Junkies, Murder, Land of the Free

Chapter 9 – Junkies, Murder, Land of the Free

Carson walked fast down Santa Fe Avenue then headed east on the 6^th Street bridge. He stopped in the middle of the span, looking down over the rail yards and the L.A. River.  He was more pissed off now than shaken, angry enough to keep killing, if that was what he’d done to the junkie. But it wasn’t intentional. He never handled a needle before. He’d been distracted, disturbed by the grotesque image of the girl’s face, by her fluid-slathered mouth inundated by the junkie’s sorry looking, bloody pecker. He rushed the job, forgetting what Mickey told him about going only two thirds down. He wanted to get away from the room, from the junkie’s mangled dick, from the dismal temptation of the girl.

Carson tried to reassure himself. It was an accident. He hadn’t killed the low life dung that was Mickey. At most he was an accessory. It was nothing more than an assisted suicide. All he’d done was to expedite a process that had been going on for years, with a large hand provided by the state. Certainly the mayor would be pleased to hear of the junkie’s death. And the president, too. In fact, most taxpayers would applaud the ultimate exhaustion of a bag of bones that had been kept alive on their largesse. The junkie’s life had been nurtured too long on the salaries of cops, social workers, paramedics, government bureaucrats, research statisticians and ivory tower masturbators, not to mention a vast underground criminal economy. Carson thought that some people might even consider him a hero for having done a valiant service to the city and the nation’s economy. He’d made the streets safer for the general citizenry.

Carson had permanently deleted a figure from the ledger of the chronically indigent. Politicians could point to the statistic and use it. It would help them foster a comfortable illusion – they were winning the great battle, apocalyptic warfare against the forces of darkness that threaten society with the chaos of self-indulgence and lawless behavior. The irony was not lost on Carson. His lethal injection into the capillaries of the junkie’s ravaged sperm canal would be received with loud acclaim by the vast majority. But the authorities would still arrest him for murder – even while the state encouraged junkies, homeless and other low lives to kill themselves as soon as possible. That wasn’t murder. In the big store that was America, it was an indirect cost, an overhead item. It was a given, a widely accepted axiom at Wharton, Harvard Business School and the Treasury Department. In order for the fewest number to control the most resources, a small percentage of the population was expected to subsidize the program with its lives. This was the ineluctable factor in the greater equation that drove the American political economy. Nobody in elected office ever admitted this to the millions too absorbed in Oprah, the Wide World of Carnage, and Monday Night Mayhem, or who were too distracted with how to become the next big Lotto winner. The several people who actually tuned into the president’s State of the Union address were never told his little secret. Tucked away in the administration’s budget was a line item known as “Reduction in Entitlement Program Expense Due to the Ongoing Early Mortality of the (Non-Voting) Fringe Bloc” (i.e., junkies, crack whores, crack babies, obese and diabetic black people on welfare, and the homeless). Any increase in that line item from year to year was seen as a good thing by the budget wonks at the O.M.B. Any savings from year to year could be applied to a reduction in the progressive tax rate for the ones in the highest tax bracket. This would help fuel the economy, encourage new investments and productivity, keep the dollars circulating, and provide a stimulus to earnings, yields and returns. It was a beautiful system, even flawless, if one considered the flaws as necessary for the system’s continued success.

