I started noticing it when I started going to the gym more regularly. Now, I’m not a gym guy, no no, or at least I wasn’t back then. I concerned myself with the life of the mind, such as it was––I liked to lift books, not weights! These were the kinds of things I was telling myself to justify my inertia––inertia, my sweetest love, temptress of men. The calm, cool, pull of the couch, the television, a pint of ice cream, a 10mg edible gummy, oblivion, bliss, sweet oblivious bliss. For someone who defined himself as a thinker I never liked to think all that much.
That changed the day I had my first panic attack. It came screaming out of nowhere like the god of frenzy and his wild hunt, splitting my ego in half and reducing me to motionlessness but for the gasps. Have you ever had a heart attack? Have you ever died? It was like that, except there was no escape. I was cursed to live.
This experience completely changed me. The next day I cleaned my apartment. I had never done this. I know what you’re saying––“how? Are you not an adult man?”––and I am indeed, but also a single man, a lonely man, and lonely men often find solace in the accumulation of detritus. Surrounding myself with evidence of my own existence helped remind me that I was alive on those nights where I wasn’t so sure––“Surely I must exist, for who else could have eaten all of this In n Out? Who else has so many DVDs tagged from long-dead video stores? Who else has so many seemingly identical plain t-shirts from Target? ’Tis I, a man!”
Now, though––no longer. The panic attack had colonized my brain, had set up neat little rows of irrigation to farm alien crops inside my head. I have friends (hippies) who have insisted on the reality-shattering power of psychedelics, and I have believed them. I took mushrooms once, and I did not transcend; I just watched The Boss Baby and found myself fixated on the smoothness of the animation. But this! There is no psychedelic like the certainty of death––and a panic attack does not kill, of course, but it does everything but. You feel like you have a very small taste of death, a real petit mort.
So I cleaned. I threw out things that I did not need, and I organized the things I kept. What does De Niro say in Taxi Driver? “From here on out, it’s total organization.” Total organization. That’s how I felt. If my brain was going to explode in my skull it would at least be in an orderly and disciplined setting. I gave up everything. I quit weed, I canceled my streaming services, I started wearing 100% pure cotton shorts and 100% pure cotton tank tops almost exclusively. One hundred push-ups every morning (that was the goal at least––I started with ten), yoga, meditation. I would stand in the sun and let it burn me until I was blind. I went back to the beach––god, how long it had been since I’d swam in the ocean. I considered buying a surfboard, and ultimately did not, but I liked being the kind of person who would consider it. I turned myself into a ronin, and all of Los Angeles was the shogunate that I wandered.
And––I went to the gym. I felt the strength fill my arms, my sedentary bulk hardening into something powerful. My posture changed; I walked differently. No longer was I simply a “guy”––I was a man. I walked proud and strong. I surveyed my landscape. I never had my headphones in when I was walking around anymore; there is no music sweeter than vigilance, no podcast more thrilling than awareness. I could catch a fly out of the air with chopsticks, if I knew how to hold them correctly.
This is when I started to notice it. Before I would drive to the gym, even though it was close by, just down Variel from my apartment. I noticed a tent here or there on the sidewalk; it wasn’t uncommon, back in those days, especially in LA. But once you walk, man, it’s different. You see things differently. The street quickly grew from a few tents here and there to full-on favelas. Entire RVs, permanently camped, surrounded by trash––bikes, grills, whatever. Maybe they needed the reminder they existed too.
For someone weaker than me, I would imagine that this would be scary; me, I didn’t mind. I could handle it. I could stare down the sore-encrusted junkie with the dirty beard, the black couple whose RV had “1488” painted on the side for some reason, the youth of indeterminate age scuttling around. They weren’t used to interlopers, but I wasn’t interloping. I was just trying to walk a half-mile from my apartment to the gym. They didn’t scare me, but I resented them. These are supposed to be clean streets. “Someday a real rain is gonna come,” etc.
I never had a purpose in life. This is the kind of thing that makes a man a little crazy. I’ve had stuff to do, sure, I’ve had people to care about, but I’ve never had a purpose. When I first started walking through the hidden little favela on Variel, I felt a strange little twinge of kinship for the lost boys and girls on the side of the road––they felt like me, like purposeless people. Maybe this is what happens, maybe this is where I was headed before I changed my life around. Maybe they can be helped too. They were disgusting and I hated them, but I was disgusting and I hated myself before too.
That changed, as I’ve learned it usually does. I was walking home from the gym one night when I felt a push behind my back. I turned around and was immediately clocked square between the eyes by one of these street creatures. By the time I regained my composure, the perpetrator was gone, leaving only a few snickering onlookers that could be fourteen or forty. I walked home and put ice on my face.
The next morning, both of my eyes were lightly blacked and my nose seemed broken. I put a strip of bandage over it and went about my day. I saw red––I was filled with fury. I had tolerated these people, even attempted kinship with them, and for this––this!––to happen was simply unconscionable. I would not be fooled again.
I bought several cans of gasoline and a flare gun. I bought a balaclava and a milsurp jacket (the former for anonymity; the latter because it looked cool). I prepared. I ran drills. “This was a man who would not take it any more.”
