How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? (2 page)

Not any more. Over the past ten years, there was an explosion of uncontrolled development, and Phoenix was suddenly the fifth largest city in the nation. It was too much too fast, and the place couldn’t handle it. But, once started, it couldn’t stop. We all worshipped in the cathedrals of McDonald’s and Burger King, bowed before the shrine of Metrocenter. And we imported such features of West Coast city life as pollution and gang-banging. Some kids decided that it was cool to drive around and randomly shoot people. Some cops decided that it was cool to randomly shoot kids, as long as the kids weren’t white. The papers kept saying that if we weren’t careful we were going to end up like LA.

But then we were as bad, and I wondered what we could say now—
If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up like Beirut
? At least in LA there were places where it was safe to walk around at night. In Phoenix, there was no such place. The rule was simple—avoid South and West Phoenix, and don’t walk anywhere after dark. Some people from out of town said it couldn’t be that bad, that the fear was just the product of  paranoia. But the bullets that punched holes in cars and burned through flesh were something less amorphous than paranoia.

I saw my first drive-by shooting a few weeks after I moved back to town after I got out of the army. I was living in Park Lee Apartments, an overpriced complex in West Phoenix. My apartment was one of those large, dark spaces that always feel chilly, even when it’s summer in the desert. During the day it wasn’t too bad; there was a supermarket just around the corner, and a Circle K and a burger place within walking distance.

But the neighborhood was a drug emporium, and at night you could tell. I felt like I’d come from one war zone to another. I heard gunfire almost every night, as rival dealers vied to attain domination of the crystal meth free market.

One night some friends were over, just sitting around talking. It was around ten o’clock. We heard four gunshots, so close by that they echoed around the complex, bouncing off the walls. About five minutes later we heard police sirens.

“That means somebody got hit,” said Laurie.

“How come?” I said.

“The cops don’t come out otherwise. There’re so many shootings, they don’t have time to come unless somebody’s hit.”

We were all nervous. But we were also hungry, and I had no food in the place. We’d been planning to go out to Denny’s. Hunger was stronger than fear, so we got in my car and went. As we turned onto Camelback, from 19
^th
Avenue, we saw what had happened.

A car sat on the curb, with cops and an ambulance in attendance. Its rear windshield was shattered, and its front was mangled. I only had to look at the conclusion to see the whole story. The bullets coming from behind. The driver being hit and losing control, crashing the car. I thought of him, the bullets burning tearing his skin, shattering his bones. I thought of the guy who had shot him—what he’d eat for breakfast the next morning. Who he’d wake up with. Who he’d never think of shooting.

“Major drive-by,” said Laurie.

“Yeah,” said Mara.

I didn’t say anything.

It was around five-thirty when I left the Willow House. The class wasn’t till seven, but I knew it’d take me the best part of an hour to get there. Phoenix is a car town—the bus service barely exists, and only homeless people walk—but it hasn’t been upgraded accordingly. During rush hour, I once sat for ten minutes trying to make a left turn onto a busy street, unable to reverse or turn right.

The class was in Tempe. I didn’t feel like taking my life in my hands on the freeway, so I drove up Van Buren. At that time of day it was nice; the hookers and junkies were taking a break, and people were almost observing the speed limit. The sun was behind me, so I wasn’t dazzled. I rolled over the bridge into Tempe, went down Mill Avenue, then turned onto Fifth.

I parked outside Laurie’s house, got out and knocked on the door. No answer. I used the key she’d given me to let myself in. I changed into my sweats, then went into the back yard and did some stretches. She had a couple of exercise mats laid out, so I got on one of them and did a hundred sit-ups, then a hundred push-ups on my knuckles. I went back into the house and drank a pint of water.

Laurie showed up just before seven. By seven-fifteen, I had thirty students. This was the fourth time I’d run the course—each one lasted eight weeks, and each one attracted more students than the one before. The controversy didn’t seem to be doing any harm. The class was open to anyone, and there was no charge, though I invited donations. Laurie provided the use of her back yard for free.

