The Crimes Unforgivable

He was the nicest old guy. Outside of the cataract’d left eye, with a bluish, white film covering it, Billy looked like a central casting version of the kindly old guy who ran a news stand in some film noir potboiler. White, stooped and with a tight-cropped head of gray hair I made him for about 60 years old. A hard, old 60.

If you read my memoir you know where this is going as Billy, which is what he told me to call him, came to rest on the seat by my side. This happens to me a lot. In a truckers’ diner in Youngstown, Ohio a trucker, after mad-dogging me for 10 minutes and finding no yield, finally asked if he could join me for breakfast.

Ten minutes after joining me in my booth for breakfast he was offering to show me Polaroids that his son got as a cause for divorce when he discovered his wife had been fucking the family dog. I said that I was OK, not seeing those photos. The point remained though: either by affinity or some sort of spiritual recognition I drew people to me. People like this.

Because you see Billy had been released from prison that day. Twenty minutes into the train ride I asked what some find impolitic to ask: what were you in for?

Billy chuckled. “Well they said that I…” and he spilled it. He had beaten up his live-in lover, strangled her with her torn nightgown, and to guarantee that he could go back to the baseball game he had been watching, that she so rudely interrupted with a drunken rant recalling all of his shortcomings, tossed her out of their apartment window to the pavement eight floors below.

Was liquor involved? Sure. Had he been a domestic abuser and this was just part of a long list of generalized partner crimes? No, he didn’t think so. He claimed to never have hurt her. Before. As in “before he killed her.”

One thing all of the murderers had though…to be always connected to their personal murder ballads was this idea that there was a “reason”, why they killed.

So it went and so it goes.

“You have a lot of friends who have murdered people,” she said in response to some light date conversation. “I don’t think I know anyone who has that many murderer friends.” Which put a finer point on it than I ever had, in terms of accounting.

One thing all of the murderers had though, and one thing that now seemed, to me, to be always connected to their personal murder ballads was this idea that there was a “reason”, why they killed. Which is, as faint praise goes, sort of satisfying. That is, that it fits within a framework that while we may not agree with, we can (kind of) understand.

“Lisa tells us you tried to rape her.” Not a question at all. A statement. And one that required a response to hold back the wall of ass-kicking that was working its way toward the perpetrator.

“I was leaning over for the cigarette lighter,” he said, in full-on “wait, but” fashion. “And my cock fell out of my shorts.” She woke up from where she had been sleeping on the front seat, screamed, and the scream apparently shocked him so badly that he then fell on her.

And yeah, while he was known to have raped this woman Vivian in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side, the fact that Vivian was a crackhead and quasi-unreliable narrator, had tempered people’s understanding of him as a rapist.

But this story of the falling cock? Not a reason, or an excuse, comedic in the extreme when measured up against the charges he was looking at in the court of street justice. And we did laugh. Right before we rendered judgement in a fusillade of kicks and punches.

We had been stopped in finishing him off by Colombian drug dealers with guns who did not want their spot heated up by the “sudden” appearance of cops (in New York of 1982 cops never came suddenly), but were the street court been of the mind to ask “why?” he had done it, it seems sex offenders are routinely stymied in trying to explain. Like what they were attempting to steal was explanation enough: of course if you can’t get it given to you, you’d take it.

“What’s the deal with all of the homosexual rape?” — My mother

Which underscores a crushing truism of sex crimes: the perpetrators rarely see the abused as human.

“What’s the deal with all of the homosexual rape?” My mother had just read my novel, A Long Slow Screw and, well, she had questions.

I told her by way of any answer that it was my belief that men, with the connivance of Hollywood, do not take rape seriously. For many reasons but if you’re being given something that you don’t want, those giving it are thinking of the times they imagined you did want it and so “what’s the difference now?”

You can tell that’s the thinking with the whole film obsession with rape. Rarely do you see unattractive people raped in movies, though it is almost a certainty that unattractive people get raped all of the time. Hollywood plays a dishonest game with this.

But homosexual rape? Even gay men are not excited about the prospect and men exposed to this second hand are taking it seriously in a way that rarely happens across gender. Which is why people still talk about Deliverance, the first, as far as I know, graphic cinematic depiction of homosexual rape.

So novel-wise if you want to show the irredeemable mixture of power, abuse and a certain kind of mercilessness, homosexual rape it is.

Rape that doesn’t violate my sense of fair play. Child rape, the unforgiven and unforgivable, violates any kind of understanding of fair play, especially when exercised by people of means and power. People named Jeffrey Epstein, or the Presidential Maniac Donald Trump.

That is to say while I have no fewer than 14 murdering friends, as far as I know, I have zero sex offending friends. Sex offenders offer scant, or no, reasons why they do what they do. They can’t account for it except by way of believing that it is an overpowering compulsion, and this is what, in my mind, places their crimes, beyond the pale.

If you’re starving and you steal a loaf of bread because you have no money unless you live in a rural community you might be said to have had scant choices. But rape and sex offense is chosen, despite what Peter Lorre said in Fritz Lange’s great film M. In his final defense speech Lorre claims that the burglar chooses to be a burglar, but that he, the child killer, has no choice.

When asked how he knows the serial sex killer in Dirty Harry will kill again, Clint Eastwood in the title role says it best, “because he likes it!”

[In an interesting footnote Peter Lorre’s daughter had been hitchhiking in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s and was picked by the Hillside Stranglers, the serial killing cousins, who spared her because of her connection to the man who performed so ably as a child killer.]

Yes, but how often did the child killer kill children hanging around police stations?

We make choices all of the time, acknowledged or not, and sex offenders are choosing, each and every time, to violate not only fair play, but making that sort of the point of the whole exercise.

Famous Rapists for $200, Alex? Bill Cosby, Danny Masterson, Jeffrey Epstein, P Diddy, Presidential Maniac Trump and all of the statutory rapists from the rock world ALL had choices. And they chose to do that which can never be forgiven. That is, it’s understandable that you can’t undo a murder, you can only explain it away.

But rape, and sex offenses? You can’t undo them and you can’t even really explain them away which leaves the abused in a really tight spot.

And the mind that chooses to do this, habitually, compulsively maybe, will never choose anything else. When asked how he knows the serial sex killer in Dirty Harry will kill again, Clint Eastwood in the title role says it best, “because he likes it!”

So cue the accused pedophile Drake meme. Murder? OK, you know, sometimes, whatever. Sex crimes? No, no, no.

In the Epstein case it seemed the twain have met. Now what? And what of Elvis, Anthony Kiedis, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Chuck Berry, Steven Tyler et al?

Questions, questions, questions…

OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?

HEY HEY HEY…and because rust never sleeps.

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