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Author’s Note: After my brother, Asher, was shot and killed on June 17, 1992, friends and family told me I had to deal with the tragedy or it would eat me alive. In today’s parlance, these caring folks wanted me to “process” the trauma of his sudden, shocking death and the many ripple effects of grief it set in motion. But I was only 21 and had little idea what they were talking about. I was just trying to get through the day. Then, about two decades after Asher’s murder, I began to understand: I had unanswered questions, untended feelings, a mysterious, painful hole in my life. It was time to deal.

I wrote this story, which was originally published by Gawker in 2013, as a sort of exorcism to contend with personal demons. I’ve never been great at therapy, so I looked at reporting and writing “A Hollywood Ending” as my version of it. I wanted to get everything out, as it were. There were other considerations, too: I was motivated to make sense of a senseless act of violence for the people who had counseled me after my brother’s death. And I wanted the story to speak to people I’d never met. We hear about the shootings that grab headlines, but what about those that don’t? I wanted to bring to life just one of the thousands of anonymous people killed by guns in this country every year.

Finally, I hoped that, in some small way, I could help shift the dispiriting conversation about gun violence, and perhaps even move people in power who had refused to do anything about it. This is also the reason my friend Josh (the same Josh in the story) and I later launched a series of benefit concerts to support organizations fighting for better gun laws and championing survivors. Today, I’m deeply dismayed that things have only gotten worse since I published my story. According to Johns Hopkins’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, someone in the United States was killed by a gun every eleven minutes in 2023, and there were 46,728 gun-related deaths that year, the third-highest annual total ever recorded.

I remember after Sandy Hook, President Barack Obama said that if a tragedy of such enormity didn’t change hearts, minds, and legislation, then nothing would. I’m afraid he might have been right. But I also know that, for my brother and for countless other people whose lives have been stolen from them, I can’t stop believing that change is possible. —M.M.

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Mardi Gras in June. That was what the noise outside the window sounded like. A celebratory spray of firecrackers. A tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-tack midnight burst of joy.

It was a new twist in a long night. The evening had begun at a movie theater in Santa Monica, California. For the life of me I can’t recall which so-bad-it’s-almost-transfixing early-nineties screwballer we’d seen. I do remember the film’s apparent message: Bodily fluids are hilarious. Elastic, spastic faces and groin shots. Fluids for days.

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Evangeline doesn’t remember much about it either. Evangeline. Evanne. She had the name of a country-music singer and a life like country songs. Her dad and stepmom were splitting up. She lived with her dad in a dark, dusty apartment. The bathroom cabinets were packed with pills. We made out on top of her unfolded laundry.

As we left the movie theater, I was pretty damn psyched. I’d grown up in Baltimore, a million miles east, give or take. Barely 21, I’d been set loose in the land of endless summer and legs. I was ready. For what, I couldn’t really say, except it was going to be sweet. Maybe I’d be in a band. Or maybe those method-acting classes with the teacher with three names would pay off. Big time. So much was possible.

My brother, Asher, had said so. He’d called me after my freshman year at NYU, when it was clear I couldn’t afford to go back there. “Move to L.A.,” he said from where he was living in Northern California. “You’ll live with Aaron and take acting classes and buy a motorcycle.”

Aaron, our cousin. Taller, cooler, blond, able to surf, skate, play guitar. The Thurston Moore of Huntington Beach.

So I moved. The rest of the plan, such as it was, involved Ash finishing school in Sonoma, then joining Aaron and me. Together we’d take over. The new Coen brothers or some shit. Asher had been writing a script with Aaron. There were toxic accidents set to shredding Metallica. Their movie would transcend genre flicks.

Two weeks before that June night, Asher had finally moved, joining me and Aaron in our cramped ground-floor one-bedroom. The plan was happening. Life.

Dayenu.

But there was more. Evanne, this amazing heart killer, liked me for some reason. She was a California girl but better—flaky, opaque, sexually at ease. Hazel-green eyes that were kind, not cunning. Hair the color of molasses. A pattering laugh like a sudden storm.

That night she wore a sheer black blouse, her dad’s seventies leather jacket, and deep-blue, low-rise velvet pants. Stylistically, she was in her Kelly Lynch–of–Drugstore Cowboy phase.

And me, I was trapped in a confused amalgam of John Fante and the Beastie Boys. A gap-toothed redhead, flapping wide-wale corduroy coats and vintage Pumas. When my girlie shakes her head, she sure gets funky. Invincible.

Sure, kiddo.

My brother and Aaron were off somewhere else that night, working on the script. After the movie, Evanne and I decided to head back to the apartment. We held hands as we walked toward the sunroofed Rabbit I hadn’t yet named. I’d hastily obtained the Rabbit when my ’66 Dart went from gushing oil to not starting. I had to get to work behind the counter at the new Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop in the Century City mall. The tape deck worked? Done. To hell with a mechanic checking out the whole car. I was not very good at Los Angeles.

