I knew two things about him immediately: that he was mentally deficient and that his physical resemblance to me, although substantial, went deeper. I knew we were bonded hypothetically; that if I had grown up innocent instead of irredeemably jaded, this is what I would be.
With no intention of ever hurting the man, I watched him play in the garbage dump every day for a week running. The boardinghouse I lived in was on a hill three blocks from the dump, and with binoculars I could see my hybrid brother toss rocks at abandoned cars and rummage around for rusted auto parts to put to use as toys. Toward dusk, an attendant from the “Home” would lead him away from his playground, and it was she that I wanted to hurt.
I had narrowed down my hit list to two, and was heading toward the Evanston Junior College campus to make my final decision when I met the could-have-been Martin face-to-face. It was early evening, and only an hour earlier I had watched with amusement as the man hid in the weeds, foiling the nasty-looking spinster type who came to drag him away from his fun. Now, as I slowly cruised past the dump, he emerged from the shadows and flagged down the van.
I stopped, and flicked on the cab light. The man walked over and stuck his head in the passenger window; in extreme close-up I saw that his features were a hideously slack version of my own. “I’m Bobby,” he said in a squeaky tenor voice. “Wanna see my playhouse?”
I could not refuse; it would have been like denying my childhood. Nodding, I got out of the van and walked with Bobby through the dump site. His shoulder brushed mine, and it felt soft, weak. I found myself wishing that someone would make him build up his body, and was about to offer brotherly words of advice on the subject when Bobby pointed to a light flickering up ahead. “My house,” he said. “See?”
The house was two rotted car seats arranged facing each other, with a Coleman lamp in the middle. The light from it shot straight up, forming a tunnel that illuminated Bobby’s head hanging loosely out from his shoulders as if he couldn’t hold himself erect without help. “My house,” he said.
I put my hands on Bobby’s shoulders; he jerked into a military posture and said, “Yes, sir,” but his head still lolled off at an angle. I looked at the ground, then back at the askew idiot face bobbing now like a toy animal in a hotrod backseat. Tightening my grip, I said, “You don’t have to call me that. You don’t have to call anybody that.”
Bobby grinned, and I felt his spongy body quiver under my hands. His grin got bigger and more contorted, and I saw that he was in some kind of idiot ecstasy. Finally his tongue and palate and lips connected, and he got out, “You want be my friend?”
Now I started to quiver, and my hands on Bobby quivered, and the glow from the lantern burned the tears that were running down my cheeks. I turned my head away so my idiot brother wouldn’t think me weak, and I heard him making wet noises as though he was crying. I looked at him then, and saw that the sounds were coming from the obscenity of the big round O he was making with his mouth, and that he was waving a dollar bill, flaglike, in front of my chest.
I took my hands from his shoulders and started to walk away. Hearing contorted sobs and “Pl-pl-pl,” I turned back to see Bobby holding out the dollar, trying to beg for my friendship and make his hideous overture at the same time. I put my left hand back on his shoulder; I took the .38 from my windbreaker pocket. Bobby tried to smile as he wrapped his lips around the silencer. I pulled the trigger and my hybrid brother flew into the dirt, and I stole his wallet only to have it as a memento of my first mercy killing.
Robert Willard Borgie ruined Evanston for me, and I got out a month after my one-and-only routine police questioning. I drove West then, Illinois plates on the blue Deathmobile, no Ross or Shroud Shifter advising me, only an awful sickly-sweet smell clinging to my person. I felt perilously close to self-annihilating revelations, and as I sped across brutally long and flat and hot stretches of farmland, I schemed and daydreamed and even ran old brain-movies to keep them pushed down. Troubling thoughts broke out anyway:
Borgie was subhumanly intelligent, and he wanted you that way—
You fixed on him as your brother, and didn’t plan to kill him, even though he looked just like you—
He made you cry—
If he made you cry out of empathy then your will is slipping—
If he made you cry for yourself, you’re finished.
I ended that long and hot and flat leg of my journey in Lincoln, Nebraska, renting a boxlike, cramped and hot bachelor apartment on the city’s north side. I found a night watchman job, and was assigned to sit in the foyer of a downtown office building from midnight to eight each morning, wearing a gold-braided uniform and a mace gun and handcuffs in a plastic scabbard. Aside from rounds of the hallways once an hour, my time was my own. The former night man had left a dozen cartons of magazines behind, and rather than go stir-crazy brooding over dead retards and what they boded, I devoured copies of Time and People and Us.
It was a complete new education at age thirty-one. Years had passed since I last explored the written word, and the culture I had moved through had changed dramatically — changes lost on me as I maneuvered with tunnel vision. Between June and late November of ’79 I read hundreds of magazines cover-to-cover. Although the snippets of information I sucked in detailed disparate events, one theme dominated.
Family.
It was back, it was strong, it was “in,” it had never gone away. It was the antidote to new strains of sexually transmitted virus, to Communism, to booze and dope addiction, to boredom and malaise and loneliness. Androgynous musicians and Fascist preachers and muscle-bound black buffoons with Mohawk haircuts and gold chains proclaimed that you were fucked without it. Pop philosophers said that the years of rootlessness were over in America, and the nuclear family was the new-old constituency, period. Family was what you yearned for, worked for, bled for and sacrificed for. Family was what you came home for. Family was what you had while certain scum roamed around the country having nightmares and killing people and weeping when mirror-image idiots offered them blow-jobs for a dollar. Lack of family was the root of all hurt, all evil, all death.
My anger simmered, sizzled, bubbled and stewed all those reading months, and Ross popped up periodically, offering comments like a Greek chorus:
“Martin, if I thought it’d help you out, I’d be your family... but you know... blood is thicker than water.”
“The thing about family is, you can’t choose your own.”
“The thing about being alone like you is that you can take anything you want from anybody.”
“Awww, poor Marty’s mommy was a doper and his daddy took off and the nasty retardo made Marty cry. Awwww.”
“Didn’t I tell you back in January to get yourself a new ID?”
I started looking for a genealogy to usurp. People magazine said that bars were “The new meeting places for singles seeking to become duos,” and since I wanted to connect with a man to kill, it was only fitting to go to bars where single men were seeking to become duos with other men. Christian Times magazine called such places “dens of sexual depravity that should be banned by a constitutional amendment,” and somewhere between the two statements the truth probably hid. I didn’t care either way, and the idea of gay-bar-hopping for a new ID was my antidote for a slipping will to murder. So I read men’s fashion magazines, bought myself a slick new wardrobe and jumped will-first into the scene.