Where's Barry?

Had a crush in highschool on a girl named Barry.   Mush have been my junior or senior year.  New girl in town.  Year younger than me.  And possessed of the kind of southern accent that can still poke a finger in my brain.  Wonderful.  Her voice alone just made me so happy and weak and stupid. 

Called her on a grocery store work break one weekend morning from the pay phone in the drug store on the corner.  When she answered with that fabulous, judgment-damaging accent, I said a lot of nice things from my heart -- nothing salacious, but, you know, personal, sweet and one hoped endearing.  Went on for a bit.

Then she said, 'that's very nice, but this is Barry's mother.'  Kind of thing you never forget.

I wonder where Barry is.

'K' for 'Killer'

He was my apartment mate in Chicago when we were both going to school there. Older, wiser, much more sophisticated. John L and I hooked up and agreed to get the place, moved our boxes of stuff in, and I took off for a weekend of fun elsewhere. Sometime during that weekend John's girlfriend jumped out of the window of the apartment and died in the courtyard below.

So when I got back one evening John wasn't there, and shortly the police were. They took me in to some Northside cop station and without offering much in return, asked questions about John. I didn't give them much, which was a problem for them, and they made it one for me. Kind of a stand-off. To be fair, on their side it was an unexplained death and a possible witness who wouldn't tell them anything. To me fair, on my side, they wouldn't share either. That lasted a good deal of the night. It was another set of detectives coming on shift who told me that the death was suicide, John was totally in the clear, and that he had checked himself into the hospital for his mental state. When he came out he had the letter 'k' tatooed on the inside of his shoulder and said it stood for 'killer', which he felt himself to be. We moved and shared the new, much nicer, and deathless apartment for a but more than a year. Then he moved in with a girl and ultimately I lost track of him. Alas.