‘Nothing Together’
May 21, 2026 at 03:30PM
Maccabee Montandon | The Atavist Magazine | May 2026 | 1,752 words (6 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 175, “A Hollywood Ending.”
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.
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.
This story is part of The Atavist’s Revived series. The Atavist, our sister publication, publishes deeply reported, elegantly designed stories. Support the magazine by becoming a member.
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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/05/21/hollywood-ending-atavist-magazine/
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