The Venus Complex

by Barbie Wilde

  Marvelous.

  Well, what could I say? “I’m sorry, Elene, you have to stay here and become my sex slave.” I escorted her out to her car and watched her drive off in a huff. Jesus, if only I could channel some of that misplaced passion for poor old Lonnie towards myself, I might have something going here. Maybe Elene secretly has the hots for Lonnie.

  Fuck it.

  I drove around for a couple of hours, fuming in my own special kind of snit and then found myself irretrievably drawn to Kahunaville. I knew that I was taking a major chance of blowing things, but I couldn’t care less. They weren’t there. Maybe Frank went wild and took Elene to Pizza Hut instead.

  I am getting tired of this. I am rapidly coming around to the idea that Elene deserves to be kidnapped, tied up, tortured and raped by a masked man, then horribly strangled and perhaps her body violated after death. That would shut her up once and for all, that’s for sure.

  ENTRY 95:

  I saw some female being interviewed on Oprah the other day. This creature had written a book about how women should go about trapping and keeping a man. The author had, unfortunately for her book sales, just gotten a divorce and was trying to explain how her book still worked, regardless of her own situation. I was torn between utter surprise and total despair. Is the state of relationships between men and women so parlous now that we need books to tell us how to date? I guess so. After watching a few excruciating minutes of the program, I turned it off and turned on my computer. I went to Amazon.com and found hundreds of books about the subject. How sad. How pitiable.

  I can just see all these high-flying career girls hitting their late thirties and then going into a biological tailspin. “Fuck! I’ve got the job. I’ve got the car. I’ve got the apartment. But I ain’t got NO GUY! What’s it all about, Alfie?” What a joke. What did the dumb numb little bitches expect? How can any male find a female appealing if she is playing the part of a man all day long? All that fake testosterone must take its toll eventually. I observe the way women act on TV and their manner has become so unattractive that a vast majority of them are completely repellent to me. And most of the ones I see are actresses and models. What about the rest of the herd? What a state they must be in.

  Most American women seemed to have totally lost touch with the essence of their femininity. They are so intent on buffing their bodies by aerobic exercise that they have forgotten how to walk like a girl. They are so obsessed with dieting that they have lost their girlish curves, except for the fake ones they have inserted at great cost. They are so bedeviled by the impossible ideal of “having it all” that they have lost it completely.

  American women have even forgotten how to talk. Women from the forties and fifties had beautiful, melodic, educated voices. Now we are treated to strident-voiced harpies, who, if they can manage to string a coherent sentence together, use words like “empowerment,” “personal space” and other buzzwords that make me puke.

  It seems to me that the Sister’s Struggle for Women’s Liberation hasn’t made any of the gaggle of emancipated ladies any happier—just more stressed out.

  I see female singers waggling their asses in front of the camera on MTV and I wonder what goes on in their heads. Is this really female empowerment—the freedom to stick your butt in front of a TV camera like a bitch dog in heat? Girls insist on doing these kinds of shenanigans and then they wonder why men still treat them like shit. Of course, men want to see tits n’ass—an ordinary man can never get as much sex as he wants, so any vicarious thrill he can grab, he’ll seize it with both hands. But when I see pop stars in bikinis writhing in the waves in time to their latest tune, or movie stars showing off their bony chests and erect nipples at the Oscars, it just demeans them in my eyes. They become female creatures, not women. Not goddesses.

  ENTRY 96:

  They have scheduled Lonnie’s preliminary hearing in a couple weeks’ time. How strange it will be for me to sit and watch someone on trial for crimes that I have committed. I imagine that it will give a special piquancy to my acts. Everyone will be talking about this monster, this fiend who preyed on innocent women and I’ll be thinking, “Shit, they must be talking about me!” But no, all the fingers will be pointing in another direction: at poor old Lonnie. It’s going to be extraordinarily liberating. And the power! The power it will bestow upon me. Frankly, killing girls is nothing to having the power of life and death over someone in such a public arena. I can’t wait.

  I have a choice. I could be reaching a major fork in the road of my destiny. Do I keep my mouth shut, or do I dramatically leap to my feet at an appropriate moment and declare my guilt, Perry Mason-style? Declare my guilt and clear an innocent man. Ah, but he isn’t innocent, is he? Lonnie may not be an atrocious serial killer, but he ain’t Pollyanna, either.

