I’ve become a killer. This will surprise, even shock, my friends,
who think of me as a reasonably calm, peace-loving character, but it’s true. And I kill morning, noon, and night, though
especially at night, when my victims are most plentiful. I kill, and without a qualm, without even a
hint of a flicker of conscience. Not
exactly with joy, but at least with a grim satisfaction. And without mercy.
What
do I kill? Bugs. “What kind of bugs?” you ask. I don’t know, just bugs. Smaller than American cockroaches, some bigger
than ants, some smaller, even minuscule.
Different kinds, though I can’t differentiate them, just call them bugs. But maybe they are German cockroaches (Blatella germanica), smaller than other
species of roaches, though I haven’t heard them speaking German.
 |
| German cockroaches. But they're really much smaller than this. Saphan |
 |
| This is the way I like to see them. But I don't use K300. Gadi Vishne |
Why do I kill them? Because they’re everywhere, defy gravity by
crawling up walls and on the ceiling of my apartment, won’t let me alone, and
don’t pay rent. In the bathroom in the
morning they’re crawling over my toothbrush or hiding under the soap. In the medicine cabinet I find their egg
cases in the pill boxes and bandage wrappings, and their unholy droppings on everything. As I breakfast in the kitchen, they try to
feast on crumbs from my bread or a stray bit of banana, till I chase them away
and they disappear under the table’s surface, where I can’t pursue them. And as I continue to breakfast, they come
back again, try to sneak another tiny bite.
Finally, as the day wears on, they disappear into their hidden
sanctuaries: any crack or crevice in the walls of my ancient apartment, any bit
of clutter, any remote corner of a shelf, any cluster of bottles, any pile of
newspapers, any heap of plastic bags, and above all the dark infernal recesses
of my ancient stove’s ancient oven.
“Doesn’t an exterminator come once a
month?” you may ask. Of course. His
spraying here and there may result in a few small corpses in a day or two, but
so what? They are legion, and they
proliferate. The exterminator leaves a
stack of glue traps that I dispose of at strategic points in the kitchen, and
within days the traps reap harvests of stuck wigglies waving their antennae
frantically. Their death throes seem to
entice more to join them, till the traps are so full there’s hardly any room
for more. On one 5-by-8-inch trap by the
kitchen garbage can I’ve counted some 400 bugs in all, most of them tiny, some
50 of them bigger. But so what? They persist, they abound. Through sheer numbers, I’m told, the insects
will inherit the earth. If they haven’t
already.
And so, in self-defense, I’ve become a
cunning and ruthless slaughterer, determined that these marauders shall, in
great numbers, die. When at night,
heeding the bladder imperative, I traipse to the bathroom and suddenly turn the
light on, I have my trusty slammer handy – an empty pill bottle with a
flat-topped cap – and bam bam bam I
massacre as many as I can, as they flee in all directions. They have the best chance of escaping if I
catch them on a wall, for my slammer is less effective against a vertical
surface. On the wash basin I usually bam bam bam get several as the others
scurry to safety, but if I find some in the bathtub, they are doomed, for their
dark little bodies stand out sharp against the white enamel, they have a long
distance to go before reaching safety, and I am determined that they shall die
the death. And they do. And if I then go into the kitchen, their
favorite feeding ground at night, and turn the light on, I convulse their
midnight revels in the sink, as bam bam
bam bam bam I wield my kitchen slammer, my Excalibur, and perpetrate a
massacre of dozens, scores. Some escape,
many don’t.
 |
| My Excalibur. Minus the vitamin B's, of course. Ragesoss |
Do I enjoy these massacres? Yes and no.
My actions are strictly in self-defense,
so I don’t consider myself a born warrior or sadist; when I mash them, their
death is instantaneous, no writhing, no pain. I don’t feel joy, but I do feel the
aforementioned grim satisfaction, and if they annoy me enough, at least a momentary
flash of anger. And a sense of power,
since I loom large over them like Yahweh smiting the Midianites. And even, if they get on me (as they
occasionally do), a touch of loathing
and hate. But if, as they flee when I
turn the light on, some of them run onto a glue trap cunningly positioned by me
and get stuck there, or if, in the morning, I find a cluster of them – anywhere
from five to twenty -- in an empty yogurt container in the garbage, and I spray
them and kill every last one of the wee beasties, then, I confess, my grim
satisfaction extends to the outskirts of joy.
