M Y S T I C�� T A C O�� S T A N D

Find The Evil, Win A Prize ... January 28, 2005

i am looking into a true story i heard today at work. i think that, if properly told, this terribly sad tale might contain much meaning.

first, let me give you the background information, but i want you to refrain as best you can from making any moral judgements about "right" and "wrong" until you hear the whole thing.

a couple weeks ago a very drunk, very dirty man walked into a convenience store in my town. under his coat he carried a loaded gun. (free animal balloon to the first person who guesses what he does next...) he waited until the store was empty save for the clerk and himself, and then he proceeded to brandish the weapon, send a couple ceiling tiles to their ultimate doom with a few unsteady shots, point the gun at the terrified clerk and demand that she hand over the money in the cash drawer. the clerk followed robbery proceedure to the "T", even going so far as to take the recommended non-confrontational step back after she had laid the drawer on the counter. without even looking at the money, the man shot her three times, once in the face and twice in the abdomen, killing her instantly, then, after a pause, turned the gun on himself.

i remember how terrible i felt for that dead woman and her family when i heard about that. i remember how many not so nice things i said and thought about her killer, too. "what the HELL makes anyone just fucking kill a random clerk? what kind of cold blooded mother-fucker would just shoot someone like that? i mean, she GAVE him the money, right? what a fucking moron!" yes, i actually said those things. ah, but i have yet to explain why i feel such shame over my thoughtless exclamations.

see, i'm sure you're probably thinking the same things about that man as well. the media in my town certainly made this murderer out to be some sort of bloodthrirsty freak. for weeks after the killing, people quoted nice clean statistics at me that tried to show how common that kind of killing is, too. i can't blame anyone for feeling disgusted or frightened over what, to the uninformed, looks like a malicious act of pointless violence commited by a person who is most comfortably viewed as a barely human monster. what i'm trying to say is that i understand where you are right now, because until this evening, i was there too. but there's simply more to the story. there always is.

time for a tension relieving digression!
the remainder of this tale came from the less than reliable mouth of one of my six thousand shift managers. she's nice, but sometimes she's a bit of a blabbering moron. (imagine a woman who wasted four years in college so she could be a bottom rung "manager" whose duties include vaccumming floors, sticking up price tags, using a cash register, and/or counting out change) so she was probably exagerating a bit to make what she told me more dramatic. this is why i am planning on looking into this myself. i want to verify what she told me before i go try to pass off an unresearched piece of literary garbage as a "true" story. please correct me if you notice i got something wrong in the next bit. just sign my guestbook and tell me. it's so EASY! (link's at bottom of every entry)
okay, back to your regularly scheduled progamming...

