Personal Journal

Watching A Man Die (NC-17)

I figured that any woman who starts talking about her clitoral piercing during your first meeting is a prostitute. Callgirl, whatever; Jay’s tastes were discerning, and this speakeasy was more upscale than anything I’d be drinking in during the next 10 years.

I had to write that down because it’s the line for the next short story I’m going to give serious effort to. But my energy is otherwise screwed, back at work, and with a lot of pessimism borne of the latest ramblings of my favorite political writer (Andrew Sullivan, www.andrewsullivan.com). It’s time to start the 04 presidential campaign, and I’m not up-beat enough of mood to deal with that. Frankly, conservative as I am, this president has done foolish things with Federal money. I’m rather ashamed of the dichotomy he’s expressed between social libertarianism and fiscal conservatism. He’s got it backwards. Rein in the dollars, let loose the moral proscriptions. I’m not used to Andrew Sullivan being down-beat, so I’m disappointed this morning.

The biggest trauma to my damn weekend was this pizza delivery guy who had a bomb strapped to his neck. I haven’t stopped to really examine my feelings about this tragedy. Look, I’m jaded. In my family, we watched the Los Angeles evening news every night of my life at the dinner table. It substituted for family dialogue, and now the three of us are all very distant, but we’re all masters of national and global current events. I can remember a great many things about our world that most people never knew occurred, and I’m thankful for that.

“There’s a bubble-headed bleach blonde comes on at 5/ She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye/ It’s interesting when people die/ Gives us dirty laundry”
From Don Henley’s first solo album, great song, “Dirty Laundry”.

Anyhow, I’m jaded. I have made some humor at national tragedies that made people laugh uproariously when they should have been shaken to their core. I did so at the Oklahoma City bombing, and when Susan Smith drowned her two boys… It’s odd, I don’t feel good that I did it, it doesn’t say anything about me that I’d like to be said (and I’ve turned away from that callousness), but you know, the humor was good. Anyway, this pizza guy.

This is the one death that’s going to torment me for a long time, I’ll remember it forever. I delivered pizza for about 15 months of my life, of course, so there’s that level of empathy. But I started to watch the film footage of this crap, and thank god I turned around and got out of there in time so as not to see his last moment. But I cannot extricate myself from being in that scenario in the first person. I cannot stop seeing him and being him simultaneously, and I can’t hold back the terror it causes me.

I’ve seen a few people die over the course of my years, in real footage of a variety of things. I’ve seen a bosnian soldier felled by a single bullet onto a pure white snowfield. I’ve seen a stunt-man fall from underneath an airplane into a forest 20 feet below him when his safety wire gave way. I’ve seen others, too. Murders, some. And it sickens me so horribly because I can recall those scenes with absolute clarity. And those people who knew they were going to die, it’s like their souls start reaching out to the souls in sight of them, “Help me, save me, remember me forever” and they’re gone in an instant of unfathomable heartache. I feel left holding it for them. Because I am capable of great empathy, I can be a good writer. But because I have great empathy, I can be easily traumatized by reality.

To have to come face to face with your own imminent death would be the highest measure of your bravery, of your mettle. I’m afraid to fly, and I extrapolate that moment by hypothesizing how much different facing death would be from facing my raw fears when a plane shudders in turbulence. The reality cannot be changed: Here comes my death. All that I can do is put my own soul at peace, take measure of my actions, recall what gave my existence meaning. These things will carry me through beyond. I was a decent man. I loved my friends. Would that be enough to calm my own soul as whatever medium approached to excavate my soul from my body? It tends to work for me on airplanes, though granted, those airplanes have never begun rapidly losing altitude or had an engine go up in flames…

So there was that poor pizza guy, sitting in front of the sheriff’s vehicle, hoping to god someone could come help him. And there’s some asshole filming it. I wonder if cameramen are the opposite of writers. The cameraman has to separate himself from his emotions, has to view the impending death of the subject matter no different than a ferry going under a bridge. For me, that’s sinful. That you can sit there and film another man’s death cheapens your humanity. Maybe they cry afterward. Maybe they have nightmares. I hope so, and I hope not. I hope they don’t replay those terrible images the way that I do, once I have viewed them, because some things never let you go. They become ghosts, haunting only the one who saw, who understood. But I hope so, because if you can watch a man backed into a corner by a crowd and shot three times in the torso, and you don’t feel anything about it ever again, you’re not really human, by my definition.

Which brings me higher into the chain to whatever sociopath could put that video up onto the web for someone to view. Yeah, I clicked on it and thought I might see, but then I backed out. Jean was going to watch it, then, after I backed out. I told her that if she did, I’d be disappointed in her, but she was still curious, and I caught myself emphatically ordering her not to watch it. Which is unlike me. I don’t think I was trying to protect her from the footage. I think I was warning her of something, instructing her not to show herself so heartless before me that she could be witness to that horror. She relented, then, and I didn’t think more about that exchange between us.

A person shouldn’t be cynical. Cynicism, I believe, is dehumanizing. Skepticism is all that’s necessary to maintain intellectual honesty. Cynicism is as dishonest as zealotry, and we forfeit an important part of our reasoned thought when we espouse either.

What kind of person puts that footage of a man’s death out on TV? His actual last moments. I can accommodate that journalists show us the dead, on occasion, but not the death throes. Look, I’m very realistic about human nature. I know some people might argue that showing these things brings us all closer to how precious life is. I say there’s got to be another way. Maybe the friggin church might be a better place to start, maybe the funeral of your grandparents, or the death of the family pet. Among feeling human beings, these things would suffice… “A word to the wise is sufficient” And among our fellow man we will never eradicate sociopaths entirely. So to advocate executions on live television as a means of shock therapy is specious. The sadists would have jiffy-pop.

I guess this notion has run its course. That poor SOB pizza man, and worse, his family, with record of his final moment on earth, and those cops…
We are human beings. We are one part animal, one part god, and we struggle between the aspirations of each part of these inheritances.

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn