Chapter 4: “Rooftop Courage” (from BRONX NIGHTS 🌃🍎)

We both have demons that we can’t stand
I love your demons like devils can
If you’re still seeking an honest man
Then stop deceiving, Lord, please
(Sam Smith)

{If you need to talk, the 988 Lifeline is here.}

If I had a dollar for every time I called the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline since the fated night on November 10, 2023, when Candy tried to kill me, the night of the “COLD HANDS!”

Actually, let me calculate it.

Flips through phone call logs. Consults Excel sheet of outstanding debt that is so laden as to stretch the storage limits of any Dropbox subscription. Minus three. Carry the eight. Aha!

I estimate I called the Suicide Hotline approximately 100 times since November 10, 2023.

Understand, it was about three dozen times that first month in the aftermath of Candy—not just due to the obscene stress of nearly being offed by a lover—Jesus, we had plans to get married; move to a hobby farm on the outskirts of the Twin Cities; have a son named Davisson; buy a cow, whose name is too sacred for these pages—but also from the sheer exasperation of pleading with my entire intimate social network not only to believe me about what happened, but to stop taking Candy’s goddamn calls and texts!

Did I just swallow an entire 12-pack of Fresca writing that bit? Hell, I think I ate one of the cans.

My Neuro mind refused to stop insisting that my inner circle cut off Candy completely. I hate to beat a dead horse about Autism—but pushing perceived truth was already my default setting before Long COVID cracked me wide open three years prior.

Bless the shrinks! My friend, Dexter, a psychology professor with psychopathology expertise, weighed in. Of all things, Candy reached out to him, thinking he was my therapist. He was my racquetball buddy, actually. She plied him for health information about me.

Only at his insistence did my close circle of (now mostly former) friends, mentors and family agree to block her.

With one exception, but that family member shall not be named.

Well, they can’t exactly be unnamed. Or can they? Shame on them for betraying family. Let’s see how they respond. I mean, a lot of people in this book are secretly reading the online serialized version.

(They think I can’t tell.)

By then, the damage was done—not just to my psyche, but to nearly all my closest relationships, including best friends, godparents, etc.—precisely as Dr. Dexter predicted. He told me in no uncertain terms:

“Because Candy is the real-deal psychopath and didn’t get to ‘execute’ her design—she will do everything to burn your life to the ground. That may have been the plan to begin with—not to kill you, but to light you on fire and watch you burn.”

I agreed, in part. But the reason Candy didn’t shuffle off to Houston and move on to the next victim wasn’t just because she had been cheated from some trophy.

In the Curious Case of Candy, there was a Witness.

Of all the unnamed names in this book, I promise you this one will remain the most unnamed.

I doubt there is any human drive fiercer than a pathological personality aware it has itself been “captured.”

After Candy returned to Texas, I told her there had been a Witness to what happened the day following “COLD HANDS!”

That’s why she became desperate and reached out to everyone she could think was close to my ear.

I was sick. I was self-medicating daily, and she knew that. I was an “unreliable” witness. What if the Witness really existed—and was reliable?

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Remember how I transitioned my disabled mother from South Carolina to Wisconsin in late October 2023?

My sister arranged for me to stay at a $10,000 a month cabin on Lake Superior, for an extremely reduced off-season rate, that in every way lived up to its sunrise and sunset views. Here’s one such view. And that may or may not be Candy in the bottom right.

I needed a break—a true convalescence.

Driving up I-95 four times while moving to New York was nothing compared to moving my mother up north.

Mom already had a debilitating spinal condition from a work injury, but that September, she became completely immobile due to the total deterioration of her hip.

I couldn’t serve as mom’s caretaker anymore. Because she was penniless, her only option was a South Carolina nursing home—until my long-lost sister stepped forward and offered to oversee her care.

Because this was Wisconsin—a state that gives a shit about the elderly and social safety nets—mom would instantly qualify not only for the surgeries she needed, but also a housing situation, plus medical and aide care, that was otherworldly better than the concentration camp nursing home systems of the Deep South.

I owe a tremendous thanks to people from all over the world—many of whom I have never met—who donated to mom’s journey north, as well as to the wonderful human beings—who I wish I could name—who did everything from drive her hospital bed 1,200 miles in two days, to sponsor our airfare from South Carolina to Minneapolis, to house our land and sky caravans along the way.

