THE ELATIONS OF DANGER

Another Esquire excerpt:

The first time I left my home in South Carolina for the outer world, it was 1963, and I was 17 years old. With two college friends I went North to Harvard Summer School. My cousins thought I had become a Communist, and my mother thought the Boston Strangler might kill me. I knew the Red Menace was in the Soviet Union, but the Boston Strangler might be a problem, so I weighed my options carefully. There had to be tens of thousands of young women living in Boston, and the Strangler had killed only 13. Or was it 31? Those odds seemed livable, but in Back Bay, where I stayed that summer, I never went out alone after dark. I faced all stairways like ambushes, and my apartment door loomed as an object of dread.

At the end of the summer I was disappointed. No one had even tried to kill me, so Boston wasn’t that different from home. I gave up the elations of danger reluctantly, so, when I got back to Charleston, I told my mother I had found an arm wrapped in red tin foil in the apartment I’d rented. This apartment, I improvised, had been empty for several months, and this left arm had belonged to a white female. It didn’t smell much unless you unwrapped it, a mistake I had unfortunately made. The police, when they arrived, were kindly and ironic. They shook both my arms and made jokes. Later, when I told my mother that the story was made up, she said I was making it up that the story was made up, because no one would invent such a story. I began to feel I had a future.