Typically, it was this last genre that was the most interesting. As time went on, we learned tales about specific events in Marcus’ childhood: When he was six years old, he got in his first fist fight. It was over a girl, he grinned wolfishly. Her name was Mary Lou and she lived three houses down and her mother was named Mary Lou and her grandmother was named Mary Lou and everyone in the goddamn family was named Mary Lou, but big Marcus couldn’t appreciate that that was bizarre until he was much older.
In any case, sweet Mary Lou was tiny and redheaded and she was seven years old. Big Marcus told us that he usually liked an older woman. He’d repeat the word “usually” and then wink at me and that Jeremy would seethe. He would make sure to put his arm over my shoulder for the rest of the story. As useful as I found that Jeremy’s jealousy, I could tell that big Marcus enjoyed it. And since I relied on big Marcus’ loyalty coming from enjoyment of his work, I let him infuriate that Jeremy as much as he so chose.
One day, he discovered that sweet Mary Lou had found solace in another boy, an eight year old nothing that was hardly half as wonderful as a child big Marcus could have been. And big Marcus found inside himself a great fury. The next day, on the slip of park that was really more of a lot than anything else, or perhaps just a driveway that had been overgrown since its owner had no longer been able to afford his car, the six year old big Marcus, who surely hadn’t been as big then, met up with the eight year old nothing and challenged him to a fight. The eight year old nothing refused at first, of course; who was he to try fighting such a child? But the six year old big Marcus was not to be deterred from his bloody goal, filled with a fury that he only felt because someone had told him he ought to, not because he actually missed the possibility of the affection of a seven year old girl with red hair who shared a name with ever member of her family.
Eventually the eight year old nothing was tired of the pestering of a younger boy, eager to give the lad a thrashing and get him out of his life once and for all, just to end the whole mess, particularly since he had ended his childhood romance with redheaded sweet Mary Lou already. So one day, in the slip of park that wasn’t on a cloudy evening that was much closer to night than anything else, six year old big small Marcus fought with an eight year old nothing and won. In fact, he broke his arm in three places and the eight year old nothing turned into a nine year old nothing while still wearing the cast on his arm and would eternally beep going through air port security as a result of the three pins in his elbow.
Many of big Marcus’ stories ended like this, or at least all of the ones in which he played a pivotal role. It was funny for him, I could tell, to watch the faces of his listeners change: first they were amused at the thought of this hulking muscular beast as a little bit of a thing, a sweet tiny child with his first crush on a little girl. And then they were returned to exactly the same image that they had always had, of this great hulking beast as nothing more than a great hulking beast, so severely deforming the arms of other little boys that the damage lasted a lifetime.
One of the few stories that usually loquacious big Marcus never seemed to tell was the story of his incarceration, of how he had gotten betrayed, caught, thrown in jail for the rest of his life. We knew some of the details, of course: we knew that he had become involved in a bigger system of organized crime instead of working solo. We knew that his partner in crime, so to speak, was incompetent, useless, was really just a pretty face to go behind big Marcus’ charming words and bulging muscles. Big Marcus played the Cyrano role, to keep his criminal life running as smoothly as was humanly possible. We knew that the partner had betrayed him, a sniveling worthless worm, in the words of big Marcus, looking to save his own skin by serving his companion up to law enforcement. And we knew, finally and most of all, that big Marcus had killed this sniveling worthless worm, and the way he smiled the one time he mentioned it made us realize that the murder had been brutish, drawn out, cruel, and painful.
I waited with my own special kind of patient anticipation for the history. I was beginning to make a catalogue of crimes of passion, just to see if I could understand what, exactly, inspired that kind of excitement. At that point in my life I was twenty nine, and not knowing what anger or love or jealousy or fear or happiness or sadness felt like for myself, I was very interested in trying to understand as much as I could what caused people to feel the way they did. And being very much in the lack of university libraries, I could only do with case study, could only watch and try to understand from my knowledge and understanding of human beings as they existed inside my very controlled setting.
I had started this study with a tall brunette, lanky man who had killed a prostitute. He had fancied himself in love with her, he said as he cried. He still cried over her sometimes, had outbursts in the night when the rest of us were trying to sleep. It sort of surprised me that he hadn’t been killed by now, and very little surprised me. But he was so pathetic, crying over a girl he paid to be with, who barely remembered his name between the times he got up the cash to be with her, whom he bought presents prettier than anything she had ever owned, which she gave right to a pimp anyway. He was just so pathetic, crying over a girl he had stabbed forty three times after spending almost his entire life’s savings on evenings with her.
