This is the articles page, which I will primarily use for articles that have nothing to do with science fiction. There are currently two of them: “My Own Private Carleton” and “My Old Friend, the Murderer.”

**********

“My Own Private Carleton”

(Note: this article was written years ago to be submitted to the Carleton Voice, but I discovered that it does not allow outside submissions.)

by Gary Westfahl

Out of all the unsolicited mail that clutters the mailboxes of America’s college graduates, surely nothing is duller than their colleges’ alumni magazines. This is not the fault, I hasten to add, of the talented writers and editors who labor to produce publications like the official alumni publication of Carleton College, the Carleton Voice; rather, this magazine’s employees, like their colleagues at other colleges, have effectively been assigned  to be dull. For due to the questionable belief that such material is most likely to inspire readers to make donations to the college, those responsible for the Voice are required to chronicle what might be described as the public Carleton – celebrating the victories of its athletes, the uplifting exploits of adventurous students who travel to distant parts of the world to perform charitable acts, the ground-breaking research of Carleton professors, and the noteworthy accomplishments of former students.

Yet none of this is of any real interest to most current students or former students. Rather, they are preoccupied with their own private Carletons – the special places that they claimed during their college years to engage in special activities beyond the scrutiny of any outsiders. Memories of such past experiences, and accounts of such current experiences, would actually attract the attention of Carleton alumni. That is, former art majors might care very little about what Carleton’s art professors are displaying in galleries, but they might be wondering: are the current art students still madly procrastinating and staying up all night in Boliou Hall to start and complete their senior projects the night before they are due, and ordering pizzas to sustain their frenetic labors?

For the record, I spend little time reminiscing about my years at Carleton, inasmuch as I have always preferred to primarily live in the present, not the past. However, as an example of what alumni magazines should be publishing, to address the genuine interests of its readers, I will now provide an account of those facets of my life at Carleton that I actually cherished, and still occasionally remember.

********

In the days before the internet, much of the college experience involved sitting around in the dorms, carrying on conversations into the wee hours of the morning, all as part of everyone’s ongoing efforts to avoid doing schoolwork. Sometimes, these discussions had memorable moments – I vividly recall, for example, the evening when a student from California stood on a coffee table and gave everyone a surfing lesson – but there would also emerge a strong desire to get away from the dorms for a change of pace and do something different. And, when you were living in the Goodhue dormitory, one recurring suggestion during those long evenings was “Hey, let’s go climb the Water Tower,” which was relatively nearby.

Officially, of course, unauthorized personnel were not allowed to climb up the Water Tower that loomed over the campus, because the ladder leading up to the reservoir was surrounded by a metal cage and a locked gate at the bottom. However, as the veterans would explain to the newbies, this really wasn’t much of a barrier; all you had to do was climb up the outside of the cage for about ten feet, where the cage was reduced to a few widely-spaced bars, so it was easy to slip through the bars and get on the ladder. Then, it was simply a matter of slowly and carefully climbing up the ladder and trying not to look down.

At the top, you reached a narrow walkway that extended around the reservoir, with a railing to hold to prevent a precipitous fall. There, you could look out over the entire campus, though at night there was little there to draw anyone’s interest. It was far more stimulating to examine the throbbing metropolis of downtown Northfield, looking at the store lights and watching the cars drive down Main Street. You had been warned to bundle up in a warm jacket, because the breezes at that altitude during a Minnesota winter could be quite chilly; but this was also a good thing, as it helped to keep you alert and less likely to slip and fall, especially if you were very tired or a bit tipsy.

For most visitors, it was entertaining enough to simply stand on the walkway and admire the view for twenty minutes or so; but a few students found other ways to spend their time. First, there was another ladder that extended up the side of the reservoir and took you to its slanted top. One of my friends reported that he enjoyed climbing up this ladder and balancing precariously on top of the Water Tower, literally risking his life (because I don’t think anyone would survive a fall from that height); personally, however, I only ventured a few feet up this second ladder to get a slightly better view of the surroundings. Later, some students decided that it would be fun to bring some cans of paint with them and adorn the Water Tower with novel words or images – again, something I never would have dared to do. But there was a time when, every few weeks or so, students could look up at the Water Tower and see something new on the gleaming side facing the campus.

