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(Art by spoon+fork.)

Once a week I flossed my teeth and went to downtown Highlands to meet my parole officer.  The Shore Points border was the mushy intersection of the Shark River delta with a sand bar that separated the river from the Atlantic Ocean.

I had to take a bus over three bridges to get out. My driver’s license was revoked when I was convicted, but one thing I will swear to is that I had always waited at least half an hour before getting behind the wheel when I was high.

Highlands was the old administrative center for the British when New Jersey was a colony.  It was as close to the beach the British were willing to come.  Over the years I’ve seen and heard tourists from all over the world, but not Britain, although we do have fish and chips on the boardwalk if they showed up.

Highlands looks like Legoland.  Everything’s square, blocky and plastic.  They did a good job of trying to make the district parole office look like a dentist office from the outside, with fake brick walls, trimmed hedges and white gravel.  It didn’t fool anybody.  Cars going both ways would slow down to look at the people getting off the bus at that stop and walking into the building.

My parole officer was a black man named James O’Keefe.  He was about 35 and had short hair that was curled tightly to his scalp, and he had a bald spot near the back.  If you stared at it, he’d glare at you like he was going to hit you with a left hook.  The other parole officers had family pictures or fun little things on their desks like snow globes.  O’Keefe had nothing.  You had no indication what his life outside the office was like.  But the nameplate on his desk was the biggest I’d ever seen, bigger than any of my principals’.

The first time I met him, he said, “Sean Kerry. . .are you Irish?”

“Mostly, yeah,” I said.  “James O’Keefe. . .are you Irish, too?”

“Well, not that I’m sure of, but obviously, somewhere along the line, there was a slave master who was.”  His face told me that he was thinking about how he could rip my head off and make it look like I’d committed suicide.  Luckily for me, he kept talking.

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