Dang, this really isn’t the chapter I expected. Better now than never.

While a team of Good Samaritans was looking after my daughter in South Carolina, I was planning to spend most of November in Wisconsin, helping mom transition. And, finally, rest.

Enter Candy.

Hey! I’ve got a posh cabin at a deserted resort—not many tourists clamor to skinny dip in Lake Superior at the edge of winter.

“Candy, want to fly up to Wisconsin on November 8, spend a few days relaxing undisturbed while I get mom set up in her new home?”

“Sure!”

I told you this book isn’t very kind to dogs.

We’ll let the academics debate the extent to which people with psychopathologies can love animals, but Candy sure loved her dogs—one German shepherd in particular, Daruk. (The name of this dog is also protected, for personal spiritual reasons.)

Daruk died unexpectedly just a few days before Candy flew from Houston to Minneapolis, where I picked her up, then drove her four hours to Washburn. Not once did she mention Daruk’s passing—not that day, not the next, not the day after.

In fact, the only mention of Daruk wasn’t even a mention at all. Candy ceremoniously left her precious Daruk pendant necklace for me to find on our made bed the day after she tried to kill me.

I was meant to find it when I returned to the cabin after dropping Candy off at the airport in the Twin Cities.

Wait a second! You drove someone who just tried to kill you four hours to the airport the day after she tried to kill you?!

Six hours, actually. There was a huge snowstorm on the way back.

It’s a valid question. Let me explain.

You’re at an exclusive resort—by fishing vacation standards—that is as deserted as the Stanley Hotel, and with just as much snow.

This somewhat diminutive, altogether friendly and quiet-seeming, African American former military marksperson, who you thought was the love of your life, goes all work and no play Jack Torrance on you after a lovely final evening dining and carousing—

Stop. I should mention Candy was something of a teetotaler. But not that night. That night, she had several cocktails, which is several more drinks than I had ever seen her have. (Bronx Nights is not likely to nail any alcohol endorsement deals.)

That last night, I took my sister and her husband, plus Candy and me, to a fabulous dinner. We wined and dined, then Candy and I drove to the Legendary Waters Resort & Casino. The last photo in my phone from that night is of her smiling, holding up a voucher. We walked away with $500 playing slots and electronic poker on 20 bucks.

I know, this story is getting more Nightline means Fargo by the second.

It was our last night together for probably a month or two. I offered Candy a full body massage. No expectation of sex. Just a one-way gift from one lover to another.

I was finally on top of the world—despite my failing health. And I was happy to give such a parting gift. After all, Candy had just lost her precious Daruk and couldn’t even bring herself to mention her pet’s passing in my presence.

Mom’s transition was a miracle mission accomplished. I was reunited with my sister after three decades. My daughter was in good hands. I had a new, well-paying job with Motorola Solutions—and was even on extended FMLA paid leave.

I even considered my Autism diagnosis a blessing. I was finally discovering answers for a lifetime of behavioral paradoxes.

Lucy had pinned the football to the ground, and by gosh, this time I was going to launch that pigskin between the uprights!

As I’ve come to learn, that’s when predators seize the opportunity to strike: at the sunrise horizon of hope and reality.

What Candy did that last night in the cabin is for a later chapter—if ever. This isn’t a murder mystery. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to share that information publicly.

But trust me—when we returned from the casino—that full body massage never happened.

“COLD HANDS!” got in the way.

“COLD HANDS!” didn’t just make Charlie Brown fly a little in the air and hit the ground with a grumbly “good grief!”

“COLD HANDS!” launched the zigzag-shirted tot into a suicidal orbit as large and round as his bald head.

As to why I bothered to escort Candy back to Minneapolis—driving her six hours through a blizzard—you be the judge.

Sooner or later, I’ll share the full scroll of Candy’s lies. I’ll give her this. She put on a good show for this librarian caught off his normal fact-checking guard from illness.

Candy was, no lie, a precision shooter—and always carried a gun on her. Plenty of photographs backed up these claims.

She obviously hadn’t carried a firearm on the plane, but what if I had kicked her to the cabin curb in the middle of the nowhere woods in the wee small hours of the morning?

Let’s say Candy calls the small-town cops—what if I had?

Who is law enforcement going to believe?