  I don’t feel sorry for him for a minute. He was careless and he got caught and I don’t care one iota for him. Let him go to his death and let his death absolve me. He can be the modern equivalent of the medieval sin-eater. He can consume my sins and then take them to the grave with his own.

  I like that concept. I feel very comfortable with it. My crimes will be washed away by his execution and I can start life anew. How delightful.

  ENTRY 97:

  I decided to take some time off from teaching to sit through Lonnie’s preliminary hearing for the murder of Vivian Miller. It was fascinating stuff. Despite Elene’s efforts, I didn’t think his lawyer was very good. Elene told me that he was trying to plead an insanity defense, which seemed tenuous in the extreme to me. Maybe the lawyer was trying to lay down some groundwork for Lonnie’s impending trials for my works of art.

  Through newspaper reports and a chat on the phone with Elene, I was able to find out Lonnie’s side of the story, which was predictably sad and stupid. After picking up Vivian Miller on South Salina Street, he had sex with her and then fell asleep. When Lonnie woke up, he discovered Vivian diving into his wallet for a bonus. He snatched back his wallet, and Vivian, obviously a soul sister of Gertrude, hit him in the head with her shoe. “It hurt like a sumbitch,” to quote Lonnie. He remembered nothing else until he found himself sitting in his beat-up Mazda outside of his house in Solvay.

  Poor schmuck.

  Insanity is the hardest defense in the world to prove. Blackout or no blackout, Lonnie probably knew the difference between right and wrong, which is the major provision of the M’Naghten Rules—as the primary test for the insanity defense is otherwise known. Also, the fact that he wrote “Fuck You Vivian” on the girl’s stomach while still under the effects of the so-called blackout would strain the credulity of any jury.

  I wonder if Lonnie is going to try to use his blackout defense in the trial for the serial killings. That would be to my advantage if he does. You can achieve just about anything in a blackout, even murders such as mine.

  Maybe Lonnie should have entered a plea of self-defense. Nobody knows better than I how much it hurts being hit in the head with a shoe.

  So I sat there in court and stared at the back of Lonnie’s head. For hours, it seemed. I was trying to bore through his skull with my laser vision and ascertain what kind of character he was, but I was not successful. Lonnie’s skull was impenetrable. I also kept getting distracted by his bad haircut, which was eerily reminiscent of a German soccer player’s hairdo in the good old Seventies, that glorious decade that saw a complete taste bypass on oh-so-many levels.

  I bet Lonnie was wondering how the hell he managed to end up in Court Room Number Two. What wild set of circumstances had led him to face the music—heck, the Big Combo—right here and now?

  From what I heard from Elene, “Born To Lose” should have been tattooed on Lonnie’s chest, instead of “Lorraine.” Elene had to admit that Lonnie did fit a certain profile for a killer, but more akin to the Albert De Salvo type, rather than the dazzling Ted Bundy. Lonnie was blue collar working stiff, a bright guy but a low achiever and he suffered from poor relationships with the women in his life, especially
his mother. His father had also been a plumber, with a history of alcoholism and wife-beating.

  The prosecution trotted out their evidence and called their witnesses. After her interviews with Lonnie, Elene had decided that she would not testify for the prosecution, but since she utterly disagreed with Lonnie’s defense team opting for the insanity defense, she wasn’t going to testify on his behalf at his Prelim either. She just didn’t believe he had experienced a blackout, as he had no history of them before or since the murder. Elene’s theory was that Lonnie got angry, lost his impulse-control and strangled the girl. But Elene would testify for Lonnie in the serial killer cases, as she felt that he just didn’t have it in him to commit those crimes.

  She was right, but I think it was highly ironic that my dream girl was fighting so hard to free my perfect fall guy.

  Frank was the first prosecution witness up on the stand. He was pretty good, I have to admit: straight from Central Casting, the tough detective who had fearlessly tracked down the killer of Vivian Miller. The fact that Lonnie left a trail behind him that an inanimate object could have followed was beside the point. Frank ran down the catalog of evidence:

  1. Lonnie’s thumbprint was found at the scene. It was on the dead woman’s belt buckle. Since it was the only full print found, it would seem to indicate that Lonnie busied himself after committing the murder by wiping the joint clean of prints, making his blackout story seem even more unlikely.

  2. Lonnie’s semen was found in a condom found floating in the bathroom toilet. This was confirmed by a DNA test.

  3. A palm print and two fingerprints of the dead woman and 4 strands of her hair were found inside Lonnie’s Mazda.

  4. A friend and “associate” of Vivian Miller, Lois Jorgenson, had seen Vivian go off with a man matching Lonnie’s description on the night in question and then never saw her again. The two women had an arrangement to always keep an eye on each other and make a note of any dubious customers.

  Next up on the stand, we had a forensic DNA scientist telling us all about Lonnie’s DNA and that the odds that the semen in the condom came from someone other than Lonnie were a whopping 7.6 billion to one.

  Then we had the fingerprint expert talking about Lonnie and Vivian’s swirls and whirls. We had another forensic specialist talking about the similarities of Lonnie’s handwriting to the handwriting on Vivian’s body.

  Finally, Vivian’s friend Lois came to the stand. Crowned with a mop of shocking red hair and very questionable taste in what was appropriate to wear for a trial, Lois was quite a broad and very entertaining in her own way. It turns out that she and Lonnie had been intimately acquainted, as Lonnie habitually frequented the ladies of the night. Lois didn’t like him much, because, in her immortal words, “A lot of times, he smelled like a goat,” which caused considerable amusement in the courtroom. Lois said that one time, Lonnie got mad at her and socked her in the jaw. The defense leaped to his feet and asked whether Lonnie had ever tried to strangle her. When Lois said “no,” he sat down with a satisfied expression on his face, which just goes to show what a numbnuts he really was.

  The prosecution’s case was wound up and the defense began by putting Lonnie’s Mom on the stand, a strategy that baffles me to this day. I would have thought that it would have been poor salesmanship, but the defense obviously thought that the tales of woe from Lonnie’s childhood might sway the judge.

  Mrs. Sharldon, whose first name was the impossibly romantic Claudine, told us that Lonnie was a good boy, but that his dad, Carl, was a drunken, abusive bully who beat everyone in the family to within an inch of their lives every damn day. “I can’t remember a day when me and Lonnie didn’t get beat,” Claudine said eloquently. The happiest moment of her life was when Lonnie got old enough to whoop the shit out of Carl. “I was so proud of him, I went over and hugged him,” she said.

  I glanced up at the judge and I could see that Claudine was losing her audience. Whaling the tar out of Dad at fifteen was not exactly the character reference they were looking for. Claudine went on to talk about the petty crime, which was always everyone else’s fault but poor Lonnie’s (“he just got in with the wrong crowd”) and the indifferent grades (“bad teachers”) and the divorces (“Lonnie just can’t keep his hands off of trashy women—it’s like an addiction with him”) Finally, Claudine left the stand and I could tell that everyone in the courtroom was mightily relieved.

  The defense then brought forth Lonnie’s best friend, who made Claudine look like a rocket scientist. Doug Clutter was supposed to be another character witness, but it seemed like he was one of the bad crowd that Claudine was talking about.

  Then a professional witness finally made an appearance. A forensic psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Ronald Butler took the stand and proceeded to go into a detailed explanation of what may have caused Lonnie’s black-out. It turned out that when Lonnie was ten, he was carelessly playing on the monkey bars of his swing set at home and subsequently fell on his head. Unfortunately, Lonnie’s Dad had moved the swing set to the patio because he was planning to mow the lawn, so instead of falling onto the cushioning grass, Lonnie tumbled directly onto concrete. This could have caused front temporal lobe damage to Lonnie’s brain, which in turn may have precipitated the aforementioned black-out. The head trauma might have impaired Lonnie’s primal neurological circuit functions and hence induced behavioral seizures, which could also have resulted in incidents of rage beyond Lonnie’s control.

  The D.A. made short shift of this testimony. He got up and asked Dr. Butler if Lonnie had ever experienced any blackouts immediately after the bump on the head or in the intervening nineteen years until the night of the murder or since the night of the murder. Butler said that Lonnie had experienced the blackouts twice before the night in question, but the D.A. cut him off, suspecting that Lonnie’s lawyer was laying the groundwork for some kind of diminished responsibility defense in future trials.

  In redirect, the defense asked Butler if Lonnie’s previous attack on Lois could have been a result of some kind of behavioral seizure and the Doctor said it possibly could. Again, the defense sat down with a smug look on his face, but no one was buying it.