This practice came to an end, though, when some students decided to paint a very rude word (albeit one found in all dictionaries) on the Water Tower. If you must know, it was “smegma.” Since I had never heard this word, and since I immediately consulted the dictionary and learned its meaning, one might praise these students for building the vocabularies of their cohorts, but college administrators somehow did not see things that way, as they quickly had the Water Tower repainted and installed an improved, intruder-proof barrier to keep future students from climbing to its top. But by that time, I had moved away from Goodhue and had found other ways to occupy my evenings.

********

When I came to Carleton in 1969, the only sauna on campus was inside the men’s locker room on the bottom floor of the “Stadium” (actually, the trapezoidal building underneath the bleachers at Laird Stadium).  To allow female students to use the sauna, the college set aside special hours on the weekend when the locker room was off-limits to male students. However, many students, both male and female, were well-connected enough to obtain copies of the coveted “sauna key” which allowed them to enter the building at night, when it was officially closed, and together these men and women would enjoy the sauna in the traditional way, without wearing any clothing. But when a need arose for additional rooms to accommodate Carleton’s growing student population, some spaces on the second floor of the Stadium were converted into dormitory rooms, so the building had to be left unlocked at all times. Now, even students who were not part of the in-crowd (like me) could visit the sauna in the evenings.

For the record, I first went to the sauna when I was invited to join two male friends, and though I observed no women there, I found the experience so delightful that I soon returned, again finding that only males were present. I was coming to believe, then, that Carleton’s legendary “co-ed sauna” might no longer be in operation. But on my third visit, as I walked through the showers to get to the sauna, my path was blocked by a naked woman, drying herself off, and when I walked past her to enter the sauna, I found two other naked women were sitting on its wooden benches. And, on most of my subsequent visits, I had both male and female companions.

I suppose I must address the concerns of hypothetical readers who are shocked and scandalized to hear of this practice. For heaven’s sake! Lusty young college students, sitting naked together inside a small room! Surely, this was merely the prelude to endless orgies and other perverse indulgences! But such people do not really understand that era’s Carleton students – who all were able, and intelligent enough, to find far more comfortable places for their canoodling than the sauna’s wooden benches – and they do not really understand the very nature of the sauna, which has an overwhelmingly tranquilizing effect on its users. Even if a male student had entered the sauna with seduction on his mind, he would soon find himself blissfully content to simply sit there and relax – and, not incidentally, his weapon of choice would be shriveled and ineffectual. Overall, there was a true aura of innocence about the experience of sitting and talking with other naked people until the pleasurable heat drove everyone to sedate silence; I recall innocuous conversations with a number of Carleton students that I might otherwise have never met, including Kai Bird, later renowned at the co-author of the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that inspired the award-winning film. In sum, if a female Carleton student had been determined to preserve her virginity on a Saturday night, her wisest course of action would have been to spend the evening sitting naked in the sauna. And as it happens, one of the sauna’s regular visitors was openly and proudly a virgin, clearly confident that her ability to catch unicorns would in no way be endangered by spending her time naked in the company of naked men.

If you are curious about what constituted a wild and crazy evening at the sauna, I should first explain that while there was a door on the bottom floor, it was always locked, so that visitors had to climb the stairs to the second floor entrance and then walk down a flight of stairs to reach the indoor track and locker room on the bottom floor. But one night, one person in the sauna reported that, for some reason, he had found that the lower door had been left unlocked. So, when I, two other men, and three women in the sauna were ready for a break, we were able to run past the showers where we normally cooled down in a cold shower, go to the door, and cool off in the traditional Finnish manner by rolling around in the snow.