It’s on the short walk to the Rabbit that memories jump-cut into clearer focus. The night smelled of jasmine and charred taco meat, the smell of L.A. And I remember… a feeling. A wobble in my gut. Physical. A hollowing out. Not nausea. Closer to the opposite, like I couldn’t get enough air in. And all I could say, once I was behind the wheel, was: “I feel weird.” Then, at the light, looking past the windshield but not seeing much: “I feel weird, man.”

I fought it. Denied it. Look at this rad girl. Look at the swollen moon through the sunroof. Moonroof! Shove in the Tom Waits cassette and forget the gut. We’d get to my place and await further evening instructions from friends. A bar? Dinner? Drinks? We’d see. We’d make some calls.

When we got to the apartment I shared with Aaron and now Asher—just southwest of Hancock Park and northeast of a place called the Miracle Mile (which is neither a mile nor, I would soon learn, capable of miracles)—Evanne and I decided to smoke pot. I don’t know why. Neither of us were big weed smokers. Maybe I thought the pot could coat the peculiar wooziness still swirling my innards, two negatives stacked atop each other to reach a positive charge. But no, the effect instead was cumulative, and I was left with whittled wits. Unhappily stoned.

We played a Sonic Youth CD. Swooning feedback covered us completely, a sheet of spiked velour. I fixed us some chocolate milk because we were young and thirsty and she keeps coming closer saying I can feel it in my bones. Cocoa powder. Milk.

And then: Tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-tack. Strange for the neighborhood two weeks before Independence Day, I thought. Strange for anywhere.

I ran shaky to the window and poked a finger into the venetians. Peeking, peaking. Like a detective in middle-class squalor. A cheap dick. “What is it?” Evanne’s voice wobbled from across the room. “I don’t know. Nothing. I don’t see anything.”

I ripped back to the couch for more stoned groping. Mardis Gras in June, what a lark.

Detective Frank Bolan of the LAPD told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that Asher Montandon was shot “in the lung and aorta” during a “robbery attempt” early in the morning of June 17, 1992. The paper reported that my brother and Aaron “were double-parked and looking for a parking space … when a man ran up and said he was being robbed. Another man ran up and fired a shot through the car’s window.” The article continued: “Police have no suspects, but hope to soon release a composite drawing of the gunman.”

From what I recall Aaron telling me, when the second man approached the car, Asher, confused, instinctive, mashed the gas pedal. Bullets exploded the driver’s-side window. My brother screamed out in pain, “I’ve been hit. I’ve been hit.” The car—in my memory, a turquoise Geo Tracker—tacked right and crashed.

Aaron somehow hailed a taxi. My brother was staining the pavement crimson, but this cab driver, this stranger, stopped. He helped Aaron carry my brother to the cab’s back seat. He surely lost money later that night while toweling blood from cushion crevices. (I should remember this the next time I want to badmouth a cabbie.)

It wasn’t long after the Mardi Gras noises that the phone in my apartment rang. How long I can’t say. Fifteen minutes, maybe fewer. It felt like no time at all. One second I was at the venetians, the next the phone rang. I remember hearing it through the haze, the wooze, the Sonic Youth.

Asher was dead before Evanne and I arrived at the hospital. He’d been looking to park on South Detroit, the street we lived on. By the time the doctor called Aaron and me into a small, windowless room to tell us he was dead, I’d already realized that I would never see my brother again. I didn’t want to see him dead.

“Friends are mourning the death of a popular Sonoma State University graduate who was shot and killed a few weeks after he moved to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a Hollywood scriptwriter,” the Press Democrat wrote. One of Asher’s Sonoma State advisers told the paper, “He was one of the people society needs. He was ready to go on and make his mark.”

We would not become the new Coen brothers or some shit. We would be nothing together.

My brother adored me. When he was the judge of our preteen dance contests at a neighbor’s house, he often named me the winner.

Asher and I went to the same high school, three grades apart. The Park School of Baltimore was a progressive, private institution tucked into a verdant, wealthy suburb of Charm City, not far from rolling horse country, with a once very helpful and liberal scholarship policy. All seniors were required to do a final project during their last semester—an internship at a hospital, say, or filing for a law firm.

My brother went a different way. Over the spring semester of his senior year in 1986, Asher made a short film designed largely to eviscerate our headmaster, whose name was F. Parvin Sharpless. Asher considered him a buffoon, a blowhard, and possibly actually evil. Somehow, overachieving with his casting, my brother persuaded a popular history teacher to play Sharpless in the movie. The character’s name—in case there was any doubt what Asher was up to—was Dr. Bluntmore.

Asher cast me as the lead. He and his cinematographer, a theater-school refugee and transfer student named Jeremy (who remains a close friend), shot straight to VHS. They edited by cutting and splicing strips of magnetic tape. They videotaped my character scoring with hot new wave girls and prep-school field hockey stars alike; working out shirtless on a Soloflex, with the hardcore band 7 Seconds as the soundtrack; showering behind frosted glass in the bathroom in the Pikesville house Mom shared with her New Age friends. They filmed me organizing the scheme that would bring Bluntmore down. (It involved several boom boxes blasting bad classical music.)

Park Punk Rules played in our school’s well-appointed auditorium at the end of my brother’s final semester, during weekly assembly, which was attended by faculty, staff, and students. Sharpless stood in the back of the auditorium, arms folded tightly across his chest.

