by Alan Emmins
When I wake up the next morning I am still in that frame of mind, wondering where this sense of decency went? How can I lose it so quickly after just one month away from my home, from my friends and family? Why am I walking around victorious at my achievement of worming my way into the sadness and loss of other people? To have made so much fun of it?
If I can’t understand my own thoughts then how am I to understand the thought process of the woman who checked into a hotel, slipped on a nice dress, did her hair and makeup, and then wrapped her head in a towel and shot herself in the cranium?
This is just terrible.
Yet, here I am, playing my own part in another tragic end. I’m still trying to understand things I have no right to, things I am not even capable of.
Neal says she wrapped the towel around her head so as to create less mess. To soak up the blood.
I can go with that as an explanation. But I will never understand it.
“When she checked in,” the motel receptionist tells me as if it is a little tidbit of gossip, “she took her key and said, ‘Now I am going to go and kill myself. ’”Enough is enough. I have to get out of here. I have to get away from death. Away from people who make their living from death. I want to go home and write. Write my book, which will make money from death. I even got money up front. I got paid to write about dead people who at the time of payment were still alive. Beat that!
I want to get off.
For an instant, I wonder if I will ever write the book. But it is only a fleeting whim. My ego was ready to overpower it. I am excited by the book. I am looking forward to having that little tablet, a paper tombstone to mark my achievement. I know it is coming, the book, I just wonder how I will bear up, having all those dead souls bound inside it. How am I going to hold up on becoming the very thing I wanted to make a stand against?
How does anybody hold up when self-reflection presents an image that he or she doesn’t want to see? I guess if you are truly critical, you’ll soon find yourself under Neal’s putty knife. But I shan’t be making any rash decisions. Death is a subject we cannot avoid and so we are doomed to fascination and wonder. Whatever edifying evidence our self-reflection throws our way, we must hope it leads to change, not death.
I need a dose of Neal. A strong dose. A dose that convinces me I have no part in any of this, that it goes on without me. I call him to arrange a good-bye breakfast the following morning. A long breakfast. A fix, one that will see me all the way home, back to my friends and family in Copenhagen.
SITTING NAKED IN THE FOREST
Today is a day of good-byes. I have said good-bye to the people in the house at Grandview Avenue. Rachel and I went out for coffee early this morning to say good-bye. She was sweet enough to buy a present for my daughter, Selma. It’s a small T-shirt with a map of Twin Peaks on it.
“You can show her where you were living while you were gone,” Rachel tells me as she points to the map on the T-shirt.
But I am not sure I want Selma to know. I sit here drinking coffee with somebody whose company I really enjoy, but I find it a bit awkward. I feel exhausted. I don’t want to hear my own voice, which now seems so hollow and lifeless. But I try my best.
It’s half past ten in the morning as I race over the Bay Bridgetowards Neal’s house, aware that my friendship with this bridge is rapidly coming to an end. I am excited to say goodbye. I am desperate to get home to see my family again. But, as excited as I am to be leaving, I know I will miss Neal. He has grown on me more and more with every passing day. I want to thank him for allowing me to follow his Crime Scene Cleaners and for being one of the strangest characters I have ever met. I think that for a long time to come there will be a Neal-shaped vacuum in my day-to-day life.
My phone rings.
“Alan, it’s Neal. Something’s come up. I can’t do breakfast. Come to my house.”
This really disappointments me. I really wanted to say good-bye to Neal properly. To spend a final morning with him. Oh well, I will have to make do with a coffee at Neal’s house. It’s not the good-bye that I was looking forward to, but there you go.
Death claims Neal’s time once again.
When I pull up outside Neal’s house, and turn the ignition off, Neal comes jogging out of his front door. We meet at the end of his path.
“Hey, buddy …”
“Hey.”
“You all set to go? You taking the 5 back?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’m taking the fast route this time.”
“Cool. Well, listen, anything you need, you just get me on the phone, okay?” I am expecting him to go on to say, “I’m the president of the corp,” but he doesn’t. Instead, with an outstretched hand, he says, “Take care of yourself.”
I shake his hand and skulk back to my car, feeling a little deflated.
But I suppose that if you like somebody for who he is,you shouldn’t be disappointed when he behaves in a way that is true to your image of him. I know that when Neal reads this he will probably say something along the lines of, “Fuuuuck! What did he want? For us to go sit naked in the forest together?” And that at least makes me smile, as I drive away from Neal’s house for the last time.
I am, of course, running late on my drive to Los Angeles International Airport. Once again I am driving way too fast in a bid to beat the bushfires that keep threatening road closure when my rearview mirror is filled with the flashing of red and blue lights.
And to think, I was feeling so lonely as I barreled along.
Is this going to be my biggest Hollywood moment? Though it pains me to admit, I am thrilled by the sight in the rearview mirror. Once again I am dragged from my self-pity and find myself in a movie. In an experience. Because, for us Europeans, being pulled over on long dusty highways by men with guns is a Hollywood thing.
“License and registration?” the officer says sharply through the open window.
