5 Quotes by Joshua Davis

In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.

Part of him believes he’s still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination, and that one day he’ll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

John has always been searching for something,” says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee’s girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach “the expansive horizon.

He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. “My life was total hell,” he says. Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn’t alone. “That’s when life really began for me,” he says. He says he’s been sober ever since.

The bar’s proprietor, McAfee wrote to his friends, was partial to “shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music, to which voices beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions.