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December 8, 2002
mark thomas Last week, a man was murdered outside a night club located a few blocks from my apartment. I overheard that it was mob or gang related, but no one seemed to know for sure and information about it in the press has been scarce. There happen to be a lot of places around here that call themselves night clubs, but when I heard about this incident I assumed it had happened outside the place I can see from my kitchen window. This is a place where very well-dressed people stumble out drunk and get into fistfights and kicking matches. One time, very early in the morning, a couple of guys from that night club beat the crap out of each other right outside my bedroom window. You could hear the dull, damp thuds of one guy's fist hitting the other guy's stomach and chest, and the slapping sound of a fist hitting a guy's face. But last week's murder happened at another place which I am familiar with for having walked past many times. I have never been inside. It has darkened windows and no specific indication that it is an exclusive place, but at night the pulsating music and irritated looking thug/bouncer at the door clearly label the place a night club of some exclusivity. When I lived on the Upper East Side I lived near a bar called The Mill on York Avenue. The week I moved in to the neighborhood someone walked in to The Mill with a machine gun and shot a bunch of people dead. The details of the story (machine gun, bunch of people) were supplied to me by a neighbor and may be exaggerated. But some kind of homicide occurred there. The Mill was shut down, and a few weeks later I saw an elderly woman get hit and killed by a taxi cab at the intersection of 2nd Avenue and 72nd Street. The cab plowed into her so hard she was sent spinning straight up into the air and her boots and handbag flew long distances. I saw the whole thing and was shocked, but doubt I'd be so shocked to see the same thing today. After I heard about the murder near my apartment, I walked again over to the place where it happened. It reminded me of October, 1990, when I first arrived in New York. One of the first places I went to see was the Dakota, on 72nd Street and Central Park West. That is where John Lennon was shot and killed. One time a friend visited from out of town, and I specifically took him to the Dakota so he could see where John Lennon was killed. His response was "Mark, are you depressed?" I have had a notion over the years that I should conduct death tours of New York City, leading a guided tour of spots where famous or infamous murders occurred. Chicago might be a better town for that, and without doing any research into the matter I would bet that such tours already exist. I live in a safe and quiet neighborhood. The only other killing I know of happened a few years ago: several blocks from here a woman beat her 5 year old to death. She was charged with manslaughter and recently sentenced to some jail time. I have never, to the best of my knowledge, known someone who got murdered. I've known people who died in plane crashes, from AIDS and other diseases, and from natural causes; but I never personally knew anyone who was killed or who committed suicide. And with the exception of 9/11, I've never seen a murder take place or been aware that I was anywhere near one when it happened. One friend of mine, it has been theorized, commit a passive suicide by allowing himself to get hit by a boat while scuba diving. But there is no way to know, so I'll side with the official conclusion that it was an accident. One night in 1991, while living at the Parc Lincoln on West 75th Street, I heard sudden shouts of horror from a room several floors above. Sounds from upper floors carried to my 3rd floor room very well, making it seem like the shouting came from a much closer spot. People were shouting "PUT IT DOWN! STOP! DON'T DO IT!" One of the voices seemed to lead the others with authority. I could not see what was happening, but it sounded like a man was waving a gun around in a small room with 3 or 4 people all imploring him to stop. I heard the exchange as opera, the gunman as the tenor and the others as the chorus, where the recitative had ended and here began the buildup to the gunman's high C. I often look at crimes and courtroom verdicts as opera, and I have a theory that many types of crimes are initiated by the perps with the idea that something great is about to happen, and that if this one robbery or heist can be pulled off then the greatness of the thief will be secured for all time. The primary definition of murder is "The crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought." I find other uses of the word to be in poor taste. I'm referring to phrases such as "The exam was murder," or "Da Yankees murdered (pronounced 'moydud') the other team." The whole killing metaphor, as in "I could kill the guy who screwed up my cable TV service," is one that makes me uncomfortable. One expression I particularly find revolting is "should be shot." "Whoever wrote this copy should be shot." It is meant to be funny. By comparing the quality of someone's work to the most heinous act one human could ever inflict upon another, laughter and good feelings are supposed to flow. But to me the image of a bullet wound to the head kills, I mean neutralizes any sense of mirth. Sports writers and announcers frequently use death metaphors in their work. I've heard of teams being crucified, slaughtered and massacred -- sometimes all in the same game. Technically, I think most of these are valid English, even if they resort to 4th or 5th definitions of the words.
I had a teacher in high school who often explained that if the technology had been available at the time Jesus Christ would have died in the electric chair. Thus, instead of crucifixes with Christ on the cross, churches today would have statues of a man bound up and strapped to Old Sparky. It is a thin theory, but the teacher found it so fascinating that he gave us the Christ-in-the-chair lecture many, many times and always with an air of unassailability. His point, he finally would say, was to demonstrate that the crucifix icon is so commonly seen that to many people it has no significance. He thought the symbolism of the traditional crucifix was outdated and nearly meaningless to modern society and thus should be replaced with the electric chair image or perhaps a sculpture of a lynching. I found his thoughts on this to be oddly seductive, but I could never justify restoring the diluted shock value of the crucifix with putting Christ in the same category as John Spenkelink or Ted Bundy. In common usage the killing metaphor (if I may take a moment to sound like someone who is rejecting a National Endoement for the Arts application) is ugly and fails to accomplish what it intends to accomplish as a unit of shock value. The End. (30) « Feastly • sorabji.com • What's So Funny? »
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