The boy's mother was dead. He lived with his father, who was of grandfatherly age, and an almost grown brother. The year after "Spooky" came out we went on to junior high. I saw him occasionally on the grounds of the enormous school, but he averted his eyes against the embarrassment of recognition. The boy was always alone, off in a far flung corner of the school grounds. Once I was startled to see him crouched down between two bungalows nibbling on something he held between his hands.

We moved to Ohio when I was 14; friends told me about this when I visited about a year later:

One sunny Sunday, shortly after his 15th birthday, the boy told his father and brother that he wasn't feeling up to going to church. As his elders drove off, the boy reached deep into the hall closet for his father's shotgun. He could still barely reach the closet shelf on his tippy toes.

The keys were in the ignition of the other car. He had never driven before. The boy managed to back the car out of the garage and onto the street. He had watched his father do it a million times, and he had a real good memory. He hummed a song, his favorite.

The boy drove down the hill into San Pedro, careful to obey all of the traffic signs. Then he robbed a liquor store. Just like a real robber. The boy pulled the shotgun from inside his big overcoat like Clint Eastwood and made the clerk put all of the money from the cash register and put it into a paper bag. Just like a real robber. He startled the clerk - who had never been robbed by a small bespectacled white boy before - more than a little.

Then things went wrong. The clerk didn't stay down like the boy told him to do. As the boy backed out of the store, the clerk came running out of the store screaming like a mad man: "Stop! Thief! Police! Stop!"

The boy didn't know how much money was in the bag, but it felt good and heavy.

He peeled out of the lot, tires squealing, kicking up gravel into the caterwauling clerk's face. He headed toward the freeway.

"Cops! They're right behind me."

He ran the lights, swerving around bewildered drivers as he had recently seen Gene Hackman do in The French Connection. He felt great, exhilarated even.