Bad to the Bone (4 page)

(If she’d known what I had to feel guilty
about
, she might not have been so cavalier, but she liked to interact even then: a matter of ego, take my word for it.)

Suddenly, unexpectedly (and for reasons I’ve never understood), I simply believed her and the guilt came off like my wet overcoat in the waiting room a few moments before. My sense of it was physical. I
heard
it come off. It fled like a vampire at the approach of day.

Then the session was over and I was walking toward the subway. The rain splattered on my jacket, soaking it (and me) again. I ignored the cold because I knew that underneath the guilt lay freedom. Not, as Marilyn insisted, conscience.

I argued about it with Marilyn later on. I told her that I never had much guilt anyway. What she called guilt, I experienced as confusion. “What you gave me,” I told her, “was clarity.”

Marilyn thought I was kidding.

The two most significant events of my distinguished career occurred on the same day in November of 1978. First, the news about Jonestown began to come through. Just the death of the congressman and what looked like a massacre, in the beginning. Then, little by little, the
voluntary
nature of the slaughter.

The second event, the catalyst which caused a series of unrelated ideas to coalesce, was a simple nature documentary which I happened to watch on the TV of a chemistry student I was tutoring. The film (I never did get the name of it) was about lions.

For the first twenty minutes, it was a typically humanized narrative. Cubs biting daddies’ tails. Mommies nursing cubs. Daddies and mommies courting without actually fucking. Not as deadly as Walt Disney running film backward and forward to make the animals dance, but weak enough, except for the obligatory hunting scene.

The obligatory hunting scene was exceptionally graphic. (In stark contrast to the mating scene.) The filmmaker was attempting to prove that lions kill by strangulation and not by tearing their prey apart, so he ran the kill footage in extreme slow motion.

After a short chase, one lioness anchored a wildebeest by sinking her claws into its hindquarters and pulling downward. A second lioness clamped its jaws around the bottom of the wildebeest’s throat. She, too, hung on.

It took a long time for the wildebeest to die. The animal remained standing throughout much of the ordeal. It made occasional running motions with one of its legs, but couldn’t move because the lionesses were too heavy. Toward the end of the struggle, the filmmaker zoomed in on the lioness who had her teeth sunk into the wildebeest’s throat. Her jaws moved continually as she fought for a deeper hold. In the final moments a trickle of the wildebeest’s blood became an unbroken stream—it ran over the jaws of the lioness and into her mouth.

My student’s siblings shouted the appropriate, “Oh, gross!” The adults (including myself) chuckled indulgently. The wildebeest collapsed and died.

I began to turn away from the screen, but the lioness did something wholly unexpected. It licked the carcass several times before it began to feed. Like a child licking an ice cream bar.

Nobody else noticed. Of course. But the implications were at once clear and profound. Far from distasteful, the blood running into the mouth of the lioness was like nectar into the mouth of a butterfly. Moreover, the lioness hunted every day in order to feed herself and the pride. She was familiar with every aspect of killing and she found it unutterably sweet.

A few minutes later the conversation turned to the Jonestown massacre. The first live footage had appeared on the evening news. It consisted entirely of slow pans across the bodies with appropriate pauses to show dead babies cradled in their dead mothers’ arms. To me, the gas-swollen bodies resembled the puffy balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.

The narrator kept up a running commentary, assuring viewers that armed men had forced the Jonestown residents to feed cyanide-laced Kool-Aid to their children. Yet these same armed guards had, with only a few exceptions, eventually put down their rifles and swallowed the lethal dose.

My student (a master of the obvious) said, “How could anyone do that?
I
would have tried to kill the guards. If I was gonna die anyway, I would have at least tried to take one of them with me.”

Humans love to go on about themselves, but the tram was that my student had no idea how he’d react to the offered cup of Kool-Aid. How could he? Nevertheless, he continued to boast to his parents and they nodded wisely. For myself, I kept out of the conversation because my own thoughts were going in a different direction.

