The intersection in front of our house was the most hazardous in the state. It was a five-wayer regulated by a huge, pentagonal traffic light that winked an enticing yellow in each direction. At rush hour it became a five-army battle to see which battalion of cars would blast through first. One year there were more than fifty fender-benders. To the old man’s chagrin, though, there’d never been a real grisly wreck—a lot of close calls but no corpses. We all knew it was coming. Sort of like living on a fault line; we were always waiting for the Big One.

I’m six feet tall with curly, dark red hair. I don’t have freckles. When I was younger, the old man used to proudly tell me that redheaded guys are supposed to have mean streaks. He was confident that I would sprout into a short-tempered wild man. Well, I didn’t have it. I looked for it, I prayed, I dug deep into my soul, but it wasn’t there. I used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror before bedtime and grimace and snarl and flex my nostrils and wrinkle my lips, but I couldn’t convince myself that I was to be feared. When someone would pick a fight with me, I’d get all set—stand sideways and crouch as if protecting a manly set of balls—and I’d be staring at the kid I was supposed to be wailing on; but all I could see was my own puffy face and my little grapes, and before I could shake the image the kid would knuckle me. After years of getting beaten up for not being mean enough, my face finally developed the thick mean look that the old man promised. Girls, for the most part, didn’t notice me, but the few I did hook up with credited my good fortune to the “cute chip” on one of my front teeth. My brother, Jackie, who’s three years younger than me, got the worst of the deal; he didn’t get slapped around as much, but he was cursed with thoroughbred buckteeth. A couple of them were chipped too.