This story, along with an eerie present for Halloween (way in advance, too), was given to me by Bettina, the aquarobics teacher in the health club where I work. She is an unhappy creature, too. So, we always laugh, share stories on gravity accelerated downward mobility and play pranks on each other. Like two sorrow clowns, who make jokes to forget the tears. Those short moments of fun float like islands in an ever expanding pool of relentless sadness in which we are slowly drowning. I don't know how old is she, but she is older than me, I think. And she knows how unfairly she is underappreciated for her work. As if everybody could or should be an attorney to be respected in our new world
order. As if lawyers did so much good for our society. And they are so boring
and tiresome to hang around with. But she won't kill herself. She likes to
gossip too much. She won't be able to miss it. Small-talk is her remedy.
Of course all this is supplemental to the steady diet of world news, which
adds up to humans going to be an endangered species soon. "I don't know
who's responsible for the atrocities in Haiti. This has been a violent
society." - Jimmy Carter said on Haiti, impersonating Lord Owen's words
about Bosnia. Somehow you don't want to be related to them (much less belong
to them). Sometimes I feel I am not them. I am kind of virtual reality, and my
thoughts are their actions. I do not exist in action. I exist just in thought.
So, therefore I can't perish.
Today I was "benching" (gym-lingo for doing bench-presses) heavier
than usual. Plus I was stoned. In the middle of the last set, I got a weird
idea: what if I just drop the weight? Just relax my arms and allow the hundred
sixty pounds heavy barbell fall free across my throat. I started to laugh.
Hysterically, I believe. To outside world this was heard eventually as hissing
and grunting, since I was still doing my set. Wouldn't that be so cool? Like a
reverse guillotine: I would be able to watch it all its way down.
It is also a good
test of one's resolve. Jumping of the cliff or of the high rise or under the
train; shooting yourself in the head, overdosing, even hanging yourself - all
those suicide methods do not allow for a "last minute change of
mind". Once you, overwhelmed with self-pity, absorbed by impulse, jump of
your balcony, you can't come back, you can't decide somewhere around 17th
floor that you don't really want to go all the way down. That's where the
barbell suicide comes handy. Because no matter how certain of the
purposefulness of your determination you might be, deep in the tortured
shadows of subconscious your perseverance could be shaky: your body, that much
worshiped shrine of yours (which you polish and take for joyrides in the gym
daily, like some guys do with their Harley-Davidsons), might actually have
traitorous, disloyal, back-stabbing desires to live.
I should patent the BPS Test (bench press suicide test) as a standard method
of determining who is really suicidal and who is a fake. The really suicidal
guys would end up dead, which would prove that they were really suicidal.
Fakies, whose body survival reflex would win over their intellectual certitude,
would badly hurt their anterior deltoid muscles and, of course, pecs, and
maybe completely fuck up shoulders and/or elbows and/or wrists trying to stop
the accelerated weight at the last moment.
Being alone...
It may be an eternal holiday
or a life in prison.
The dilemma is accentuated when you work-out, since such a daily regime may be
a part of both: holiday and/or prison. You kind of start to ask yourself a
question: what a difference does it make for me if I go to jail? Almost
nothing would change for me. Actually the commute from my room to the gym would shorten, which is a positive development. Or maybe not, since we are just in the middle of
the process of revenge that society at large takes on its outcasts for its
inability to deal with real problems: so many prisons are giving up their gyms.
Much like a middle management clerk who hates his job but fears to lose it, so
he beats his wife and kids and gets drunk instead of confronting his own
misery: the State builds more prisons, outlaws more activities, puts more
police on streets, whenever it is frustrated with its incapability to deal
with deficit, health care, fall of standard of living and the disappearing
world order.
Once prisoners were punished by hard backbreaking physical labour.
(That was when prisons were self-sufficient, like let's say in China they
still are.)
Today we want to take away prisoners' weight-lifting privileges. I guess times
have changed.