This time there were seven men and twenty-three women. I made them stand in a half-circle as I spoke to them. I asked each of them to introduce themselves to everyone else, giving their names and explaining why they’d come to the class and what they expected to get out of it. When they’d all taken their turn, I said, “Okay. As most of you probably know, my name’s Andy Saunders. I run this class, and I’m here to teach you how to defend yourselves. Has anyone here ever taken a self-defense class before?”

A few hands went up.

“Well, those are useless. They teach you to use the minimum necessary force to defend yourself. Kick your attacker in the shins, knee him in the balls...” I spat theatrically on the ground. “You do that, you’ll hurt him just enough to make him mad enough to want to hurt you even more than he already did.

“I’m going to teach you effective methods of taking out people who’re trying to hurt you. In a life-threatening situation, the appropriate level of force is one which at least maims and preferably kills your opponent. Do any of you own guns?”

About ten hands were raised, mostly male.

“Well, I want all of you to get guns and learn how to use them. And, if anyone fucks with you, I want you to shoot them twice in the chest and once in the face. That, I assure you, will make them forget about trying to hurt you.”

Some uneasy laughter.

“But, starting tonight, I’m going to teach you to maim, kill and otherwise debilitate people using only your bodies and easily-obtained household implements. Let’s go.”

When I first started the classes, the press made it seem like I was training a bunch of psychopathic vigilantes. One journalist called me up and asked me if it was true that I was giving lessons on how to gouge out eyes, crush throats, chew faces and fatally stab people with knives and sharpened knitting needles. I confirmed that it was true, and then I explained why I was doing it. My explanation didn’t appear in the article, but the details of my curriculum did, under the headline SCHOOL FOR KILLERS.

The article did mention that a friend of mine had been killed. But what did that tell anyone about Mara? About the last time I saw her? My band was playing at Sutter’s Gold, and she came along. She hung out afterwards, and we talked. She was really into the idea of going on tour with us, her band and ours. She left the bar before I did, saying she had to get up for work in the morning. I said I’d call her in the next couple of days and we could talk about the tour.

Not the next day, but the day after that, I heard that she was dead. She’d been pretty drunk when she left the bar, and my first thought was that she’d gotten in an accident. The details of what had happened to her were released by the cops slowly. They said they didn’t want those of us who knew her to discuss the fact that she was raped and strangled, because they thought that the killer might be someone who knew her, someone in our circle. They were telling the women not to discuss it, not to share information—like they were to wait until someone else got killed so the cops could catch the killer.

I don’t think Mara was killed by anyone we hung out with, but I’ll never know. I don’t know how far the cops’ investigation went, but it just seemed to be dropped. Nothing happened, and after a while the murder seemed to be old news. The papers had talked about rumors that the killing was drug-related, but that was bullshit—Mara only did weed and acid, and she never dealt. There was also talk of how she was drunk that night, as if that meant it was somehow her fault. Even the language of the cops and papers denied the reality of what had happened to her. She wasn’t “raped and murdered.” “Rape and murder” are things you hear about on the news, things that happen to two-dimensional images on the TV screen. Mara was a person, not an image, so she wasn’t “raped and murdered”—she was dragged or otherwise forced into a car, taken somewhere and endured and unknown number of persons shoving things into her cunt, which would have remained dry and tight: at least one cock, and some unidentified metal and plastic objects. Before or after—or, conceivably, during—this, she was beaten so severely that her jawbone took on the consistency of something that has been put through a blender. Somehow she was still alive after that, because the autopsy found that she had died of asphyxiation, caused by the piece of shit who put his hands on her throat and strangled her. Then her body was thrown out of a car to lie on the curb like trash.

For about a month after that, I thought I’d lost my grip. I hardly ate. I fucked up the simplest things at work, then stopped working completely. I couldn’t do anything. At one point I didn’t leave the apartment for fifteen days. Then I organized some community meetings—aimed mainly at women, but open to anyone—and pointed out the reality that none of us wanted to have to face—the cops weren’t going to protect us. We had to do it ourselves. And if we didn’t know how to do that, then it was up to us to learn. So I started the classes.

