For some odd reason, earlier this week, I was thinking about a guy I used to work with during my brief collegiate and post-collegiate stints at a St. Louis pizza restaurant. He was a manager, nicknamed Devo, who was, quite frankly, a pain in the ass to work with. He was a loud mouth, a braggart, always claiming to know more than he did. What popped into mind recently was a discussion we had, which went on over several shifts, about the word "tip." Devo kept insisting that it stood for "to insure promptness." I told him he was full of shit. Thus was the level of our discourse. Just a short while ago, I learned that the man arrested today for kidnapping the two boys mentioned in the previous post is Michael Devlin. Or, as we used to call him, Devo.
I can't describe to you the feeling of seeing his face on CNN.com, recognizing him easily, a thousand stupid exchanges and dumb tales coming rushing back...and trying to reconcile it with the type of monster who takes other people's children and holds them for years. And we don't yet know what poor Shawn Hornbeck was subjected to in that time, in a small apartment in quiet Kirkwood, Missouri.
I'm not sure I knew before tonight how pervasive the sensation of one's skin crawling could actually be. Â