A beautiful black, ex-Army woman with no prior criminal record. Or the equally drunk 225-pound guy with a beard? (Thankfully, I didn’t have any priors, either.) Kind of a crapshoot there, I figured.

Still, let’s say I had managed to boot her from the place and secured the fort a la Straw Dogs.

What was to prevent Candy from calling an Uber, spending a night at a local inn, then heading to Walmart the next morning and going on a Smith & Wesson shopping spree, then returning to finish the job?

There are other factors, as well. I did the best thing I could do—and I’d do it again. I weathered the storm and got her from where Interstate 35 begins back to where it ends in the Lone Star State.

But not by car. By plane!

Here, have some peanuts, ma’am. Sorry about your pooch.

Candy knows what she did, all told. And I know what she did.

But most important of all, the Witness knows what she did.

That’s why Candy went Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs with my Emergency Contact list after she returned to Houston—and, as mentioned, changed her location on social media from Texas to South Carolina to fuck my mind some more.

Thankfully, there was a Third—someone who witnessed Candy at her very worst.

I often wonder if the death of her precious Daruk didn’t throw her off just enough—that, and the booze—to save me.

Thanks again, Alcohol!

The next day, Candy came after me again. I was standing on a dock, staring into the woods on the other side of the short peninsula, trying to make sense of my cartoon sunrise gone David Fincher solar eclipse.

She launched out of the cabin and ran toward the dock at full tilt. Literally—she was already drunk again.

She cornered me on the dock and swallowed two ciders faster than any frat boy could pull up to a keg spout.

The unprovoked, noxious blue streak that emerged from her mouth would make every Samuel L. Jackson scene in every Quentin Tarantino movie look like a Sunday School flannelgraph presentation of the rainbow moment from Noah’s Ark.

Her violence wasn’t just recorded. It was heard.

And that Witness keeps me safe to this very day.

Still, predictably, I lost my marbles. And my daughter. And all my best friends. Even some family.

And that was before I ever met Alex and Jojo.

Maybe the title of this book should have been How to Catch a Predator while Your Life is on Fire. Maybe it kind of is.

Let me conclude with the dog, for now.

Candy left the necklace with the picture of Daruk on the bed for me to find, when I returned from the airport to the cabin—only, I went back into the cabin quickly before taking off for the Twin Cities.

I wanted to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind. No way did I want to turn around and head back for any possible reason.

There was the pendant sitting in the center of the perfectly made bed—in the bedroom I didn’t dare reenter until I knew Candy was gone for good.

I put the necklace in my pocket and decided to give it to her at the airport. Another no way in hell—I wasn’t going to bring up my wannabe killer’s dead dog while driving through blinding snow.

When we pulled up to the airport curbside, we engaged in the most awkward goodbye in romantic history.

“Bye.”

“Um.”

Candy walked away. I pulled a cigarette pack from my jacket and reached inside my pants for a lighter. The necklace!

I texted Candy: “You forgot your Daruk pendant. I grabbed it off the bed.”

“I already cleared TSA.”

Candy hadn’t even been two minutes inside the airport.

“Come back and get it, please.”

“It’s yours.”

Candy buried her bitch with me. Maybe it was supposed to be more literal than that.

I drove back to northern Wisconsin, collected my shit and spent several days hiding from the world in Eau Claire.

When I entered the Lismore Hotel lobby, the kind concierge took one look at me and surprised the shit out of me—probably as much as I did her

“Do you need a hug?”

“Yes,” I squeaked.

She came from around the counter and hugged me a full minute. She must have seen Candy’s recent social media post:

I stayed in Eau Claire long enough to enjoy a nice cheeseburger in a warm tavern—until a woman cozied up to me at the bar, and within minutes of telling me her name, informed me she had Borderline Personality Disorder.

I casually walked toward the bathroom, slipped 30 dollars into the hands of a patron and asked her to give it to the bartender, then slipped out the kitchen exit.

I prayed for the first time in a long time on my return to the cabin. I parked at a rest stop to take a piss and uttered the words, “I wouldn’t be the least surprised if someone has a heart attack in front of me right now.”

Sure enough, I walked into the rest area and spotted a man on the ground, being given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a citizen nurse.

I sidestepped the emergency on my way to a wall of urinals, voided, then went back to my rental car.

Whether or not anyone believes me about anything in this book is irrelevant.

I know what happened.

