the killer

            The killer woke up and shaved. He had coffee and read the papers. He ate his oatmeal and toast quietly, the sounds of the city waking up drifting through his windows unheard. He drained his coffee cup, set the paper on the stack with the others and filled the dog’s bowl with kibble. The dog acknowledged him  with a quiet thump of its tail. He gave the house a perfunctory once over and then hit his knees before he left for the day. The praying was a daily ritual since a childhood he no longer recalled. Kneeling there, he was withdrawn in repose. He prayed   

            “Help,” he  said.

            Outside was a mess. The ennui and apathy was as a bad odor: smog, stench, the rot that putrid bodies let off if they lie too long. The walking dead shuffled in and out of their routines. He made  his way through the mess politely. “I smile and nod a lot” he said once when someone asked him what kept him from just climbing out onto the clocktower and exacting revenge on all of humanity for the shit hand he’d been dealt.

But the truth was, he had his own agenda. He drove his nondescript sedan through the banal streets to the place where he earned a living cleaning high rise buildings—he was a shadow amongst the power and prestige of those arching balustrades. He pushed a mop, carried a bucket and emptied the garbage. He did it humbly. He did it without being asked and never asked questions when the orders were changed or not given nice enough or if they lacked clarity. Laconic he was used to and out here, in the hustle bustle workaday world, laconic was the norm.

             The killer pushed a broom for a living; he was a janitor; a cleanup guy; a grunt.  He was the inconvenience people encountered when they saw a CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign on the door on their favorite john, on their way to take a shit or relieve themselves–and usually these tended to be situations which were very urgent, as these things go. Depending on which building he cleaned that day, the killer was responsible for children being beaten, for family pets being kicked or for criminals being sent to jail for much longer than their crimes warranted. Some days it was the large corporate offices where whole lives were bought, sold and bartered, where the illusion that corporation cared about you as an individual was really just and insidious sham to get you further into debt and closer to the casket. Other days he cleaned the hospitals, where the sick and suffering the lame and the dead sat idly and counted the minutes until something happened. On others, he was in the courthouse, where punishment and vindication were meted out with equal abandon. He saw them in their suits, in their armor, in their masks, in their disguises, sometimes in their cups, sometimes naked and compromised in the throes of infidelity. This is what the killer did every day because it was his job. He was quiet, nondescript and polite. He watched, he listened, he absorbed and he knew. He cleaned. He mopped. He emptied. He shined. He disinfected. He sanitized. That was, after all, his job.

            On the way to work the killer saw a bad freeway accident. One car hit another. Both were going the speed limit and both were obeying all the traffic rules. There was no explanation, as these things sometimes go, and the two cars were right where they were supposed to be–fate and fatality intertwined forever. There was blood and broken glass and bodies and sirens and urgency. The killer slowed down and looked at the commotion just like everyone else. In so many ways, the killer was just like everyone else, but underneath the careful veneer was a desperate perspicacious nature which made normal interactions  strained and fraught with the things people tried  desperately to avoid.  Everyone had their own ways of dealing with their demons and the demons others made them carry. 

             Just past the horrible smash ‘em up accident , he noticed an angry man driving a big semi pickup truck. The truck was large and unnecessary, very american. It burned a lot of gas–foreign and american gas.  The bumper sticker on the angry man’s car implored that you work and implied that if you didn’t work for a union you were a nobody, you  had no life and everything about you was meaningless. Much could be told about the angry man just by  looking at his big american made pickup dual diesel twin engine monster of a vehicle. The man believed in certain political figures and organizations and their beliefs and promises. The man was angry.  Angry man, angry man,  the killer thought, what do you do with your demons? The killer wondered if he was ranting about family values to his helpless passenger. The driver of the big truck was screaming at a little girl whose pony tails you could barely see in the passenger seat. You could see  how mad this man was,  veins straining, neck all red and eyebrows furrowed like misplaced horns. The little girl must have said something he didn’t like because the angry man’s hand left the steering wheel for a second and slapped! his little cargo square across the face. His hand returned expertly to the steering wheel and continued to drive and yell.  The killer wondered what it was like to be in prison in that big big truck, trapped with a maniac whose very existence your life depended upon. The killer wondered what it would be like to have that angry man as your father and trying to love him.  Him and his family values and his red veiny neck and his union membership

