BEN: I see.
JAY: They’ve got the boxes of schoolbooks piled up so that it looks pretty much the way it did. To me, frankly, it seemed like a very awkward vantage point. There were two guys there who were hunters, and one of them said, “Lord, that’s one tough shot.” They talked about how slow the car was moving, and the other guy said, “All I can say is, I sure couldn’t make that shot.” They were talking softly, you know, and for a moment we were all thinking like assassins.
BEN: Why did you go there?
JAY: It was last year, just around this time last year, I took the bus all the way from Birmingham to Dallas. There’s a great bus station in Dallas, it’s practically untouched, classic Deco lines, the Greyhound station. Just the way it would have looked, at least on the outside, in 1963.
BEN: But what made you take the bus there?
JAY: It was that thing I read on the Net, the news story. It was so awful.
BEN: About what?
JAY: It was in the Sydney Morning Herald.
BEN: Sydney, Australia?
JAY: Yes.
BEN: What was the story?
JAY: Oh, it was about this checkpoint, and, um. I don’t want to — oh, it was a thing that happened, that nobody would have ever wanted to happen. But it happened, and it made me so mad. So mad at him.
BEN: Why don’t you tell me.
JAY: It was just an event. Well. Okay. There were a bunch of Army guys there and this Land Rover drove toward them. It was filled with a family, they were fleeing. Many children. Everybody was jammed into this car, and they were trying to get out of the war zone.
BEN: Okay.
JAY: And they waved, and somebody at the checkpoint misinterpreted the wave, and so there was a huge blast of fire, and one of the women in the car, the mother, she said, “I saw the—” Sorry.
BEN: It’s okay.
JAY: She said, “I saw the heads—” Pull myself together.
BEN: It’s all right.
JAY: She said, “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off.” That’s what she fucking said. I’m not kidding you, man. “My two little girls.” That’s what she fucking said. Can you imagine it? You’re just trying to get your family out of a war zone? Your farm’s already been blasted by helicopters, and then a bunch of guys in Kevlar open fire on your kids, and you see that happen? Ho, God.
BEN: That’s bad.
JAY: Liberators. Such bullshit. It’s just one event. The grandfather was killed, too. You know what he had on? He was wearing a pin-striped suit so that he would look more American. Ho, man. Ho, man. And that creep, that fucking Texas punk, who can’t even talk, with his drugged-out eyes, he brought us to this point, to this war, and for nothing, for not one red fucking thing. And I thought, I want to see what it feels like to be in the last place where a president was shot dead. Where somebody had moved from the fantasy stage over to the reality stage, shall we say. So I took the bus there. And I stood there. And I thought, Man, there’s no way I could do this. Too sharp an angle.
BEN: Good. That’s good! That’s good!
JAY: The feeling ebbed a little, and then a couple months ago it began to build again. Fallujah. Marine snipers on the roofs, shooting at everything. At ambulances. At children. Shooting at an old woman holding a white flag. Mosques hit. F-16s again, flames everywhere. And Kufa, boys with shrapnel wounds. Six people in a family died there, three children. And the prisons. The mockery on the
guards’ faces. It’s like when he was governor of Texas, smirking over the executions. The man’s personality trickles down through the entire military hierarchy and makes everyone meaner and nastier.
BEN: Including you.
JAY: Including me. And nobody around him is saying, Stop. Pull the Army out, get the Delta Force out, get the SEALS out, get the Green Berets out, get the CIA out, get the Marine snipers out, get the F-16s totally the fuck away from that part of the world. Right now. Yes, cut and run. Get away from that country that you have so royally fucked up. You know? Nobody’s saying it to him. So then the desire for justice just starts moving through me. It’s like a huge paddlewheel, it just churns up all of this foam and fury. VENGEANCE.
BEN: Please don’t stand up! I mean it, this will invalidate any point you will ever want to make.
JAY: This is the point that I want to make. You’re blocking me.
BEN: You’ll just become another nutcase. What if I knock you out with this bottle?
JAY: Don’t.
BEN: And what if coincidentally tonight, while you’re out cold, somebody else shoots him, and tomorrow morning you wake up and you read the headline, and it says, you know, CRAZED MAN WIGS OUT AND SHOOTS PRESIDENT? I mean, what would your reaction be?
JAY: Now, that’s a good question, that’s a very good question.
BEN: Would your reaction be that this was a good thing? Remember what’s happening tomorrow, okay, Cheney’s on TV from some hideout, the stock markets are tumbling, the, um—
JAY: The stock markets? They’re all just Styrofoam pellets. They’re just big boxes of Styrofoam popcorn, that’s what stocks are.
BEN: In any case, the day after, are you going to think, Ah, good, he did that, so I don’t have to?
JAY: I’m going to think, I wish he hadn’t done that. I wish I’d done that. Because this is the one thing that I have to contribute.
BEN: You’re going to have other things. You will. Be patient.
JAY: Let me ask you. I’m going to go down there now and I may well get hit before I make it very far. But I may not. There’s a hole in the fence. I’ve seen it, I know it’s there, and I’m just going to RAM my way through that fucking hole. And I’m going to be out there on that lawn, and I’m going to run like a crazy man with my gun and my hammer. And those guys on the roof, you know? Here’s the thing. The chances that somebody is going to be running toward the White House at any given moment are practically zero. They’re like the people at the bomb-detection machines at the airport. There’s no chance that they’re ever going to find a terrorist. So even though every piece of their training says to look for the danger signs, they know that there are no danger signs. Okay. So I’m counting on that. The guy’s working his way through a bag of Skittles up there. His job is so awful. His job is to sit on the roof day after day, squinting at nothing. I mean, of all the pointless things to spend your life doing. Not only that, maybe he doesn’t even like the president. Maybe the president spoke sharply to him one time. Or maybe he loves him. Anyway, he’s beginning to have his doubts about the war. So he’s not as attentive.
BEN: He’s—
JAY: So I push my way through. I break out across the green, no cover, but I’m sprinting, and I’m fast, and I’m going to make it.
BEN: Then what? You’re still outside.
JAY: Then, with my hammer, I smash my way through the windows. And then I leap in. I wave at Condoleezza. “Stick to the piano, baby!”
BEN: And then you’re shot, and you fall.
JAY: Maybe, maybe not. But here’s my question for you. Say I’m down, I’m bleeding on the rug, but I’ve got the gun under me and I’ve got just enough strength left to point it toward him — won’t part of you think, He’s got it coming to him? Huh?
BEN: I don’t—
JAY: Won’t you think to yourself, Man, I hope that little peckerfuck gets it right between the eyes?
BEN: I don’t — I’m not — I can’t predict how I would react if the president were actually shot.
JAY: You know part of you would celebrate.
BEN: I think that the simple sight of any human being stilled, you know — dead — that there’s a basic patheticness to that. There’s just a sadness or a stillness of one’s emotions that comes from their not being able to speak, that is so, so… I don’t want to say “sobering,” but so quieting. So that, no, I don’t think I’d feel any need to celebrate. Much as I dislike the guy. In fact I think I would feel a certain amount of horror knowing that to an extent I was part of it. To an extent I had something to do with it because I’d talked to you about it at length, and I’d failed. I wasn’t successful in convincing you not to do it.