I was watching my student closely. He believed his own boast. Perhaps he
would
fight if faced with death. My own experience is that most humans go like frightened sheep. They beg and they cry, their bladders (and sometimes their bowels) emptying convulsively.

But I
have
known people who struggled right up to the end. Looking for a way to escape or kicking out in rage. I know such people exist.

I excused myself and left my student’s apartment, but I didn’t take the subway uptown. A series of questions, a precursor of some deep understanding, so dominated my attention that I ignored everything else. Why were there no fighters in Jonestown? Why was there no sign of struggle or rebellion? Did this collection of sheep come to the Reverend Jones with its wool sheared? Or had some arrived as lions and been gradually reduced to lambhood? Did Jones deliberately design his ‘message’ to attract the sort of humans who would take the cup of Kool-Aid? Or is submission an inevitable part of the religious experience? And what, precisely,
are
the conditions for ‘obedience unto death’?

In the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in the 1950s, those families who owned dogs let them out to run freely. I never knew these dogs to cause any trouble to humans. They sometimes fought among themselves, but most often the stronger dog would simply growl and the weaker would slink away. My own dog, King, was the king of the neighborhood. He was a malamute and dead game with other dogs. King didn’t get into many fights, but the ones he got into were usually intense.

Poochie lived at the other end of the heap. He was a small mongrel with short yellow hair and a tiny tail that curled as tightly as a pig’s. Whereas most of the dogs hung out together, Poochie was always alone, even when a bitch was in heat. He never got into fights either. He sunk down on shaking legs at the mere approach of another dog, male or female.

In some ways, I was similar to Poochie. I, too, usually played by myself. But I was never bullied by the others. I never pressed my belly into the ground and begged for mercy. The neighborhood kids resented and feared me, but they didn’t challenge me.

In the years before we left Valley Stream, my mother insisted I play outside, in the ‘fresh air,’ even when it rained. (Back then, I thought she wanted to get rid of me. Now I’m not sure that she could formulate a desire that precisely.) On this particular day, it was raining hard and I was playing in the garage as usual. This was before we lost the house. I was about ten years old. I was rearranging the small jars of hardware my father had stacked in his workshop before he took off. If the jars had only been different heights, the perfect arrangement would have been easily found. If they were the same height, I could have used the objects inside as the key to their arrangement. But they were of different widths and different heights, and every arrangement seemed haphazard.

Nevertheless, I persisted. There wasn’t anything else to do. Not in the rain.

About an hour after lunch, Poochie wandered in through a small door on the side of the garage. He was soaked and shivering, but he didn’t try to approach me. He pressed his belly and his muzzle onto the greasy concrete floor and hoped for the best.

I was annoyed at first. The garage was uniquely mine, because my mother never went there. She didn’t know how to drive and we didn’t own a car. I decided to throw Poochie into the rain.

He didn’t move as I approached, although he kept his eyes on me. Even when I casually kicked him (a hint and not meant to hurt), he did no more than flatten himself into greater submission.

I kicked him harder. He moved about six inches, but didn’t run.

I kept him between myself and the door, offering an escape route that he didn’t take. Poochie placed his faith in submission. He trusted submission to pull him through, as it had with the other dogs.

The first thing I did, once I realized that Poochie wasn’t going to run, was close the garage door. I locked it, too, though I hadn’t clearly formulated my experiment. Then I sat on the floor of the garage and stared at the dog for a long time.

Poochie was very ugly. His fur was thin and dingy. His muzzle was short and sharp. His body was too long for his stumpy legs. Without thinking too much about it, I yanked at his corkscrew tail. I expected him to squeal like a little pig, but he kept his muzzle on the concrete.

I decided to determine the exact point at which Poochie would abandon submission and decide to fight. I put my hands around his throat and squeezed slightly. No response. I slowly (and predictably) tightened my grip.

His body contracted, once he understood where the experiment was going, and his back feet kicked out. He even groaned toward the end, a high, hopeless cry so pitiful I almost let him go. But he never tried to get away. He never growled. He never tried to bite.