I’m looking back in time at receipts, photographs, reexamining background check reports, pinching myself—squeezing out bloody Christ tears!—to make sure all these things really happened.

The only thing that didn’t happen was Godzilla sashaying on the George Washington Bridge. Also, the Lizard People. I hope.

Back to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

I wore those fuckers out!

I didn’t want to wake up at 49 and relive a childhood that would make Rosemary’s Baby check into the nearest orphanage!

I didn’t want to lose my invaluable friendship circle, a career and community I had labored for like the horse in Animal Farm, all in one fell stroke—though it nearly gave me one!

I didn’t want to spend wasted Bronx nights in the Detention Center and the Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program!

I wanted a puppy and a cow—and even a second child named David Harrison.

And I wanted the Minnesota Vikings to go to—maybe even win—one goddamn Super Bowl in my lifetime after a 14-3 season!

Most of all, I wanted to watch my daughter grow even more into the amazing woman I know she can become!

I dedicated 17 years to being the best dad any man could be. I keep toting around from storage unit to storage unit a 100-pound box of photo albums I meticulously archived for her future children and their children and their—you get my point. Also, her stuffed tigers and her cool anime sketch she has no idea I kept and laminated.

Honestly, fatherhood was the original destination of this chapter. But here the holy hell we are!

I even missed feeding the ducks and gardening every day with my mom—no matter her role, active and passive, in my fucked-up past!

I wanted a good night’s sleep just as much as the next man!

I wanted to sit with a buddy at a bar and knock a few back!

I wanted to trade in my Neuro hotrod manual brain for a Honda Accord automatic!

And I wanted to make a life with Candy!

And if not her, Alex!

If not her, Jojo!

Or whatever other shipwrecked capybara floats along!

Because who the fuck else but a member of Club Ped could possibly want to be—or manage to be—survive!—with someone as creaturely Situation Neuro All Fucked Up as I am?!

I wanted—want!—the goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch fuck a camel up the ass normal life that nearly everyone around me seems to have!

Hey, Arik, life hard for everyone.

HAVE YOU FUCKING READ
A SINGLE SENTENCE
IN THIS GODDAMN BOOK?!

Time for a sip of Fresca.

Gee, it’s only 5:34 a.m. This time 546 days ago I was locked in a bedroom in a Wisconsin cabin with a wooden duck statue under my pillow in case Candy managed to somehow bust through my door barricade with a butcher knife and a chainsaw.

Anyway, I’ve called the Suicide Hotline a lot the past couple years.

They’re quite good at what they do—except for that one lady who thought I was making all this shit up and hung up on me.

Suicide prevention operators are human, too, it turns out.

Don’t worry, though. Unless your life is this catastrophic, this apocalyptic, they’ll hang in there with you.

By the time this book goes to press, I hope and pray (to the gods I flattened with my keyboard in the last chapter) that Donald Trump hasn’t defunded the Suicide Hotline—or at least that Canadian international aid comes through for this “shithole” nation of ours.

Yes, even for the MAGAs. Lord knows they’ll need it soon enough.

Where was I?

Ah, yes. If I had $725 for every time I called 988, I’d be out of debt and financially redeemed from all the predators who have swooped upon me the previous half-thousand days or so.

All that started back on November 10, 2023—the night Candy showed me what “COLD HANDS!” are all about.

From now on, let’s just refer to that moment in time as 11-10.

Consults phone again.

That last casino photograph was taken at 11:55 p.m. By the time we got back to the cabin and Candy waved her magic wands at me, it was actually November 11.

So let’s call it 11-11.

G.A.L. just suggested I go with:

11
: :
11

Hmm. Not sure a text-based symbolic sigil is going to do the trick.

11-11 it is.

As you know, I lost my healthcare when I moved to New York, and for a time, I had neither therapist nor psychiatrist. Also as mentioned, Alex stole my controlled medication for Autism.

At one point during the Summer of ’24 Long COVID Cyclone, I found myself on my rooftop apartment late one night, ready to take the Shakespeare not to be plunge of faith.

I noticed a billboard just over the Harlem River. It read:

COURAGE

Not by design, the “U” in the sign was erratically blinking.

I had the stupid, Hallmark card idea: “Without U, there is no Courage.”

For what it’s worth, there’s also just Co-Rage.

Not exactly greeting card material. But kinda true.