“Okay,” I told my new students. “The most important thing I want you to remember is this: the person who wins a fight is not necessarily the person with the greatest physical strength, or the greatest fighting skill. A fight situation is a stress situation, often a panic situation, and the person who wins and comes out of it in one piece is the person who stays calm, thinks about what to do, and does it. For example, a guy twice your size who’s a lot stronger than you is holding you down. Don’t fight him off. Pull his face down toward yours, clamp your mouth over one of his eyes—and suck the eye right out of his head.”

A few students made grossed-out faces. One of them, a guy, said, “Can you really do that? Suck it out with your mouth?”

“It’s not the most pleasant procedure, but yes, you can. The eyes aren’t affixed to their sockets with superglue. They come out surprisingly easily. And—take it from a man who knows—your opponent will be surprised.”

Laughter. Good. My arrogant teacher persona was working, and a rapport was building. Another student asked, “Have you ever done that to somebody?”

“It’s not something I do socially, but yeah. I have.”

It wasn’t something I’d been taught how to do. It had never even been suggested to me. It was something I’d discovered by accident.

For more than a year, I’d stopped being human. I was just starting to be human again. This was about three months before I left the army. It was just after the Gulf War, and I was doing my best to convince everybody that I was gay and that I thought Saddam Hussein was the greatest man who’d ever lived. Neither was true, but it was the only way I could think of to get myself discharged.

I had to be careful, though. The regulations were tricky. In time of war, or the threat of war, saying you were gay wouldn’t automatically get you out of the military. It’d get you out of active service, all right—but there was a good chance that they’d put you in a military prison as punishment for lying about your sexual orientation—claiming you were straight—in the first place. This wasn’t so much to penalize faggots as to scare straights out of claiming to be gay to avoid getting killed in some pointless war.

So, instead of putting on a dress and making a pass at my commanding officer, I was more subtle. Supposedly in confidence, I told the guys with the biggest mouths on the base that I was having doubts about my sexuality. To anyone who would listen, I expressed the opinion that America was a corrupt and evil empire, and the only hope for our nation’s moral redemption lay in surrendering to Iraq.

These sentiments failed to endear me to the neo-Nazis on the base. The military has never been a hotbed of liberalism, but only recently had it become acceptable to be openly Nazi. There was a white supremacist group on the base that had about twenty members. They were allowed to hang swastikas and other memorabilia on the walls, the authorities turning a blind eye to it. I never got close enough to their little party to figure out the group dynamic, but their leader seemed to be a guy named Ted Warner.

He was about my age. He’d served in Desert Storm too, but I hadn’t met him. The first time he ever spoke to me was when I was singing the praises of Saddam Hussein, and he interrupted me by saying, “Is it true you’re a fag?”

“Give me a kiss and I’ll tell you,” I said.

He gave me no warning, just threw the punch straight. He was good. But I still blocked it and smacked him in the face with a backfist. He staggered, but he stayed on his feet. “Okay, how about a blow job, then?” I said.

He started to come after me again, but some of the other guys got in between us. They’d have relished seeing a fight, but he was wobbly from the punch I’d given him and they knew my next move would have been the end of it. Not all of the guys were Nazis—at least I hope they weren’t—but they didn’t want to see a regular guy like him beaten by a crazed unpatriotic fudge-packer like me.

“You’re fucking dead,” Warner informed me.

“Yeah? I don’t feel so bad.”

“You will.”

I wasn’t worried. I knew I had a reputation that frightened people. I knew Warner wouldn’t present much of a problem for me one-on-one, and I didn’t think he’d be able to find anybody willing to help him out.

I’ve been wrong before.

His revenge plan was shaped with the peculiar logic of the fascist—since he hated fags, he decided to demonstrate his homophobia and all-round manliness by rounding up the rest of his crew and getting them to help him rape me.

They waited for me in the gym. I stepped through the doorway, and they jumped me before I could turn the light on. My legs were kicked from under me, and they threw themselves on top of me as I went down. I hit the floor under the weight of three men.