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Florida.
November 21, 2000
I remember every word, every moment, the smells, the people around us, the busboy dropping a bucket of used silverware and plates and receiving the obligatory sarcastic clapping from patrons nearby.
It was a Luby’s cafeteria. This was in the Florida panhandle, Panama City to be exact. No beach, no beautiful white sands and tanned bodies glistening in the sun. Just plain old strip center Panama City itself, and even then, the air was thick with depression and a sense of hopelessness. The Luby’s restaurant was nestled up against a large local grocery chain store, one of those stores that tried very hard to duplicate the concept of a Super Walmart, but actually ended up sadder somehow.
Not that I understood any of it. I remember it, but I didn’t know what was going on around me, really. It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand, but that’s a story for another time. The reason I did not understand any of it is because, quite simply, I was a child. I was eight years old. But I remember. I remember all of it.
I come from an unconventional home, though in the part of the country I come from, becoming more and more conventional. I never knew my mother. She died during childbirth, you see, and the story goes that it somehow drove my father mad. Not that he was a particularly kind, compassionate man before, but all hope that he could straighten himself out and become something more than he was, died that day along with her.
Or so I am told.
My grandmother, my father’s mother, was an identical twin. When I was five years old, my grandmother succumbed to the cancer, and her sister, my great aunt, took over the role of loving grandparent.
And she was everything she should have been. Kind, stern when a stubborn little boy needed it, courteous, gentle but strong, and by and by, the only person I can truly say ever loved me. She was my everything, my entire world, the only beacon of goodness in an otherwise miserable existence.
She was in her sixties then, and like many in her generation, she had started smoking very young, around fourteen or so in her case. But by then, modern thinking on cigarettes and the effects they can have had become more readily understood. A teacher at my school showed us a photo of a smoker’s lungs in class, and it shook me.
So on this day, at the Luby’s Cafeteria, I looked up from my small bowl of macaroni and cheese and said, “If I asked you to, would you stop smoking for me?” She looked back at me with a hint of sadness, but smiled. “I would do anything for you.” I looked down at my food, satisfied, and took another bite, and I looked back up, and I remember, I will always remember the look in her eyes. “What made you think to ask me that?”
“My teacher showed us what happens to your lungs when you smoke. She said it was dangerous and you could die. I want you to stop because I don’t want you to die.”
Tears started to well up in her eyes, and I looked at her, but again, I did not fully understand.
All she said was, “Go on now, finish your food,” and worked to regain her composure. I don’t remember the rest of the meal. My memories of the event stop right there.
What I did not know at the time was she had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer just three days before. She had hidden this from me, didn’t want me to worry or be upset, but the prognosis was grim.
Only a few weeks later, I was at home with my dad, and the phone rang. He answered, showed no expression, and then hung up. He turned to me, his usual scowl on his face, and said, “Get your ass in the car.” A doting father, if ever there was one.
We drove through town, me in the back seat and my father in front driving, white-knuckling the steering wheel with both hands. When we got to the hospital, they shuffled us off to a waiting room. I watched from a distance and saw a doctor talking to my dad, though his expression hardly budged, and I took this as an opportunity to figure out what was going on. He wouldn’t notice. He never did. I had overheard a room number, 2308, so I looked up at the signs on the wall and followed the arrows. On the wall, I saw a nameplate with two temporary names slide into each spot. The one on top had her name there, Ms. Juanita Roberts. It didn’t cross my mind at the time, but the formality of making sure the prefix is on her name fascinates me now. Human beings always have to live on the formal; they think it means anything at all.
I slowly peeked my head around the corner of the door frame and was shocked at what I saw. I wasn’t prepared for it, and I don’t remember the next few moments because my mind went completely blank, like a gunshot had gone off and destroyed a plate glass window, and I helplessly watched as the shards of glass scattered around me. She was lying on her hospital bed, all of her hair burned away by chemotherapy. She was on her back, mouth slightly open, and very short, ragged breaths coming from her nostrils. I remember I called out to her, but she didn’t respond. Her mind was gone already, you know, but I was little. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand. I stood there. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I shouldn’t have witnessed it, but I watched her take one final long breath, then nothing more. She went still, and a beeping went off in my head, so I thought. But the beeping was real, and several doctors and nurses made their way into the room. They didn’t rush. They had expected this.
I stared at my dad as he walked in the room, and I remember this: he frowned as though he were inconvenienced, and he turned his attention to me, saying, “What the hell are you doing in here?”
The tears started flowing down my face. I tried but I couldn’t stop them. My stomach did somersaults and everything inside me came rushing to the surface, and exploded out of my tiny body.
“Goddammit Jeff, you’re acting like a baby. Pull yourself together. We’re leaving.”
I remember, but I didn’t understand. I never have, never will.
For the next four months it was a blur of endless sadness that never went away.
I was eight years old.
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“Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” – Anne Frank
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When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
I know we’re not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk in real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we do not care that we don’t.
It all ended that day, you understand?
All of it. Whatever it was that I could have been was murdered in cold blood right in the middle of that hospital room. I watched as everything I cared about and cared about me died, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Pull myself together. That’s what I did. I took a knife and stabbed what was left of my innocence through the heart, and I vowed to never feel anything for anyone ever again.
Oh, it just struck me that I must not have mentioned yet that my father was an evil man. The abuses were far-ranging, from physical, to emotional and sexual. Every horrible thing you’ve heard of, that you’ve watched in an edgy film for entertainment, I lived it.
Abuse manipulates and twists a child’s natural sense of trust and love. His innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and he learns to ignore his feelings. He can’t afford to feel the full range of feelings in his body while he’s being abused – pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal.