My brother adored me. When he was the judge of our preteen dance contests at a neighbor’s house, he often named me the winner. (I’m crushed now to admit that, when I took over as judge, I often gave Asher low marks for “bending your knees too much.”) He could also make my life unbearable. One night in high school, downtown, our parents absent as Peanuts adults, our small gang of friends were in a twenty-four-hour greasy spoon on Charles Street after an all-ages punk show. A waitress with a beehive spilled a glass of water on the checkered floor near our table. I joked about feigning to slip and fall, and the lawsuit riches that would rain down on us.

Ash was taken with the idea and wouldn’t let it drop. He said I had to do it, the pratfall. He said he wouldn’t drive me home unless I did. I thought he was joking and looked for a wink in his eyes. It didn’t come.

He was serious. So serious.

Why? Because he thought I could pull it off and successfully sue the dive? Or was it because he knew the waitress’s life was hard enough already and yet here was some asshole—me—smirking about making it worse, and so I must be punished? Or did he just want to stir shit up?

I never knew. I still don’t. But in that moment—in the many moments of brotherly standoff he engineered—there was a glimmer of Asher’s wounded, mercurial spirit. Eventually, he would relent and drive me home. But not before amping the evening’s drama. Not before inflating, like a rainbow-tinted soap bubble, what was possible, real, and imagined. Not before making me sweat.

Everyone at the memorial services for my brother said that he would have wanted us to party, not mourn. They were probably right. From his high school freshman year on, he was ready to party, to drink and take drugs and play Led Zeppelin very, very loud. “Have a good time, all the time,” he’d say frequently, quoting from Spinal Tap with a pirate’s smirk.

He was obsessed with Woody Allen, Steve Martin’s standup, and Mel Brooks. We played the cassette of A Wild and Crazy Guy to dust before I was old enough to understand the jokes. I watched Dad and Ash to know when to laugh. My brother could recite the entire script of Blazing Saddles.

But he also watched a lot of Fellini, Truffaut, and, most dearly, Kurosawa. He had some samurai in him. He was probably the most loyal motherfucker I’ve ever known.

Like most of us, he contained multitudes. He could be somber, sensitive, depressed. In fact, a few years after Asher died, our mother told me that he used to dream, often, of dying young. He wrote her pained letters saying that he was quite certain he wouldn’t live to see 30.

The memorial services were in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Walnut Creek, California, where our parents—though divorced and no longer living together—had both moved some years before the murder. I took the heartbreak tour, and by the time I went east, Evanne and I had broken, too. I couldn’t or wouldn’t let her sunbeam goodness crack through the gloom encasing me. Just one more regret.

In Walnut Creek, family and friends gathered, drank, went ribald, raunchy, blue. I read an original poem I called “Laughing Like Trains,” written months before the occasion.

The memorials ended, but the mourning didn’t. It was only just beginning, and already beginning to fray. The days, weeks, and years slugged along, propelling the people who loved Asher most in different directions. Lonely ones. Surprising too.

Mom has been a spiritual seeker all her life. Or, at any rate, for as long as her mom, my grandma, can recall. If it wasn’t a Bohemian poet-guru friend who held all the answers, it was a Santa Fe psychic or Sufism. How it looks to me: Mom has never felt right in the world. She has never been satisfied that, as her father was fond of saying, “life doesn’t give a shit.” She gives a shit and wants to know what it all means.

Even as events like Asher’s murder show me a world in which randomness, cruelty, and devastation are the air we breathe, for Mom there must be more. And so she wanders—from Baltimore to Portland, Chicago, India, and Walnut Creek—searching, lost.

As a very young woman, she fell in love with a dashing University of Chicago student of philosophy and mysticism named Alan. He looked like a Jewish Al Pacino and turned Mom on to Sufism. Soon enough she was pregnant. And then she was driving Alan and their friend Barbara from Chicago to San Francisco, to visit Alan’s mother. Mom drove through the night until her eyes closed, and with them the future she’d imagined for herself. The Volvo skidded off the road, down a steep hill, and into a culvert.

Mom broke a wrist and was badly cut up. Barbara, who was in the front seat, survived with serious injuries. Alan, in the back, was crushed to death. This happened just before dawn on December 20, 1967, outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Asher was born almost exactly five months later.

I can’t fathom what it was like for her to lose him too, twenty-five years later. By then she’d already been drifting for years, ever since divorcing Dad when I was 11 and Asher was 14. Home to home, coast to coast. After Asher died, my sense was that she became more unmoored than ever.

Sometimes she’s lived alone. Other times she’s found a community of friends to take her in. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars she’s spent on quasi-spiritual classes, never-recouped loans to fellow seekers, long-distance calls to perceived psychics. I don’t think I want to know.

A couple of years ago, she became enamored with a Northern California group called the Pathways Institute and started attending seminars and workshops conducted by her guru du jour, Carole Kammen. The group’s website describes its purpose:

The Pathways Institute Mystery School is a life-long learning academy in the human arts. In all cultures throughout the ages, mystery schools appear at times of extraordinary cultural, societal and technological change to help ordinary men and women bridge the resulting chasm between the inner sacred and outer mundane life experience. Like the mystery schools of old, Pathways Institute revives ancient wisdom and practices relevant to today’s challenges.