Mostly, it’s a game, and I’ve gotten
fairly good at it, know where to place the glue traps and where to put my
slammers – one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen – so they’re immediately
available when the light goes on. I
always clear the kitchen table, so as to have a wide and unobstructed killing
field, and if I find the creepy-crawlies in the toilet bowl – and I often do –
I feel a kind of glee when I flush them away to oblivion. And glee again when I find an empty egg case
and some forty tiny creatures stuck fast in a trap. And if I leave a coffee mug half full of
water in the kitchen, in the morning I’m bound to find one, two, three, up to
five winged corpses floating in the water.
(Yes, some have wings, though they never fly.) Do I pity my victims, drowned or mashed? Hardly.
For me, they aren’t capable of true feelings. So what are they? Bundles of instincts, tiny machines. As for Blake’s wonderful line, “For everything
that lives is holy,” I dismiss it as a beautiful lie. Poets are notorious liars.
There was indeed a killer in my family,
but it wasn’t me; it was my father. But
to be fair, I should say a hunter and fisherman, for he loved the outdoors and
loved to hunt and fish. Fishing usually
meant long hours on a quiet lake in northern Illinois or Wisconsin, sitting
quietly in the sun, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Forced to accompany him, I was totally, utterly bored. Did I ever catch anything? Once, as I recall,
some small, flat finned thing that didn’t look like much, but I suppose we had
to cook it and eat it. But when my
father, on his annual fall vacation, went to a lake in northern Wisconsin for
two weeks, he caught plenty and shipped them back in ice.
As for hunting, when I was sixteen he
taught me to shoot a shotgun. I didn’t
like it, for the recoil made my shoulder ache, but I did learn a thing or two
about guns. He took good care of his
guns and used them carefully, always carrying them with the barrel toward the ground,
except when about to shoot. From fall
through spring he took me and my older brother to his gun club, where sportsmen
assembled to sip coffee, swap hunting stories, and shoot trap, aiming at clay
pigeons flung from either of two trap houses.
When they hit a pigeon dead on, it vanished in a puff of dust, and
discreet congratulations were extended.
It was a man’s world, with one exception: the wife of a sportsman who
was just as into shooting as her husband; my father, always quick with
nicknames, called her “Pistol-Packin’ Momma” and, like all the men, accepted
her completely. My mother, if she went
along for the ride, never set foot in the clubhouse, preferring to remain in
the car with a good book.
 |
| Not my father, but the exact same look. |
For hunting my father took me into bare autumn
fields, hoping for a shot at a flock of blackbirds or a lone scurrying
rabbit. No blackbirds came our way, and
if a rabbit did finally show up, I never got a shot. Nor did I want to, having no desire to kill
anything. When one of my schoolteachers
lamented the killing of deer – “those beautiful creatures” -- for sport, I
queried my father about it. Far from
dismissing her as a silly old maid who knew nothing about hunting or life, he
explained quietly that hunting is an instinct, stronger in some people than in
others. True enough: strong in my
father, but weak to nonexistent in me.
And so, bugs notwithstanding, I insist that I am not a killer. Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t hurt a
flea. (Unless, of course, it was on me.)
 |
| A luna moth. Too eerily beautiful to kill. |
On my many hikes in parks and woodlands, I
never killed an insect, with the exception of a stray mosquito, and then in
self-defense. I loved watching butterflies,
and once stared in awe at the haunting beauty of a luna moth sleeping on a tree
trunk, but I never tried to catch, much less kill, any of them. And if I saw a nectar-seeking honey bee
struggling to free itself from the sticky pollen of the milkweed, I would take
a twig and gently free it so it could fly away.
But there was one exception: if, in the late spring, I saw the white (often
dirty white) tent of the tent caterpillar in the branches of a tree, I would
knock it to the ground with a stick and then trample the teeming, writhing mass
of tiny caterpillars inside it, so they couldn’t defoliate the nearby
trees. Something about that writhing mass
of living things alienated, even disgusted, me – a feeling that I have rarely
felt in nature. Perhaps I should have
let nature take its way, but I love trees and hate to see their leaves consumed
by that horde of tiny mouths.
 |
| They make me want to kill. Brocken Inaglory |
 |
| Sparrow hawks. |
Let
nature take its way: there is mystery in that process, and death. Once, toward dusk on Monhegan Island in
Maine, I was watching a flock of migrating sparrows feeding on birdseed that
Bob and I had scattered on the lawn outside our cabin window, when out of
nowhere a sparrow hawk swooped down to seize one of them as the others
fled. In the dim, fading light I could
barely see the hawk – really a small falcon, the kestrel – spread its tail to
steady itself on the ground, as it consumed its prey. It was unsettling, mysterious, awe-inspiring.