Oscar Wilde, while doing time, was sometimes denied pen and paper, as another
form of cruel and unusual punishment. Now we want to take away TV from
prisoners.
Will we indeed free our prisoners from our warden?
Then, we prohibit use of drugs in prison (tough we are in no position to
actually enforce that rule in overcrowded prisons largely governed by drug-lords). We convene this prohibition on the premise that drugs are illegal,
which is true. But we should then ask ourselves why drugs were made illegal in
the first place!? If we did that we would find out that we as a society
decided that drugs are illegal because the health care professionals among us
believed that drugs were harmful to our health, which, in most cases, holds
the water, too. Therefore, in the case of prison population, considering the
ban on weight-lifting and even more health-deteriorating measures passed into
a law in the State of Mississippi, it seems to me inefficient, peculiar and
sanctimonious to proscribe drug use in prisons. Why on earth would somebody
want murderers and rapist to live longer and stay healthy? Let them overdose.
You, the government, you may (if we, the people, continue to let you):
Build more prisons. Impose harsher penalties. Follow the 3 strikes you're out
sound-bite like the most sacred mantra. Lower the felony age. Cancel probation
and revoke bail. Make doing time more unbearable. Make more crimes punishable
with death penalty. Declare certain misdemeanors or just plain unorthodox
behavior - intolerable. Demand people to carry ID on them ALL the time. But,
please, don't try to convince us in efficiency and uniqueness of such actions.
It is pretty much kind of legal system that countries like China and Soviet
Union had way before the U.S. even thought of it.
We should duly note that it didn't and it doesn't work there very well. It is
hard to contemplate it would work excellent here.
If you are on Cuba you escape TO prison - whether it is an American one in
Guantanamo bay, or a Cuban one. You are fed in prison and you are free, at
last. Nobody gives a damn about what you think any more. Young people inject
themselves with AIDS infected blood preferring slow and awful death in
isolated island of freedom in Pinar del Rio, to life in Castro's Cuba. What a
perverse revenge: to drain the resources of the hateful society by a slow
suicide. Do we care? Of course not. Clinton heeds Jorge Mas whose sole
interests are to slip in Castro's boots, after thirty years of anger and
impatience. He doesn't give a fuck about how many young Cubans have no future
with the U.S. embargo on Cuba.
Cut The Crap from roqueros The Clash:
Yes I am the dictator the more guns I got the better
Yes I am the liquidator I carry the gold Beretta
You know there once was freedom
You know how dangerous that can be
The people used to dance & sing
& they used to run wild in the streets
But now I am the voice
Howling from your radio
From my armour plated Cadillac
You'll hear what I say goes
Yes I am the dictator I satisfy the U.S. team
I always do my killing in the woods & keep the city gutters clean
Cos I need a few more dollars
For my fighter pilots to be free
To dive bomb on the population
If they go running wild in the streets
Yes I am that voice ... etc.
Yes I am the crusader I spent twenty years in exile
But now I am the invader and I'm never never gonna die
Yes I am the dictator my name is on your ballot sheet
But until my box has got your cross you know the form is incomplete
And you know.......etc.
(play very, very loud)
I went running in the evening. Around the "beruehmte" (German for
celebre) reservoire in the Central Park (now the Park of Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis). September evenings are the only acceptable climate New York ever
produces. They are also created for running. Right temperature. Right amount
of breeze. Right amount of humidity. One guy that I passed followed me until
the end. I love competitive types. Since I am too much a teenager to allow
somebody to actually pass me, I push myself harder. Before the end he started
sprinting. So did I. I've heard him shouting "Damn!" somewhere
behind me when I passed the line. 9'31" It is a relieving experience for my
battered ego to actually be winning at least somewhere.
But, I should be a superb runner, shouldn't I? Don't I know so much about
running? I am running all my life: from my family, from the school, from the
army, from my country, from the stupid war, from the stupid regimes, from the
stupid people... Finally there was nobody left to run away from, so I started
habitually to run away from myself. And I am fast, you bet.