To me it’s all a mystery.

Mom has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the considerable Sufi population of Walnut Creek. I believe it was during an off-again stretch, and following a concussion she sustained from a fall while working as an early-childhood teacher, that she found Pathways. Hard to know whether it’s the concussion; early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, with which she’s since been diagnosed; or Pathways’ New Age voodoo, but these days Mom seems cloudier, sadder, farther away than ever.

When I saw her last December, she suddenly seemed to be aging very quickly. By then she was living with Kammen in a rented house with a pool in Marin County. She was not working; she had not had a job since her fall. She told me that her driver’s license had been revoked because of the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. My online research indicated that this is only done when a physician believes the illness has reached a stage sufficiently advanced that a person poses a danger on the road.

A fellow Pathways member had driven Mom to meet me, my wife Catherine, and our two young daughters for lunch at a bookstore café not far from her house. An hour and a half later, Mom’s friend picked her up. It was like visiting a prisoner in the jail of a Marin mini mall.

During lunch, Mom seemed occasionally lucid. She asked me about a screenplay I was writing, which I hadn’t mentioned to her for several months. But she also seemed to be receding, a half ghost nibbling egg salad. She didn’t appear capable of relating to the kids. At one point, with the girls and Catherine off browsing books, Mom and I talked about possible holiday presents for her granddaughters.

“Do they like warm blankets?” Mom asked, as if she’d just fallen to earth.

Dad said that he often thinks about how things might’ve been if only my brother were less naive, better prepared for confrontation. Armed.

As a young boy, Dad didn’t care much for guns. He grew up in a forest clearing along a dirt road in a tiny community called Trailwoods, in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania. There were only eleven other families there. The dads in about half those families hunted for deer and bear meat to feed their kids. Not my grandpa. He preferred to fish for trout he couldn’t seem to catch. My dad remembers standing at the edge of a lake watching his dad cast lines while the pop, pop, pop of hunting rifles echoed in the forest. During hunting season, my grandmother wouldn’t let Dad play in the woods.

Dad took after my grandpa. When he was seven he went shooting with an uncle, popping helium balloons tied to rocks with a .22 rifle. But shooting didn’t thrill him. He did like his BB gun, with which he would stealthily slip into the woods, meaning to nail a squirrel or two. The creatures hid too well, however, and he never bagged one.

By the time he entered high school, Dad’s family had moved to a middle-class neighborhood in southeastern Massachusetts. Dad had experienced a considerable growth spurt. He started boxing and played on his school’s football team, made up of guys like him: not naturally athletic, but hungry. Starved. Desperate to put the opposing quarterback not just down, but out of the game. Their unofficial team motto was “We’re small, but we’re slow.” They won the state championship his senior year.

After graduating, Dad hitchhiked and hopped freight trains across the country. He fell in love with the West Coast and decided to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon, studying philosophy.

It was around this time that he met a young widow with a two-year-old boy named Asher. After Dad graduated college, he and Mom moved to Baltimore and, with the help of her parents, bought a house on a busy street in an otherwise quiet middle-class suburb. They planted a row of spruces at the edge of the front yard. A prickly, sweet-smelling wall against the world. Dad completed medical school and went to work as a psychiatrist.

Together my parents became intensely interested in spirituality, mysticism, and Sufism, the Eastern philosophy that is sort of to Islam as Kabbalah is to Judaism. They began regularly attending Sufi meetings in Washington, D.C., learning the teachings of the Indian mystic Merwan Sheriar Irani, known as Meher Baba. Boiled down, Baba’s teaching, devoured by my parents and many other liberal seekers of the 1960s, seems to be a variant of the Golden Rule: Love others as you want to be loved.

Which is partly why I found it strange when, in the late nineties, Dad told me he’d begun buying guns and shooting at a range. The way he tells it, when he turned 50, he made a list of things he wanted to learn. Number one was ballroom dancing, which he ultimately didn’t seem to have a talent for. Number two was French, which he quickly realized he’d never speak fluently. So he quit and turned to number three: buying a computer and teaching himself computing. That one took, as did number four: abandoning his primary amateur interest, physics, for neuroscience. He spent years constructing a brain map and now works with some of the country’s most accomplished neuroscientists on various projects.

Number five was learning to shoot. Though he’s never been diagnosed as such, to my mind Dad displays certain tendencies that indicate he might be on the autism spectrum. When he turns to a subject—Sumo culture, ballpoint pens, perfume—reading a book or two isn’t enough. He must know everything. When he got interested in Native Americans, he erected a full-size, hand-painted Sioux-style tepee in the backyard. Its peak was visible above the roof on the approach to the house he shared with my stepmom. For years he slept on a bearskin rug beside their bed.

Dad told me he joined the NRA so he could get a subscription to the magazine, American Rifleman, because it had comprehensive information on guns. He stopped paying dues a few years ago, when the organization “started being nasty about Obama,” but there’s still an NRA sticker on his white pickup truck. Next to it is one for Amnesty International. A dream catcher hangs from his rearview mirror.