My mind was plagued by visions of terror––not from me, but from them. I imagined the favela like a tumor, spreading, as it had already spread, into more and more neighborhoods, more and more communities. What happens when kids need to cross one to get to school? Will they be assaulted? Sold fentanyl? Are little old ladies going to start getting accosted in Trader Joe’s parking lots? I remembered a Target I went to once––not my normal one, a different one––where teenagers were joyriding the electric wheelchairs in the parking lot, smashing bottles and raising hell. I went inside to get a new plain navy pocket tee and nodded politely to the security guard. The guard looked at me with some amount of pain in his eyes, and said, “Hey man, it might not be a good time to shop. There’s some kids inside too, who knows what they’re getting up to.” Sure enough, I immediately tuned in to the sound of chaos from deeper inside. This security guard became loathsome to me––is this not your job? To guard? To secure? But he was neutered too. He wasn’t allowed to do anything; he was in an impossible position. I just went home. I didn’t need to catch a case from potentially assaulting a minor. Those were kids, anyway. Not mad dogs yet––mad puppies. Not so these cretins of the favela. These were adults. And they were hurting people. They would not be hurting anyone else.
Purpose is a thing that takes ahold of you. It’s related to the genius, as the Greeks understood it––the Greeks understood genius as a living thing, a spirit, that possesses you and creates greatness through you. Purpose is like that––it takes you by its reddened claws and jolts you into the sky. I knew in an instant that I was not like the people on the streets. Even if I may have been in another life, in this life I had made a choice. I was a loser, but I got better. They were losers who decided to build a kingdom of losers, and they were invading us. Nobody was on the ramparts, no watch fires were burning. There was just me. Purpose. It’s a high, really.
I started the day before. I remember learning in school that before Hiroshima, the American government dropped leaflets over the city, encouraging people to leave for safety and petition their governments for surrender. Fair enough. I started dropping leaflets of my own in the favela. Nobody noticed that I was doing it, but when I crossed through later, I saw a few people reading them. It told them exactly what was going to happen and when. I hoped that they would heed the warning, but I’m honestly pretty Calvinist about these things––the people that deserved to leave, would. The ones that stayed would simply not be the elect. I can’t control that.
It only took about twenty minutes, deep in the middle of the night. Pretty much everyone who was still there was asleep; anyone who wasn’t was too high to notice. I made a gasoline trail up and down Variel, making sure to hit every single camp and car and RV. I made fun little patterns out of it––what’s the point of doing something if you can’t have fun with it?
I went back to the edge of the street and fired my flare gun at the origin point of the gasoline spirals. This was, perhaps, unnecessarily dramatic, but there are few things in this world more satisfying than pulling a trigger. The camp immediately went up in flames. I wanted to stand and watch, let the flames dance electric in the iris of my eyes, but the longer I stayed, the more likely I would get caught, and I was not interested in getting caught. I fled.
That night was the best sleep I’ve ever gotten.
–
I woke up late, almost 8am. A voicemail from my boss chewing me out for not being there at 7. I didn’t care. Maybe I’d quit. Jobs are for suckers, anyway. I was not a sucker. Not anymore. I was a god among insects.
I made a cup of coffee and put a splash of milk in it, the way I like it. I stared at my fridge, thinking about breakfast. Everything felt mundane in a transcendent way––like day to day life was livable, and suffused with a glow. I understood, finally, people who found comfort and meaning in domesticity. I could do this every day. Every little decision, every little thought, was at ease. I made a breakfast sandwich out of sourdough toast, eggs, and cheddar with a splash of Tapatío, and I ate it slowly––unusual for me, who usually eats like a prison inmate.
I stepped outside with my coffee and thought idly about a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I thought about starting. What did a pack of cigarettes cost these days? With California taxes, who knows. I looked down Variel––no smoke. I knew there was a firehouse nearby, so they must have gotten there early. Would it be safe to walk over and check it out? None of them knew it was me. May as well.
What I saw when I got there astounded me––clean streets. Barely a sign they’d ever been there. A char mark here and there on the sidewalk, by a hedgerow the top of somebody’s grill. Otherwise, the people of the favela were ghosts. The city finally cleaned something up.
I went home and got on Twitter––people were talking about me. Not me, of course, but me. “Unknown arsonist strikes homeless encampment.” “Fascist does genocide of houseless neighbors.” Headline after headline. Former blue checks tut-tutting, newer ones celebrating. Celebrating! Me! What fun! You ever been somebody? It’s a hell of a thing.
–
The copycats started two nights later. It spread out of the residential areas in the Valley, by where I lived, and at first everyone thought it was me. I can tell you the truth, just between you and me: I only ever did the first one. All the rest were copycats. And I never killed anybody, that's the truth.
The early ones dressed like me, and they had the same tactics––gasoline, flare gun, leaflets dropped the night before. By the way, I heard that some of my original leaflets are in the Museum of Death. That seems a little morbid to me, but I’m glad they still exist. I’d like to go see them when I can.
They stopped dressing like me after a while. I don’t know who they were. The media said I started a cult or a gang––they said it was like Fight Club. It was never like Fight Club. I didn’t know any of the others. It does seem to me like someone started a gang, and more power to them, I say. Did you ever see Henry––Portrait of a Serial Killer? About Henry Lee Lucas, the serial killer? Or the “serial killer,” I guess. He did probably kill some people, I’m sure, but the point is that he basically confessed to whatever the cops brought him, so the cops started clearing case after case––they invented a serial killer, more or less, to make their jobs easier, and in doing let potentially dozens of real serial killers out on the streets. I feel like that’s what they’ve done with me, they’ve made all of these about me. I can see why Henry Lee Lucas took the credit, though. It’s intoxicating.
Anyway, good luck with your search. I’d keep going, but I actually have a date. The first in forever, can you believe it! I’m confident these days, boy I tell ya. Nothing like shouting yourself hoarse until your voice echoes back. Boy howdy, nothing like it.