Poochie made a tremendous impression on me, because I
didn’t
expect him to die without a fight. The experiment was supposed to determine the point at which the animal would make a stand. Before Poochie, I believed ‘submission unto death’ to be impossible.

How can the same species that holds Poochie hold, for instance, the hounds that corner bear and puma until the slower humans arrive with their guns? Or the police dog willing to brave clubs and knives? Or the pit bull terrier
eager
to fight to the death?

How can the same species that holds me hold the followers of Jim Jones?

There’s no limit to what I could do with a few hundred Poochies at my command. That’s what I kept coming back to. Of course, I knew nothing of Jim Jones’ personal beliefs. He may have been absolutely sincere. Nevertheless, there was
no
limit to what I could do with a few hundred Poochies at my command.

I dumped Poochie in a bed of blossoming peonies. His carcass was found the following day. Apparently, nobody in the neighborhood was capable of what I’d done, because nobody formulated the possibility of foul play. Some of the kids thought Poochie had eaten slug poison. Others insisted he’d suffered a heart attack or a stroke. All the kids were tremendously saddened, though none of them had given a shit about Poochie when he was alive. Not even the fat girl who owned him.

As for myself, I felt only fear and confusion. I observed the children’s tears and wondered why my own eyes were dry. Whereas they demonstrated their human feelings by conducting a full-scale backyard burial, I stayed in the garage, arranging bottles of nuts and bolts. Again and again, I asked myself what was wrong with me. I never once thought to ask myself what was right with me.

At that age (how could I help it?), I was afraid of my differences. (I thought I was
supposed
to feel what the other children obviously felt. That these feelings came down through some unimpeachable source, like God.) I experienced this fear as a kind of confusion. To live one’s life without clarity, pushed from one pseudo-obligation to another, is a curse. To have the potential for freedom, only to be lost in confusion, is a proper cause for mourning.

Marilyn took away the confusion, which I understood as guilt and which was never more than a mistake in judgment. She gave me clarity and purpose, but never, not even for a single instant, have I been grateful.

T
HERE WAS A TIME
in Stanley Moodrow’s life, a brief moment just after he joined the detectives, when he dreamed of being the kind of suave investigator associated with stolen art or Fifth Avenue jewel thefts. Stepping out of the uniform and into a suit for the first time, he entertained a goal common to many of New York’s finest—they strive with all their might to project an image of classy sophistication. Some detectives succeed at this. Some don’t. Moodrow was a don’t.

Thirty years later, a year after turning in his gold shield for a private investigator’s license, Moodrow was still a don’t, but he no longer felt the need to pass for a civilian. Being taken for a cop, he’d learned over the years, had any number of potential advantages. PIs, on the other hand, are little more than ordinary citizens with gun permits—they have sleazy reputations and, as often as not, the public meets them with scorn instead of respect. PIs
buy
information. Real cops demand it.

In the decades that followed his rise to the detectives, Stanley Moodrow worked on his cop image diligently. He wanted to project the essence of cop, to reek of it so that everyone, citizen or criminal, would make him for exactly what he was. No surprise, then, that he consciously used strangers to evaluate his success or failure. Of course, most people are oblivious on the street. The rule of thumb goes like this—don’t make eye contact if you don’t want trouble. There are some, on the other hand, who find no safety in hiding their heads, who watch everything and everyone, especially six-foot six-inch cops.

The mutts, of course, fit neatly into this category. Crack or heroin junkies, mostly, they prowl the streets, looking for opportunity. Korean greengrocers are just as sharp. The skells have taken the Koreans for soft, and robbery is an ever-present threat. Cab drivers also learn to evaluate their customers quickly. They have to, because more cab drivers are killed every year than cops.

Doormen are as wise to the faces on the street as any of these groups, but for an entirely different reason. Doormen are not subject to robbery, because street criminals know that doormen, like joggers, don’t carry enough money to buy a cup of coffee. The problem facing doormen is who belongs and who does not.