             Another man and a woman were driving and the woman was sucking the man’s cock. The driver of this car was weaving in and out of traffic, distracted at such an early hour of the day with such a distracting thing happening to him in freeway traffic. He was smiling. Her head bobbed. The man smiled and weaved as he drove. The killer noted the big wedding ring on his finger. When the cocksucker looked up, she was embarrassed, seeing the killer notice them. A look of shame and terror spread across her face. Her hands went up to fix the makeup that wasn’t on her face and her mussed up hair. There was no wedding ring on her finger. The man smiled. The killer nodded.

            Everyone was driving. They either ate or talked or listened to the sounds of their heads or car radios as they drove.. The killer wondered which was more dreadful–the head or the radio. He drove. He saw a very fat man eating a piece of pizza, the box sitting next to him in the passenger seat where the wife he probably used to have once sat. She probably left the man because he was indeed getting too fat and so here was the man, eating, eating, eating.  No more wife. Lots of pizza. The man chomped and munched and swallowed and drove.  The killer watched him for a few seconds, then passed him.

            The killer meandered down the highway, in and out of traffic, noticing these things. He saw a quiet man with a JESUS LET DACHAU HAPPEN! sticker on his car picking his nose. He saw another man with an I LOVE JESUS sticker flip him off as he cut the Dachau driver off and almost ran him off the road. Dachau was a concentration camp, the killer knew this. They boiled babies and coupled women with animals there. Here, in the city, in homes and in houses and in rectories and in convents and on therapist’s couches and in the hospitals and schools and jails and day care centers, they did the same only no one knew it. This much the killer knew.  He saw a Mexican lady on the side of the road in a really shitty station wagon , steam and smoke and inconvenience and money she obviously didn’t have to fix it emanating from the hood. Helplessness and despair emanated from her face and on the faces of the four children with her. There was another man driving a lowered pickup truck with a lot of unnecessary adornments and accessories that he never used all over it. His bumper sticker said. MY CHILD WAS MURDERED IN A DRIVE-BY @ LINCOLN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. The man was taking hits off a discrete little contraption called a sneak-a-toke that allowed him to smoke marijuana while driving. Anesthesia was medicinal. Maybe the man didn’t have to think of his dead bloody child when he smoked the killer weed.

            The killer continued on his way to work at the big, big building in the  metropolis. He was quiet. He observed the madness and drove. Someone once asked him how it was that he drove on this particular freeway (a heinous three lane stretch that had yet to be updated by  the federal organizations in charge of such things). People acting crazy, driving way too fast, screaming at each other, wearing earphones with  loud music blaring, blind, drunk, absent, deaf, dizzy, dumb, numb and oblivious as they cut each other off and threw things and spit and cursed and bitched and sucked and fucked and screamed and slapped–all while trying to drive this hairy freeway in the metropolis of misery and corpses. ‘Easy,’ the killer would reply, ‘I drive my own car.’ They did not know what to make of such responses, and as a result, the killer seldom had company on his way to work or anywhere else for that matter. That was OK with him. Being alone was sometime easier than dealing with people. It was better to assume that the bulk of them could comprehend nothing past shopping and basketball most days.