While I enjoyed visiting the sauna and talking with the friends I had made there, this was also an experience that was destined to come to an end. There were rumors that the Minneapolis Tribune was planning to publish an exposé about Carleton’s sordid co-ed sauna, and I recall one evening when a strange older woman wearing a coat came walking past the open door of the locker room, saw me emerging from the sauna naked, and nonchalantly asked me to check and see if there were any women in the sauna. (I duly complied and reported that, at the time, there were none.) In any event, college officials soon took two steps to eliminate this potential embarrassment: they started turning off the power to the sauna at night, so it could be used only in the daytime, and they built a second sauna inside a women’s locker room, so women no longer needed to visit the men’s sauna. There were still stories about occasional women visiting the male sauna, and even one male visitor who had been invited to enter the female sauna, but all of these changes occurred during the spring quarter of my senior year, and in the warmer weather, I had largely stopped going to the sauna anyway.

********

At the Carleton Arena Theatre, it is the night before a new production is opening, and the final dress rehearsal has just ended. After the director gave notes to the actors and technical crew, one imagines that everyone would go home, to get a good night’s sleep before opening night. In fact, while a few of the leading actors were allowed to leave and relax, everyone else was expected to stay, and stay for most or all of the night – because there were still many set pieces to be built, lights to be hung, props to be made, and costumes to be sewn.

I have been involved in several theatrical groups in my lifetime, but I have never known any that were so addicted to the extreme procrastination exhibited by Carleton’s theatrical community. This had been a longstanding tradition well before I began my career as a supporting actor and techie: for when the very first play was staged in the Arena Theatre, Victorien Sardou and Émile de Najac’s Let’s Get a Divorce (1880), there came a time when members of the crew were hard at work painting the sets, and an usher came on stage and asked them to please stop painting the sets because it was time to start the show.

The last-minute work would always begin right after the last dress rehearsal ended; and, to signal the start of the process, someone would always go into the sound room and put on the famous “Work Tape,” long ago prepared by a crewperson so that rock’n’roll music could blare throughout the theatre to entertaining all the hard workers there. The first item on the tape was the Rolling Stones’s Beggars Banquet (1968) in its entirety; and to this day, when I hear the infectious conga drums that introduce its first song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” I still feel like I am being summoned to perform some labor. After this, perhaps by design, came a somewhat mellower album, the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead (1970), though the compiler had omitted two songs on its second side that he didn’t like. I actually don’t recall what the third album was, though it might have been a live Jefferson Airplane album – perhaps Bless Its Pointed Little Head (1969); however, by the time the third album started, nobody was really listening to the music anymore, since they had by then realized the full extent of the mammoth amount of work that was still not completed and were focusing all of their attention on getting it done before they grew too exhausted to continue.

To qualify for participation in this stimulating marathon session, you needed to meet one significant requirement: you had to be there. If you happened to be there, somebody was sure to approach you and ask you to do something, and when that task was finished, you would be asked to do something else. So it was that, on the night before the opening of the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), I was pointed in the direction of some imposing pieces of equipment and told that I must use them to cut some boards and plywood into the proper shapes, so they could be nailed together to form set pieces. The fact that I had never used this equipment, and didn’t know how to use this equipment, was irrelevant; the work had to be done, and I was the only person available to do it. Somehow, I managed to figure out how to produce the needed pieces, but the regular sounds of pain coming from the equipment indicated that I wasn’t doing it entirely right. A year later, I was talking to one of the veteran techies and he commented, “I’ve never known anyone who abused the equipment like the Forum crew.” I did not volunteer the information that I had been part of the team.

Working all night on sets, lights, props, and costumes may not sound very pleasurable, but a sense of crazed camaraderie did emerge from joining in these desperate efforts, and students felt a strange sort of euphoria when, as dawn approached, they began to believe that maybe, just maybe, everything would get done in time. And when morning came (something crew members learned only by looking at their watches, since there were no windows to reveal the morning sunlight), the crew leaders would begin telling the volunteers that they could go home, as they could personally handle the manageable number of remaining tasks. And this was welcome news, particularly since many of the workers had small parts, or were assigned to move sets between scenes, in a play that was opening in several hours. But after a few hours’ sleep, these troupers always managed to do everything correctly, and the opening night audience, observing all of the fine sets and costumes, and everything running smoothly, remained entirely unaware of the frenzied circumstances of the play’s final preparations.