“Sure. It’s a rental car, so …” I tell him. “I have the paperwork here,” I say as I start sifting through several weeks of sandwich wrappers and coffee cups.
“Are you aware that you were doing ninety-two miles per hour?”
“I wasn’t, no.” Even though I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I am lying, I have started, and so I have to finish. “I thought it was more like eighty.”
“Are you aware that the speed limit is seventy-five?”
Ah, that old chestnut.
“I thought it was eighty?”
“It’s seventy-five,” the officer says, taking an unimpressed look at the mess on the passenger seat. “Where are you going?”
“L.
A. I’m flying home to Denmark.”
The officer pauses. I am expecting him to ask why I am going home to Denmark when I am English. Should I not be going home to England?
This is the part of the conversation, I become aware, where I can come across as nothing else but an out-and-out liar. There is simply no way he is going to believe any of my complicated reasoning.
“Okay,” he says, handing back my paperwork. “Well, slow down!”
I am amazed. He follows me for a couple of miles and then overtakes me. I watch him up ahead as he cuts across the median and doubles back the other way.
I am hoping that back home in Copenhagen, surrounded by my family and friends, I will get back to the person I was before I started focusing so much of my energy on death. But for Neal, death will continue to loom in the forefront of his mind. His views on the subject will always be guided by his work.
“Death scares the hell outta me,” he had told me the other day. “But I believe there’s a life after all this. I’m more of an evolutionist, but my head has a hard time dealing with the fact that we could just be worm dirt when we die.”
“But ultimately it doesn’t really matter if we are worm dirt,” I say. “We’re dead!”
“Yeah, it does!” Neal insists.
“Why does it?”
“Why doesn’t it? That’s the whole t
hing. Nobody really knows what death is. Do we have a spirit, and, if so, does that spirit live on? Do you have memory of past? Do you remember your family? Your loved ones? Do you even wanna remember that shit? I don’t worry about this shit every day, but you know, when you walk in a room and Granny’s a big brown spot on the hardwood floor … I mean, I can’t accept that that’s the end of it.”
“Where do you think they’ll be welcoming you when you die?”
“I don’t think I’ll go to hell. But I don’t think I’ve earned heaven either. I think for the most part I live a pretty good life. I try not to bother people. I don’t steal. I typically don’t lie. I’m not fucking my neighbor’s wife. You know?”
“But what about your views on the less fortunate? Those that commit suicide? Your views are unsympathetic. They seem very harsh.”
“Dude! I didn’t make them kill themselves. It’s just my opinion. Suicide is for the weak-minded, my friend. It’s their last ‘fuck you’ to everyone around them. I mean, it’s my opinion. I don’t preach any of it to anyone, but if you ask me I’m gonna tell ya, ‘I think you’re a fucking pussy. Go and blow your brains out, though. I want the money!’ I don’t really cram this business down anyone’s throat. They come to me. If you’re at the point in life where you feel you need to commit suicide, then so be it. It’s your choice. I just hope they have my phone number after you do it, that’s all. I am trying to run a business that makes money off that.”
“If you were in a room with somebody who wanted to commit suicide, what would you say to them?”
“ ‘Fuck! Let me get out of the way! ’”
“That would be it—you wouldn’t try to talk to them?”
“I’d probably ask them, ‘Why do you wanna do that?’ I’d probably give them a little common sense, or try to. But you know, I’m not someone’s fucking therapist. I just don’t wanna be involved with it at all. But I don’t have much sympathy for it. The ones I have sympathy for primarily are the old people who are sick or in pain and they kill themselves, that’s fucking terrible. But I don’t know if I could kill myself, man. It would have to be a pain thing, where I was in so much pain that the thought of suicide just wasn’t that bad. Then how am I gonna do it? I think I’d probably use a gun, ’cause that’s for sure. In most cases, like Valium, they’re gonna find you, pump your stomach, and you’re gonna be a retard for the rest of your life. Worm food is better than that! But in honesty, I think I’d like a slow death, even if it was painful. I would want the time to say good-bye to everybody. I don’t want to be here one minute and gone the next. I want my death to be slow, like cancer. I’d take cancer—sure! Why not? Cancer would suit me just fine.”
It’s not something that I thought I would ever believe: that someone would choose cancer. But this is Neal Smither, and I find myself believing him.
For my part, I would not choose cancer, given the choice. Even though I have been following Neal for a while now, I have not been exposed to so much sudden death that I would take the painful, drawn-out and emotional option. I would still opt for a painless brand of death, any one will do. Now you see me, now you don’t.
EPILOGUE: MAN IN THE BATH PART V
The San Quentin State Prison is spread out over 432 acres of land in Mary County, California. It was opened in July 1852 and is the oldest prison in California. The prison has 275 acres of waterfront land. It is valued at eighty million to one hundred million dollars, making it the most valuable prison in the world. California’s death row is located at San Quentin. Currently, there are 622 inmates sitting on death row. Surprisingly, Jim McKinnon is not one of them.
In fact, right now, at the time of this writing, McKinnon is not even serving a sentence.
McKinnon managed to cut a deal with the DA’s office after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter. He was released from prison in November 2007, after serving only five years in prison.
