Suicide by Cop (ROUND 2)

Let's workshop this piece where a man reflects upon the triggers and motivations behind his rage-fueled fantasies

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Suicide by Cop

Dedicated to Mike Shaw

My recurrent nightmares, where I find myself at the precipice of homicidal fury, manifest typically as lucid dreams tipping into wakeful consciousness as the climax nears. Two prime intensifiers, the same catalysts that have propelled me into many regrettable actions over the decades, are responsible for these reveries—reveries more and more not just nocturnal—failing to end on an otherwise less brutal note.

The first is the blatant disregard for some more-than-reasonable request of mine—a righteous request always vocalized, as is typical of a giving and downright boundary-folding person like myself, with beta sweetness and bowing deference but one that common courtesy demands must be heeded.

The second is the presence of a loved one, witness to it all: my son or my partner or one of my close friends—their eyes digging into my mind, haunting the corners of my consciousness.

These two coming together usher me to the brink. It is because I hate to look feeble in front of my people. And if my people happen to be responsible in some way for the situation (and especially if they join the chorus of defiance to my inarguably-justified request), it is furthermore because I hope to punish them with guilt made possible by our bond.

Let me make this concrete with an example, the very one that riled me up this morning. My girlfriend has friends over, drinking to sloppiness in the face of my teetotal discipline. They were supposed to leave no later than midnight, tops. It is well past 1am and I am in bed upstairs trying to self soothe, trying to quiet the throbs of heart and the other pain-numbing preparations for adrenalized war. It is 3am—the time I promised myself would be the absolute limit, the time I watched the alarm clock reach each red minute by each red minute—and yet the laughter continues to perforate the peace of home.

Say it is 3:30 and I am still—having once again failed to defend my boundaries—wrestling back that familiar mounting energy: my manipulative superpower, present since childhood (numbing pain and giving me control in a world rife with drugs and drinking and violence and shattered homes). My heart slams inside my ribs and my fists clench and unclench, the tension in my body a wire too taut. I am box-breathing, diaphragm-breathing, pursed-lip breathing. I am repeating a mantra: “let go to love, let go to love, let go to love”—all in a last-ditch effort to keep my most sinister bosom companion from unleashing.

And yet I already know, as I always do when it gets this far, I am only going through the pantomime of struggle. It is only a matter of time: this kinetic fury needs a destructive dissipation that no journaling, no making some fucking poem out of it, could ever satisfy. 4am is closing in and, although it has only just now been turned down, the music still seeps through the walls.

I grab my gun off of the turntables, set there as if by the diurnal machinations of my shadow. The magazine clicks inside the handle, my breath coming in ragged gasps. With a clammy hand, the room shrinking to more like a closet, I slip the frigid weight into my waistband against naked tailbone.

I make my descent. I have made many descents into the darkness of rage, proceeding largely by the inertia of a heightened physiology overriding the self-pitying awareness of where my fearful steps could lead. By some grace, some guardian angel, these descents have yet to bottom out in too much tragedy—at least not too much relative to the new bars that get set after I punch through doors or kick a dog or e-brake the car on the highway or hold a gun to a lover’s head.

I go down prepared, as always, to provide one final chance. All these chances I extend, so I have wondered in recent years, are—looked at from the flipside—perhaps more like baited traps set by my internal antagonist, more like the ruses of cops pretending to be prostitutes. The extra chance I tell myself they deserve might be, in effect, just another chance for the monster’s righteousness to swell beyond any measure of control—its goal being liberation for as long as possible, distance from the cage as far as feasible, even if it spells the ruin of the host (a ruin that will render its time back in confinement much more entertaining).

I make my appearance before them, an unexpected apparition sapping the room’s warmth (kind of like Regan MacNeil when she descends the staircase to interrupt her mother’s after-dinner gathering with a terrible forecast whispered by Pazuzu). Trying to keep my quavering voice pieced together in a fluidity cloaking rage the likes of which they have only heard about on TV, I say “Hey guys. I’m sorry to disrupt, but I have to ask that you all leave now.” My inner wormtongue has me lay the contrition on thick. It also has me append an explanation, knowing that this will only augment its strength. “It’s getting too late,” I say in a honeyed tone of pleading.

Suppose, then, one of the guests—someone already perhaps discourteous to me earlier or perhaps someone resting his boots on my couch with insouciance—goes, in response: “Oh come on man, we ain’t bothering no body.” Say I go, “I’m sorry, but no.” And say my girlfriend counters: “It’s almost morning anyway. Let them stay at least to then. We’ll turn off the music.” As I stand there (watched by all in my tongue-tied disbelief at the audacity, nails biting crescents into my palms), imagine the same guy chimes in, saying—in my very own house, which I am on the verge of owning outright—“Yeah, it’ll all be good. We won’t be a bother.”

I put myself in an even weaker position, and yet a position that is more like the retraction of a spring now to the limits of supernova density, by offering more words of explanation—yes, to someone to whom I owe absolutely no explanation. My girlfriend, like the malevolence within, knows that my stuttering imprecision will only feed the apoplectic fire. And they both also know that bringing my son into the matters, making it seem that their disobedience is a form of disrespect toward my son, only means gasoline. Yet she still does not get up even as I go: “Well how?—For all, for all you know I just got a call that my son—that there’s been in a crash or something like that. So please just everyone go now. I’m in—I’m insisting at, at this point."

