(Aug. 2010) – Today a police report appeared in the local paper about Douglas P., killed by a car last week while running across four lanes of Highway 101 at night in a driving rain, north of here between Novato and Petaluma. He was 44.

Witnesses said there were two men, Doug was being chased across the highway. He ran in front of a car that couldn’t avoid him. A CHP officer said, “It’s strange he chose to run in the rain in cowboy boots. He tried to stop and slipped on the wet pavement.” The officer said alcohol was being looked at as a factor.

Doug was an old neighbor, grew up catty-corner from our place. He lived with his parents off and on in a big old house next door to some good friends. He did a little handyman work around the neighborhood, including for us when we first moved there. He chipped tree prunings, hauled trash. Doug was a naggingly threatening presence in our lives during those years.

There were petty-criminal types living with their mother two doors down on the other side of our friends’ house, Ted and Wally, drug-addled losers who couldn’t stay out of jail. Occasionally Ted, or Wally, I never knew which, would show up – riding a clunker bike down the sidewalk or standing in front of his mother’s house. He’d stand there all day, beer can in hand, ogling passing schoolgirls and muttering comments. Wally or Ted had a droopy mustache, mirror shades, sunken cheeks like he had no teeth, sleeveless undershirt showing off spiderweb tattooes spreading from elbow to hairy shoulder. Those two were burnouts, jailbirds, and would get nailed easily for grabbing jewelry out of somebody’s window, dipshit stuff. Another neighbor called them “worms.”

Doug was a lot scarier – a violent criminal. He never wore a shirt, just his jeans. Even on a cold and rainy day he’d drive around in his pickup shirtless, all the windows open. He seemed to generate heat from inside and needed cooling off. He was muscular and rawboned, no fat on him but not skinny. His body was hairless and his skin polished hard. He always seemed to be in tension as if he was keeping every muscle at full strain.

Doug had an intense look on his face, which was muscular and raw, and he’d grin at you strangely when talking. His brown hair was combed straight back from his square hairline. He had a strong brow and wasn’t bad looking but for his front teeth, which were chipped and gapped. He would ask you for more money for the work he’d just done, even if you had already paid him the agreed amount. I gave him some beer once after he pressured me for more money and I didn’t have any. It was a good microbrew, and Doug seemed just as happy to get that as cash. I shook his hand and was glad to see him off. If you had to pick the scary-evil violent drughead out of a crowd of a hundred bad dudes, you’d choose Doug.

After a while things deteriorated between Doug and his old dad, who was a drunk. Dad kept a horse named JD (for Jack Daniels) on the part of his property that elbowed behind our friends’ back yard. The dad and Doug’s mother were country people who’d always lived there, but got swallowed up by Marvy Marin, and the 60s, 70s and 80s passed them by. The dad would ride JD around his property drunk, fall off and injure himself. But he wasn’t a nuisance. Doug had some old junked cars back there that he’d part out, and he’d show up now and then to collect something to sell off. On these visits, the nice neighbors had to endure Doug screaming at his parents – how stupid they were, etc. I had words with the old dad one day, told him to keep Doug away from the neighborhood. He kept saying, “He’s a good boy, it’s the drugs make him crazy.”

The parents eventually got a restraining order on him. Doug would sneak back home in the middle of the day to get at his cars – this was when I was working evenings and I’d be home mid-day. I’d see him hiding in neighbors’ bushes, hop intervening fences and slither into his parents’ back lot. The nice neighbors had talked to the police about Doug, and the cops asked us to report anything we saw of him – they were dead serious, he was violent as well as criminal. In a town of 45,000 he was Numero Uno on their list of irritants. Another neighbor knew a local who had grown up with Ted, Wally and Doug going back to junior high, and told us that Doug was always serious trouble where Ted and Wally were just dropouts. Here they all were, on one street in our beautiful Marin neighborhood.

According to the newspaper at the time of Doug’s freeway demise, a few years ago he got sent to San Quentin after a fight in a bar, the Viking on Redwood Blvd. in Novato. (I’ve been in the Viking, nowadays not a bad place to get a dry martini. The whole town changed after the housing prices went sky-high. In latter years even Doug’s parents cashed in and moved away, and their old home now has a young family with an infant living in it. Ted and Wally’s mother sold her house and a contractor bought and remodeled it.)

At the old Viking, pre-Housing Bubble, someone with a grudge decked Doug with a monkey wrench. He sprung off the floor and brained the other guy with his own wrench, sending him to the hospital with a fractured skull. Doug was uninjured, too tough. He pleaded self-defense, he didn’t start the fight, the other guy hit him first, brought the wrench to the bar. It’s a pretty good defense for most people but not Doug, and he was off to the Big Q for a year-and-a-half for aggravated assault.

When Doug was released he was a changed man, got religion in prison, cleaned up his act, was civil to his parents. But it didn’t last, and when he got to be a nuisance again the parents took out the restraining order, sold their place, towed all the junked cars, got rid of JD the horse and left the neighborhood. That was about four or five years ago, and the last we heard of Doug and family until now.

Of course alcohol was the least of whatever influenced Doug P. Of course he was wearing cowboy boots to run across the slick freeway in the rain. I can picture him now, dark winter night, shirtless, burning from inside, cold rain on hard, bare skin, a ripoff, hauling ass across the freeway in cowboy boots. I talked to the neighbor about it and he said “I hope the poor woman who hit him realizes she was just an instrument.”