I do not know, but I sense, that these ill-advised habits represented another tradition that was coming to an end as I prepared to leave Carleton; for all of the veteran actors and techies that I had come to know were graduating, and the next generation of students destined to take their place struck me as not quite as creative as their predecessors, but much more responsible. So, in their productions, I suspect that the sets and costumes may have been less spectacular, but they were all completed well before opening night.

********

I have spoken only of those aspects of Carleton life that I personally experienced, but I know from talking to other people that there were numerous other private Carletons that students had become familiar with. I have already alluded to the after-hours activities in Boliou Hall, described by an art major in my dorm. A friend of mine went for a walk in the woods one night, was drawn by the sight of a bonfire, and discovered that the forest was a regular gathering place for members of Carleton’s then-closeted gay community. I vaguely recall stories about strange goings-on in Carleton’s computer lab, and I once had a fascinating conversation with an elderly housekeeper who explained that, in an earlier era, she had played a key role in providing amorous college students with secluded places for their romantic rendezvous. And, unlike accounts of students climbing Mount Everest or professors receiving research grants, these are the sorts of stories that I, and others, might actually enjoy reading in an alumni magazine.

**********

“My Old Friend, the Murderer”

by Gary Westfahl

(Note: when our local newspaper, the Claremont Courier, said nothing about a well-publicized murder committed by a longtime resident of the city, I decided to write this article about the murderer. once one of my friends, and submitted it to the newspaper. They ignored it, probably thinking that if it was known that someone in Claremont had become a murderer, it would drive down property values, or something, so they instead kept printing their feel-good stories about charming children and well-connected residents proudly self-publishing their books.)

I don’t wish to trivialize something that was a horrible tragedy, but in the unlikely event that I ever reconnect with my old friend Robert McGill, now in federal prison for the second-degree murder of his wife on a cruise ship, there is only one thing I could begin by saying:

Bob, you really blew it this time.

It’s not easy to say that a person who, by his own account, strangled his own wife in a drunken stupor was once a friend of mine, but one must be honest about such matters. I met Bob McGill sometime in the mid-1970s, when we both lived in Claremont, and for a few years he was a close friend of mine. In the 1980s, when Bob left the area and we moved down different career paths, I saw him only occasionally, and I had no contact with him after the early 1990s, so I never saw him with the full beard that he later grew. Still, since his parents long lived in a house on Indian Hill Boulevard in Claremont, it remained possible to imagine that I might run into him one day and have a friendly conversation about old times and what we’d been doing during the last two decades. Until July 14, 2009.

Perhaps there are some extremely judgmental, and extremely stupid, people out there who are now thinking, “How could a man possibly be friends with someone who was going to murder his wife?” Well, as any fair and intelligent person would know, it isn’t easy to make predictions about such things. Certainly, if somebody in the 1970s had bizarrely asked me to rank-order my friends based on the likelihood that they would someday murder their spouses, the laid-back, easy-going Bob McGill, if not at the very bottom, would have been far from the top of the list. As my former roommate commented, Bob was “always so mellow,” and according to news reports, even close friends who knew him in 2009 were completely shocked to learn that he had turned into a killer. So, somebody who knew him in the 1970s should not be expected to be any more cognizant of his future crime.