Inmates of San Quentin have included Charles Manson and the crime writer and actor Edward Bunker. One of the currently on death row. Anticipation of the Peterson trial was already building while I was in San Francisco researching this book. I remember being in the courthouse, walking around looking for a court clerk, and hearing people in the corridors talking excitedly about the coming case.
McKinnon, I would imagine, was one of the least notable inmates in San Quentin’s history. He killed a man (or do I need, legally, to call it manslaughter?), and even though he left him in a bathtub for a month, and lived with him rotting in that bathtub for a month, it simply wasn’t newsworthy.
Or, to use another means of measurement, punishable.
I am at the very end now; in fact, a few years have passed since this book first appeared in the UK, when there was no end to the McKinnon trial in sight, and I find myself wondering now if I will ever really have a complete grasp on death-as-entertainment.
The fact that Gary Lee Ober decomposed in the bathtub for a month, I personally would have thought, was worth some air time. The fact that McKinnon lived in the same apartment while this was going on, I would have thought worthy of a prime-time mention.
But something about this pair, this killing, just wasn’t sexy enough for the national news. The entire ordeal went for the most part unreported. Which leads me at this time to take my hat off to Ed Walsh—a journalist for the Bay Area Reporter who covered this case from start to finish. Walsh reported the death of Gary Lee Ober, the pretrial and plea bargain of McKinnon, and if he hadn’t, where would this information be now?
Not here on this page.
The crime would simply be another act that goes unrecorded and uncared about.
Stephanie Henry cared. Walsh captured and recorded that. Henry cared, and because of Walsh, the fact that she was a friend to Ober is now a part of history. Frank Franco, the barman who pointed McKinnon out to the police, cared, too.
Walsh reported him as saying, when commenting on the parole deal, “That’s just disgusting. They should leave that sucker to rot for the rest of his life.”
Shortly after this comment, it is reported, Franco left the state of California, concerned for his safety.
“He’s very dangerous,” he told Ed Walsh. “Some other poor bastard is going to end up like [Ober].”
The reason the punishment was so light is because the prosecutors thought the case was too weak. They felt that a trial was risky. The body was, after all, badly decomposed. This minimized, or destroyed, for the most part, the physical evidence. Even though the medical examiner found two “sharp force injuries” to Ober’s chest, due to the decomposition of the body it was impossible to tell if these injuries had killed him. Then there was McKinnon himself, acting crazy and setting himself up for an insanity plea.
I think most of the distress, which really seems to fan out only to Ober’s two friends, Stephanie and Frank, was due to that fact that the deal was struck but not communicated. None of the key witnesses were told. The plea bargain came out only when Ed Walsh came across the information while investigating another case. He was not able to report it until two whole months had passed.
Franco was particularly upset by this. He felt it was a conscious decision on the part of the DA’s office not to notify, which is normally considered standard procedure.
“It’s a total slap in the face,” he is reported as saying. “There’s a good reason for them to keep it quiet if they settled for manslaughter. What is wrong with the prosecutors in San Francisco? It’s ridiculous.”
“I’m not gay. I’m not bi,” McKinnon had told Ed Walsh in a jailhouse interview. “I’m a people person. And I love people. I don’t like peepholes. Do you know the difference between a peephole and a people? You can see right through a peephole.”
McKinnon is right. It’s not possible to see through real people completely. They are always holding something back. They keep things hidden, both from those who choose to study and record them and from themselves. What real people do marvelously well, at least those who are incredib
ly secure within themselves, is direct all questions back to sender.
I came to San Francisco to get a look at how people live around death, to find out if Neal Smither specifically is a product of a modern culture of death or whether he is at the forefront of defining it. Even though Neal is now woven into the fabric of my story as one of life’s heroes, as one of the more straightforward and painfully honest people I have ever met, it would be a push to say that he is defining some kind of American culture rather than just responding to it. He is at least ahead of most of those who feed in the wake of this culture. He is using it to his advantage, rather than the other way around.
During my time following Neal, he ended up, consciously or otherwise, working as a reflective surface. All my questions and thoughts were reverted directly back to myself. On a certain level, I think I found out more about my own character than Neal’s. I found things that I don’t much like about myself, and perhaps I should thank Neal for showing them to me. I am aware of these things now and can look for warning signs. But maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Nobody has access, let alone an understanding, of his or her complete self. Not even Neal Smither.
I am not a classic hero like Neal. An outsider, maybe, pursuing long bouts of solitude, alcohol, and the glow from my computer screen, but that is as close as I get. Any internal battles on my part are not divided across a line of good or bad. I am not walking the same precarious path as Neal walks. I am a writer who wants to record, without influence, the lives of others. I write stories about the things other people do. My role here will always be questionable. My objective will always be hard to pull off.
We may always be looking at other people, moving toward other people, but it is only ourselves that we really get closer to. But the closer we get to understanding ourselves, the more we evolve and grow. By the time I find out who I am today, tomorrow has arrived, and I’ve changed again. I will never know the complete me. At least, not while I am alive.