In high school my PE teacher told me "you'd never be much of the
fighter" - I was 125 pounds, and nobody had ever seen a 120pound football
player - "so, let's teach you at least how to run away."
Running. Like Forest Gump. He must have been so happy. There are times when I
feel sorry for not being born stupid. (And that guy Murray is predicting a
meritocracy in this country, meaning that a hereditary caste of genetically
advanced individuals would govern! What an idiotic idea. Plato thought so
twenty five centuries ago, and it never happened. Those with highest IQ mostly
hate to hang around this world anyway, least would they like to rule.)
Instead I've been given the power to understand, which just brought me sorrow
and insecurity. Which made me burn my wings much too often.
So, I decided thoughtfully to carefully avoid responsibility.
Run away. Fast.
When I was six I used to run away from a soccer ball. If I spotted the ball
in my team's half, I'd run over to the opponent's half of the field. If I
saw the ball is advancing on the left wing, I'd run to the right. As fast as
I could. This was why my team always won. Because I rarely allowed to be
touched by a ball. A few dramatic instances in which I failed to avoid the
ball, lead to tragic consequences for my team (and for me after the game was
over). Obviously, the magic of winning was in not really playing.
I feel like I've jumped in a skydive from the plane first and then to showoff I decided to be the last to open a parachute. Eyes wide I am falling into
the abyss. From time to time I roll over, grinning victoriously, to see if
everybody opened their chutes. By the way this is also a suicide that allows
you a "last minute change of mind" much like the bench press: you
can open the parachute anytime until like a few hundred feet before the impact (a few seconds). There the price is
strained shoulders. Here the price is broken legs, arms and/or spine.
Now, when others are opening their snazzy umbrellas and taking over the skies,
I just gave up on survival: since I abhor the broken legs or broken arms (not
to mention broken spine, brrrr) way more than death, and I am already so close
to the ground, my rig still packed, that I can't elude to break something if
I open the chute now. Maybe I'd be better of dead. I was first to jump. I was
last to consider opening my chute. I kept both promises. I never promised to
anybody that I would open my chute in the end. I thought I would. But now, now
it is just too late. Gravity accelerated downward mobility.
It was too late for Andrew Gaertner, too. "A troubled teenager committed suicide
yesterday by lying down in the path of a Westchester commuter train." was written under the
wide smiling teen picture in a Daily News article. He laid his head on the rail just seconds before
the train passed. He was decapitated. There was no suicide note, just school books in his
knapsack. That was the silent end of Andrew Gaertner.
Emilio Bonilla, a despondent young man of the Bronx, couldn't keep it to himself, and lived
(though, he was arrested for reckless endangerment and cocaine possession): he called Howard
Stern. Stern, of course, told him not to jump, or at least to wait until Stern's new movie would be
released. Emilio laughed. Two people listened K-Rock in their cars and spotted Emilio. Police
came later. I rarely listen to Stern. Not because I don't like his show, but because I most often
sleep in the time of his show. People who have day jobs listen to Stern, while they wash their teeth
in the morning and while they drive to their jobs. He brightens them up. The guy is
funny. People who lost their day jobs due to downsizing or some other bullshit reason but still
wake up every morning at 6 or 7 am out of habit and then watch in disbelief the world around them
rushing to their jobs, they are the ones who call in the Howard Stern's show. He is a therapist for
them. Being on the air, listened to by a million people, suddenly being so important, is the best
therapy for someone who just lost his/hers job. Although, only a few individuals would go that far
in order to be admitted to the Stern air as Emilio Bonilla has: calling in to announce how they are
about to jump of the George Washington Bridge.
Emilio chose a good bridge, too. Of eleven people that tried to commit suicide from the George
Washington Bridge, four were successful. Other bridges do not have as good track-record. A
despondent young woman (the adjective "despondent" seems to be official way to
describe somebody who wishes to commit suicide) Connie Mercure managed to wriggle out of her
coat, after a cop grabbed it, and then she leaped from the Verazzano Narrows Bridge. She survived
the fall with a broken leg and some internal injuries. The 230 feet drop to the water from
Verazzano's midspan, obviously, is not enough. Other bridges don't come even close: Brooklyn
Bridge's distance to water from midspan, for example, is just 90 feet, which doesn't qualify for a
good suicide.