imagine a man in prison for i-don't-know-what. the prison psychiatry staff sees signs of serious mental illness and begins observing/couseling this man to treat his disorder(s). they quickly conclude that this man could benefit from the effects of one or more psyciatric drugs, one of which is a pretty hardcore anti-psychotic. they give him a compliment of meds, all paid for by the state, of course. these medications don't work like asprin, you can't just pop a couple pills and cure all your ills in under 30 minutes. nope. these have to build up in the body for a while before they really start taking effect. but after a time, the man starts showing signs of a slowly blossoming mental stability. basically, he's saner than he can ever remember being, and the psychologists concur. he's never going to be cured because of the severity of his condition, but as long as he works at it and keeps on his meds, there is a hope that he might live a normal life as is possible for a person in his position. maybe a year or so later, he is released. he is as "cured" as he is ever going to be, and he's hoping to keep it that way. "no more of this insane bullshit for me. things are really going to be better," he thinks as the last door barring his path to freedom finally opens and his taxi wheels towards the city. now here is the same man, no home, no family who will have him, no job. he really has nothing, and he's no spring chicken, either. most people his age have kids in highschool, a house, a mediocre credit history, a spouse, maybe a few friends, a car. he's got none of these things, though. the only friends he ever had are dead or in jail themselves. anyways, he knows he can't go back to those people if he wants to stay out of trouble. but first things first, a job. get a job. but have you ever had to search for a job as an ex con? first, you are legally barred from a plethora of jobs automatically. you can't work in a gun shop, for instance. no boss in his right mind would let you work as a clerk or with the public. imagine how shameful it would be to turn in a nearly blank resume' at this man's age. so even basic office work is completely out. now, if it just so happens that this man went into prison without having any specific job related skills, as often happens, and he also happens to not pick up many skills while he's in because he was too busy dealing with a severe mental disorder, then he's also completely left out of any job which might require skilled labor of some sort. alright. what about working in a factory assembly line somewhere, you say? oh yes, that would be ideal for this man, for sure. but it just so happens that the economy is going pretty lousy at the time of this man's release, so none of the factories are hiring. now we see that this man's mutiple meds are starting to run low. he's sleeping in one of the town's various homeless shelters every night because, being chronically unemployed, he can't even think of affording an apartment. he's wearing cloths he got for free from one of the shelters. old, stained, out of style, two sizes too big. even he laughs when he thinks of what a potential boss would say if he showed up for a job interview dressed like this. he eats the dinner provided by the shelter in the evening and wonders if it's even possible to escape. he knows it's not, of course, so he starts buying booze with the money he manages to beg off people in the street and drinks himself to sleep every night. about now he realizes his meds are all but gone. two more days before the little orange bottles are all empty. he seeks out a doctor who can write him a perscription. of course, he's basically penniless, dirty and not to mention the fact that his history is against him. after all, some of these medications are the kind that can be abused, and him being an ex con, it makes doctors leery of giving him access to such things. finally, he finds a free clinic with a doctor who will see him and give him the perscriptions he needs. He walks into the pharmacy, and that's when it hits him, he has no way to pay. he questions the pharmacist, "about how much would all this come to?" "oh dear, that's quite a compliment of pills," she comments. she points at the top-most slip of paper, "well, that one is probably going to be over a hundred. do you have insurance?" he leaves, dissapointed and despirate. he spends the next day being shunted from one government waiting room to the next in the hope that he can somehow get help paying for his treatment. but everywhere he goes the answer is no, the door is closed, he is directed to see so-and-so who happens to be elsewhere. by 4pm his head is spinning and he can't remember why he was even denied anymore. something about ex convicts not being elidgible for certain government assistance programs or something. maybe it was just that the government does not consider his medication essential, so they won't pay. maybe both, or neither. he can't remember and he's got to hurry back to the shelter if he wants to eat today. the only souveneer of his effort, a hastily scribbled phone number on a scrap of notebook paper for the organizer of an ex-con support group, is stuffed in his otherwise empty pocket. he doesn't call. instead he sits on his cot with his supper of cheap vodka and lukewarm soup and stares deep into the grime encrusted surface of what used to be a whitewashed wall. he takes the last pill he owns and passes out with the bottle still balanced on his chest.

days pass, and he spends them wandering about the town in a drunken stupor, begging for spare coins. about this time, an idea is forming in his progressivly disordered mind. "if i can go back to jail, i can get better again," he chants it silently to himself in the brief periods of lucidity between bottles of Dark Eyes.

Another interjection to let the pressure out of this story before it explodes...
as you can see, i've been doing alot of imagining throughout my little story. i really don't know exactly how it went down, but do i know experiences like the one i just made up seem to be fairly common. usually, these kinds of things merely lead the person to rejoin the criminal world in order to not starve or freeze to death. and i don't want you to think that i imagine this man as being the virtuous victim of some malicious system which inexplicably decided to cause him harm. i realize that the man most likely began participating in some sort of criminal activities at some point between his release and the convenience store shooting, because he would have been otherwise unable to obtain the gun he used. he might have stolen it directly from someone's home, or done some other criminal act in order to earn the money he needed to buy it from some various illegal weapons dealer. it's even possible that he had managed to earn a little money working some meager part-time job for a while before his unmedicated mental illness and alcoholism forced him to quit or got him fired. i really have no idea how he did it, which is why this story is as yet unwritten until i can do some research.
alright kiddies, the story's almost through. stick with me here.

