by Lydia Lunch
No one wins in War except the Military Industrial Complex. A Corporate Cabal run from inside the Pentagon’s walls set up to both build weapons of mass destruction and then repair the damage done by them. The astronomical expense of war, at last count $100,000 a minute in maintenance fees, seems paltry when you consider the estimated 37,000 corporations who have their hands in the till and are growing fat on the blood and bones of widows, orphans, and soldiers piling up in mass graves strewn throughout the desert. Oh closer my God to thee!
I pity the fool who prays for life everlasting. I want my taste of Heaven and I want it now. I realize that at any moment I could become the next victim of this War Without End. And Heaven to me would mean dying with a smile on my face screwing half a dozen returning Iraq War veterans. Hell, somebody’s gotta take care of the vets. Their own government sure as shit won’t. America has over 200,000 homeless veterans of War. Men tossed to the streets and forced to fend for themselves when they were no longer useful as mercenary cogs in the wheel of the world’s greatest killing machine; suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, tricked into a War, and conned by doublespeak into believing that fighting will bring peace, domination will bring freedom, and that your Uncle Sam will take care of you after you’ve risked life and limb to safeguard his superiority complex.
War is an incurable virus, forever mutating, that travels the globe feeding on man’s fear, spreading panic and terror, violence and death. Until we find a vaccine that finally inoculates the entire population against stupidity, arrogance, aggression, and blind faith, we will be forced to forever repeat this War cycle like stunted victims of Orwell’s Memory Hole.
PART III
SHORTCHANGED
THE BEAST
He came from Cleveland where the high rate of alcohol poisoning, drug abuse, and teenage suicide cemented his position as a lifelong contender for the F-ward at Bellevue. His parents sent him to NYC to commit him to an institution that could deal with the type of entertainment that he liked to indulge himself in. Like threatening to throw his baby brother out the window of the twenty-first story of the freshly painted suburban high-rent condominium that Mom and Pop just got through paying off.
An addict by fourteen, he had already been diagnosed as dangerous and a threat to society since becoming an active member in several schools practicing sadomasochistic rituals which he would employ against himself and anyone else within spitting distance.
I met him one night on the Bowery when I tried stamping out a fire he had started by giving a homeless man a hot foot. Arguing that it wouldn’t be long before he and the bum traded places, I tried reasoning in favor of salvaging the human wreck smoldering on the sidewalk. Hearing nothing of this, he began screaming at me in a piercing falsetto, “I am the Beast … 666 … Puta! Puta diablo!” (I would soon come to recognize this as his mantra.) All the while dancing around me like an evil troll attempting to torch my beautiful auburn locks with a Bic lighter wielded as one would a blowtorch.
I tried wrestling the Beast to the ground with a series of damaging elbow smashes. He began giggling hysterically, drooling and coughing, spewing liquored spitulets all over my face and neck. Disgusted by his rancid breath and inflamed by his atrocious behavior, I retaliated by chewing up a big wad of Oreo cookies mixed with Jack Daniel’s and splattering it across the front of his white wife beater.
He dove into me, knocking us both into the side of an oncoming Cadillac, which came to a screeching halt. A drunken Native American with a speech impediment barreled out of the driver’s side laughing with delight at what he mistook for a lovers’ quarrel. He insisted that me and my newfound wrestling tag-team partner get in—shouting, “What you two need is a little cruise! Hey, how, how, how ’bout taking a ride with me up to, up to, up to Central Park … I gotta see a man about a horse!” Laughing at his own banality as he slapped at his skinny thigh.
Always on the prowl for somebody more fucked up than me to pick on, pulverize, or pervert, and never able myself to pass up forward motion, movement, speed, or sleaze, I barrel into the backseat dragging the drunken dwarf with me as some kinda prophylactic against my own disease.