It was my fault. I should have been a better boy. I deserved it. That’s what my tiny little brain thought. You don’t have to wait for someone to treat you badly repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future.
If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say “FINE”. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another living person for two consecutive days. “FINE” is what you say.
You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don’t stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.
It wasn’t long before I started to become something else too, something beyond my father and his simple drinking problem and common anger and hatefulness. Soon a big thick wall went up around my mind and my heart, and I would not allow anymore emotions in. I started acting out in my very first relationship, my senior year in high school, which I did not finish. She was helpful. She unwittingly allowed a fledgling killer to figure out what works and what doesn’t. She helped me learn to be a better sociopath. I wasn’t born this way, you see. I was made this way though years and years of systemic abuse, and so if I was to be bombarded by this sickening emotional pain that I so loathed, everyone else would feel it, too.
Usually those of us who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose as partners are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman I ever loved, the only one who ever loved me, was not true to her bond of love, abandoned me, then how can I trust that my partner will be true to love? So I acted out again and again to test her. This testing does not heal the wounds of my past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately she will become weary of being tested and escape the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This, of course, confirms for me that I cannot put my trust in love. I decided that it is better to put my faith in being powerful, in being dominant.
But yes, she was most helpful. So many lessons learned.
People think I’m only angry, only wrathful, nothing more. But the killer doesn’t have a problem with anger. He has a problem with your anger. One of the basic human rights he takes away from you is the right to be angry with him. No matter how badly he treats you, he believes that your voice shouldn’t rise and your blood shouldn’t boil. The privilege of wrath is reserved for him alone. When your anger does jump out of you, as will happen to any continued victim from time to time, he is likely to try to jam it back down your throat as quickly as he can. Then he uses your anger against you to prove what an irrational person you are. “He”, of course, was me. In time, she began to feel straightjacketed. She developed physical and emotional reactions to swallowing her own anger, depression, nightmares, emotional numbing, or eating and sleeping problems, which I naturally used as an excuse to belittle her further and make her feel crazy.
The abused becomes the abuser. And, that’s the only thing that makes me feel anything at all.
I was made by unspeakable atrocities. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial simply does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will win out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention away from it. I find this most apparent in the way that I alternated between feeling numb and reliving the events. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which the layman calls “doublethink,” and which the mental health professionals who tried to understand and help me, searching for calm, precise language, call “dissociation.” It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which was recognized a century ago as disguised communications about abuse in childhood.
This is how a madman is made. This is how he is lovingly crafted, by fate or design, into a monster that preys on the weak and powerless, who asserts his dominance and takes home trophies of his victories like a fat man in a bowling league.
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high, it’s tremendous. The ideas are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. Most psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.
But somewhere, this changes.
The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against. I found myself irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. I never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
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”They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks.” – J.K. Rowling
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How much time have any of you spent in an actual prison yard?
Any?
Have any of you stepped out into the yard for the first time and felt the weight of a hundred cold, calculating eyes on you as you pull up to an empty bench and light up your cigarette? Have any of you watched a man full of confidence and a dry smirk on his face approach you, but recognize in your eyes that you aren’t just like everyone else in the yard? That you’re something else?
When I first was taken into custody and brought to prison, I had yet to fully comprehend what I was. But I was not upset, sad or morose about the experience. I was kind of excited to go to jail for the first time, and I learned even more than I already knew. That’s me. Always learning.
Charm is something I have in abundance, a tool that helps me with my work, and I can turn it on when I want to.
During the first day, curious at having an outsider among them, a long stream of inmates came over to talk with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn’t do it. Of course. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. Not much to learn from liars. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.
Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.
So now I’m supposed to imagine a scenario in a prison yard where the other seven of you are presented to me as something more than a buffet of delectable treats for me to devour. And I know, I know you’re each gonna have some snarky little thing to say, some condescending trope about me that bores everyone to tears and makes you look like a tool.
I’ve been in prison for the last ten years of my life, and I will never be free, nor should I be. But don’t condemn me to the prison of your bullshit.
I didn’t go mad in this hole. I came here already mad.
So fuck you, Bobby Dean, the only man who watches porn and cums when the pizza gets delivered.
Fuck you, QT Reese. Fuck you and your endorsements and your Green Acres overalls and that stupid grin on your face.
Fuck you, Steve Solex, you Diet Coke version of me.
Fuck you, Brian Hollywood, and all your history in HOW and your dumb friendships and your dumb words and your stupid goddamn face.
Fuck you, Cancer Jiles, you duck-faced fuck face. I can’t wait to smash those stupid sunglasses and grind the glass into your eyeballs.
Fuck you Scottywood. Bring your little stick so I can break it in two and then stab you with it. Bring anything you want that I can get my hands on and end your old man escapade into barely relevant sadness.
Fuck you, Doozer. Useless unless someone needs to get a discount at IHOP and they wanna use your AARP discount card.
Fuck you. Fuck all of you. Fuck you and all of God’s little prison bitches. He slips you some cigarettes and a con job smile and you run off to do his dirty work for him. Go and scare some sinners. No one’s listening to you here.
Me, on the other hand – he’s given me a purpose. You are, all of you, expendable. I am being handed a golden opportunity here, and I won’t waste it, I assure you. This may be the last time any of you are within arm’s reach of me, and I think it’s making me sentimental. I very much would like to take a little something from each of you to remember you by.
They kept me in a cage for too long because now every room I am standing in is just another cell.
He’s taken my shackles off.
None of you understand me or the depths of this existence, and so you can never know what you are in for. Don’t dare to pity me.
I don’t just represent a deadly sin.
I AM SIN.
Bienvenue à la mort de l’âme