Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1980

     Rom Soriano stood at the railing near the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, waiting to finish his cigaret so he could jump to his death.
     Fog spilled over the bridge's shuddering roadway and obscured the lights of nearby Alcatraz Island.  Rom sniffled and spat out some phlegm, and the cold wind jerked it away.  He took a final drag on his cigaret, flicked it over the rail and looked down.
     He stood back a second and looked at the traffic streaming by, shiny cars filled with happy people.  He took out another Marlboro, but between his shaking hands and tear-blurred vision he couldn't get it lit.  His face a grotesque mask of pain, he threw down the cigaret and lighter and grabbed the railing, and, before he could change his mind,  vaulted over it.

     It was true what they said about your life flashing in front of your eyes.  Even with the wind slamming into him and the black water rushing up to meet him, Rom viewed every moment of his life.
     He remembered Tony & Mary's Confectionery on Avenue C in Bayonne, and sitting outside and sorting his baseball cards with Kenny and Junior.  He remembered the Shore, and his dad hoisting him up onto his big chest and the waves crashing in and him screaming with delight.  And the long night in Asbury Park.
       He saw the streets of Roseville, remembered old Max Rogul chasing the cats away from his grocery store, remembered the way the gym smelled in Barringer High.  He remembered the ‘64 World's Fair over in New York and kissing Roseanne Fox in the Futurama exhibit; he recalled the night he found his mother dead, and the nurses in Presbyterian Hospital who treated him so sweetly.  He saw his grandmother, whose Florida funeral he had been too strung out to attend.
     Now he saw the face of every druggie he got high with.  He remembered every movie he'd seen, every woman he'd loved, every book he'd read.  He saw friends and fist fights and highways and basements and Christmas presents and report cards and valentines and Viet Nam.
     He saw Maria.  He saw the heavy cloud that was his curse.  He thought of everyone he loved, now dead, and that he would be joining them.  Finally, as he felt the first fingers of cold spray,  he thought that Jesus, he didn't want to die.  And then, in a blinding moment without pain or sound, he slammed into the icy blackness, and his eyes and mouth and lungs and soul were filling up with harsh, brackish water, and he became part of the darkness.

     "Did you see that?"
     "No, but I heard it.  Full stop!"
     The skipper of the Eleanor T., a 40-foot pleasure craft out of Sausalito, hit the searchlight as the mate cut the engine.  There was no mistaking the smack of a body as it hits the water.  The light picked out an arm slipping under the waves not 10 yards to starboard.  The arm popped up again, followed by some black hair.  From the cabin four passengers spilled out.  One of them, a large man in his 50s with a red nose and a wine bottle in his hand, sized up the situation.  He yanked off his jacket and shoes and, before his companions could stop him, dove into the icy water.  After a few furious strokes he reached the spot and trod water, looking around frantically.  Next to him an arm surfaced again, and he grabbed it.  A life ring splashed into the water nearby; he stretched for it but missed, and went under, still clutching the unconscious body.  In a moment he surfaced again and this time grabbed the life ring, and was pulled in, coughing and shivering, the limp body of the jumper in tow.

     Slowly the white speck of life filled Rom's being, then exploded in a spasm of retching.  His side hurt and his nose and throat stung, and every bone ached.  He was coughing now, and his ribs complained sharply.  His eyes throbbed with pain, but he opened them and saw three men bent over him, and beyond them one large man wrapped in a blanket, turned away from them,  vomiting.  Rom looked up, and far above he could see dim lights.  He was moving.  He was on a boat, lying on the deck.  Something had happened.  What?  The man with the blanket turned and spoke.
     "Yuch!  There goes a twenty-dollar bottle of wine."  He peered down at Rom.  "Just relax, friend.      That was quite a dive!"  He turned to one of the other men.  "Thank the saints we stayed a bit longer in Bodega Bay."
     One of the men, wiping his mouth, looked up to him.  "Indeed, your eminence, this young man is a fine kisser!"
     "Don't get carried away now, Father Dietrich!"  The big man's laugh filled the night.
     Now Rom remembered.  The bridge!  He'd jumped!  And he hadn't died!  Hot tears of gratitude choked him, and his ribs complained again.  Many arms were lifting him off the deck.  He passed out, and when he awoke in Marin General Hospital with taped ribs and a terrific headache, beside his bed, snoring in a visitor's chair, was Cardinal Noah McCormick of the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, still wearing the blanket.