I imagined Food Bazaar down the way at Bronx Terminal Mall, and I thought of the poor octopi on ice, waiting to be eaten.

No one should ever eat a cephalopod!

I could see Yankee Stadium too.

Fuck the Yankees! And fuck the Minnesota Twins for never measuring up to the Bronx Bombers!

I noticed the Tyson-Paul billboard just beneath me erected for I-87 commuters. {See the back cover.} I remembered that I was going to help Alex pay for her mom’s 50th birthday party bash. Alex was either going to host a rooftop party (which I wouldn’t be invited to, probably), or try to find a way to send her mom, who is a huge Mike Tyson fan, to the big fight in Arlington.

Fuck that shit! And especially fuck Jake Paul and the entire State of Texas!

I must have said—or screamed—some of these things aloud, for a voice called to me:

“Yeah, well fuck you, you dumbass, good for nothing retard!”

I looked up. It was the Manhattan Skyline.

“What the fuck?!”

“You heard me. Go ahead. Do it, you pathetic bucket of rat piss.”

“Hey, no one gets to call me retard but me!”

“Yeah, retard?! What ya gonna do about it?! Retard gonna go home and cry to his crippled mommy? I know, why don’t you jump off this here roof and fly to Wisconsin, Peter Pan.”

“Shut up, 520,” a maiden voice interrupted.

The gruff, mixed-use skyscraper backed down. “Okay.”

Another building chuckled.

The female voice had no patience. “Zip it, Chrysler.”

“You can hear me?” I called out.

“Yes,” the Skyline answered as a chorus.

The female voice identified herself, “You can call me 111 West.”

“I’m Arik,” I whispered. “You’re a lovely needle.”

520 nudged a neighbor. “He’s getting fresh.”

Several of 111 West’s lights popped on and off. I could have sworn it was a side-eye glance 520’s way.

“Arik, you can jump if you want to. We’ll understand. You won’t be the first. But someone’s going to have to come along and clean up the mess. Not going to really make their day. And who’s going to tell the people who still care about you? What about Loki and Porridge?”

Chrysler couldn’t help himself. “Aw, they’re just cats. City’s full of ’em.”

“But they’re my emotional support fur buddies. They’ve walked every step of this wasteland with me.”

The rest of the conversation is private—as will remain all our conversations.

The New York City Skyline became my therapist that night.

She saved me.

Well, I mean, I saved myself. She just listened.

And so have a lot of other people.

The amazing doctors and clinicians at BronxCare Health System.

The friends and family, and even perfect strangers, who didn’t just survive the madness with me—they held me down and shoved a wallet in my mouth when they knew tough love mattered most.

Even the worst of the worst people in this book listened—sometimes as best they could, even if it was hardly at all.

Well, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.

I know one thing. Their lives are just as consumed by Pain as mine is. Maybe some of them even more.

Well, probably not. Who knows?

I decided in that moment to stay, to write this goddamn book.

To give the predators and others who have hurt and abandoned me—as well as those who I have hurt, in turn—at least one chance to flip through its pages to get to this very page to hear me say:

I love you.

I’m sorry for what’s happened to you.

I’m sorry however I contributed to the Pain.

Please forgive me.

You don’t deserve your Pain, any more than I do.

None of us deserve a “shithole” Universe.

Whatever you did to me, I forgive you.

I don’t know if we can patch things up, but I’m letting whatever it is go—that’s what I’m throwing off this rooftop.

And I’m giving you another chance, whether or not you give me one.

Whether or not you give one to yourself.

Still, fuck the Yankees.

“That’s the spirit,” 111 West says.

“Fuck,” Chrysler sighs.

“Jesus,” 520 mutters.

“Kinda,” I say. “He didn’t die for nothing. It took others to do that for him. If you want to put me in a tomb, I guess you gotta come at me harder than this.”

Don’t worry. They did. And they do.

I’m still here. I’m writing this book anyway. And I’m still loving and forgiving them, as best I can.

And I’ll never stop taking chances on any of them. On anyone.

I don’t care how much you steal from me, lie to me, cheat on me or beat me.

I don’t care how wounded and aching you are—bent over from a lifetime that has turned your heart into callous stone.

I will never stop believing that things can be made right.

the gods made redemption something screenplays should strive for.

Fuck them again.

REDEMPTION IS EVERYTHING.