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Bad Dude

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-09-23

I served on a jury for a criminal trial in Fort Wayne in the mid-90s, and while the case was a relatively straight-forward one (armed robbery, witnesses, corroborating testimony,) the experience had a profound affect on me. It is no small thing to send someone to jail or prison, after all, and when it’s your turn to say “guilty” or “not guilty” in that suddenly small, claustrophobic juror’s room, you feel the full weight of your civic responsibility. Even though I had no doubts about the suspect’s guilt, I still felt uncomfortable mouthing the actual word when I was polled by the foreman. But that was the gig.

During the trial, I was fascinated by the witnesses’ testimony, and I couldn’t help wondering, as the trial prattled on, how reliable I’d be as a witness on the stand. Would I be believable? Most people probably think they’d be great at it, but I wasn’t so sure about my own capabilities. I’m prone to self-doubt, and second-guessing, after all, and I wonder how convincing my statements would actually sound if I started my usual equivocations and ruminations while testifying.

As I get older I’m discovering that I’m probably not even a reliable witness about my own past. It’s a wildly destabilizing feeling when you recognize that someone else’s perception about some vital moment in your life is totally different from your own memory. You start wondering, Are they right and I’m wrong? You question the veracity of your cognitive skills, like you’re the character in Total Recall who’s had his memory erased and the only things left are implanted, false notions.

I ran into an old high school friend and her mother last year at an outdoor jazz concert, and immediately upon
recognizing me, the mother said, “Oh, Chris Colcord, you were a devil!” Not any of that polite, socialized, “Hi, how are you” or “Nice to see you,” just: “You were a devil.” And it didn’t seem like it was said with any joshing or fondness, either; just a cold assessment of known facts, like she had been waiting 40 years to tell me this very thing. It took me back a bit. It was a surprisingly uncomfortable moment, which I tried to laugh off, but the mother wasn’t having any of it. She wasn’t joking. Even my friend seemed a little embarrassed, and I was quite bewildered when we parted.

That encounter stayed with me: Jeez, was I a devil? I tried to recall any overtly devilish acts from my high-school era and couldn’t really come up with anything that wasn’t standard-issue, teenaged, getting-into-trouble-for-no-reason stuff. But maybe there was something more sinister in my past that I had airbrushed out of my memory but the mother remembered vividly? It was silly, but that comment kicked off an interior investigation into my own past, with the goal of answering a (now) very large question: Was I (am I) a Bad Dude?

I knew better to rely on my own perceptions when trying to answer this question, because I’m a narcissist with a large ego. My totally objective take would be, Not a Bad Dude; not a prince, either, but generally a decent sort who’s occasionally thoughtful and often very reckless. A good tipper. The sum of my parts, as it were. Probably not too different from anybody else walking the earth.

But again: I’m an unreliable witness. I had to find other testimonials. So I combed my memory bank and found three relatively troubling pieces of evidence.

The first: at a friend’s wedding a few years ago, a woman I dated briefly before she met her future husband, and during the exchange of vows she said this: “When I met you, future husband, I knew you were more real, more authentic than the other guys I had dated.” I was the last guy she dated before her husband. So, on the scoreboard now: Chris= Unreal, inauthentic.

Next: a profile of one of my best friends in a local publication. He talked about his past, and about the time in his twenties when he quit going to church and fell away from God. This coincided with the heyday of our friendship, which I remembered as being fun and episodic. But they were his “downward spiral” times. So, on the scoreboard: Chris = Bad Influence, anti-God.

Third: a born-again friend from high school who I tracked down on the internet. He was being interviewed on some evangelical website. He talked about his conversion, and how he had to sever ties with the people from his past who he couldn’t trust to do the right thing consistently. Directly after his conversion, my friend had severed all ties with me. So now, on the scoreboard: Chris = Inconsistent Right-Thing Doer.

This all seemed like pretty damning evidence that not only was I a Bad Dude, but I might have actually earned that “devil” moniker. I tried to buffet my disillusionment by saying, Hey, maybe their memories are unreliable, too. Maybe they’re wrong about all this. But it didn’t feel convincing to me. For I was troubled by a couple of painful memories that I couldn’t rationalize away, things unrelated to my three acquaintances that I had dredged up in my investigation. Things that I couldn’t pawn off on someone else’s faulty memory. Things that if I were to objectively judge about someone else, I’d say: that’s a bad guy. Not a pleasant realization. These are the perils of engaging in a post-mortem of your past.

So now, when I read about a public official announcing to the press that he wouldn’t be able to recall something he did 35 years ago, I can’t help thinking: Lucky Guy.