In 1995, I wrote a rough draft of what probably would have become the longest personal essay in the history of the written word. I titled it *Al, the Prowler, and the Siege at Dodge Boulevard*. The project was a memoir recounting “events” that I either, willingly or unwillingly, had participated in or had witnessed between 1961 and 1978. The time frame stretched from my first semester in college to the years when lived in an apartment complex on Dodge Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona.

A lot of memorable and sometimes crazy things happened during those times. There were days when I felt as if my friends and I were characters in some weird sitcom. Today, many of those things would be fodder for blog posts (and probably will be), and a few of them would be fodder for a reality show. Happenings included (but were not limited to) ditzy teenagers, local bad boys, a phantom prowler, a real prowler, crank phone calls, police reports, a couple of subpoenas, and a busted window.

I abandoned the project about a month after I started it.

I had completed the first draft when a man who had once been a good friend of mine died. I put the essay away and didn’t look at it again until a few years ago. Once in a while, I take it out, thinking that maybe I should finish the story.

I woke up about 3 a.m. today and started thinking about why I wanted to write that essay. In 1995, the message I wanted to get across is this: Sometimes things (and people) are not what they seem to be on the surface—or what you dearly or desperately want them to be. Sometimes the people who are supposed to love and protect you are the ones who are trying to hurt you. And sometimes, someone you don’t think cares about you at all really does give a hoot about you in their (the new gender-neutral *their*) own weird way.