Homicidal Fantasy

Back in graduate school, Steve Lowry and I used to sit around on the campus mall discussing philosophical issues and visually overdosing on all the beautiful women walking by. At first glance, Steve and I appeared rather similar; we were both tall, long-haired, bell-bottomed white male graduate students in clinical psychology, we both loved to play the guitar, and we both enjoyed discussing topics like phenomenology and existentialism late into the night. But we actually came from radically different cultural backgrounds. Steve had grown up in an upper-middle-class suburb in Ohio and claimed he had never been in a fistfight in his life. Having grown up in a New York neighborhood with more than its fair share of lower-class Irish and Italian hooligans, I had a hard time believing him. There were periods during my childhood when I had a fight every day....