I have a confession to make.

After 30 years of hiding from the truth, I admit it.

I ordered my first hit in 1981.

It began in 1980 at Georgia Tech.

Or, rather, it began with a relationship in secondary school during the late ’70s, which led to my rooming with a schoolmate from home who left our dorm room unlocked one evening.

Smith Hall.

Radiator heat and leaking windows.

Concrete block walls and athlete’s foot fungus-filled shared showers.

I have a short temper that I hide by diverting myself often, a murderer’s habit, resembling ADHD.

Sometimes, though, I can be pushed too far and can’t turn away.

First, someone steals from your dorm room.

You see the kid race out of the bottom door of the dorm staircase, across the street and into the anonymity of the Techwood slums.

You call friends in Techwood Dorm and ask them to ID where the kid entered a slum housing unit.

Second, someone steals your bicycle from the rack at the bottom of another staircase.

Your Techwood Dorm friends identify the thief as the same one who’s been robbing dorm rooms, including yours.

Finally, you note it’s the days of “The Man,” when a fellow, later captured, is supposed to be killing little black kids.

One day, I wandered through the slums to get to the Omni.

I stood with a crowd and watched – actually, jumped up and down and cheered with the crowd – as a person was pushed out of a third story window.

Life was meaningless in the slums.

So, ignoring the pleas of the fundamentalist Christian organisation to which I belonged to turn the other cheek, I contacted some dope peddlers who sold marijuana and other goods to Tech students.

I wanted revenge.

Old Testament style.

A life for a stolen stereo set and a stolen bicycle.

Once you take that path, there’s no turning back.

The guilt can eat you alive or make you more alive.

Or both.

From suggestions by the dope peddlers, I organised a group that watched for the thief to cross over onto the Tech campus.

The guys grabbed the thief, a kid half-Haitian and half-Cuban.  Illegal and on the run.

With a nod from me, they dragged the kid behind a Techwood slum and beat him to death.

My life hasn’t been the same since.

Neither has yours.

Or will be.