            The city was anarchy–a normal day. It was lights and chaos and hotels and bars and restaurants and blackness. The extra large subliminal font on the ubiquitous billboards  proselytized  sex and violence and booze and gadgets. The killer was impressed by this plethora of sensory devastation. He loved it. Inherently tragic and colorful, it gave the impression that  everything was lacking something. Everything was bad. Everything was morose and glum and in need of additives and Prozac and lithium to make it different, to make it feel better and cover up the bad, the sad and the shameful.  Everything needed to be new and improved, bigger better, thinner, richer, tanner, and free. Everyone should belong to a union. Everything needed a new paint job or new clothes or anesthesia or medicine or plastic surgery or self help tapes or miracles or jesus or the lottery to solve all of its inherent ugliness. These were the messages he read all over in the city as he drove to work here on this nondescript day to his nondescript job.

            He parked his car, got out and made his way toward the building. In front of the building was a beggar. The beggar held a sign that said he had no money and that he needed something to eat.  The killer had a job. The beggar did not. The beggar reeked of vomit and piss and grease. He was smiling and said Thank You after the killer gave him a dollar bill. A long time ago before the beggar was a beggar his parents had taught him to be nice and always say “Thank you.”. The beggar never forgot a few of the things his parents taught him. So, many years later, when the man was displaced and alone and begging for food, money, or some compassion and someone gave it,  he always accepted it  and said “Thank you.”

            Inside the building everyone thought they were better than him. Usually, this was consistent no matter what building he worked at on which day. It was usually the guard and the elevator guys that were nice to him. The killer  never knew their names, but they always talked at him as if they knew him for a long o Even if it was a different building in a different part of town, the same guys talked about the same things. Sometimes they talked to him, but mostly they talked at him. No one seemed to listen, the killer noticed. That’s how it was with these two. Every day. They talked about the news, weather and sports. Sometimes they discussed their wives and their children or how much they hated standing in line or paying for necessities or fulfilling their obligations to their creditors or the nuances of things that broke down or didn’t work and all the things in between that they couldn’t control.  They talked about the bodies their wives didn’t have and the things their kids weren’t and all the things  “…that would only  be better if…”

            The killer smiled a lot. The guard and the elevator man (and sometimes the sandwich shop guy) all suspected the killer was a little fruity. They were entitled to their opinions. This much was evident because they gave them out a lot–whether you asked for them or not. The killer knew they talked about him and this was how it was, so he just let it be. Everyone had a knife. Everything was subject to change. People swore loyalty and love with absence and no game plan or connection about how to do that, but they promised it anyway. That’s how it was. Every time he stepped outside to go to work, to buy the papers, to sit at the lunch counter, to approach someone to say hello to them, he knew what the deal was already: lots of things getting in between people, much of it they didn’t even see. Someone once called him analytical, an ex girlfriend who was long gone in the morass of No One’s Perfect-dom that seemed so popular. It damn near killed him to tell her the fine line between seeing things as they were and being “analytical” was at times very, very thick. The woman left him anyway and the killer moved on himself.

            At noon, the killer clocked out and went to lunch. He sat outside in his car and he read the papers. He sipped diet soda from a can and contemplated things in the shade. He always collected his trash and disposed of it properly. He was always careful to retain the recyclable materials. The killer saw children every day and realized that they were eventually going to inherit the whole mess. Things had to be in order for them, so he was careful to recycle. He knew the sun was bothersome sometimes when it got in his eyes, but he knew that its existence was necessary or he wouldn’t be alive. He hated when it rained but he didn’t complain like his co-workers did when things were not the way they wanted them to be.  To them it was more work. To him it just was the way it was supposed to be. If things didn’t get dirty, he wouldn’t have a job. If people didn’t make messes or dirty toilets or floors or bathrooms or throw their own trash away, then there would be nothing to clean, hence no work, no food, no car, no clothes, no papers, no cigarettes. So when it rained and the floors and carpets and walls and windows were muddy and sloppy and foggy and greasy or when he got to work and things were in disarray, he didn’t grumble. He was a janitor. He was supposed to clean. That was his job. It seemed that resistance to things that people could not control caused them a lot of undue stress and resentment.