And when I read about how a rattlesnake
sinks its venomous fangs into a startled squirrel, waits patiently as the
squirrel scurries off, each bound pumping the venom deeper till the squirrel
droops, drops, and the snake follows at leisure and slowly consumes its prey
head first, I get that same feeling of horror mixed with mystery and awe. Killing is a part of nature’s way, common and
necessary in the processes of life. But
is it necessary among humans as well?
Here I will bring us back to New York, to
the draft riots of July 1863, during our Civil War, when, even as a great
battle raged at Gettysburg, Irish workers in the city rose up against the newly
initiated draft, destroyed the building where the draft was being processed, looted
and burned every other building they associated with the draft, held off the
outnumbered police, and lynched every black man they could get hold of, blaming
blacks for the draft and the war. Some
of their victims were hanged over a fire, around which the Irish women, by all
accounts more savage than the men, danced in a frenzy. The rioters were not drifters and the
homeless, but men with steady jobs who deserted their workplace and for three
days, joined by their women, raged in the streets. What drove them to this?
 |
| No women here, but they were usually present. A Harper's Weekly print. |
That they resented the draft is
understandable. They had come over here
to escape famine in Ireland, and to get free of centuries of English rule. Deep in their psyche was a hatred of
authority, of government, of being forced to do the will of others, and this
hatred transferred to the American government when, desperate to crush the rebellious
South, it initiated the draft. And the
cry “A rich man’s war, a poor man’s fight” had resonance, since the affluent,
by paying $300 for a substitute, could quite legally avoid the draft, whereas
the rioters didn’t have $300. One also has
to suppose a deep-seated racism that suddenly, under these exceptional circumstances,
flared forth. There were a few white
victims too: policemen, soldiers, anyone who interfered with the rioters,
anyone who looked like a “three-hundred-dollar man.” Yet when, after three days of riots, the
military arrived to restore order, the rioters went back to their jobs and
resumed their role of quiet, steady workers.
Is there a killer buried deep in all of
us, or do only a few of us nurse this hidden urge? My pen pal Joe, while doing time in North
Carolina, wrote a series of vignettes about prison life, including an unforgettable
one entitled “Killer Friends.” In the
vignette he explains that, when doing time, you never ask another inmate what
he’s in for; to do so is to court danger.
But sometimes an inmate chooses to tell another inmate, and so it was
that Joe heard the stories of several convicted murderers. One of the stories especially impressed
me.
A young inmate told Joe how, at age
fifteen, he had asked his parents for a motorcycle for Christmas, and they said
they would see what they could do. But
when Christmas came, his parents explained that, regretfully, they hadn’t been
able to afford it. Instantly consumed
with rage, the young man went to his room, got out his shotgun, loaded it, came
back to the living room, and killed both his parents as they were sitting on
the couch. Then, panicking, he grabbed
all the money in the house and rushed to the garage to get into the family car
and flee. And there, in the garage, he
found a shiny new motorcycle; his parents had wanted to surprise him. He is serving two life terms.
What made this young guy tick? I don’t know if he had a history of violence,
but quite possibly he did not. I can
understand his disappointment, maybe even his rage, but I can’t understand a rage
that precipitates murder. Between me and
him a vast chasm opens up.
Another of Joe’s stories is about a man
who killed his wife in a drunken rage, when she announced she was getting a
divorce. He then put her body in his
car, drove to some nearby woods, and buried her there. But two weeks later the state police came
knocking on his door to report that a bear had dug up her body and devoured
some of it; could he explain how she came to be buried there? He then confessed and got a life
sentence.
In these accounts of murder two common
denominators emerge: the murderers had trouble controlling anger and, closely
related, they yielded to impulse. In
both of them there was an appalling lack of judgment, an inability to think of
consequences.
Have I ever experienced violent rage? Just once, years ago, when a waiter in a crowded
West Village gay bar harassed me, telling me not to stand here or there, not to
move around the bar – harassment so intense that I finally just handed him my
half-finished beer and walked out. Why
he chose to bother me I have never fathomed; there was no history of antagonism
between us, and I was behaving no differently from any other patron of the
bar. But I felt intense anger and
stalked the streets for some time nursing it, hoping to meet a friend to whom I
could pour out my story and, in so doing, temper my rage. Alas, no friend showed up, so in the end I just
went home.
This is a trivial story, but it
demonstrates that, when consumed by rage, I never contemplated any act of
violence, wanted only to get rid of my rage.