There had to be casualties. But at least this wasn’t India or Afghanistan, countries where there really was no regard for human life. Americans still pretended that their own economic casualties were either a tragedy or an isolated corporate theft. But mostly they attributed it to laziness. The Asian barbarians, on the other hand, recognized the death and disease of their societies as just part of the regular deal. Another one dead? No problem, man. Stoke the pyre and light up a cheroot, man. People were supposed to die by age forty. Beyond that was an aberration. In America, letting a junkie die was not the same as killing him. People hoped he would die. But going up to him and shooting him in the head, well, that was against the law. That was criminal. It was murder. Jesus would say, “Bad, bad. Thou shalt not. Bad.” What Jesus says goes, man. And Jesus is still talking to us. He is alive, brother, just like Elvis. Shit. Jesus and Elvis are brothers. And man, you know Jesus is an American. Every day you can hear him opining about abortion, gun ownership, search and seizures by the FBI, welfare reform, evolution taught in the schools, school vouchers, genetic engineering, gay parenting and marriage, the Muslim question, the Patriot Act, female Catholic priests, whale hunting, global warming, mergers and acquisitions, corporate greed and capital punishment. Jesus has a huge political agenda that encompasses every contingency for every people at all ages of history. But he’s partial to Americans. He’s talkin’ to us and he says it’s okay to set up an economy where a few people are choked off in order for others to prosper, but don’t you dare think about shooting those poor suckers in the head. That’s murder, my child. Better to prolong their suffering. Kill them slowly. It’s more humane. He endorses that. After all, this is America; these poor schmucks were given the same opportunities as everyone else, with the same chance to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps just like everyone else. If they die, it’s their own fuckin’ fault, my child. Go in peace.

            Carson had no love of junkies. He cared little whether they lived or died. But neither was he some knee-jerk liberal. He actually believed in the economic system of America. He wanted to enrich himself as much as the next guy. It was just that he had long ago accepted that the machine was inherently brutal; the system was a killer. There would always be casualties. There would always be junkies and others who, for whatever reason, either chose or were forced to live on the outside; who would never participate the way society wanted them to participate. He knew that, even if you gave such people a million dollars and said, “Here, take this money and invest it, make it grow. Buy a house and a car, start a family; send your kids to college, retire in dignity,” he knew that those people would take that million dollars and spend the whole goddamned thing, every last cent, on junk, or whiskey, or whores, or blow through it in Las Vegas until nothing was left. There would always be those people who were Fucked Up. And the politicians knew it. But they rarely let on. Instead, they counseled compassion and good Christian values. Each of them understands the importance of God in America. Acknowledging God keeps them in power and the people tamed. A demonstration must be made of some kind of moral/ethical/legal code, a sacred code. It allows the haves to keep what they’ve plundered, keeping it safe from others who wish to take it away, just like Mickey said. The scumbag junkie spoke the truth.

Carson’s rationalizations didn’t exonerate him. Execrable as he was, the junkie was still human. Despite Carson’s strong resistance to taking responsibility, he couldn’t shake the feeling in his gut that he was partly to blame for the loss of a human life. Perhaps he would’ve felt the same way if he’d killed a dog. It wasn’t moral culpability. It was more his identification with the junkie. It was a sadness for himself that he felt in Mickey’s death. The junkie’s death was emblematic of the imminence of Carson’s own finite consciousness. It was a narcissistic thought, but it saddened him nonetheless. Did that make the feeling less authentic? He was affected by the knowledge that a living thing, one capable of emotion, no matter how crude, had been extinguished. It didn’t matter that the world was made a better place with fewer Mickeys; that the streets of downtown Los Angeles were slightly improved by one worthless junkie’s long-overdue demise. Carson knew that there was someone who would mourn the addict’s passing, even the girl, who was so fucked up that she hadn’t the good sense to understand that his death was her liberation. She, in her sick way, would grieve the loss of the very person who tormented her most in the world. What kind of world was that, Carson asked himself; a world where even serial killers had people in their lives who undoubtedly loved them. Even serial killers exhibited qualities that nurtured affection, even love, in the hearts of certain people, people who perceived them not as sick psychopaths but maybe even as gentle, loving individuals. How fucked up was that, he thought. It didn’t make sense, but there it was.

Carson looked back at the city’s towers. They stood sparkling in the sun, grouped like polished scabbards thrust into the earth with the force of bold hubris. They were haughty in their ambition, looking proud and confident, yet surely doomed. A dark chaos swirled above their radiant spires, just beyond history’s horizon and the limits of human knowledge. He wondered who would grieve for him when his life was snuffed out. It pained him just a little to think that Mickey, the dead junkie, might have had a greater capacity to elicit sadness in his passing than Carson would ever have in his own.

