What Happened to "X"

OK, here's my first real post, and it's a doozy ...

I grew up in a high rise middle-income housing complex in Greenwich Village in the 60s and 70s. My family was part of the first wave of tenants who moved in as the building was completed. Many of these other tenants were also families with young children. The building was one of those classic NYC housing deals that don't exist anymore -- really nice, really cheap apartments, that no one ever moves out of.

As a result, most of the kids who moved in together wound up growing up together, attending the same schools, playing together after school, and, as we grew older, doing the things that teenagers do together. Of course we didn't all hang out together in one crowd, and we all had friendships away from the building, but there were fairly stable subsets of kids in the same grades who made the trip from infancy to adolescence together. My main partner in crime in the building for most of my childhood was a boy I'll call "X".

X and I knew each other even before we moved into the building. We played together as babies in the playgrounds of Washington Square Park. We went to the same junior and high schools. For several summers, our families stayed in beach houses near each other. It wasn't as intimate or deep a friendship as some I've had, but we were close and spent an awful lot of time together until about age 16. After that, we drifted into different circles of high school friends, and after we graduated, we went our separate ways. Over the 25 years since I graduated from high school, I've seen X only a handful of times, but it's always been friendly, and he has always been one of those people I think of trying to track down and catch up with.

Fast forward many years later and I hear a bit of building gossip from my mother, where X's parents still live, too. It seems X was arrested in an FBI sting for attempting to solicit a 13 year old girl (actually an FBI agent) for sex over the internet. He's under house arrest pending trial. He's not allowed to see his child, and is looking at a minimum five-year sentence if convicted. I google his name, and because X has spent much of his career as an entertainment and gossip journalist, the details are easy to find, and pretty lurid.

I get in touch with another building alumnus ("Z" who remained close with X long after I did) , who fills in some more of the background. X had had a drug problem, and had gone through a messy divorce, but there had never been a hint of anything like this before. Z says X had been getting his personal and professional lives together after hitting bottom and seemed to be doing well.

So what the heck happened? X was a fairly ordinary kid. Bright, though not particularly intellectual or academically dedicated. Good at sports, though not really a jock. Funny and gregarious, though not charismatic. A bit of a prankster, and a wiseass, but overall, he was a good kid. We grew up with some kids who got into some very ugly stuff, but he definitely was not one of them.

His growing up to become a gossip columnist surprised no one who knew him, but a pedophile? Was it drugs? Lonely late night hours on the internet robbing him of inhibition and judgment? A bizarre spasm of middle age? Or was this always something inside him? A ticking time bomb set up by something in childhood? I've gone over every memory I've got of him and his family, but I have absolutely no insight into this. "You think you know someone." A cliche, but in this case, the truest one I've ever met.