California has fairly stringent firearm regulations, so it wasn’t easy for Dad to find a place to buy his first gun. Google led him to a licensed dealer in Richmond, about thirty miles from Walnut Creek, where he bought an M14 made by a company based in Baltimore. “It’s one of the greatest rifles ever made,” Dad told me, detailing its use in the early phases of Vietnam.

He packed the M14 into his pickup and went to a gun range. Its director was an older guy with a military background named John. Dad marveled at the breadth of John’s knowledge—on the history of firearms, ballistics, you name it. He spent about fifteen hours training with John before ever firing a single bullet.

“Finally, the day comes and I’m nervous,” Dad told me. “I’m using iron sights at a hundred yards. All set up for my first shot. A couple minutes go by and John says, ‘You’re not shooting.’ I turned to him and said, ‘I’m savoring the moment.’ He just cracked up.”

Dad’s familiar rat-a-tat cackle burst from my cellphone’s speaker when he told this story. But he quickly sobered. “You’re using metal and wood to control this amorphous, chaotic force. And you’re training it at 200 yards away,” he said. “It’s still mind-boggling.”

More guns followed: a Sako TRG-42 (“now there’s a rifle”), two Glock pistols, a Remington 300 Winchester Magnum, two shotguns, and a .22. He turned away from the don’t-worry-be-happy Sufi ethos and hardened himself, at least in appearance, against the world. Most Sufis at the time were awash in white—they wore white, flowing clothing, and painted all their walls white. Dad went black. Black T-shirts, black military-style cargo pants, black Nikes. That was his uniform. I took to thinking of him as Johnny Cash, if Johnny Cash were a Navy SEAL.

These days Dad’s preferred firearms are rifles—due to his Swiss heritage, he speculates, and his enduring appreciation for the physics involved with long-range shooting. “Shotguns I don’t like,” he said. “They’re very inelegant. But they are the last word in self-defense weapons. If a guy did burst in and you had a choice between a Glock and a shotgun, you pick up the shotgun.”

Dad told me that when he first heard about the Holocaust as a young teenager he was devastated, and the terror of it stuck with him. He was also quite moved as a young man reading about Russia’s forced labor camps in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. He thinks often about the lesson he learned from the book’s section on people who resisted arrest: “You fight back.”

But who would he need to fight back against? In 2011, Walnut Creek’s population was around 64,000. The city had one murder that year, and 422 burglaries. In the twenty-four years Dad has lived there, he has never been robbed, much less threatened with murder. “These things aren’t rational,” he told me. “I don’t really think people will break into the house, but if they do I want to be ready.”

One day a couple of years ago, he was working in the backyard when my stepmom came out of the house and said she thought a stranger was in their garage. Dad grabbed his Glock and crept into the garage, but no one was there. I asked him why, if a shotgun is the best home-defense weapon he owns, he went for the Glock. He thought a minute and then said, “Remember, the shotgun is really, really messy, and I rent this house. It would take out not only the person but a good portion of the wall behind them.”

Asher was murdered with a nine-millimeter pistol. Dad remembers the event differently than I do. His version is that Asher was trying to break up a fight, which he never should have done. But Asher didn’t always think things through.

Dad told me about a time when Asher was living with him in Oakland. My brother picked Dad up at the San Francisco airport one night, and when Dad got in the car, Asher was irate. He couldn’t believe Dad hadn’t told him that he’d need money for the toll to go over the Bay Bridge. He had to talk his way past the tollbooth operator. Luckily, he was good at talking his way past tollbooth operators.

Dad couldn’t understand how Asher didn’t know about the tolls, and that he’d left the house with no money. “He was a smart guy, but he didn’t have street smarts,” Dad said.

Dad thinks that if Asher had taken a course with John at the range, he never would have confronted someone who was holding a gun. In training, John stressed the seriousness of firearms, and had some ironclad rules: You were safer carrying a gun than not, but only if you knew how to use it. Guns were always a last option in a fight. And if you were unarmed, you avoided someone armed.

Dad said that he often thinks about how things might’ve been if only my brother were less naive, better prepared for confrontation. Armed.

“I still think that,” he said quietly on the phone. “And I think, damn.”

The line was silent for five long seconds.

“Damn.”

A few years ago, Catherine and I were out to dinner with Dad at a Brooklyn restaurant. Somehow, unfortunately, gun control came up in conversation. I bit my tongue as Dad rehashed his familiar, flawed arguments. States with a higher percentage of gun owners in the population, he said, have lower violent crime rates. Switzerland, he said, where compulsory military service results in high levels of gun ownership, reports almost no firearm-related homicides.

Dad told a story about a boy who used to bully me when I was about eight. He said that he still gets angry thinking about it. He said he wishes that he had gotten into guns earlier so he could have done something.

I felt sick.

“What, you would have shot an eight-year-old kid for picking on me?”

Dad likes to be provocative.

“If I thought it would stop him from picking on you? Sure.”

I pictured myself reaching across the table to stab Dad in the face with a salad fork.

And yet, as much as I disagree with him, I’ve never tried to do anything about guns. I’ve never written to my congressional representative or donated to the Brady Campaign. Instead, I rationalize: The NRA is too powerful, there’s too much money involved, nothing will ever change.