            As was his custom, Carson took pains to shake himself free of that eddy tugging him down into the torpor of remorse. If he allowed himself, he could languish there the rest of his life. It was unproductive. The illumination that came from that darkness, if there were any to be found, showed its light on actions he preferred not to take. It meant having to radically change his life. He didn’t trust the impulse for change that was borne of a kind of guilt. He believed that guilt was nothing more than a conditioned reaction. It was the residue of his childhood, from having been raised by parents for whom guilt was an effective tool for shaping his behavior. It had no more substance or utility than teaching a dog how to heel or not to shit on the carpet. It kept people in line, kept property rights secure, treaties from being broken, and nation-states from trampling one another with impunity. All of this was accomplished to prevent one party from harming another, to keep everyone’s resources from being sacked by the Huns. Guilt as a tool for deep human transformation was, in Carson’s estimation, only effective on the grounds that there was a supreme being watching humans torture one another, keeping a running tally so that justice, based on a loosely consensual system of right and a wrong, could eventually be applied. Guilt was the fear of damnation, the fear of pain. If most people believed that their actions didn’t matter, that they could behave with impunity in this world or the next, certainly then they would steal, rape and plunder from sun up to sun down, allowing themselves few breaks other than to take a dump or eat a snack.

            The thought of food made Carson realize he was hungry. It also reminded him that he still had no money. He needed it now, sooner than finding Giambone. Giambone would have to wait. He was long-term. Short-term was food and shelter. Carson supposed he might get a meal and a cot at the Neptune Mission, but it would be several hours more before he could go back there. He had to get some cash in his pocket and the quickest way was to pawn some goods, meaning he had to lay hold of some merchandise, meaning he would have to steal. Carson hadn’t stolen anything since he was a freshman in college, when Carl Trembly let him steal his stereo system so Carl could get the insurance money. He walked into Carl’s dorm room and walked out with all the components in broad daylight, as though he had a perfect right, which he did, he laughed, because Carl let him take it. He hadn’t stolen a thing since then, unless his wife Beth’s dreams of the future were considered in the accounting. Those were intangibles. Carson hadn’t needed to steal, to actually steal tangible goods. He’d borrowed a lot of money, money he would never pay back, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. He’d always intended to pay it back.

            There was a Macy’s at Hope and Seventh. He might find something there small enough to pocket and hock for a meal. He’d been to the same Macy’s once before, several years ago, after a meeting at Wells Fargo about a new phone system he’d sold the bank. Somehow he’d remembered it was Beth’s birthday, so he stopped inside to pick out a gift. It was a cute black skirt and slinky silk top. She became upset when he’d given it to her. Complaining that it was too small; that he knew her size; that she wasn’t 21 years old any more and he must have confused her with one of his slutty girl friends. She wasn’t some whore, she said. She was his wife and the mother of his children. (In his mind, this was the problem.) She ended up throwing the clothes at him knocking over his glass of wine and staining both the dress and the blouse. They were ruined and he was unable to exchange them or get his money back. It was characteristic of encounters between them in the last years before the final rupture. Looking back on it, he impressed himself at how restrained he had been. In all the accumulated hours of trading accusations, insults, and jagged shards of words fully intended to wound and draw metaphoric blood, he had not hit her once. He thought this was a formidable act of self-control and, in itself, should have exonerated him to some degree from the charge of being a bad husband. Neither she, the kids, nor the judge had shared his point of view on this. He had to admit that losing the equity in one’s house in a poker game was a setback from which any married man might find it difficult to locate sympathy from neutral parties, let alone the very people who have been forcefully evicted from that house. Needless to say, after that debacle he wasn’t welcome in the family whose lives he’d abruptly ruined. They would have to start all over. He at least could find another game of Hold’em, as soon as he repaired his credit on the circuit or found a backer. At the moment, it looked like Macy’s was going to be his backer.