One of the many downsides of becoming a murderer, of course, is that the act comes to define you, and everything else that you’ve ever done, for better or worse, is entirely forgotten, though he was a good friend to many people and a dedicated teacher. So, I’ll get back to what happened on the cruise ship, but I’d first like to talk about the very different Bob McGill that I knew in the 1970s. I met him through an unlikely chain of connections – he was the friend of a friend of a graduate student in my department at Claremont Graduate School – and though I’m not sure exactly where we met, it might have been at one of the poet Virginia Adair’s parties, in the special section of her backyard reserved for the friends of her son Doug where we socialized and smoked marijuana. For a while, Bob and I were part of a social group that met every Tuesday night to eat popcorn and watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus, International Animation Festival, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back to back; we were also drawn together by our mutual interest in rock music – Bob was a bass player, and I played the piano. I wouldn’t say that I was his closest friend, but once, after one of his innumerable moves, I had to call his parents’ house to get his new phone number, and his poor mother first had to consult a special list her son had prepared of the only people that she was permitted to give that information to; and I was pleased to learn that my name was on the list.

While by no means a saint, Bob was a man who could be very generous to his friends. Since he had an extra copy of the Rolling Stones album Their Satanic Majesties Request with the original 3-D cover, he gave it to me, and I still have it today (which is why I forgive him for borrowing my copy of the book The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record and never returning it). After an old acquaintance of his grew dysfunctionally deranged, Bob nonetheless made a point of seeing him every month for what he termed his “Take a Psycho to Lunch Day.” Once I accompanied them (I think we went to Walter’s Restaurant in Claremont), and the oddly disjointed conversation that ensued, which was not exactly enjoyable, proved that Bob was indeed performing a public service by regularly enduring his company. When I decided to purchase a Fender Rhodes electric piano to perhaps pursue a career in a band, he accompanied me to the music store and guided me to an economical purchase with sage advice: walk in the door with the amount of cash you want to spend, since that’s what stores prefer; bring competitors’ ads to lay the groundwork for the bargaining; and negotiate with the salesman by first offering an outrageously low price so he’ll later agree to the price that you actually want to pay.

Bob could also be entertaining company. If he was at your house, he would offer to play a game: I will look through your record collection, and I will find an album that you have never listened to. I took the bait, and I must say that he did succeed in identifying such a record in my own collection; but looking back with a more cynical eye, I can’t help but wonder: did Bob really possess a unique ability to deduce a person’s proclivities in purchasing and listening to music, or did he simply look for albums that still had their plastic coverings on, and hence had never been opened? In his own casual way, Bob could be slyly deceptive about himself, as will be discussed.

Bob also provided me with some unique experiences. I still remember the day he dropped by my apartment to report, incredibly, “Hey, the Ramones are playing in Garrison Theatre today!”

“What? The Ramones? In Garrison Theatre? In Claremont?”

Needless to say, we rushed over to Garrison, bought tickets at the door, and got to enjoy two hours of raucous three-chord rock’n’roll in that improbable venue.

More significantly, Bob McGill is the reason that I can honestly report I was once in a band myself. Bob had been asked to play the bass in someone’s new rock band, and when the man mentioned that he’d like an organist as well, Bob volunteered my name as an acceptable alternative, a decent electric piano player. We practiced several times, mostly covers of Cars songs that I did not enjoy, before our leader decided that he’d rather front a country band and recruited a different set of musicians before we ever got to play a real gig.

Of course, since I never officially performed in front of a paying audience, one could argue that I am stretching the truth a bit to say that I was once in a band; but I could respond by saying that I was schooled in the art of stretching the truth by Bob McGill himself, who was known for telling strange and not quite credible stories. If you got to know him well enough, though, you’d find out that while he never told an outright lie, his accounts were in fact not entirely accurate. For example, Bob liked to tell people that when he visited Europe with his parents as a child, he had his teddy bear blessed by the Pope. Hearing this the first time, one imagines the McGill family somehow being granted a private audience with His Holiness, where little Bob handed his precious teddy bear over to be blessed by the indulgent pontiff. Later on, though, I got the full story: he and his parents were standing in a crowd outside the Vatican; the Pope stepped out on the balcony to bless his assembled followers; and as he did so, Bob held his teddy bear up in the air, thereby enabling him to say that the stuffed animal had been blessed by the Pope.