Yet another idea is to get the cops kill you. Moe Pergament, a 19 years old compulsive gambler, decided to have police take his life over a $6000 gambling debt. In a "last act of desperation" (Daily News. 11/17/97), Moe bought a cheap plastic gun toy and pointed it at the first constable in sight. Actually, he took his dad's car and drove real dast getting the cops to pull him over, and then he charged at them with his toy gun. They shot him four times. They shot him dead. Among other farewell cards in the car, the officers found this note addressed: "to the officer who shot me!"
All that can't surpass this story: At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the
American Association
for Forensic Science, AAFS president Don Harper Mills astounded
his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a
bizarre death. Here is the story:
On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald
Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head.
The decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building
intending to commit suicide (he left a note indicating his
despondency). As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was
interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him
instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a
safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect
some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to
complete his suicide anyway because of this.
Ordinarily, Dr. Mills continued, a person who sets out to commit
suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not
be what he intended. That Opus was shot on the way to certain
death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode
of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that his suicidal
intent would not have been successful caused the medical examiner
to feel that he had a homicide on his hands. The room on the
ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an
elderly man and his wife. They were arguing and he was
threatening her with the shotgun. He was so upset that, when he
pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and pellets went
through the window striking Opus. When one intends to kill
subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the
murder of subject B.
When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were
both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. The
old man said it was his long standing habit to threaten his wife
with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her -
therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That
is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old
couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to
the fatal incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off
her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of
his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with
the expectation that his father would shoot his mother. The case
now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of
Ronald Opus.
There was an exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that
the son, one Ronald Opus, had become increasingly despondent over
the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This
led him to jump off the ten- story building on March 23, only to
be killed by a shotgun blast through a ninth story window.
The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
Weird, isn't it? Well, I live in a rent-controled apartment with a roommate,
a cat, a bicycle and a variety of mostly unuseful furniture (this is written in 1994). The apartment
is, of course, not in our name. The apartments like ours real-estate people
'round here call studio 'cause it definitely sounds better than to say: the
shower is dripping, the radiator is whistling and steaming, the lights go off
when refrigerator turns on, and you need an exquisite knowledge of mechanics
to operate the toilet (read Jitterbug Dance for more in-depth explanation of the meaning of the word studio in the real estate jargon). Before any of us leave that beloved place we have to
secure the window with the ski-pole and tie the lock on entrance doors with
the peace of rope, then pull the rope while closing the doors (otherwise the
lock would come off). Instead of killing our own domestic roaches our cat
brings us some of the backyard stray-roaches - bigger specimen - to play with.
The landlord wants us out, and doesn't cash our rent checks. On top of that
Dusko (the roommate) insists on small TV (although we have a bigger one) since
it better fits the room. Room? What room?
All those resumes and all those essays and letters to different places. Nobody
cares. I have a job that barely covers my rent and basic nutrition. Which is
about what the slaves were being given in the South. Yesterday I broke my
tooth. Today my stereo broke. For Croatian ethnic community I am too American.
For American show-biz I am obviously too Croatian. INS is too busy going to
Carribean cruises to (after seven years) finally solve my asylum case. And I
already had so much shit in my previous lives. So, why care about anything
anymore?
Looking for a job that would utilize my special skills like Croatian language,
while I couldn't get accused of stealing jobs from my American peers, first I
applied for a position at the Voice of America.
They need foreign language radio broadcasters. I worked at the radio station in Zagreb/Croatia/Yugoslavia several
years before I came to the U.S.
Sure, jumping off the tops of the buildings isn't always as promising as it
used to be. Due to recent breakthroughs in medical sciences doctors could keep
you up even if you are brain-dead by pumping blood through your body and
breathing air into your lungs. 