We pull over to piss up against the piers along the West Side Highway, lighting a joint and kicking back some Jack, when a gang of beautiful, queeny Puerto Rican rent boys start rallying round to “check out the freaks”—a mad middle-aged Choctaw Indian, hair almost down to the crack of his ass, sporting low-slung hip-huggers, flip-flops, and love beads, doing a rain dance on the gravel; a squat escapee from Bellevue, Hitler haircut, holes in shoes, almost passing out while pissing on the hood of the Caddy, dick sticky and still dribbling the spent alcohol; and me.
Three of the older, harder queers come sauntering over, looking me up and down while snickering, “Ohhh … Miss Rough Trade … Are you pimping? Or pulling?” A dirty-blonde with razor burns introduces her/himself by lifting up a short spandex skirt and proudly displaying a juicy well-shaved asshole while shouting out the menu of the day. Blowjobs going for a truly competitive five dollars a pop. They start bickering amongst themselves about prices and talents and specialties of the house … and who will do what to who if she don’t back up … and “Hey, Tonto, you got five bucks for me, Big Daddy?” and “Bitch … you better watch yourself—I saw him first …” And on and on. And what five dollars can buy. And what you can do for five dollars. How with five dollars you can help them, that’s right, help them to try and buy their way out, bust their way out, past this scum-encrusted fuckhole. This endlessly ugly urban sprawl.
Where the easy way out is usually the quickest way out … is usually a one-way ticket to Rikers or Sing Sing or sailing out on the rusty end of a dull knife blade, or a bullet hole or needle tip, far, far away and flying somewhere above all the bullshit and drivel and doublespeak of do-nothing lifelines that are apparently genetic, you know … runs in the family that certain type of sickness, that disease, that insanity, profanity, vanity, malnutrition, addiction, co-addiction, insecurity, inability to deal with reality …
What the fuck ever “reality” is supposed to mean when you’ve spent half your life standing in a welfare line or waiting for the next SSI check or at 2 o’clock in the morning sucking off some scurvy john from New Jersey—with poverty and pollution no longer being metaphors for the state, but an indictment against the chronic state of being.
A constant which reminds you always of where you came from … where you’re going to … and where you’re never gunna get … and you know no matter what you do, what you try to do, no matter what gets done or don’t, it ain’t gunna save your sweet ass from falling into a bottomless pit—faceless, graceless, and without a trace.
So the only way out is in. Deep, deep inside yourself. You poke holes in your skin. Thinking that if you just had one solid base where you could concentrate the ache, concentrate the pain, so that it wasn’t an all-consuming surround that suffocates you from the first breath of day to your last dying day.
And little Hitler wakes up throwing up all over the knees of one of the queens, who goes into hysterics demanding her five dollars for being the human vomit launch, threatening to shit on his forehead if he doesn’t pay up, reaching into his pocket trying to wrangle out a five-spot as the Beast cracks the last of the bottle of Jack against the fender, holds the busted end up to the chippy’s pretty face, and with a quick snatch-and-grab manages to pull his/her wig off before jumping into the Caddy, jacked up and screaming to the Indian, “Get in! Get in! Get in! Let’s get away with the goods!” shaking the rotted wig out the window. And “Take off, go faster, faster, faster! Break the speed limits, the time limits, the law … Run somebody over, run those bitches over … Let’s go back and kill ’em! Let me drive … Let me drive! Let me take the fucking wheel … I’ll show ya how it’s done … Drive—goddamn it! Drive! We’re standing still! You gotta catch the fucking breeze … I was born to fucking fly …”
And ninety-two miles an hour up Ninth Avenue with three teenage Pue
rto Rican bisexual prostitutes throwing bricks at the back window and the Indian’s hiccupping nervously trying to catch his breath, and Little Hitler, all pumped up now, starts flipping the finger to an unsuspecting carload of heavy-looking black dudes with a necklace of donkey teeth hanging off the rearview mirror. Screaming, “Kiss my lily-white ass, you assholes!” They do a double take, a look of WHAT THE FUCK? on their mugs as the Beast, a.k.a. Little Hitler, a.k.a. this fucking asshole next to me, who I was idiotic enough to jump in a car with starts screaming out racial epithets soon to be turned into a custom-made obituary. As our future executioners race up alongside us, one of them releasing the pressure in his tight black trousers by pulling out a small pearl-handled black-and-white hand-gun which he starts wagging out the window three feet from my right temple. And shit for sure I’m shaking and they’re screaming that I “better shut that faggot honkey ass up … Shut him up! Shut him up! What—is he fucking nuts? You wanna die motherfucker, you wanna die?” And “What kinda cheesy bitch be banging it with low-life scum?” Didn’t I wanna earn a little bit more dime-bag money? … They needed some fresh white meat in their stable … “Check it out, she got some fine white titties!”