  The judge didn’t take much time to decide that the prosecution had produced enough evidence to prove that there was probable cause to continue onto trial, i.e., he felt that a reasonable jury would be convinced that the defendant committed the crime. Since he’d never made bail in the first place, Lonnie went back to his cell to await his trial.

  ENTRY 98:

  I just heard from Elene that Lonnie’s lawyers have persuaded him to cop a plea, i.e., to plead guilty to not only Vivian Milller’s murder, but to the “Painted Lady” serial killings as well and therefore avoid a death sentence. So, no trial, no sensational press coverage, no potential Perry Masonesque moment of truth for me. I am a little disappointed, but somehow not surprised. New York State hasn’t executed anyone since 1963, but why should Lonnie take a chance? He is already in for life. Hell, if I had been in his shoes, I would have probably confessed to the Kennedy assassination after being locked in a small windowless room with Frank for a few hours.

  I wonder how Lonnie managed to explain the poses and the poems on the other victims. Perhaps the police gave him a helping hand to remember all the details of the murders. Maybe the police did just what Elene predicted and typed out the confession and gave it to Lonnie to sign. I guess that’s why confessions are considered to be unreliable as the only evidence. Too many chances that corrupt policemen would take some short cuts and force a suspect to sign away his life. Unfortunately for Lonnie, no one gave a shit about him and since he was already going to go down for one murder, why not the others? The fact that the serial killer hadn’t struck again after he had been arrested was also a major factor in the authorities wanting to believe in Lonnie’s guilt.

  I was a bit disappointed that Elene didn’t mention inviting me over for our missed meal after all this time. I was also surprised that she didn’t
seem that interested in the fate of poor old Lonnie any more. Maybe Frank managed to persuade Elene that he had the right guy after all. It seems very unlikely though, but I suppose you can only contain that amount of hurt pride and righteous anger for so long. Although I seem to be holding onto mine with a firmness unto death.

  ENTRY 99:

  I was watching the anti-globalization protesters on the tube last night. My first thought was, “Don’t these people have jobs to go to?” Obviously not. They are happily collecting welfare and leeching off the state before they jet off around the world protesting against something that no one can stop: progress. I wonder how all the poor people in Africa and elsewhere feel about these selfless moronic knights in shining armor, championing their cause without a thought to the real issues in the case.

  If I were living in a mud hut in Swaziland, I would be begging for more globalization. Please, more McDonald’s, more laptops, more Nike trainers, more cell phones, more DVDs, more Shell Oil—fuck it—more hot pants. Please let me pour the black water of American Imperialism, AKA, Coca Cola, down my parched throat so that I, too, may feel that delicious jolt of sugar shock syndrome. Please lift me out of this grinding poverty so I can experience the joys of rampant capitalism. Spare me the ministrations of these brainless hippies who want to prevent me from tasting the illicit pleasures of the Yankee Dollar.

  It makes me laugh when I see folks despairing of the passing away of the “culture” of some of the poorer peoples of the world. What culture are we talking about here? The culture of hunting with a bow and arrow for hours, when you could walk out and fell a deer in a few minutes with a high-powered rifle? What’s so wonderful about bows and arrows? What is so cultural about living like your ancestors did ten thousand years ago? That’s virtually the Stone Age. They did some pleasant wall paintings back then, but the life style was a bit harsh, to say the least. If the children of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, or the children of Amazon Basin tribesmen, or the children of some rice farmer in China had a choice, I am sure that they would rather be happily ensconced with a Playstation than spending every waking hour trying to find something to eat, or worrying about the myriad bugs and dangerous animals you had to avoid on the way to your stinking outdoor toilet. Yup, I bet those kids, if they had televisions, which of course they don’t, would watch the protesters in despair. They would wonder why all these middle-class white kids want to keep their poorer browner brothers in ignorance and poverty. Why would they want to preserve a culture that—just picking some quaint customs randomly out of the air—still allows the brutal sacrifice of young children to some all singing, all dancing jungle god? Or orders by law that if you steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family, the authorities have the right to punish you by cutting off your hand? Or believes that drinking rhinoceros horn tea or sautéing a tiger’s testicles will make you more virile? Or believes that marrying your daughter off to a donkey will give you good luck? Or believes that it is perfectly OK to machete up to a million people to death, just because they weren’t a member of your tribe? Oh, I could just go on and on. All culture and tradition stand for are just yet more ways for one segment of the population to keep another segment down.