Then, watching a Harry Nilsson documentary not long ago, a tsunami of guilt washed over me. The film chronicled Nilsson’s dogged gun-control efforts following the murder of his good friend John Lennon. When all of Nilsson’s work came to naught, I began to sob, the laptop wobbling on my chest. I’ve failed, I thought. I’ve failed my brother.

If I wanted to become active on the issue, January 2, 2013, would have been a good day to start. That’s when I received an email from a friend I’d met while living in Los Angeles. I hadn’t had any contact with Josh in nearly two decades. I didn’t remember him being particularly close with my brother.

“The Sandy Hook shootings really hit me hard,” Josh wrote. “As the dad of a 3-year-old and even just as a human being, I was physically sick hearing about what happened.” He wanted to act. “I really decided that enough was enough and that if I didn’t do something to stop gun violence, I was as much a part of the problem simply for not doing anything at all.”

Josh, who works in the music industry, talked about putting on a benefit for Brady. Then he arrived at the reason he was writing me:

It has been about twenty years since Asher’s death and I really can’t believe this is still an unsolved crime (as far as I know). If you are willing, I’d at least like to try and bring his case back to the LAPD to look into this cold case that I think needs to be reopened.

With your blessing, I’d like to at least try and do something to catch the guy who killed Asher.… I’ll never forget Aaron telling me that the cop who interviewed him at the hospital said, “Don’t worry, we’ll catch this guy.” 21 years later—they didn’t and that’s a fucking shame. Asher’s life was worth more than an empty promise.

An empty promise. I agreed with Josh that Asher’s life was worth more than that. But I’d truly never cared much if the police caught the guy or not. I’d never felt vengeance burn in my veins. I didn’t think much about justice. I couldn’t tell you why. Just the way it’s been.

Still, I found Josh’s note incredibly bighearted and brave, and it made me want to act, too. Get answers. In March, I wrote to the LAPD’s homicide records department requesting a copy of the report on my brother’s murder. After several phone calls and many faxed documents proving I was in fact who I claimed to be, the document arrived in my mailbox.

The report about my brother’s murder consists of just over one page of rote information memorializing the make of his car (turns out it was a gray 1989 Chevy Tracer), the time of the shooting (0045 hours), where it took place (460 South Detroit Street, just two doors down from where we were living), and witness names and addresses. There’s also a page and a half of witness accounts.

The documents elucidate what happened when, one after another, two men ran up to Asher’s car. Apparently, the first one approached the passenger-side door. He had just passed another man a block up South Detroit Street and “observed the butt of a handgun protruding from [his] right front pocket.” According to the police, the man at the car “shouted, ‘Help me, help me please,’ then looked back and proceeded to run northbound.”

Then the second man, the shooter, approached the car. “[He] demanded money and then fired one round through the driver’s side window striking Montandon on the left side,” the police report states. After reflexively hitting the gas, “Montandon, Asher lost consciousness from his gunshot wound and collided with a vehicle.” A witness saw someone who might have been the shooter get picked up by an American car made sometime between 1975 and 1980, either brown or maroon in color. The possible suspect was described as male and Hispanic, around five feet seven inches tall and weighing 175 pounds. He wore a “WHT T-SHIRT, BROWN ¾ LENGTH PANTS.”

My brother was pronounced dead at 1:22 a.m. by a Dr. Verham. Despite my vivid memory of hearing about Asher’s death at the hospital, the police records indicate I was notified “by Detective Maxwell at Wilshire Station,” an event I have no recollection of.

After receiving the report, I tried for several weeks to reach Detective Frank Bolan, who had responded to the scene and was later quoted in the papers, to find out if a suspect was ever taken into custody. But Bolan had retired in 2007, and he didn’t reply to my inquiries. Then one day I received an email from Detective John Skaggs, the homicide coordinator for the LAPD’s West Bureau. Two weeks later, we spoke by phone.

Skaggs told me that there had never been a suspect identified in my brother’s case. “It’s just a tragic, tragic event,” he said. I asked him a question I’d long had: Was the first man who approached the car ever considered a possible accomplice? He said no.

Then he told me something incredible.

After I initially reached out to the LAPD, Skaggs had looked into my brother’s death. He told me that a single nine-millimeter shell casing had been recovered at the scene. Its specifications were entered into a forensic computing system that police use to search for matches among the weapons used in various crimes. Over the first decade following Asher’s murder, nothing turned up. Then, in 2004, police found a gun while responding to a domestic violence call in the San Fernando Valley. Back at the LAPD’s lab, the gun was fired to generate a shell casing. Skaggs told me that the lab technician who entered the test casing’s specifications into the forensics database had indicated a “possible match” with the casing taken from the scene of my brother’s murder. He said that the technician retired not long after entering the data, and the match remained unconfirmed.

Skaggs told me that it was very unusual for a possible match to remain unresolved for this long. He said that he was looking into the situation, and if he determined that the casings did match, he would find out as much as he could about the gun in question and its previous owners.