Listening to him cry his story over and over night after night, I decided that the therapist from the old jails would have diagnosed him with one of those nonsense disabilities she was always talking about when she flirted with the stony faced guard outside my cell. She would have had him taken out of the jails, put in some sort of hospital so he could get better, as she put it. She never had realized that talking to the guard in that way was really chasing the wrong audience. “I just really hope to help them,” she would gush, putting her hands to the neck of the same shirt that had just entertained so many inmates. I wondered if the guard had thought about that as she clasped her own throat, as if protecting herself from a vampire. I wondered if the guard had thought about that as the men cried their catcalls later in the night. He only ever stared stonily ahead as she gushed and gushed and gushed. “I really think they are all good people on the inside. There is good in everyone, you know. You just have to find it, and I want to help them find it, so they can be happy. That’s really why they’re all here, you know. They were just so unhappy. You can’t even blame them.”
She had passion lurking in her, too, not that she ever gave me the chance to explore it. She could have been interesting if she hadn’t been so all fired eager to talk about me and about my past and about my thoughts all the time.
As a result of her one mindedness, she was never as interesting as the man who killed the prostitute but still cried about her in his sleep, and not half as interesting as the woman who had killed her husband and clearly was not sorry for it. She was the opposite of the man who had killed the prostitute in just about every way: for every inch of his pathetic remorse she was haughtily guiltless. He had been such a bastard, she would spit, if anyone asked her about her husband. Son of a bitch had thought he could mess around on her when he was out of town on business. On her, the one woman who knew him better than even his own goddamned mother. And it wasn’t even, she said, that he was cheating on her that was the worst part, though that was bad. It was that the son of a bitch had tried to fucking lie to her, to her of all goddamned people, when she confronted him about it. Oh no, honey, the bastard had said, I would never. I have to be in Wichita. That’s where my work is.
That’s where his other fucking wife was, the woman would snarl, thoroughly incensed by telling the story again. In the midst of the fight she had hit him over the head with the nearest heavy object, which happened to be a bookend, and so smashed him over and over again with a fake stone owl perched in a pile of classic literature. The owl’s beak had broken off and stuck inside his skull. Then she had purchased a plastic container for less than a dollar, dragged his body out to the woods behind her house, and filled the container with him and with every household chemical she could get her hands on. She had never really wanted to not get caught, she told us. She just wanted to be able to watch the son of a bitch melt into a tiny puddle of goo. And if that meant she had to spend the rest of her life in jail, well, at least she had gotten to see his skull drip through cracks in cheap plastic first.
She had gotten her wish. By the time they found her husband’s body, deep back in woods that nobody every traveled, it was nearly impossible to identify the remains. They had had to call in all kinds of scientists and specialists to even determine who the body was, let alone who had killed him. But the woman hadn’t, in her rage, bothered to clean off her now deformed owl statue beyond wiping it with a damp cloth. They found the blood splattered all over her living room, and she was given thirty to life. She was not a soft spoken or docile woman, this haughty murderess.
One night, when I was sleeping, someone who had become fed up with her too high attitude killed her, and claimed the reward from the guards. My study of her passion was not yet complete. I had Marcus kill the man who had killed her, just to reiterate that this was my domain. I was closing the vice on the victory of my triumph, and my studies were not to be disturbed.
One day, he discovered that sweet Mary Lou had found solace in another boy, an eight year old nothing that was hardly half as wonderful as a child big Marcus could have been. And big Marcus found inside himself a great fury. The next day, on the slip of park that was really more of a lot than anything else, or perhaps just a driveway that had been overgrown since its owner had no longer been able to afford his car, the six year old big Marcus, who surely hadn’t been as big then, met up with the eight year old nothing and challenged him to a fight. The eight year old nothing refused at first, of course; who was he to try fighting such a child? But the six year old big Marcus was not to be deterred from his bloody goal, filled with a fury that he only felt because someone had told him he ought to, not because he actually missed the possibility of the affection of a seven year old girl with red hair who shared a name with ever member of her family.
Eventually the eight year old nothing was tired of the pestering of a younger boy, eager to give the lad a thrashing and get him out of his life once and for all, just to end the whole mess, particularly since he had ended his childhood romance with redheaded sweet Mary Lou already. So one day, in the slip of park that wasn’t on a cloudy evening that was much closer to night than anything else, six year old big small Marcus fought with an eight year old nothing and won. In fact, he broke his arm in three places and the eight year old nothing turned into a nine year old nothing while still wearing the cast on his arm and would eternally beep going through air port security as a result of the three pins in his elbow.
Many of big Marcus’ stories ended like this, or at least all of the ones in which he played a pivotal role. It was funny for him, I could tell, to watch the faces of his listeners change: first they were amused at the thought of this hulking muscular beast as a little bit of a thing, a sweet tiny child with his first crush on a little girl. And then they were returned to exactly the same image that they had always had, of this great hulking beast as nothing more than a great hulking beast, so severely deforming the arms of other little boys that the damage lasted a lifetime.