Everybody’s yelling and gesticulating wildly as we push the Caddy up to ninety-six miles an hour … “Play that Funky Music” blaring on the car radio and the loud-mouth next to me starts howling out “666 … I am the Beast! Puta … Puta madre!” as we’re racing up to 110th Street faster than a greased rat’s ass blowing every red light, the wrong way up one-way streets for thirty-two blocks, no fucking cops when ya need ’em … no fucking cops and we’re blasting on the friggin’ horn … They could have heard us in Hoboken if anyone had been listening, but the whole fucking city was hammering away, hammering away, and we were just a tiny close-up of life about ready to abort itself.
And the closer they get the gun to my face, the wilder the asshole next to me is getting. Cursing the mothers and godmothers of our would-be killers, yelling at them to “Blow our fucking brains out! … Go ahead and do it, you chicken-shit all-dick-no-balls black boys … What the hell ya waiting for, City Hall? It’s two miles in the other direction!” And as the Sicilians are fond of saying, BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR, because no sooner said than done, and they start firing tiny bullets, little pellets which rip into the bloodstain-red interior as the Indian who has now also joined in the fun begins yee-hawing and yippity-dip-do-ing like it’s a Wild West comedy fest, stuttering so hard he can barely control the wheel and “666! I am the Beast!” And I’m freaking out trying to convince myself that I’m too stubborn to die … too young to die, too goddamn pretty to die … And with a sharp right turn we pull up right behind an empty police van and park Kojak-style as if nothing happened while the sharpshooters sail off into the sunset screaming out our license plate.
* * *
[Author’s Note: At least once a week for three years running, an equally outlandish adventure cemented my friendship with the Beast until it finally collapsed under the strain of a mutually accelerating frenzy.]
The last time I saw the Beast, he was in St. Vincent’s Hospital where they were threatening to amputate his right arm to eliminate the cellulitis, a cancer and rancor, crank-related. He got off easy when they decided to just gut it, leaving a gorgeous scar four inches wide and three centimeters deep running from wrist to armpit, doing gentle swirling twists all the way down the inside of his useless limb. I knew half a dozen guys who would have killed for that type of memento, a souvenir that says FUCK YOU … I’m a survivor, if you wanna get rid of me you’re gunna have to chop me up in little pieces. And I pictured him a head on a skateboard buzzing down to the men’s shelter where he started living after they let him out of St. Vincent’s because there were only so many beds and they wouldn’t take him back at Bellevue because he no longer qualified as a serious mental health threat or in need of intensive care or could be considered disabled, except for the fact that his motor functions didn’t and the chemotherapy left him pallid and weak and he was constantly hallucinating with the fever of delirium caused by the painkillers or by the methadone treatments or the Thorazine or the Xanax and Ritalin, the Percodan and Placidil, the antipsychotics and antidepressants … the whatever the hell it was it took to placate him into a permanent sedation, a stupor, a torpor.
And even though they couldn’t just lock him up and throw away the keyhole, it wasn’t two months later that he was back in detox for the fortieth time, trying to fight the Devil in the bottle and losing badly. Saying, “I need the juice … I need the juice …” to recharge his battery. It had been overloaded. His circuits went haywire. He short-circuited. It was pure chaos. He was being devoured. His blood flow was quicksand. He was looking for someone, for anyone to break the free fall. He was free-falling into a timeless wonderland where sight and sound were replaced with smell and taste and touch—“AND NOBODY WANTS TO TOUCH ME ANYMORE”—and the only touch is that of a wet hand on the back of his neck like the kiss of death reaching up from under his deathbed.