            He relaxed in his car and smoked. It was good to smoke. Cigarettes were cancerous. Cancer was bad. Bad was good. The killer was content. In the parking lot there were lots of cars. Expensive ones. Cheap ones. Old ones. New ones.  Some had their religious affiliations and organizational allegiances plastered on their bumpers. Most had things people wanted everyone to know about. Like who they loved. Who they hated. Who they voted for. What radio station they listened to. What they’d rather be doing. Who they’d rather be with. Who’d they’d rather be. What city they were from. Where they worked. How they’d rather not be working. What 12 step recovery program they belonged to.  How all people should care about the planet. What big fish to save. What to eat. What not to eat. Who they’d rather be eating. The killer noted the utter futility in the whole matter as he saw a man in a very expensive suit walk up to his big, expensive flashy car. The man was proud of his car. He was careful to unlock, disarm, disengage, and decode to get into his car. Such was his ritual. The killer knew that this was also what the man did with his house–unlock, disarm, disengage, and decode.

            And with his wife–unlock, disengage, decode, disarm.

            And with his children–decode, decipher, and disengage.

            And with everyone else in between.

            And so on.

            While sitting there smoking the killer watched a little girl walking alone. She was ten, maybe eleven years old. She was a pretty little girl. There was a man the killer had never seen before sitting by a nearby bench, apparently feeding the birds that wallowed and loitered around the parking lot. The killer wondered if the birds knew that it was against the law to loiter. The killer saw the man produce something from his pocket and beckon to the girl. The girl happily obliged. It was candy. The strange man handed the girl candy and she took it. They exchanged a few words and the little girl skipped away with a smile on her face. It was strangers much like this man that the little girl was warned about, but it was the girl’s older brother who forced her to do horrible things when she got home. The girl was terrified all the time, walking around scared and shaky, and she found comfort in being as far away from home as she could and when strangers offered unconditional love she most certainly took it. This was something she knew nothing of, so when it was offered, she took it. The killer watched the girl, her smile, the lollipop, the old man, the birds and the terrible sun that watched down upon all of it. He finished his cigarette, mashed out the butt and went back to work.

            At quitting time, the killer packed up his things and clocked out. He headed for the bar. He liked to have a couple of beers and relax after work. He drank his two beers in the silence of the bar, watched the TV, smoked, and ruminated. There was usually the same crowd at the bar who talked about the same things. They talked about the things their wives weren’t, what they wish their kids could do and about all the great things a lot of money could do and all the relief and stress and low self esteem a beautiful woman could alleviate. They complained, they ruminated, they digressed, they waxed poetic. They talked about all the things they could not change. They talked about the world and how terrible it was, about the terrible people on the planet and how these terrible people on it would never be the way that they wanted to be. They talked about the niggers, the chinks, the spics, the kikes, the trailer trash, the wops, the reds, the greens, the oranges and everything else that wasn’t the way they wanted it to be. They discussed these things. They lamented these things. They burped, laughed, smoked and changed the channels on the TV. It was the only thing they could change. Everything else they couldn’t.

            On the TV was the news. There was footage from a bank heist. The robbers would not be taken alive. They came out of the bank shooting. They had bigger guns than the cops. They shot a lot of cops, killed a couple and were eventually killed by the cops. Some of the cops were interviewed by some of the eager reporters. The cops were upset that the robbers had bigger guns than they did. This is the land of the free, one of them said. He was upset. He was bloody and covered in blood. It was his partner’s blood. His partner had a family, a children, a house, a respectable life. His partner also had a head, but that was gone. Most of it was now on his partner, who stood in front of the TV cameras. Apparently, he was standing with his partner by his patrol car when the robbers came out shooting. One of the big ugly bullets hit him in the face. Big ugly bullets do  a lot of damage traveling at such high speeds,  so it took most of his head off. The dead policeman’s partner  was babbling, ranting gibberish after a while. He appeared angry, hurt and sad. He didn’t know how to express these things so he talked about the large caliber bullet, the jellied brains and skull and pulp and the convulsing headless corpse (that was once his partner) that shit and pissed all over itself as it  hit the pavement. A sergeant came on and spoke for the cop soaked in his partner’s brains and skull. The sergeant explained that that particular officer had been through a lot as he dismissed the eager curious reporters and walked the man away from the reporters.

