a part.

Everyone liked my cousin. My buddies still nod their head each time we talk about him. My wife and brother-in-law (her brother) too. They all knew. What, I'm not sure.

Seven years later his body is still out there. No closure for an aimless soul.