somehow, he obtains a gun. perhaps he initially intends to kill just himself with it. who wouldn't be considering death as an option if they were in his position? but ever present is the hope that he might be able to get better. it's like an annoying horsefly that keeps biting him just at that second when he's got the barrel of the gun in his mouth and his finger is reaching out for the trigger. one night, drunk again, he makes his decision. he's going to live. he's going to get better the only way he knows how. he's going back to jail. he knows he's got to do something so terrible that they'll never let him out. he looks up and sees a 24 hour convenience store across the street. the only person around is the clerk, and she's got her back turned to him. so he tucks his gun in his pants, closes his coat, and stumbles across the street. "sorry, whoever you are." he wanders in, not looking at her, and someone comes in right behind him. he turns and heads for the back to fake looking at bottles of stale motor oil until the customer leaves. he's scared, shaking, the idea of what he's about to do has sobered him up a bit. time for another swig from the bottle in his pocket to calm the racing thoughts. "maybe i can just take the money, yeah. that will set me up for a while. nonono, i still can't get a job. i'll be back in the dumps in a week. this is pointless, i should just leave. no. i'm going to die if i do this much longer. I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!!!" the sound of the bell tied to the top of the door startles him. he stands erect, brandishes his gun and steps forward. this is it. adrenaline courses through his already alcohol flooded body. ceiling tiles rain down beside him. he doesn't even realize he's fired his gun at all. he points it at her, and she looks like she's going to cry. but he doesn't want to kill her. no no no. so he demands the money instead. "NEXT time, next time, i'll do it," his thoughts race. she sets the cash drawer on the counter and steps back. her hands are in the air and she's shaking so bad she's having trouble standing. an onlooker would have merely heard animal screams, gurgles and drunken babbling coming out of his mouth. "no no no, i've GOT to do it. there's no other way. there's no other way!" he's trying to shout at her through the alcohol. the gun goes off once. twice. thrice. the shots throw what's left of her body back against the cigarette racks. she's a mass of mangled red flesh sliding down and flopping heavily upon the tile floor. but now he sees his handiwork. now he really feels what it is to kill. he realizes what he's done. he's never going to be cured, he swats away the horsefly. pointless sting of hope dies away as he puts the barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

...

disturbing? yes. but what bothered me the most was the unthinking way i was so angry about the shooting before i really had any idea why it happened. i truly believed it was completely random, that this man had killed someone for kicks, as the local media implied, and then had freaked out and killed himself. but that makes no sense. no one acts like that just for the hell of it. what kind of monster does that make me, when another human being is in such despiration that he feels doing something like that is necessary, and i can't feel an inkling of compassion for him? like i said to a friend of mine as we were discussing this whole thing earlier, my complete lack of compassion for a human being who was being crushed, and crushed, and crushed, like a half smoked cigarette beneath the boot of the very system that sustains me, it makes me sick. i am fucking riding the horse that is smashing his bones to powder with it's hooves, and all i can worry about is whether i might get his blood on me.

what is the proper reaction, though? should we be angry and disgusted at him for holding on to a hope that he might be able to find a tiny piece of sanity? he was obviously misguided and unbalanced, but were either of those things really his fault? do we, as members of the very society which forced him down the path towards utter ruin, really have the right to sit in our nice safe, warm houses with our bellies full of food and condemn him for what he did in a state of despiration that our own system was a major factor in? and furthermore, when things like this happen, is it right to hide behind statistics, to tell eachother that "things like this happen all the time" so we don't have to face up to the fact that we COULD have done something but didn't bother?

it's not just me who needs to look closer at this, either. just like me, you're all scared to realize that someday, that man might be you too.

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