And the scars on his arm just weren’t healing right and more talk of amputation since he couldn’t afford the antibiotics after getting kicked out of first the Palace Hotel above CBGB’s and then the men’s shelter on 4th Street when they found out he had AIDS, so it was back to sleeping on the Bowery which was way worse than Bellevue because at least there you could steal chump change from the other inmates. But in no way was it as bad as being sent to Rikers when he got busted for selling methadone on the corner of 2nd Street and Avenue B, since he had the misfortune of running into the same Puerto Rican fags he puked on at the piers who proceeded to gang-rape him with a crusty Coke bottle requiring twenty-four stitches to close the festering wound. But he was released immediately after surgery and even managed to pick up a trick or two on the way back to the city.
And I’m swallowing this all down staring into his beautiful bloodshot blue eyes and finally gather up the guts to ask him what’s taking so long. What’s taking so fucking long? What’s he holding back for? What is it he’s holding on for, holding on to? How many more times does he want to go through this? Does he want to put me through this? How much longer can he show off by showing up with the next murderous dose of no-good-news? How many more daily disasters? How much more devastation, degeneration, can he put himself through? What’s he waiting for? Xmas, Easter, his birthday … ? Why doesn’t he just fucking snuff it … go for broke? Why break it up in little pieces? I know he’s got it in him … It ain’t like he ain’t got the gall or the balls … or that he hasn’t been trying to fucking kill himself for every single day since ten years before I even met him …
And he looks up at me all watery and wounded and says, “It’s because I’m scared. I’m scared …” Scared that when he passes on he’ll be called up on all the false starts and half-assed attempts and that he’ll have to stand in line with his pants down around his ankles and show the world that he was just another picture postcard depiction of a professional loser, all the markings of a two-bit gambler, a petty thief, a hustler, a cheat, a nobody … It’s nothing he’s got any control of … I mean, it doesn’t control him … It’s not that he’s a victim … It’s just something that he can’t seem to master that wants to master him … That seems to master mistakes and disillusion and dementia and, like an addiction to adrenaline, it keeps forcing him to draw and cross that thin blue line dividing reality from insanity … safety from harm, right from wrong again. And c’mon! Any idiot can spit in the eye of the Devil, but few are brave enough to get down on all fours and tongue that fiery hole … And he’s calling out to me that maybe I don’t understand. Maybe I just don’t understand. How could anybody understand? It’s just a classic case of wrong place, wrong time, right guy.
And the next time I see him he might just be smiling, yeah! Smiling on a mountain top counting the corpses of all the young and old alike who didn’t know that when the time is right there’ll be no time left for whining, for crying, for self-pity.
No time left for any more big fights or fuck-ups or handouts. No more corrosive sensation in the limbs, no more muscles as if twisted and being torn, then laid open, bare. No more brittle feeling of being made of glass, no more wincing or cringing at any quick movement or sound. No more unconscious incoherence of steps, of gestures. No more overwhelming central fatigue. And “I’m holding it together by sheer willpower. Holding it all together by sheer willpower!” He was trying to create a void so that I could progress. He was offering the expanse of an impossible space someplace deep inside that would germinate like a generator, sucked into life, sucked into death.
And kill yourself already! … All you who are desperate and you who are tortured in body and soul. Lose all hope! There is no more relief for you in this world. The world dances on your graves. All you lucid madmen, the consumptives, the cancer-ridden and plague-stricken, you will be forever misunderstood. There is a point in you that no doctor will ever understand and that is the point which, for me, saves you and makes you majestic. Pure. Marvelous. You are outside of life. Above life. You have pains which the ordinary man will never know. You go beyond and then beyond again and this is why other men are against you. You are poisoning their quietude. You are dissolvers of their stability. You have irrepressible pains, un-resolvable agonies, pains beyond thought which are neither in the body nor in the soul, but which belong to both. The essence of which makes you unadaptable to any known state.