How The Bad Kids Came To Life

My father had a stroke in early 2025. Luckily, he made a nearly complete recovery but the event caused me to think about the past and our relationship over the years. Memories returned of my childhood, the person I had been and the things I had done. These recollections reminded me of a few rough chapters I had written two years earlier about a boy and the misdeeds he committed with three friends. I had typed those chapters and forgotten about them—until Dad had his stroke.

Like most people who write, I have an “idea file.” Nowadays it’s electronic, takes the form of emails to myself, but in the past I would jot things on scraps of paper and shove them into a file folder. I was going through that folder a couple of years before my father was rushed to the hospital. Most of the story ideas I had lost touch with and were crumbled up and tossed into the garbage. One, however, reminded me of a world I had left behind many years earlier: “Matt rented me a car today." Matt–I whispered his name, struggled to place it, and then I saw his face as a man in his twenties behind a rental car counter and then as a boy in his early teens. He had been my tormentor, the kid who bullied me in junior high school. In my head, I saw Matt and then I saw my friends and recalled all the crazy and often illegal things we did. Our obsessions with TV shows like Dukes of Hazzard and scrounging for quarters to play Donkey Kong at our local 7-11. Over the course of a few days, I wrote what I call “vignettes,” little stories about what we got up to in Petaluma, California in the early 1980s. And then the inspiration ran dry and I thought that was it: The memories had been purged, the past was back where it belonged.

I was wrong. 

Driving back to Portland from Sequim, I kept seeing my father’s face. He had seemed frail and I could see him for what he had become: An old man. He was elderly and I was only twenty-two years behind him. How had we gotten there? I thought about how things had been after my parents divorced, when my father was young and did things like build racing sailboats. His son had been a wayward kid in a small town; bright and creative but directionless and unformed. Back in my apartment, nostalgia caused me to re-read the rough vignettes from two years earlier. As I scrolled my hands started moving over the keys on their own accord as more details emerged; one story reminded me of others and ghosts acquired substance. I lost myself, lost 2025, typed in a fever as buried things clawed their way out of the darkness. It became apparent that there was a story I had to tell. Not wanted to, had to. There were Matt’s cheap abuses but also the uncomplicated joy, in-jokes, and antics of four boys. I listened to music that had been on the radio then, saw my friends’ faces, and wondered what had happened to them. We had been so close then and now we were again on page after page I typed out.

After I had typed out the last chapter, the weight of what I had done settled on me: I had a book. I hadn’t planned on writing about my childhood but there it was. After years of doing this, I have an understanding of when I’ve written something best left in my files and when I have completed a compelling story. This book was in the latter category and it excited me; I wanted to share it. On the other hand, there were parts that filled me with shame and guilt, bad things I’d done as a boy—should those be edited out? No: I didn’t want to make myself easier to live with on the page than I actually was, I couldn’t brush my shameful acts over because my disdeeds were part of the story. The real story—the story I understood had to be told.

The book is called The Bad Kids.