One of the few stories that usually loquacious big Marcus never seemed to tell was the story of his incarceration, of how he had gotten betrayed, caught, thrown in jail for the rest of his life. We knew some of the details, of course: we knew that he had become involved in a bigger system of organized crime instead of working solo. We knew that his partner in crime, so to speak, was incompetent, useless, was really just a pretty face to go behind big Marcus’ charming words and bulging muscles. Big Marcus played the Cyrano role, to keep his criminal life running as smoothly as was humanly possible. We knew that the partner had betrayed him, a sniveling worthless worm, in the words of big Marcus, looking to save his own skin by serving his companion up to law enforcement. And we knew, finally and most of all, that big Marcus had killed this sniveling worthless worm, and the way he smiled the one time he mentioned it made us realize that the murder had been brutish, drawn out, cruel, and painful.
I waited with my own special kind of patient anticipation for the history. I was beginning to make a catalogue of crimes of passion, just to see if I could understand what, exactly, inspired that kind of excitement. At that point in my life I was twenty nine, and not knowing what anger or love or jealousy or fear or happiness or sadness felt like for myself, I was very interested in trying to understand as much as I could what caused people to feel the way they did. And being very much in the lack of university libraries, I could only do with case study, could only watch and try to understand from my knowledge and understanding of human beings as they existed inside my very controlled setting.
I had started this study with a tall brunette, lanky man who had killed a prostitute. He had fancied himself in love with her, he said as he cried. He still cried over her sometimes, had outbursts in the night when the rest of us were trying to sleep. It sort of surprised me that he hadn’t been killed by now, and very little surprised me. But he was so pathetic, crying over a girl he paid to be with, who barely remembered his name between the times he got up the cash to be with her, whom he bought presents prettier than anything she had ever owned, which she gave right to a pimp anyway. He was just so pathetic, crying over a girl he had stabbed forty three times after spending almost his entire life’s savings on evenings with her.
Listening to him cry his story over and over night after night, I decided that the therapist from the old jails would have diagnosed him with one of those nonsense disabilities she was always talking about when she flirted with the stony faced guard outside my cell. She would have had him taken out of the jails, put in some sort of hospital so he could get better, as she put it. She never had realized that talking to the guard in that way was really chasing the wrong audience. “I just really hope to help them,” she would gush, putting her hands to the neck of the same shirt that had just entertained so many inmates. I wondered if the guard had thought about that as she clasped her own throat, as if protecting herself from a vampire. I wondered if the guard had thought about that as the men cried their catcalls later in the night. He only ever stared stonily ahead as she gushed and gushed and gushed. “I really think they are all good people on the inside. There is good in everyone, you know. You just have to find it, and I want to help them find it, so they can be happy. That’s really why they’re all here, you know. They were just so unhappy. You can’t even blame them.”
She had passion lurking in her, too, not that she ever gave me the chance to explore it. She could have been interesting if she hadn’t been so all fired eager to talk about me and about my past and about my thoughts all the time.
As a result of her one mindedness, she was never as interesting as the man who killed the prostitute but still cried about her in his sleep, and not half as interesting as the woman who had killed her husband and clearly was not sorry for it. She was the opposite of the man who had killed the prostitute in just about every way: for every inch of his pathetic remorse she was haughtily guiltless. He had been such a bastard, she would spit, if anyone asked her about her husband. Son of a bitch had thought he could mess around on her when he was out of town on business. On her, the one woman who knew him better than even his own goddamned mother. And it wasn’t even, she said, that he was cheating on her that was the worst part, though that was bad. It was that the son of a bitch had tried to fucking lie to her, to her of all goddamned people, when she confronted him about it. Oh no, honey, the bastard had said, I would never. I have to be in Wichita. That’s where my work is.
That’s where his other fucking wife was, the woman would snarl, thoroughly incensed by telling the story again. In the midst of the fight she had hit him over the head with the nearest heavy object, which happened to be a bookend, and so smashed him over and over again with a fake stone owl perched in a pile of classic literature. The owl’s beak had broken off and stuck inside his skull. Then she had purchased a plastic container for less than a dollar, dragged his body out to the woods behind her house, and filled the container with him and with every household chemical she could get her hands on. She had never really wanted to not get caught, she told us. She just wanted to be able to watch the son of a bitch melt into a tiny puddle of goo. And if that meant she had to spend the rest of her life in jail, well, at least she had gotten to see his skull drip through cracks in cheap plastic first.
She had gotten her wish. By the time they found her husband’s body, deep back in woods that nobody every traveled, it was nearly impossible to identify the remains. They had had to call in all kinds of scientists and specialists to even determine who the body was, let alone who had killed him. But the woman hadn’t, in her rage, bothered to clean off her now deformed owl statue beyond wiping it with a damp cloth. They found the blood splattered all over her living room, and she was given thirty to life. She was not a soft spoken or docile woman, this haughty murderess.
One night, when I was sleeping, someone who had become fed up with her too high attitude killed her, and claimed the reward from the guards. My study of her passion was not yet complete. I had Marcus kill the man who had killed her, just to reiterate that this was my domain. I was closing the vice on the victory of my triumph, and my studies were not to be disturbed.
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