            The next  story was about a little red -haired girl who made a wish for a Dalmatian puppy for Christmas. The little girl lived in the ghetto and was the victim of circumstance. A nice man had called the TV station and donated one for the girl. The man’s name was kept a secret. He was a nice humble man. The little girl was happy and grateful that nice humble men existed. They showed her happy and crying with her new friend in the squalid little apartment he and her mother and brothers lived in. In the apartment were many other things nice people had donated. There was hope for this little girl, this much was evident. She was happy with her new found puppy friend.  She named him Max. She was going to have a real Christmas, which is something she had never had. She was explaining this to the TV cameras as the little doggie wagged it’s tail and licked her face.

Commercials came on, selling or persuading things that made no sense. The killer ordered another beer, surveyed the wreckage of the bar and looked at his watch. It would soon be time to go. One more for the road, the killer thought  The bar conversation jelled as the killer thought about the dead policeman and the happy little girl.

            He drained his second beer after a while, said his good nights and left.  No one acknowledged him. No one said good-bye and most of them, if asked, could not give a description of the man that usually came in every day at around six p.m. for the  two bottles of beer he drank with the four cigarettes he smoked. No one could give a character description, yet if the killer were found mugged and beaten and shot their summary obituaries of him would be angelic and innocent and devoid of negative information. It was protocol to be very kind to the dead, despite what kind of lives they led or what evil things they practiced, you always said nice things. You  talked about how much they loved life. How they were always smiling and would do anything for anyone. How they aspired to help people and never said anything bad or were caught stealing or jacking off  to stolen porno mags. There were no monsters in the world of the deceased. Everyone who died was nice and could do no wrong.

            At home, the killer propped up his feet and watched science fiction movies on the television until the early morning hours. He had his cigarettes, his Hungry Man TV dinner and a glass of  milk. He smoked and watched late night sci-fi movies. He sat content and contemplated the monsters and the aliens that maimed and wreaked havoc and thought about the monsters and aliens that he saw every day. He watched the evil dead and the ghosts and was reminded of the skeletal closet deep in the recesses of his own private hell. Late at night it was the seediest characters from the farthest worlds doing the most unfathomable deeds. All of it was amusing because it was make believe. It was the human drama that the killer was witness to every day that was appalling to him, that sometimes made him wretch, squirm and question things he was once told to uphold as convention. As the killer sat and smoked and ruminated,  his arteries clogged and  his belly grew, and his brain cells died off a few at a time. He was content.

            He was dozing off when the phone rang. It was a friend of his, a man he’d known all his life. The man had a wife and children and a job at a big corporation that designed missiles and the airplanes that carried and dropped them on little countries far away that no one ever heard of. The man had what he thought was a good job and a fulfilling life. Big company job, big company benefits, big company salary, with big company BBQ’s and a big company title. His whole life was the big company and the big things it made him think about his little self.  The killer had known the man his whole life, yet knew nothing about him. The big company man usually called and complained about all of the things in his life  minuscule and monumental that he had no control over. Of feelings the man knew nothing. Of connection he could not fathom. The man usually complained about the things his wife couldn’t do and the way his child did not behave. The killer listened. That’s what he always did. They talked this way for a little while and then they said their empty good-byes and hung up. He went back to his sci-fi movies and his cigarettes. There was a moth flying around near the television, attracted to its light, its warmth, its radiance.  He  picked up his slipper and smacked the moth dead. It fell down and twitched and fluttered and then it was still. The moth perhaps would not have to fly around aimlessly around the television set any longer to find comfort in artificial light. Now it was resting. Now good things could finally be said about it and its life of searching for something that it never found.

