Murder, Death And General Mayhem

I'm a big fan of crime, murder and all around mayhem as long as it's relegated to the pages of my novels and the DVDs on my shelves. Those elements have never really been a part of my life growing up in the quiet small town of Pinon Hills in the Mojave Desert. I think it's that boring small town upbringing that led me to seek out stories of outlaws and gunslingers and urban warriors like Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey. Superheroes in latex underwear and capes never quite appealed to me, flying around in the air between skyscrapers on the trail of a deformed psychopath, they seemed too fantastic, too reliant on gadgets or powers which without, they'd be powerless. If Spider-Man didn't have those webs in his wrist, he'd just be a kid in a weird suit running around. If John McClane loses his gun, he kills a guy with something else and takes his gun, he's good to go. It's the one-man-army that I love. I also liked movies like Blue Velvet that dealt with the creepiness and darkness that lies just beneath the surface and behind the white picket fences. Some of my favorite authors write the kind of rural noir that I have always believed was going on in my own backyard, men and women doing dark deeds under the cloak of rural darkness and the cover of a trailer down a long dirt road. Meth, speed and guns are the major extra-curricular activities of the high desert. But, the type of brutality and mayhem and violence that litters the pages of the crime novels I love and the action movies I worship is something I hope I never have to experience in real life, however bland and boring my life is. I've been lucky to have been raised in an area without violence (for the most part) and now as an adult, I surround myself with people who don't invite that into their lives. I currently live in Berkeley, right next door to Oakland, which is infamous for having some harsh streets and areas where you wouldn't want to make a wrong turn into. For as much gentrification and hipster-izing the city has gone through, I'm still reluctant to go through certain parts. Growing up, I had similar feelings as I would be criss-crossing the dirt roads and motorcycle trails in the desert, where I would frequently come across a trailer or a home that stood out like a sore thumb, porches full of scruffy men in wifebeaters, arms littered with swastika tattoos, shotgun at the ready resting against the wall. You just turn around, don't make eye contact and hope they're too high or too wasted or don't care enough to follow.

Still, however, violence, death & mayhem, or at least the threat of it, still creeps in. My roommates and I had trouble with some youths who sit in our stairwell and smoke weed and our landlord mentioned that people have smelled marijuana and asked if it was us. We politely asked the kids to not smoke there and received no real promise of them not doing it in the future. The last time it happened, my roommate and I asked him to leave and we mentioned that if our landlord thinks we're smoking weed in our apartment, we'll get kicked out. He said if we call the police, we'd better not get caught outside on the street because he'd make a few calls himself and make us pay for doing him like that. Who knows if he was just talking big or if he would really shoot us just for asking him not to smoke weed on our property, but it's an unsettling thought, nonetheless. In another more tragic case of death sneaking up on those around me, a manager at the theater I worked at in my first month up here had a conversation with one of my coworkers (a conversation I found out about after the fact) about the best way to kill oneself. He brought up sleeping pills and she, in the moment, in a conversation with an odd, stoic, sometimes morbid man, replied with the thought that sleeping pills wouldn't be a cool enough way to go out. That was the last conversation she had with Scott because a few days later, he killed himself by ingesting a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of bourbon. He had worked that morning to prepare for that weeks Friday openings and was due in again that evening to work a closing shift but he decided he didn't want to work or do anything else ever again. In another case of the weird ways that the threat of violence can pop up unexpectedly, today at work, in the midst of a transaction with his wife, a man handed me a notepad and told me to look at the note on the first page. The note read, "I'm going to murder someone shhhhhhh." I, like my former coworker, am okay with having a dry, morbidly humorous conversation with someone and I didn't think much of it, but it was seen as a real threat by my current coworkers and they contacted the police about it. I sincerely hope the man was just trying to be funny and expressing his distaste over having to wait in line so long in a darkly comic, hyperbolic manner. I hope nobody shows up dead somewhere in the East Bay tonight at the hands of someone unknown. In addition to all this, there was a drive-by shooting on my block a couple weeks ago that was apparently not a big deal because it happens so often on this block. A Google search of my street + shooting came up with a number of incidents in recent years.

I hope to stick with violence on the page and on the screen, let Frank Bill and Joe Lansdale write fiction that brings those worlds to life between the covers of a book. Let Jason Statham take on an army of gunman onscreen, not outside of my apartment on the street. And as callous as it sounds, I hope the true crime stories I read happen far away from me, never to break my bubble of middle-class existence here in Berkeley.