Swing for the Fences

John Fowora

March 2006

We worship artificial idols.

Here, people are famous for being famous.

I’m going to make my mark.

You will know my name when this is all over.

I’m sitting in front of the courthouse waiting for John Doe #6. He isn’t John Doe #6 yet; this is what he will be. This is very random. I’m rarely specific about what I do, and when I am, there is a always a good reason. They are numbered for my quota. He went in about five hours ago.

When he walks back out of the courthouse, I get out of my car and follow him. I stand behind him. See my heart flutter, pitter, and patter. See the sweat on my brow accumulate and wait. Wait. Here I go.

I pistol-whip him and drag him back to my car, which is a short distance away. I put him in the passenger side seat and put on his seatbelt. We’re going home.

When John Doe #6 wakes up he is visibly disoriented. I’m sitting on a stool in the starkly lit corner of my basement watching him until he stands up and when he does I say, "This isn’t personal, it’s more of a statement."

"What are you talking about? Where am I?" he says.

"Someday, they’ll read about you."

When he looks like he’s going to make a run for it, I run toward him, out of the light. And then I swing.

Anytime you decide to swing, swing for the fences.

That’s what my mother always told me.

The first time you see brains splattered on a wall in a Pollack like pattern, your initial reaction is shock. This is natural. What follows is the rush, a blue tooth connection with the person you just introduced to mortality in the form of a 5-iron. John Doe #6 slumps backward to the ground, his head landing with a jarring thud and more gray matter spills from his nappy head onto the slab concrete in my basement.

This is me with my jackhammer, DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH stop and adjust my safety goggles DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH. It’s eleven in the evening and I’m hoping my neighbors hear me DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH. After six men and two women, coated in lye and wrapped in cellophane (which by the way, barely dents the smell), I have to bury them somewhere. DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH DUHDUH what better place than home?

When I’m halfway done, I go upstairs and turn on the television in my living room. I turn on Black Entertainment Television, or BET, as it’s known in some circles. A myopic, pedantic, representation of what is black.

Watch these modern day Minstrel shows.

Call them blacks in blackface.

Being black, here, is not what you project, rather it’s what’s projected on you.

I have to go to work in three hours.

I fall asleep watching Tip Drill.

I learned serial killing online. A correspondence course with an online accredited university. There was TV/VCR repair, refrigeration repair, or my GED. The very last line was for serial killing. The course packet they sent in the mail consisted of,

So you want to be a serial killer.

Ideas for creative killing.

How to kill for years without being caught.

Serial killing refresher course (If you’ve already been killing and need remain current with industry standards).

How to get yourself caught, while leaving one last victim alive for the detectives to find.

What to do if you want be a serial killer, but can’t find the time because of work/family commitments.

Serial killing and diversity.

I had six weeks to complete all of the sections, the tests at the end of each section, and a final exam when the rest of the course material has been received by your course Professor. I finished my coursework and final within three weeks. My Professor thought I was brilliant; he wanted to know specifically about my essay from the last section of coursework Serial killing and diversity. I wrote an essay about why I wanted to be a serial killer. I feel that there aren’t enough black serial killers out there and that there is a definite void that has to be filled. His response was, you’re better off doing armed robbery or something like that. Or some black on black crime. Join a gang. Kill some cops. Maybe even mass murder if I had to. He said that it would be impossible for me to gain any satisfaction from my killings because I would never ever get caught. Black people aren’t profiled as serial killers and there is no affirmative action for being a murderous psychopath. Apparently Serial killing and diversity is mere window dressing. Serial killing and diversity only applies to the people you kill, not the killer.

My mother always told me that I always have to do things twice as good as white kids to get noticed. So I will. So I’ll kill a lot of them. I’ll kill them until they notice, however long that takes.

So, so, so I’m going to find my Professor and kill him. Eventually I’m going to kill him. I’m going to rip his ears off and stick my black cock in his ear so he’ll fucking listen. But first, more practice.

In the next month or so, I kill more people. A lot more. Like mounds of people. It’s sort of strange, unsettling even, that no one suspects I’m a serial killer. I mean they’d rather think I was out to rob them. That I have something on my mind other than the contents of their wallets. They’d rather offer me their Movado and Brietlings. They’d rather placate me and the fallacy of what they think I want. Jane Doe#9 is tied to a chair in the part of my basement that isn’t torn up yet. Her head is hanging backward and there is a trail of drool from her chin to her shirt. She offered me her ATM card and her American Express card when I grabbed her by the hair. And I had to stop for a minute, not because there was a commotion, but more because there was an uncontrollable urge in me to smack her in the face for being so obvious. And so I did. Then I followed it up with punch to her temple. So now she is sitting here in my basement disoriented with her head tied to the back of the chair and her mouth held open by hooks I attached to her cheeks and jaw that are also secured to the back of the chair. She wakes up and is screaming, sort of. So I’ll give her something to scream about. Fiberglass insulation and a bleach chaser. I ram a fistful of insulation in her mouth until I tickle her tonsils with my knuckles. She is choking and reaching for her mortality. She has the look on her face that most have when they realize that they will die. A sort of exasperated lunging and gasping at life, because life put you there, the randomness of me finding you and doing this to you. Right now she isn’t thinking about her family, her husband, her son, or her daughter. She’s thinking of herself, numero uno, which is how we all go out. When I pour the bleach into her mouth, she is no longer screaming or coughing up yellow stringy clumps of fiber covered in a mucous membrane, onto herself and my basement floor. When I pour the bleach in, she gives up, like she never had a chance in life, like she didn’t aim high enough. Incidentally, I just cleaned the floor yesterday.

It is late in the evening again, I’m not sure what time and I’m watching MTV cribs. This rapper has a solid gold toilet bowl. I’m pretty tired, but there is no mistaking what he said about his toilet bowl.

Now there is a commercial on with the requisite hip-hop soundtrack, although it has nothing to do with black people.

Another commercial with a loudmouthed, Afro wearing, black doll spewing all sorts of clichéd Negrocity.

Yo.

And it hits me.

I knew it all along.

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