Murray is a friend of mine.

Many years ago (winter time it was, and I was still answering telephones for a living), I was standing at a urinal in an unlit bathroom in the basement of a tavern in lower Manhattan. After fumbling around in the darkness for a while before finding my place, I set about my business having no idea there was someone standing at the urinal next to mine. He hadn't made a sound the whole time I was feeling along the walls?until, after I had been standing there a few moments, he told me he had a job offer for me.

It took me a second?a second of reaching for my zipper in a panic and getting ready to strike out?before I realized that I recognized the voice. It was Murray, and I relaxed again.

Murray was a few years younger than I was; a burly blond kid from California with a deceptively cherubic face. He held a number of jobs around New York Press?he worked in the personal ads department, he worked in circulation, he hung out at the bar with the editorial staff after work. Mostly people just liked having him around. He was sharp, funny, a fearless ballbuster and always had a story to tell about some kind of trouble or another he got into when he was younger. Though his face didn't show it, he'd been in horrifying car and motorcycle accidents, was part of a loose-knit biker gang, ingested his share of psychoactives and played around with explosives. Murray was the office's unofficial mascot.

Along with working at the Press, he was also an intern over at WNYC, manning the switchboard for one of the call-in shows. Radio was his real dream, and that's what led to the job offer in the bathroom. Murray thought I could make the big, big bucks by reading stories aloud on the radio. It had worked for other folks, after all, and he knew the people to approach. "It'd be a snap," he said.

At the time of the offer, Murray and I were both exceptionally drunk. The fact that we were both able to stand upright at the urinals without pissing on each other was something of an accomplishment. Nevertheless, a short while later when Morgan and I stumbled out of the bar and began weaving north, Murray followed us outside into the cold, beer in hand, still screaming after us about his job offer as we pulled further and further away.

At first I wouldn't even consider this offer that seemed like a cheap form of whoredom. But Morgan and I talked about the possibility, how easy it would be really, and how it would be a way to get me away from that damned receptionist's desk (which was, by that time, starting to drive me a little batty). We decided it was worth a shot. What the hell.

Unfortunately as it turns out, Murray had been even drunker than I was that night, and when we next ran into him at another bar two nights later and brought up this potential radio gig, he looked at me as if I'd suddenly started speaking in tongues.

"What in the fuck are you talking about?" he asked.

So that was that?and given that it was Murray I was dealing with, in the end it was funnier than it was disappointing.

It was in 1998 or 1999 that he picked up, left the paper and moved back to Northern California. He was never a big fan of New York, and always pined after the West Coast, where he could take his motorcycle back out on the freeways and didn't have to deal with the winter anymore.

Shortly after he got back out there, I received a call from him. It was brief, and I don't remember what we talked about. I think he was just checking in, and before he hung up, he left me with both a phone number and an email address. Two days later, I tried both, only to find that neither worked. I suppose some people would've taken that as a hint, but it didn't seem like Murray's style. No, he'd vanished, and I always get to worrying when people just vanish like that.

Over the months, various searches and inquiries lead to naught. Nobody who knew him here knew where he was, or had heard a peep from him. Still, he kept coming up in conversation. Morgan and I speculated about how he was doing. His photo (only mildly defaced) still hangs in the hallway outside my office. I even dropped a few Murray stories into a manuscript I was working on.

Then, after some five years of silence, I received a note out of the blue from a friend in Baltimore. He, in turn, told me about a friend of his who'd just returned from a trip to California, where she had stayed with a guy named Murray, who said that he knew me and wanted to know how to get in touch.

A few days later, I heard from him. He was doing well, he said, though there had been a few lean years. He had a job, a house, a dog and was still with the same woman he'd been with here in New York. Even though he wasn't a big fan of his job (which wasn't surprising), things sounded like they were going well. He sounded much calmer, less crazed, certainly less beer-soaked and debauched. I was happy to hear that he wasn't dead. Given his history, that suspicion was always creeping around the back of my mind.

Let me interrupt myself here for a moment. I just realized something. From the outset, this story was supposed to be about deer hunting. In fact, the note I jotted to myself at the bar last night reads simply "deer hunting." As I started writing about Murray, I figured I'd get to that deer hunting bit pretty quickly. See, in a note I received from him earlier this week (the second or third since he got back in touch), he told me that he'd recently taken a long weekend in order to go deer hunting in the Northern California woods. He'd bagged a deer without getting shot himself. It was that story that got me thinking in the first place.

I've never been hunting in my life, and with good reason. For the same good reason, there were never any guns in our house. Those two things made me even more of an outcast in my neighborhood. Nearly every kid I knew went hunting. They hunted deer, bear, pheasant, duck?all sorts of creatures. It was as much a central part of the culture as sitting in Lambeau Field in December (which I did on a number of occasions).

Anyway, the point of all this being that when I was a kid?grade school through senior high?taking the first week of deer season off school to go hunting was considered justifiable absenteeism. Even some of the teachers left. The school was always very quiet that week.

It seemed perfectly normal at the time. It was a given. But looking back on it now, it seems awfully strange.

That's all. I'm not sure how I got to talking about Murray.