The possibility of a match made me, for the first time, curious to know who had killed my brother. But that hope lasted only about six weeks, until Skaggs emailed me again. “The tentative match on the Domestic Case was negative,” he wrote. I was surprised to feel so disappointed.

Skaggs added, somewhat cryptically: “There are some other areas that I’m looking into. I will let you know if anything were to develop.”

That’s the last I heard from the police about my brother’s case.

It surprises me not at all that, after all these years, there is still no suspect in Asher’s murder. In 1992, there were a record number of homicides in Los Angeles County: 2,589, up 8 percent from the previous year.

One day around the time I was learning what little the police knew about Asher’s murder, I found a letter from the Brady Campaign in my mailbox. Inside the envelope was a note saying that Josh had made a contribution to the group in my brother’s name. I stared at the letter for several minutes, my throat squeezing, battling hot tears so my daughters wouldn’t worry.

I didn’t think I felt enough. I thought I should be sadder. I thought I should be undone. I thought, like a Beckett character, that I should not be able to go on.

After Asher was killed, Aaron and I had moved out of Los Angeles as soon as we possibly could. The sleepless haze we operated in while boxing up the apartment on South Detroit Street slowed our progress. By the fall of 1992, we’d landed in San Francisco. Some of our closer L.A. friends followed, and a few of us lived together in an apartment building across from a hospital between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill neighborhoods. The Tendernob. We started a band called Coal. Changed the name to Postman. We were inspired by Nirvana, Echo and the Bunnymen, and the Clash. We performed at bars, and at clubs with no windows. Aaron played guitar and wrote songs. There was another guitarist, a bass player, and a guy on the drums. I sang. Not really. I drank beer and Jim Beam and jumped around and shouted until my voice was a croak. Some nights there were fewer people in the crowd than in the band. We didn’t care.

I didn’t think about writing lyrics for or about my brother, but every show was a eulogy. A wake. Jewish punks playing a musical memorial. At a few shows, Aaron and I drank so much we could barely stand. But we always finished the set.

I began thinking that perhaps school wasn’t a terrible backup plan. I had taken enough community college courses that I could enter the University of California system as a junior, and maybe even afford to graduate. I applied to Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Berkeley was kind enough to make my decision easy by not admitting me.

Santa Cruz in the early nineties was a great place to live if you wanted to wear thrift-store vintage wool suits, study postmodern literature, drink Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine, and drunkenly deconstruct Beverly Hills 90210. All of which I definitely wanted. Only I didn’t know how much until I arrived.

I lived with my stepbrother, Abe, a sort of cerebral hillbilly with a narrow face and dark eyes. Small lips and rough teeth. A handsome squirrel. Abe seemed somewhat uncomfortable in the modern world and compensated by being very honest about his desires and impulses. He said what he thought. He could wear overalls and not look ridiculous. He worked landscaping on campus. He liked to get his hands dirty. He’d say things like: “If only I could meet a fine, big-breasted woman and shack up in the country.”

We developed a secret language. “The Proge” was our backyard fitness program, which primarily involved stacking bricks in plastic milk crates and running a sturdy stick between them so we could do curls. “You broke my TV controller” was code for “life is insane and my head might explode.”

We scrounged free food from friends at coffee shops and never cooked at home. Once, I came home from class and there was a rotisserie chicken in the refrigerator. I felt betrayed. Weren’t we in this together? Since when did we go around purchasing Safeway chickens? Abe found this hilarious, and I realized that he was right. We fell on the dirty kitchen linoleum, laughing like trains.

Some nights I’d drink too much and walk out the front door of our small white clapboard house. Before I reached the nearby health-food store, I’d cross the street and head for the stucco walls of the liquor store on the other side of Laurel Street. If it was late enough, about one or so in the morning, the streets would be empty and I’d be alone with the walls.

I’d walk steady, determined. Eyes on the pavement. Around and around the liquor store. Dragging my right hand across the stucco until the skin cracked open and knuckle-blood beads hit the night. I’d go as long as I could take it. And then try for one more loop, the cuts slicing wider on the raised fake stone.

Back home I’d wrap my stinging fist in a bandage. Sweat out the Beam in my sleep. In the morning I’d put on a vintage suit, careful not to yank at the bandage, and catch the shuttle to the country club in the redwoods that was Santa Cruz’s campus to talk Ballard, Baudrillard, Lacan, Kristeva.

I might still be out there at night, marching, bleeding through my knuckles, if not for Catherine. She was blond and fit. A scrapper. She took life rambunctiously. Vinyl records were piled everywhere in her tiny, carpeted bedroom: Bowie, the Muppets, Oklahoma!, Flash Gordon, both Elvises, Police, Police, Police. She did the worm on dance floors in a black cocktail dress. She made a running, diving catch in right center field to save a big game for our intramural softball team of misfits. She had twelve siblings; if things were ever truly dire, we’d always have a roof over our heads.

We met on a Thursday night at a 90210 deconstruction party. She wore a white Victorian nightgown. I had the word “Brenda” written in Sharpie across my abdomen. (This was the time of Riot Grrrls.) On our first date, we curled up on the street beneath a yellow digger truck and kissed. At dawn I dozed off on the beach and stayed asleep even as a sand-cleaning cruiser ground by a few feet away. Catherine did handstands—sandstands—and watched me sleep like I was an alien fallen to earth.

