Jackie glowed. “I told you he was probably a show dog, didn’t I?”

When visiting hours were over, a nurse handed me a plastic bag containing the clothes my brother had on when he got to the hospital. At home I emptied it out and saw that Jackie had been wearing the same stained undershirt that he’d worn when he slept with me and Clops, but the blood from Clops’s mouth had dried and looked like chocolate.

I was introduced to Suicide by Joey DeCenzo and Mousy Town. Suicide was the steepest hill in Pawtucket. When it snowed, the guys who hung out there would slide down it on toboggans. Madness. Once you got going there was no stopping. You just had to pray that nothing would run you over at the bottom. In the sixties, two kids riding on the same toboggan had been flattened by a sanding truck; everyone was hooked. It became a test of courage called Rhode Island Roulette.

I never rode on a toboggan with DeCenz. No sane person would. I’ve seen him break a leg jumping off a sixty-foot-high trestle into a shallow section of the Blackstone River—just to see if it could be done without breaking a leg. Another time, at a party, DeCenz stood against a wall and allowed Drugs Delaney to throw darts around his head from fifteen feet. Didn’t even blink until he got drilled in the chin.

But DeCenz wasn’t your standard Pawtucket sicko. Although he was six feet four, covered with body hair, and 230 pounds by the time he was fifteen, he was a harmless beast. One time, five or six of us were hanging out throwing snowballs when this pissed-off gearhead with a wad of snow in his ear suddenly slammed on his brakes and came charging us on foot clutching a baseball bat. Nobody budged. Wasn’t as if we’d been throwing grenades. When the guy was halfway across the street he had to realize he’d made a grave miscalculation, but it looked as if he’d made a graver one when he went after the biggest kid in an obvious attempt to intimidate us. He raised the Louisville Slugger and took a mighty swing at DeCenz, actually cracking the bat over his shoulder. Anyone else would have been organ-donor material. There was electricity in the air while everyone waited for DeCenz’s reaction. When the crowd sensed mercy, they started yelling for the terrified gearhead’s scalp. DeCenz massaged his shoulder and said, “Hey, chicken-neck, are you fucking nuts?” To everyone’s disappointment, though, he just carried the gearhead back to his jacked-up Chevy and stuffed him in through the open window. The guy squealed away looking more confused than if he’d been pummeled. But that’s the way DeCenz was; he wasn’t out to hurt anyone but himself.