            The  killer sat back, and eventually fell asleep in front of the TV, his thoughts random and flowing, his work done, his dinner eaten, his cigarettes smoked. Time passed. The sci fi movies gave to  public service commercials that offered help for alcoholism, rape and domestic violence–when the people that needed this help were comatose, beaten, cowering, starved, naked, cold and alone without solutions– far away from the television set if they even had one. Those gave way to the comfortable static and snow of oblivion. More moths came, buzzed around the grim blue glow of the idiot box. The killer snored loudly, with the blank snowy television screen and its static, the moths who craved light and direction,  and his sleeping dog, who never did much except eat, sleep, and love the Killer unconditionally.

            Morning. Another day. He showered, shaved, dressed, read  and ate. He overslept so he hurried to get out of the house.  The dull ache in his lower back reminded him that he had slept on the recliner. One of those days. Careful with that Axe, Eugene, the killer thought to himself sarcastically.

              The freeway was the same–a  slap in the face. Everything was the same. Nothing changed.   The billboards were the same. They sold sex and jeans and cars and pagers and fax machines and copiers and food and gadgets –anesthesia. Octopus arms reaching across the interstate–beckoning.  Give up, give up, give in,  join, submit and take the easier way. Plead ignorance. Feign  blindness. Act like you don’t know any better. Cop out. Drop out. Beg for the answer, and ignore it when it’s given. The rhetorical question he had posed to himself in between hits off his non-filter smoke every morning: Which voice was worse, the voices on the radio or the ones in your head? The answer was somewhere in the asking. He felt nauseated. His head pounded. He coughed and almost retched.

            The killer drove. He drove and reflected and began to cry as he did this. Tears were streaming down his face. There was the big truck with the stickers that implored union membership on it; with the horrible man that drove it, who was again  slapping his poor scared child of a daughter. The killer envisioned her the night before in her little bed, with her little stuffed animals, curled up in the fetal position yearning for death–for freedom from this horrible man who was her caretaker, her livelihood, her lifeblood. He thought of the abusive boyfriends and husbands she would pick many years later. He thought of her cutting her arms alone in her room, sticking dirty needles in her arm and shooting warmth and escape into those virgin veins, selling her body to the night, a lifetime of doing things she didn’t believe in. He saw her sad tragic black life and the angry man at her funeral, angrier than ever, drunker than ever because it was the only way he knew how to be since he was 11 years old–to kill the emotional pain.

            The killer pulled up behind the truck. The truck got off the freeway and so did the killer. He was shaking and sweating and crying and staring intently at the driver as the veins popped out of his neck, as he screamed and bellowed and flailed with his one free arm at his little prisoner. The killer wondered as he had so many times before if he was really so wrong being the way he was, dealing with his pain and confusion and inability to understand why everything was the way it was, whether it was so wrong how he dealt with his pain the way he did. They were his demons, his misunderstandings of the  random chaotic world he had simply never come to terms with. He sighed the last puff off of his morning cigarette out of his nostrils and closed mouth and mashed it out in the overflowing ash tray. He tried to focus on the truck and quell the pounding in his head and ignore the voices, the terrible voices that were with him since he was a fledgling adolescent in a sea of misunderstanding. The impulses, the blackness and the fog came again. Through the fog he remembered he forgot to pray before he left that morning.. Seldom had he done such a thing. But this was a bad morning–a bad morning indeed. He drove intently, fought to stay lucid and kept his eyes focused on the pony tails, the vicious spectacle, away from the glaring of the sun, the redness in his eyes and the clouds that rained terrible sounds on him from within.

            He reached for the cold steel of the magnum under his seat. It was cold and it was good. And as he followed the vehicle of darkness to its destination, he said one thing.

             “Help.”

[Circa 1996. Pasadena, CA.]