Luckily, my nightmares have never been particularly nightmarish—the most recurrent is a rather tame affair, more disorienting than frightening. It always takes place in the present, when I suddenly “realize” that, although I was awarded my Master of Fine Arts degree years ago, I still have courses to go back and take. It’s like I was given the degree in error or on faith, and I have yet to really earn it. I guess I feel like I’m some sort of hoax. In the nightmare, I am embarrassed and never quite able to “get it together” enough to go take those courses and complete my obligation, no matter how hard I try.
The reality is that I was working on my master’s at the time my mother and brother died. After “the accident”, I took a one-year leave of absence from school. In fact, I took a longer leave of absence from life. Talk about fugue states—I still don’t remember those years in any organized, systematic way. It’s like I just jumped from a memory here and an event there, with huge gaps in between. Not even a haze, just big blank gaps. And although I’m pretty sure I went to graduation and got my master’s one particular summer, I note that the framed degree on my wall is dated some six months later. I think that maybe my course work was done and degree earned that summer, but there was some technical “residency” requirement or “dissertation study” units that had to be accounted for later. I vaguely remember something like that. In any event, it unnerves me to think about it awake or asleep. It is of course just the tip of the iceberg for the real nightmare of the accident, which I guess I can’t bear at all, even after all this time.
The other nightmare which I can’t help but remember, even though I only had it once, is the nightmare that psychiatrists say you can’t have. Supposedly you are unable to dream of your own death. I’m not talking about the sort of suicidal, delusional fantasy where you see yourself dead, as if you were still alive and outside yourself somehow—that’s a common fantasy during depression, although I’ve never had it. No, the nightmare I had was a bona fide real scenario where I died. In it, I’m walking alone down a dark block, by some brick buildings. I’m thinking of nothing in particular—it’s an innocent and not worrisome walk. But then I turn the corner and come face-to-face with the barrel of a revolver. I never see the person holding the gun—there’s no time. I turn the corner, the gun comes up, pointed at my face (I think maybe the hand holding the gun is wearing a black glove, maybe), and BOOM! The gun goes off and everything goes black. And I jerked awake, knowing that I had just been killed in my dream. That’s death, as far as I’m concerned. Forget the beckoning white light and the music and the voices/faces of loved ones—forget the bullshit. When you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s black and without sensation. Nothingness. When you’re dead, you don’t even know it. You don’t know nothing no more.
And the thing is, after dealing with Bill Suff for a while, I began to have nightmares that, for the first time in my life, I do not remember. I know I awoke sweating and frightened, but I have no idea why. Whatever the images were, they’re either gone or locked away. And that really scared the hell out of me.
Either coincidentally or not, at the same time as I was having these unremembered nightmares, everything in my personal life started to go to hell. My marriage crumbled, and my wife was diagnosed with a chronic illness and some very nasty addictions that she denied. I got screwed on a house purchase, wound up in a half dozen emotionally draining lawsuits, and had to look for a new residence. The writing business looked good “on paper”, except that my employers didn’t pay me on time, and that led to more lawyers and legal machinations that cost me more than I could win.
And, as I “researched” the seamier side of the Suff story—as, for example, I interviewed hookers to try to find out how they could have been so stupid and unwary as to get into a van with a serial killer—I began to get downright obsessed with all sorts of sexual fantasies and adventures. Obsessed to the point of deciding to act them out. Feeling like I was living a boring life on borrowed time, and I’d better go “experiment” before it was too late.
Anyway, that’s the “intellectual”, ex post facto way of describing my head during that heady period. The simple experience of it was that I couldn’t shake either the desire or the determination to live out these fantasies. I thought about them day and night, and I planned long and hard what I was going to do and how and when I was going to do it.
The foreplay of planning was incredibly arousing—the anxiety itself was arousing, and I was plenty anxious, that’s for sure. By nature, I’m extremely conservative—I take risks in the privacy of my own mind, when I write, and sometimes even that frightens me. Many a time I’ve written a scene and then condemned myself for having been “sick” enough to have thought of it, wondering what cruel, twisted, atavistic part of me that scene could have come from. Luckily, every time I feel that way I read the morning newspaper and find out that someone has gone out and actually done something a hundred times worse than anything I could ever dream.
But here I was working on the Suff story, and I wasn’t going to dream or write, I was going to go act out. Bill was my catalyst, my excuse for getting deep down and close to the primordial ooze of pleasure, pain, aggression, stimulus-response from whence we all come. Because I was certain that what separates Bill Suff from all the rest of us is a very very fine line indeed.
For those of you who know me, and everyone else who is meeting me for the first time in these pages, suffice it to say that I didn’t go out and do anything too terrible, and I’ve got perversely proud Polaroids to prove it. Typically, I “acted out” more as observer and good listener than participant, but then omission, commission, and admission are all the same deal.
Right?
For the curious among you, the accumulated learning from this aberrational hiccup in my lifetrack boils down to: (i) it is indeed possible to have a giggling fit with a ball gag in your mouth; (ii) pantyhose has more uses than a Swiss Army knife; (iii) if you want to get filthy rich, open a dildo harness repair shop; (iv) no matter where you put a clothespin, it doesn’t hurt when you clamp it on, it hurts when you take it off; (v) transsexuals invariably brag about how incredibly big they were; (vi) happily married men fantasize their wives being raped by gleaming black men, while the unhappily married envision their wives on their knees to their bloated, garlic-breath bosses.
Or so I’m told.
What I discovered about myself after I reined myself back in is that there were fundamental differences between my acting out and Bill Suff’s acting out, even though my experiences did allow me to get a clearer sense of him.
First, as noted, I got off on the foreplay. Clearly, Bill does not. While I was nervous and had to whip myself into a frenzy in order to act out, Bill goes the opposite way. His planning is cool and methodical and affords him no release or enjoyment. His preparation is to establish more and more control, over himself and then his victim. My preparation was to find a way to lose control, to rid myself of a too-conscientious superego.
However, the primary acting out itself is probably similar for us both. You are completely focused on your senses, on feeding specific, insatiable sensory needs, and everything else around you gets lost, moving at a slower speed. This reminded me well of my fantastical perception of “the accident”—I heard the “bang” of the tire blowing, and I fought calmly and logically with the steering wheel and the brakes to keep the car on the road, and yet my sensation was of the car drifting gently towards the dirt median no matter what I did—meanwhile, all sounds blanked out except for the radio, which continued to play music at normal speed even as everything else went into slow motion—and, when the car began to flip over, it was a graceful, peaceful arc, with the blue sky reaching down to meet me—and then everything went black and red as I was knocked unconscious and awoke a half hour later to the sight of nothing but blood.