Say the man volleys back—right into the trap—with a tone of challenge discernible beneath a thin façade of concern: “Well, so has there been a call or, something like that”—almost mimicking me in that last phrase. The claws of the nameless juggernaut within scrape the floor in excitement. “Please, for your own good.” And yet no one moves, everyone’s gaze fixed on my girlfriend who—despite firsthand awareness of my car-crashing insanity—for some reason, perhaps transfixed by the widening gyre, does not get up to usher them out as if their lives hang in the balance.

It is at this point that I brandish the handgun. I do not want this. I am already sad for myself. But the gun, its metallic glint underlining my demands, carries its own escalating momentum (especially in the hand of my companion, at last in its craved spotlight). “Niggas best be out! Niggas will get shot with the fuckin’ quickness!" I cock the gun to make my seriousness clear, urging them to move—“Out mahfuckas!”—with screams diametrically opposed to the mousey quietness of all that came before.

It always gets blurry at this point. A cacophony of pathways open up. At minimum I shoot the wall. The ringing paranoia that they think I’m all talk, that they are laughing inside, demands at least as much. I might even rob the backtalker. As they leave in a terrified line, I picture myself even groping one of the boozy pussies, tearing through elastic, and then smelling my fingers as a pretense—no matter the actual scent—to give a punch to the mouth of its owner in a reprimand of twisted righteousness for letting it be so stinky: “Stinky bitch! Can’t stand a stinky cunt bitch. You sitting on my fucking couch with that? Where my goddamn son sits, bitch!” And if there is still resistance or any sort of critical face or attitude aside from naked fear, then yes: bodies will start dropping in these fantasies.

These visions really upset me. And I get them often: twice a month at least their shadows dance on the precipice of reality and dream. I have come so close, too many times, from acting them out but for some good grace—like that of my friend Mike who, unlike so many others just sitting back almost as if to enjoy the trainwreck, once disarmed my teenage fury with a hug after I picked up a kitchen knife at some house party where I felt offended. Toward the end of these dreams, as I glimpse and play out the multiple paths branching out after I have committed myself with the weapon, I often cry out “No No No” with genuine tears.

For so long I have deluded myself that I scream “No” because I don’t want to hurt anyone. And that is what I have long told loved ones like my girlfriend who I explain all this too, after perhaps waking them with my anguished howls: “I just don’t want to hurt anyone.” But the last time I had one of these dreams, just this morning in the predawn hours, I plunged into deep introspective for some reason—likely merely to mine whatever I might unravel for literary purposes. In my liminal wakefulness I asked myself, through the form of an imagined therapist hearing out my rambling associations, why exactly these scenarios upset me so much, why I scream “No” even at the mere idea of me going over the edge.

Two reasons have crystalized.  

First, I am capable of such havoc. Part of me waits for it each day, a coiled serpent. I peer through my blinds with a pounding heart and a push dagger in my hand, waiting for the bum rifling through my curbside garbage to make the mistake of not picking up all the trash he put on my lawn. Yes, relief does wash over me when he puts everything back, leaving no trace of his scavenging. I almost want to go out and hug him even. Yet some shadow in me craving provocation is almost disappointed. It is that shadow in me looking for a pretense to tantrum against not just the relatively superficial tragedies of daily life (the heartbreak and the job loss and the sickness and so on), but ultimately the very existential thrownness common to us all.

Second, and perhaps more disturbing, my tears and screams of “No” are, at root, merely for my own sake. These rage-out scenarios almost always involve police lights painting the night. I merely shoot the wall and the overriding dread is that neighbors have heard and have made the call. And then in these dreams I start wondering how I can explain the shot. I start scrambling to conjure explanations that will keep me out of trouble. What I am trying to say, what I could say more directly if it were not so painful to confess, is that there would be little hesitation for me going to the fullest extreme were it not for the reality of police.

Yes, I do care about my girlfriend perceiving me negatively. That holds me back too. But it is about me, ultimately—how I am impacted. I just know I would be right back to writing and cooking and cleaning and being sweet and serving my family (service is my love language) soon after the cleanup of bodies. The deterrent, it seems, has little to do with conscience. As much as it would weigh heavily on me—at least I think, at least for awhile—to slaughter someone for no reason, these scenarios of brazen disrespect are somehow different. The deterrent is mainly the clang of prison bars.

Yes, I don’t want my girlfriend to leave or my loved ones to see me in a negative light. But that in itself can be worked through. And if they stay around, soon enough I will expect them to move on with me and forget it all—knowing me, perhaps even to the point of giving them grief if they fail to soon enough. And if we are getting really real, might I even actually prefer that they not forget? Might I actually prefer that they recall it in a positive light, as I smile at the dinner table prepared for them—a sort of reverential light like “Daddy don’t take no shit”?

What does this all mean about me?

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