I could have, at some cost, splashed my beer in the waiter’s face, or
poured it on the floor, or dropped the bottle hoping it would smash, but none
of these acts occurred to me. Deep in me
there was some kind of safety valve, some instinct of self-preservation that
was stronger than any impulse to retaliate.
This safety valve, I assume, is deep in most of us, but absent or
ineffective in a few. We all feel anger
at some point, often justifiably, but we don’t all resort to violence or
kill.
I
have seen the face of rage. Once, long
ago, when I was having lunch in a crowded student restaurant in Lyons, France, we
all suddenly heard a great clatter at another table. Instantly a burly kitchen worker rushed over
to the table where the disturbance was, and found two students in a
confrontation. One yelled feverishly,
“He can’t take a joke!” The other said
nothing, just glared, his features contorted with rage. Fortunately, the burly man calmed things
down, and we all were able to resume our lunch.
But I’ve never forgotten the look of the angry student, his reddened
features warped with rage – rage on the verge of violence. If the burly worker hadn’t intervened, who
knows what might have happened? Rage is
ugly, it distorts. No wonder it’s one of
the seven deadly sins.
 |
| The sin of Wrath, as illustrated by Pieter Brueghel the Elder: soldiers massacring or torturing all they encounter. |
Are killers born or made? Is murder deep in our bone and blood, or is
it a product of social forces acting upon us?
Some of us are born hunters like my father, and I would add that there
are born writers, artists, dancers, gamblers, rebels, healers, scholars, and
reformers. From an early age I was
writing – nonsense of course, but writing – so I’m convinced that I was born a
writer, and circumstances then facilitated the urge. So are some of us born killers, or at least born
destined to commit an act of violence?
We don’t want to think so, but at times we’re inclined to assume
it. “Leave it to the experts,” you might
say; leave it to the sociologists, psychologists, criminologists. But at times we uninformed citizens are
forced to have an opinion. When on jury
duty, for instance, and hearing a case involving murder. Or as a voter, when called to vote on issues
relating to the death penalty.
Once, when doing background research for a
novel, I read some books on violent crimes and those who commit them, and was
so shocked by some of the serial murderers described, and their early and total
commitment to killing, that I ruefully concluded that some of us probably are
born killers, or at least predestined to violence. And when, on another occasion, I saw Matthew
Brady’s photographs of John Wilkes Booth’s coconspirators, who were tried and
hanged following President Lincoln’s assassination, the photo of one of them,
Lewis Powell, who had attacked but failed to kill Secretary of State William
Seward, struck me; in his hardened features I discerned a killer. Of all Booth’s fellow conspirators, he was
the only one who, following Booth’s instructions, made a serious attempt to
kill a member of the government.
 |
| Lewis Powell, after his arrest. Not the Brady photograph, but the same hard look. |
The recurring question of police violence
burst into headlines yet again when, on July 14, 2014 – just one year ago --
the police went to arrest Eric Garner, an unarmed African American selling
cigarettes illegally on Staten Island.
When Garner seemed to resist, officer Daniel Pantaleo wrestled him to
the ground and allegedly put him briefly in a chokehold, a tight grip around
the neck that is banned by the New York police but that was caught on video by
a bystander. Then Garner, lying face
down on the ground, said “I can’t breathe” no less than eleven times. Taken to a hospital, Garner was pronounced
dead an hour later. The medical examiner
ruled his death a homicide, but a grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo,
setting off protests and rallies nationwide, with passionate utterances of “Black
lives matter!” and “I can’t breathe!”
Some see police violence – especially
against minorities – as the actions of a few bad apples, while others insists
that it results from an endemic police culture that countenances such violence
and is never held accountable. Once
again the question arises: is there an urge to violence, even murder, deep in
all of us that circumstances at times activate?
And is my satisfaction in killing bugs in my apartment -- trivial as it
may seem – a faint echo of that urge?
One common denominator emerges: the victims are the Other, some living
phenomenon from which the assailant or killer feels completely alienated.