After college we spent a summer traveling Europe. When we returned, broke, we moved in to the Little House in my dad’s Walnut Creek backyard. Rent free, until we could get ourselves sorted. The Little House was smaller than some doghouses, built years ago for my stepsiblings. The ceiling was so low we couldn’t stand up straight, so we laid down a lot.

Catherine worked as an administrative assistant at Dad’s psychiatric clinic in a poor part of Oakland. Once she’d saved up enough from her paychecks, we moved up in the world—to a single, ground-floor room in Berkeley. No kitchen, no bathroom. We peed in a plastic Golden State Warriors souvenir cup and tossed the urine out the window.

On my birthday that year, Catherine bought a Ping-Pong table. During the warm months, we kept it in the front yard. In the winter, the table and the bed took up all the space in our room. You had to inch sideways past it to go for the Warriors cup. By the time we moved to Brooklyn—to be youngish in the city, and because we wanted adventures, and because that’s what all aspiring writers did in those days—my brother had been dead for eight years.

Once, on a crosstown bus, I was absolutely convinced he was riding behind me. I risked my own life and stared at a stranger on public transportation. Couldn’t help myself. Couldn’t not look. Was it? Is it? Had he faked it all in order to—what? Move to New York? It couldn’t be. Could it?

Maybe-Asher stood up several stops before I was due to get off. He made his way to the middle of the bus, ready to exit. I stood, too, and moved close behind him. Was it? The same dark hair, parted to fall over his right eye. Same gently sloping nose. Freckles. My eyes stung from not blinking.

When Maybe-Asher stepped off the bus, so did I. He walked east and I followed. I began to think that, incredibly, it was my brother. Science was against me, but still. The same pigeon-toed strut. If at any point this Maybe-Asher stretched his right arm to the side—a spastic air-punch my real brother did to loosen a tight elbow—well, what then? I followed him from half a block away, a cheap dick.

Finally, Maybe-Asher bounced up a short flight of brownstone stairs and entered a Midtown building. I froze. My chase was over. But was it even a chase at all? Can it be a chase if you don’t know what you’re after?

It’s difficult to admit, but perhaps part of my hesitation to approach a stranger that day had to do with my ambivalent feelings surrounding Asher’s death. I don’t mean I’m conflicted about his dying—of course I wish he were still alive. But for many years, I’d felt a toxic wad of gut-based guilt because I didn’t think I felt enough. I thought I should be sadder. I thought I should be undone. I thought, like a Beckett character, that I should not be able to go on. And that I shouldn’t.

There was relief, too. No longer would I be the younger sibling, squirming under his rule. Never again would he take an offhand remark about spilled water and turn it into an hour-long battle of wills that I was sure to lose. No more would I have to endure his dorky jokes. His too-loud squawk of a public laugh. His OCD-like finger-sniffing habit. His Grateful Dead bootlegs. His cajoling. His hectoring. His preternaturally stinky feet. His awkward and uncool way with girls. His insistence on making and then standing by claims I knew—I knew so hard—were not true. Impossible. The way he drew out my name, annoyingly, when he wanted something: “C’mon, Maaa-uhhhh-cccccc.” His never failing to upbraid me because he believed I ordered terribly in restaurants and should look the waiter in the eye and speak louder. His related feeling that he’d always ordered the best thing on the menu, far superior to what I’d gotten. His stoner friends. His egg breath. His egg farts. His tie-dyed T-shirts. His mirrored shades. His fondness for wizards. Fairies. Led Zeppelin tropes. His confidence in his own coolness. His unstoppable loyalty to me. His belief in me. His belief I could do better, try harder. His pushing me. To move, move, move to Los Angeles. Take acting lessons. Buy a motorcycle. Ride around in the endless summer. The new Coen brothers or some shit. His not knowing there are tolls to pay on the Bay Bridge.

When that relief had reared its perverse head, I had those knuckle-shredding nights at the liquor store wall in Santa Cruz to make things right. Guilt. Punishment. Pain. If I couldn’t feel enough on my own, I needed help. The bloodied stucco was there for me, my silent partner.

Now I feel more. Catherine and I still live in Brooklyn. Our older daughter has my brother’s name: Oona Asher. Every few weeks it hits me hard—I wish Asher could meet the girls. I wish he knew them. I wish he could see the Grease-motivated dances Daphne, our younger daughter, performs. I wish he could hear Oona’s heartfelt poetry about cheese. They’d have a fondness for Shel Silverstein in common. I wish he could hang out with Catherine. I think they’d really get along. I wish he were there for Mom in ways I cannot be. I wish he were here so Dad didn’t have to believe he could’ve been saved. I wish we could talk together, walk in the park together, write movies together. I wish I could hear just one more dorky joke.

When Josh made his contribution to the Brady Campaign, he added this note: “Asher, I only wish I got to know you better. Love Josh.”

There isn’t a fountain big enough for all the pennies.

On May 24, 2013, my brother would’ve turned 45. I wish we could’ve thrown him a party.

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