The nightly walks home: Green as Randy Lenz's unwitting companion

texture · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: 11 Nov YDAU (the attested walk); part of a nightly pattern
• What: Green regularly walks back to Ennet House after the required nightly meeting alongside Randy Lenz, who never rides back and needs a compliant ear. On 11 Nov, Lenz — secretly wired on his emergency Bing stash — subjects Green to a nonstop stream of grandiose confabulations (the finger that regrew like a lizard's tail, the akido killings, his obese mother's Greyhound-toilet trauma and pastry-borne death). Green makes "little noises of attention and assent," lets Lenz know the time roughly once a block from his cheap digital watch, lights both their cigarettes, and — a veteran of plenty of cocaine himself — notes that cocaine "always seemed like it grabbed you by the throat and just didn't let go." Of himself Green will say only that "he's been broken by life... Life has kicked his ass, and he's regrouping"; his face "sort of crumples blankly" whenever Lenz mentions late mothers, and he says he either doesn't remember his dreams or doesn't dream. Green is unaware that these walks are Lenz's cover for killing animals (event 13). Three endnote facts attach to this stretch: his neurosystem's coke reaction is "binocular nystagmus and a walloping depression even while the coke-high's still on that accounts for the tendency toward fits of weeping with his nystagmic face hidden in the crook of his big right arm" (n232 p. 1037); his beloved corporate-hard-rock bands "were all truly big two or three years past, and are now slightly passé" (Choosy Mothers split entirely), which the narrator says "shows where Bruce Green's psychic decline really started" (n241 p. 1045); and he is a better secret-keeper than his companion — "Because he'd been sworn to secrecy, Green doesn't tell Lenz" Charlotte Treat's confided adoptive-father backstory (n239 pp. 1044-1045; the backstory itself is on Charlotte Treat's timeline (event 3)).