The death penalty is an issue where I flip
and I flop. Most of my friends in New
York, good liberals, are against it, don’t even think it bears discussion. But me, I waver. Granted, it’s administered unfairly and can
be opposed on those grounds alone. And
granted, those who are convicted may be innocent, and imprisonment leaves open
the possibility of exoneration later. But
if, as can happen, there is no doubt about guilt, is the frequent alternative
of a lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole – and some or all of
it in solitary – really more merciful? I
wonder. On the other hand, pictures of an execution can chill me to the quick.
 |
| The electric chair at Sing Sing, ca. 1900. As so often, whites executing a black. |
From time to time I hear of a crime so
heinous that I’m inclined to justify a penalty of death. When, last May, four Afghan men were
sentenced to death for the mob killing of a woman falsely accused of burning a
Koran, the circumstances of the woman’s death were so horrible that I, like
many, applauded the sentence. The
27-year-old victim, Farkhunda, was thrown from a roof, beaten to death, and run
over by a car, following which the mob set fire to her body and dumped it in a
river. And when, two months later, a
court overturned the death sentence of the four men, I shared in the worldwide
indignation.
 |
| This is how the French Revolution did it. |
Truman Capote was criticized by some for
not doing more to prevent the execution of two young men whom he had
interviewed and befriended, and whose story of murdering a family of four in
Kansas he had told with great sensitivity in his work of nonfiction In Cold Blood, published in 1966. There was no doubt about the two men’s guilt,
and they told Capote how, while hitchhiking after the crime, they were picked
up by a lone driver and contemplated killing him and stealing his car. But when the driver also picked up a teen-age
hitchhiker, they abandoned their plan, since now they would have to kill
two. Reading this, I decided they indeed
deserved to die, not just because of the murders they had committed, but
because they had been ready to commit another murder as well.
One argument against the death penalty
that I take seriously is the belief that life is a precious gift that the state
has no right to take. But those who
present this argument are often advocates of free choice, meaning the right of
women to have an abortion, which, no matter how you look at it, is a canceling
of human life. And conversely, many who
support the death penalty are often right-to-lifers, fanatically opposed to
abortion. Granted, the unborn fetus has
committed no crime, whereas those condemned to death presumably have. Still, a life is a life. I find these inconsistencies troubling.
Lacking today in our secular society is a
sense of the sacred, a reverence for the holiness of life. Or if it still exists, it is often embraced
by rigid fundamentalists whose general views many of us find repellent. But perhaps it can be experienced even by
secularists in the form of wonder. Which
at once brings to mind a famous statement by Einstein, who was not
conventionally religious:
The
most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and
science. He to whom the emotion is a
stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as
good as dead – his eyes are closed. The
insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also
given rise to religion. To know what is
impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their
most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true
religiousness. In this sense, and in
this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men. (Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, Simon and Schuster, 1931.)
Only those who have
experienced and acknowledged this kind of wonder can reach me with arguments
pro or con on matters of human life like abortion and the death penalty. Only to them will I listen; the others are just
mouthing their biases.
 |
| The mysteriousness of nature: a night sky. Jffkrider |
So where do I finally end up? Somewhere betwixt and between, which many
will label as wishy-washy. I’m
occasionally for the death penalty, which can impart a fearful significance,
and almost even a dignity, to death, yet I have grave reservations about it. I’m troubled by abortion, because it involves taking a life, but wouldn’t want it
banned, since that would force women into seeking back-alley abortions, with
all the risks involved. Issues involving
human life are complex and controversial, not easily resolved. Are killers born or made? Perhaps, deep in our psyche, there is a core
of mystery that may never be penetrated.
Why in our ordinary daily lives most of us, whatever the provocation, do
not kill, while a few of us do, seems to defy rational explanation. Theories abound, but aren’t they simply that:
theories? I’m leery of those – and they
are many – who think these matters simple; I cannot. I join Einstein in marveling at the
mysteriousness of life, and in acknowledging that some things are, for us,
impenetrable. We must cope as best we
can, and humbly, with our dull faculties.
Note on Goldman Sachs: Speaking of killing, Goldman Sachs is a whiz
of a bank that in the past has made many a killing in financial markets, as
discussed in post #158, “Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid or Martyred Innocent?” (December
22, 2014). The squid or innocent (as you
prefer) has just reported disappointing earnings for the second quarter of
2015, raking in a mere $1 billion, as compared with $2 billion a year ago. The big hit on earnings? $1.45 billion that it set aside for
“mortgage-related litigation and regulatory matters.” The bank is in the final stages of reaching a
deal with the Justice Department over its sale of mortgage-backed securities
before the financial convulsion of a few years ago – a matter too complex for
ordinary folk like you (I presume) and me to understand, but one that evidently
involved consummate naughtiness. But
Goldman will survive and flourish; it always has.
Coming soon: The Village Nursing Home: from shopgirls
romping to ragtime, to luxury penthouses with a view of the river. Plus Auntie Mame, and Guinness Stout at age 93. And how did Abingdon Square get its
name? And after that, Patent Medicines,
among them Coca-Cola and 7 Up. (No, I’m
not kidding.)
© 2015 Clifford Browder
No comments:
Post a Comment