     In the days that followed, McCormick dropped by frequently and talked with Rom.  He took the young man under his wing, getting him a room at  St. Kevin's Seminary in Orinda, where he had been visiting, and persuading the headmaster to take Rom on as a maintenance worker.  Rom agreed, as he had no desire to return to the house on Chestnut Avenue.  And he didn't mind sticking to the seminary, as his car had been stolen from the bridge parking lot the same night he'd jumped.
     As the months passed, Rom found a new sense of peace, and after corresponding with the cardinal, he decided to finish his education.  He passed his General Equivalency Diploma exams with such ease that he enrolled at U.C. Berkeley, loading his schedule with classes in film and — to McCormick's delight —  comparative religion.
     He became an A student, finishing his two-year associate's degree in just over a year.  He then transferred his studies to St. Kevin's, for now, lofted by his second wind and soothed by his new world, he wanted to become a priest.  He mastered his Latin and sociology and economics and theology.  He wrote a paper on God's Intervention Through Community Service that won him publication in a religious scholastic journal.  He distinguished himself as a curious student, an understanding and creative counselor and a first-rate small forward on the basketball team.  In 1984, barely four years after he'd jumped into the Golden Gate to end it all, Rom Soriano, age 33, received his Holy Orders  in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, his Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Angie watching proudly.  His fellow seminarians, only half jokingly, voted him Most Likely to Become Pope.
     The Order of St. Kevin posted him, at McCormick's request, to Portland, where he took a job at St. Martin DeSoto School, an all-male secondary institution where "Father Rom" became a popular teacher, basketball coach and fencing instructor.  Rom and the other priests of the parish said Mass in the tiny church attached to the school and looked after the spiritual welfare of the 750 students and some 1,200 parishioners in the northeast section of the rainy city.
     Such was Rev. Rom Soriano's life for the next seven years, a happy service broken only by an incident in June 1988.  Rom had picked up a woman thumbing a ride along Portland's Burnside Avenue one evening.  The priest, returning from a wine-heavy dinner party, offered successively less resistance each time the young woman stroked his leg and offered to thank him orally for the ride.  The cop who discovered the black Buick parked behind a warehouse sent the hooker on her way and agreed to let Rom go if he would come to his house and bless his swimming pool that weekend.
 

Friday, Aug. 16, 1991

     Father Rom's pride and joy was an aggressive community-service program he'd instituted that sent the priests out to every hospital, shelter and jail in Multnomah County.  One such visit took him to Portland's Providence Hospital one scorching hot afternoon.  He checked in with the hospital chaplain, an older Dominican priest, and got a list of the new admittances.  He glanced over the religious affiliations listed next to the names.  The chaplain said he'd already "done" the Catholics, which  was fine with Rom, who preferred visiting the "no religious preference" patients; they  were generally glad to see him anyway, and their conversation had less of the overly respectful, antiseptic tone most Catholics used when talking to a priest.
     The first non-affiliated on the list, a Mr. George Peters, had arrived the previous day for emergency kidney stone treatment.  Rom stopped into the snack bar for a container of coffee, then made his way up to Peters' fifth-floor room, pausing often to exchange words of greeting with a nurse or doctor.  As he approached Peters' room he noticed a group of chattering people — two women and a man — standing outside it.  He smiled to them.  But as he went through the door he felt a moment of puzzlement and fear.  He had seen one of the men before.  Where?  Now a cry of alarm rose behind him, and as he spun he saw the man running down the hall.  The women exchanged frightened looks and short words Rom didn't understand.  Now he saw that they were gypsies.
     He looked into the hospital room, where a doctor was moving away from the man in the bed.  Rom looked at the man's face.  He blinked and looked again.  There, looking back at him with animal eyes, older and uglier than the mug shot Rom no longer carried, was Gregor Ziko.   Rom dropped his coffee.
     In a second Ziko had whipped a knife from under his pillow and jumped painfully out of bed.  The women screamed, and the doctor backed against the wall, petrified.  Ziko stood there, in his open-backed hospital gown, holding the blade in front of him, eyes wide.  He spat.  "Soriano!  You found me!  Using  priest clothes, you are so smart!  But now I kill you like I kill your gajo father and your bitch mother!  I  paid for her!"
     Rom found his voice.  "And Maria, my girlfriend, you killed her too, didn't you?"
     "Hah! You saw me in the truck, didn't you?  You look right at me. Who is stupid?  You are stupid!"
     At that moment a security guard appeared in the doorway; the doctor darted out and the women screamed again.  Ziko charged Rom, who, by instinct alone, grabbed a chair and thrust Ziko back.  The sweating, red-faced gypsy yelled something to the women, and one of them gave the security guard a faceful of fingernails.  The other woman grabbed Rom's hair from behind and pulled him back.  Ziko knocked the chair aside, madness beaming from his eyes.  He lunged at Rom, who put his foot into Ziko's crotch and pushed.  The gypsy screamed and dropped to the floor.  Anger rising, Rom whipped an elbow into the woman's ribs and sent her sprawling.  In the same motion he kicked upward, catching Ziko under the chin.  With a loud snap Ziko's head flew back and he dropped the knife.
     In a rage now, Rom leapt upon him and wrapped his hands around the gypsy's throat.  He squeezed hard, and the man's face turned redder, then purple.  Spittle flew from the gypsy's frantic lips, and his eyes bulged.  Rom felt someone pulling him off but kept his hands locked around Ziko's throat and squeezed harder.  He spat into the man's face and slammed his head into the floor, then slammed it again.  Now Rom felt an arm around his neck, and he was yanked off the gypsy.  He flung himself backwards and slammed someone against the wall.  The security guard buckled and dropped.
     Ziko, gasping, got up, looking desperately for the knife.  Rom saw it first, near  the bed, and grabbed it as Ziko charged him.  As the burly, sweating gypsy reached him, Father Rom Soriano plunged the knife into the gypsy's chest and pushed him back and through the shattering fifth-floor window.