Bob also liked to report that, while he was in northern California, he had been in a band that once played on the radio, and that was true as well. However, Bob later gave me the privilege, if that is the word, of listening to a tape recording of that appearance, and I learned some interesting things. For one thing, the radio station was a small college’s radio station which clearly had few listeners and a disk jockey who was allowed to do anything he wanted to, including letting a local band play a few songs on the air. Further, Bob’s band, called the “Wasties” for reasons that can be readily deduced, has to be absolutely the worst band I have ever heard. They specialized in exclusively playing, badly, songs that only had two chords; thus, one of their big numbers was Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” which allowed them to go back and forth playing its two basic chords, sometimes out of tune. (When I noted that the song had a bridge with some different chords, Bob said, “Oh, we didn’t play that part.”) I then heard the Wasties launch into a cacophonous version of another two-chord song, Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” also omitting the different chords of the chorus. Manifestly, this was a band that shouldn’t have been allowed to play at a high school dance, let alone on the radio.

Then there was the matter of his employment. It was an open secret among his friends that Bob was being supported by his parents, who were both high school teachers, but they did at one point rent a large unit in an industrial park for Bob, which was unofficially his home but officially the site of his own business, “Wilderness Ceramics.” Having visited the place, I can testify that it did have a kiln, and a few examples of Bob’s ceramic artwork sitting around, but if Bob ever had a customer, or ever made a dime from his artistic efforts, I never heard about it. One friend sarcastically described Bob’s approach to drumming up business as driving down the road, rolling down his window, and yelling out, “Artist for hire!”

It was a surprise to everyone when Bob decided to get a teaching credential and then actually got a job as a teacher, because it was another open secret that he was completely unable to write in a coherent fashion: “Bob doesn’t write,” his best friend from Claremont High School explained, “he does word paintings.” In fact, I was told, he almost didn’t graduate from the University of La Verne because, after waiting until his very last semester to take freshman composition, he had a principled instructor who was determined to fail him until he somehow negotiated the D grade that enabled him to graduate.

I actually got to witness Bob’s early days as a teacher, because he invited me one day to talk to his class as an expert on the Beatles, something I can pretend to be with a degree of credibility. So, to entertain his kids, I played some Beatles songs from their secretly-recorded 1962 concert in Hamburg, followed by the officially released versions, to show that the frenetic energy of their early live performances was never quite recaptured in the studio. While there, I also got to hear Bob teach the students his warped version of the history of rock’n’roll in the 1960s: first, there was this group called the Bobby Fuller Four that was destined to become the Next Big Thing in rock; unfortunately, their lead singer Bobby Fuller was killed in a plane crash; then, to fill the gap left by his group’s tragic departure from the scene, a British group called the Beatles came along. I could never fathom precisely how Bob had developed this flatly nonsensical narrative of musical history, since Bobby Fuller didn’t start recording until well after the Beatles had conquered America in early 1964, and he didn’t die until July, 1966, while the Beatles were completing their third tour of America and finishing their seventh album. But it did make me worry about the accuracy of the other information that Bob was imparting to his young charges.

With these, and many other, interesting stories to tell about this singular fellow, I briefly considered writing a book about Bob McGill, to attract some readers outside of the science fiction community that I normally write for; but I quickly realized that I didn’t really want to. For one thing, even though I haven’t seen him for twenty-five years, it still didn’t seem right for me to try to exploit a former friend’s unfortunately prominent misfortune. In addition, since I only knew him for two decades, I would need to track down some people who had known him while he was growing up in Claremont, though I did speak to one person who had attended Claremont High School with him and uncharitably described him as “the worst person in the world.” I would need to contact friends and colleagues who had known him after he moved far from Claremont to embark on his teaching career, and conduct lengthy interviews to obtain a full picture of his life; I would also have to visit with Bob’s first wife Kim, his two children, and Bob himself, asking some very awkward questions in every case. For me, frankly, the whole process would be a terrible ordeal, since the research that I prefer to do involves books, not people.

Anyway, if I did undertake to write a book about Bob, I would necessarily have to focus all of my attention on developing, presenting, and supporting an answer to the central question raised by his story: why did this apparently mild-mannered, kindly husband and teacher suddenly become a vicious killer? But I think I already know the answer to that question, and I don’t need to write a book to explain it.

