"Holy Fking Sht. That’s Dzhokhar!"
Esquire, by Luke Dittrich
The main press scrum was a block away, at the corner of the cordoned-off street where the two Tsarnaev brothers had lived, but there was a little breakaway group of reporters much closer to me. They’d gathered around an older guy in a sweater and jeans who looked a little like Richard Dreyfuss. He was holding a book in one hand and talking into the cameras, and when I looked at him again I realized it was Larry Aaronson. I walked over and waited on the outskirts till there was an opening, then stepped in and clapped Larry on the shoulder. He blurted my name and smiled a weary smile.
We found a place to sit on a low wall outside of a bike shop. I saw that the book he was carrying was the 2011 yearbook for the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. That was the year the younger of the two brothers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, graduated.
“I knew Dzhokhar,” Larry said, patting the book and shaking his head. “Can you believe it?”
Of course I could. I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t known Dzhokhar. Larry taught at Rindge for decades. American history. He taught my sisters, he taught me. We read Howard Zinn, we tore down Columbus. Larry would bring in the most amazing guests. We’d be studying the evolution of the American legal system one day, and the next day we’d show up for class and there was Alan Dershowitz, ready to answer questions. It wasn’t surprising that Larry knew Alan Dershowitz, either. Larry knew everybody. Whenever I’m not in Cambridge and I meet somebody from Cambridge and we’re searching for some sort of common ground, I toss Larry’s name out first, and it almost always hits. I was in India a few years back following Matt Damon around for a story and we spent a lot of time talking about Larry.
When the bombs exploded on Marathon Monday, Larry did what most people did. He wondered. He wondered whether it was some right-wing wingnut, he speculated about the significance of it happening on Patriot’s Day, on tax day, he considered it likely that it was some bedraggled lone wolf, an heir to Kaczynski.
But over the next few days the story became more personal, less abstract. It spiraled across the river.
“I found out that Brian Downes, who was a guidance counselor, and Debbie Downes, who was a special needs teacher—their son Patrick lost his leg. And their brand new daughter-in-law lost her leg. And then Matt Nelson—I don’t know if you remember Matt Nelson, he’s the administrative aide to [Cambridge mayor] Henrietta Davis—he was a Rindge graduate? His girlfriend, who was an eighth-grade teacher, she took shrapnel to the chest. And then, you remember the Valverdes? Sara Valverde and Mimi Valverde? Anyhow, she’s got some, Sara’s got some serious injuries. At first they didn’t know if she was going to recover or not. And so then I’m going, ‘this shit’s hitting home, this shit’s hitting home!’ You know this is no longer some sort of, ‘Okay, I’m going to analyze this, is this domestic or foreign, what does this mean, you know, what’s the take on this whole fucking thing, right?’”
Then, on Thursday night, the story spiraled even closer.
“I’m watching the Internet, and they start posting the pictures. And the pictures start getting more and more clear. And I go, holy fucking shit. That’s Dzhokhar!”
Except it wasn’t. Because it couldn’t have been. Because there’s just no fucking way. Because this was every good kid doing everything right. Because Dzhokhar was loveable and serious and reliable and competitive and athletic and just… no fucking way. Larry opened the yearbook and started thumbing through it, showing me the photos he’d shot of Dzhokhar. That sweet face, that Dylanesque hair. No fucking way. Besides, the kid lived three doors down on Larry’s street! Norfolk Street. The street that’s now cordoned off. The street where Larry last saw Dzhokhar, in January. And it wasn’t like there’d been some change of character, some change of appearance. Nothing.
The kid had called Larry out.
“Whoa! How you doing? I always forget you live right here!”
Dzhokhar told Larry he was going to UMass Dartmouth, studying engineering. Larry asked if he was still wrestling, and the kid said, no, he’d given that up, and Larry said, shit, that was a shame, because he was so good at it. He told him if he ever needed any help on papers, or with references, or whatever, to give him a buzz, and the kid said yeah, he would, and that was that. They walked away from each other. Afterwards, Larry had thought to himself that the kid was probably going to use that engineering degree of his to go back home and rebuild Chechnya, because that’s the sort of kid he was. Larry liked the thought of that: Dzhokhar comes to the States, comes to Cambridge, gets exposed to all the crazy crosscurrents of culture and thought that you have around here, and emerges as a force for fucking good in the world.
So yeah, those pictures on the Internet. They might have looked a little like Dzhokhar. But there was no fucking way.
Larry had gone to sleep at 4 a.m., and woke up at 6:30 to a flurry of texts and phone calls. Within a few minutes of putting his feet to the floor, Larry heard an orchestral swell, dozens of sirens, coming closer. He looked out the window. The spiral had tightened into a noose.
“Shit,” Larry thought to himself. “The war hasn’t come home. It’s at my front fucking door.”
The cops evacuated Larry and everyone else on the block, sent them down the street, where a media scrum was forming, where their memories and opinions were plundered. Larry had lost count of who he’d already talked to. CNN. Diane Sawyer. NPR. PBS. Who knows who else. Only organization he turned down was Fox, because c’mon, this was still Cambridge. He was tired and shaken and confused. He was trying to make it clear to me how unbelievable it was that Dzhokhar, who at that moment was bleeding in the belly of a backyard boat, could be involved in any of this. It wasn’t like every kid he’d gotten to know at Rindge was a saint. There were bad kids there, some of them, unreachable. But Dzhokhar? He was struggling for words. I asked Larry if it would have been like finding out that I’d been involved.
We got up and started walking toward my place about a quarter-mile away, so we could charge Larry’s cellphone. There was a message he had to return from the FBI, and he was out of juice, and who knew when he’d be able to go home again.
romaincrisis
vaporwave
jbbartram-illu
titsay
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
2087
discoholicmusic
