AUTOBIOGRAPHY. CHAPTER TWO

Of Murder, Mayhem, and Mellaril

CHAPTER TWO

Had the jury wanted to do so, I could have received the gas chamber. I can well see where the violence I showed my sister, Janine, in the last year of her life may well have warranted their anger and their ultimate condemnation. Yet, misgivings, even by the prosecutor, forestalled a move for the death penalty. It is my opinion that the doctors at the State Hospital hesitated to return me to face trial for three years after my arrest just prior to my seventeenth birthday and Janine’s sixteenth, not only because of my lawyer’s maneuvers but also because of their own doubts that I deserved death. In fact, the doctors at the State Hospital saw in me a most remarkable individual, “a very alienated individual,” as one chart note had it. But no one in my part of the world had ever heard of a brain syndrome discovered by an Austrian doctor, Hans Asperger.

“Asperger’s Syndrome” is a unique form of autism. Many who have it are at or above normal intelligence. For instance, in the third grade, I invented a new way to subtract. But these “autistics” have one major problem in their particular human failing: their understanding of common social reckoning. Often they are socially “clueless.” Recently, one person called me “blonde,” as if my mind was completely elsewhere. And it is true that I find the common concerns of most people to lack the abstraction that I crave. Often “autistics” are naive. And, frankly, their moral sense of things can be different—if they are not told overtly and reasonably the literal basis for a moral belief, and told about it at an early enough age. There is a term for this: Autistic Psychopathy. I suspect that many criminals may actually have a tinge of autism, but I can’t really say.

Often autistics who appear “normal” to truly normal people have hurt feelings from the constant rebukes that they face in public. That, in itself, may be why many “aspies” are shy. Aspies just don’t have the basic ground rules correct from the beginning, but life goes on, and they just have to wing it like everybody else. Many are considered geeks or nerds –and, in fairness, they can be obsessive, unrelenting, and insufferable to be around. They can seem unthinking and rude. They can be too honest, also –perhaps as I have been in the novel about sexual things. In my novel, I have the evil Internet prostitute, Vicki, begin her vendetta against the protagonist precisely because he becomes presumptuous, taking liberties with her time. All I know is if the other aspies are like me, they are not truly psychopathic. I have too many tears inside to be a true psychopath.

I belatedly achieved my Associate Degree, with highest honors in Mathematics, from “Sendby” Community College, but I won’t be going back to college for any more. I just don’t fit around normal, invasive people, and I also suspect I have brain damage now because of all those years on mellaril. I may also now have brain damage from a suicide attempt that I did at Spring Break, 2002, in the first semester that I attended “Sendby.” I felt a bit ostracized. I was over the edge and on my way to oblivion, but my pipe failed. How was I to know that a catalytic converter gets so hot? I stumbled around with numb legs and a headache for a week afterwards, wondering about it all. I kept it all well-hidden. Upon my return to classes, no one knew.

I want to tell you the truth of E.E. Cumming’s words: “When hearts are sick, minds nothing can.” I want to tell you how I came to realize that I was considered a “loser” –for almost fifty years, I actually didn’t know –and how, all along –while I’ve cluelessly gone my own way –I was really being undermined. I want to tell you, now, upfront, the conclusion of my life:

There are three evil things about this world. One, we are here because of a meaningless heat event that occurred billions of years ago. Two, life is mindless and concerned with one thing, its own self-continuance. And three, most people, just to live, are little bit cruel –a little bit too psychologically invasive. In fact, I think happiness requires at least some disguised cruelty within a person’s psychological makeup.

I intended to graduate by December of 2003, just to rigidly square it all up –and then get serious and effectively die by suicide before another year would come. I did it all with a great uncomfort in my head. I’m sure that my distress was evident to those around me. I believe that I was being hacked by those who were exploring or investigating me. For I was becoming sex crazy. And I began writing my novel in my final semester, as well. It was almost as if I was writing one long suicide note about how much I hated my father. For so many years before, my sister, Janine, was not the real and only target of that murder. I saw my life as a write-off, anyway. I was becoming very self-destructive. How I just barely survived and made it through that final semester is a curiosity to me. How I survived a suicide attempt in my first semester, as I stumbled around, is a curiosity to me. And how that unusual woman, my mother, died that last semester bothers me, as well.

I was also going through two other problems simultaneously at college. I was withdrawing from mellaril, after having been on it since those years in my twenties at “Teller” State Hospital. And I believe that I was finally waking up and realizing that I was considered a loser –from my own Internet investigations that almost destroyed this suicidal man financially. I was having a very complicated midlife crisis. And, as usual, I was doing it all alone, as a complete cipher in this world.

I was being taken off mellaril because it had been found to cause sudden cardiac arrest. I took it all those many years at a subclinical dose to control my anger. Going off that medication made me sex crazy. Imagine if my sexual socialization would have been of a sinister kind. After I had graduated and moved, I wrote the Food and Drug Administration about this. I forget their reply. All I remember is that it was faint.

Yet, to understand all this, the evolution of all this, I must first tell you of the murder I committed so many years before. I did it in the dead of winter, in 1968 –after The Summer of “Love.”