Let me first add one more essential piece of data about the Bob McGill I knew which I trust will, at this time, no longer seem shocking to anybody: he smoked marijuana almost all of the time. Indeed, whenever I form a picture of Bob in my mind, I always see him engaged in his characteristic activity of taking out a cigarette paper, tapping some weed into its middle, and expertly rolling it into yet another joint to share with his friends. And the drug seemed an ideal fit for his personality, allowing him to remain sedate in the face of irritants like his mismatched parents, unsympathetic writing instructors, and flakey bandmates. As long as he had some more pot to smoke, one felt, Bob McGill could handle whatever life threw in his way.

But on some occasions, Bob did some drinking as well, and while I never saw him get violent in any way, the drunken Bob was considerably less pleasant than the stoned Bob. I recall one party where Bob, temporarily persuaded that it would be fun to imitate the Uncle Duke character from Doonesbury, drunkenly staggered around flailing at imaginary creatures over his head and screaming “Bats! Bats!” It was not particularly amusing; one wished that instead of more beers, Bob had just smoked a joint or two, so he could settle down in an easy chair and entertain partygoers with yet another one of his twisted tales.

Despite his attachment to marijuana, however, I am quite sure (though I never spoke to him about this) that he began to see the drug differently in the 1980s, as he started working as a public school art teacher, married his first wife, and became a father. For a man in that position, given the changed attitudes regarding drugs, smoking marijuana could have serious consequences: if he had been arrested for possession of marijuana, he probably would have lost his teaching job and his teaching credential; he would then no longer be able to support his family; and he would face the prospect of a long prison term. And no matter how careful he was about using the drug, he could never be entirely sure that he wouldn’t get caught.

Under those circumstances, an older and wiser Bob McGill would naturally decide that it would be best for him to give up marijuana and instead stick to drinking. Alcohol wasn’t illegal; it was even socially acceptable. If Bob got busted for a DUI or public drunkenness, there might be a fine to pay, even a few nights in jail to endure, but he would otherwise be allowed to carry on with his career without lasting effects. Thus, as long as he was never drunk in his classroom (and I am confident that he never was), Bob could happily drink to his heart’s content without any worries.

And drinking to his heart’s content, I suspect, is what mostly occupied Bob McGill’s leisure time during the subsequent two decades, no doubt driving away his first wife and his children, and it is also precisely what led to the tragedy of July 14, 2009. While on a cruise, many people discover that there is little to do except eating a lot and drinking a lot, and on that fateful day, by all accounts, Bob had been doing an extraordinary amount of drinking. Then, when he got into an argument with his second wife Shirley (probably about his excessive drinking), something in Bob snapped, and he subsequently found that he had strangled his wife in a drunken rage.

Now, imagine for a moment that we lived in a society where someone like Bob McGill would have felt free to smoke marijuana all day on a cruise ship, instead of drinking all day. In that case, Shirley McGill would still be alive today – because a stoned Bob McGill, unlike a drunken Bob McGill, would never have had the energy or incentive to get up and strangle his wife, no matter how irksome she had become; instead, he would have simply sighed and strolled off to smoke another joint. Alcohol, not marijuana, is the drug that can fuel people’s anger and drive them to violence.

I would never deny that Shirley McGill was the victim of Bob McGill, or that he thoroughly deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail for his actions; as I said, Bob blew it this time, with unspeakably horrible results. However, if my theory is correct, it would mean that Shirley McGill was also a victim of the War on Drugs that our society has senselessly waged for the past four decades. While undoubtedly not as alert or productive as he might have been, the perpetually stoned Bob McGill that I knew never harmed anyone else; one cannot say the same about the perpetually drunk Bob McGill that I never knew. And if even a few people can read Bob’s story, and be persuaded that it is high time to legalize this generally harmless drug for those people like Bob who have a natural affinity for it, then Shirley McGill may not have died entirely in vain.