[This is a grim subject, but they bandy it around downtown as light as a shuttlecock. I'll bring it back down to Earth.]
by Jerome du Bois
In The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly's 1994 Detective Harry Bosch novel, there's a scene where Bosch examines death photos in the kitchen of the woman he's involved with, Sylvia Moore, an eighth-grade English teacher. She is in the living room grading papers. They have just eaten dinner, he has a bottle of beer, and he's examining the victims of a serial killer called The Dollmaker.
He unsnapped the first binder and laid out the sections on each of the eleven victims across the table. He stood up with the bottle so he could look down and take them all in at once. Each section was fronted by a photograph of the victim's remains, as they were found. There were eleven of these photos in front of him. He did some thinking on the case and then went into the bedroom and checked the suit he had worn the day before. The Polaroid of the concrete blonde was still in the pocket.
He brought it back to the kitchen and laid it on the table with the others. Number twelve. It was a horrible gallery of broken, abused bodies, their garish makeup showing false smiles below dead eyes. Their bodies were naked, exposed to the harsh light of the police photographer.
Bosch drained the bottle and kept staring. Reading the names and the dates of the deaths. Looking at the faces. All of them lost angels in the city of night. He didn't notice Sylvia come in until it was too late.
"My God," she said in a whisper as she saw the photos. She took a step backward. She was holding one of her students' papers in her hand. Her other hand had come up to her mouth.
"I'm sorry, Sylvia," Bosch said. "I should've warned you not to come in."
"Those are the women?"
He nodded.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm not sure. Trying to make something happen, I guess. I thought if I looked at them all again I might get an idea, figure out what's happening."
"But how can you look at those? You were just standing there looking."
"Because I have to."
Hieronymus Bosch, LA Police, is no ghoul. But we're in the Rebarb now, so imagine that the woman in the doorway is Amy Young, who co-runs Perihelion, a Grand Avenue art gallery and bookstore. As soon as she saw the pictures she'd say, "Cool!" and elbow Bosch aside quicker than a CNN photographer, picking up this one and that one --"Wow! What happened to her? Huh? Tell me, Harry, come on, this is cool . . ."
But that wouldn't work, either, because Harry Bosch, police detective, wouldn't come within a mile of Amy Young, who is a murder pimp.
Amy Young and her partner, Doug Grant, have been dragging around the moldy, moribund corpse of Aleister Crowley for a couple of years now, with some success. They just won't let the poor bastard, and the occult in general, rest in peace. Goth persists, even though its very existence is parody: these black-clad fools are as stylized and effete as Devo, their roles as fixed and irrelevant as Kabuki, every one trying to be Crispin Glover with eyeballs in his pockets. Rich old golfer Vinny Fournier, who made his mark as Alice Cooper, now hosts the same kind of acts at his joint downtown. The Ghouls just played at Modified, undoubtedly wearing tattered Cannibal Corpse t-shirts and singing the same old songs about maggots and necrophilia.
Phoenix has long tolerated a certain dose of this miasmic fantasy. But now Amy Young and Doug Grant are celebrating and exploiting real murder, and the murder of women, and that makes us mad. If you examine the profiles of their bookstore offerings, a lot of soft-core p*rn misogyny and true crime --including photographs in both genres-- occupies their minds. Right now on their home page you see an image of a Zyklon B gas container by Gidget Gein (a male Marilyn Manson alumnus, who took psycho Ed Gein's last name). And just last night they hosted true crime ghoul writer John Gilmore, who writes lovingly of up-close and personal murder. He spoke it aloud last night, and he combines my two subjects, murder and misogyny, so let's look closer at this man.
According to the squib (written by the NT food writer [?] Stephen Lemons), of the eight subjects he has written about, six were about men murdering women, and two were about degraded and degrading women. He also read sections from his "sexually-charged" novel. He says:
"It can be very subtle --it's not all gore and shit like that. It's psychological, as well. That's what I'm drawn to, the psychological darkness. It's very rich territory for a writer. The dark side of the moon, as it were."
Horseshit. Serial killers and sexual murderers are not deep. They're not geniuses or subhuman. They offer no insights, bring no gifts but misery and murder. They are simply sadists and misanthropes; they hate life and people, especially women, and see everything and everyone as mere instruments for their explorations. FBI expert Roger Depue (more about him below) compiled a list of their "common operating principles," and one of them was, "People die too easily. It should be more painful, and take longer."
What John Gilmore likes is wallowing in the gore, and in writing about instilling fear, and then pain, into women. He likes to write about it and read about again and again. He makes money from resurrecting innocent murdered women's pain.
And Amy Young and Doug Grant --and Artlink and Mayor Phil Gordon, by extension and endorsement-- have no problem at all inviting all kinds of creeps to their bookstore, along with the clueless teenage goths. Nascent Ted Bundys from colleges and high schools, travelling predators from the nearby railroad tracks, fixated punks justing waiting for the trigger for the thrill kill, the man who makes copies of your keys . . .
In his memoir Between Good and Evil: A Master Profiler's Hunt For Society's Most Violent Predators, Roger L. Depue, the Man behind Behavioral Science at the FBI for years, writes this:
Evil is not a discrete entity that springs forth fully formed. It is born in the mind, takes root there as fantasy, and prospers when normal human restraint can no longer contain it. I have seen it devour the personalities of men like Richard Speck, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy, turning them into blank-faced sociopaths who clearly know right from wrong, but choose, time and again, to follow their own base urges, with complete disregard for the terrible human suffering they cause.
And this:
My work has given me a profound respect for what humans suffer at the hands of evil, and a particular sensitivity for what its victims endure. During every investigation that I participate in, there is always an invisible observer at my shoulder, whose presence I never forget. Regardless of the circumstances of a case, I am always giving voice to its silent victim.
John Gilmore gives voice to the murderers, over and over again. He is free, and alive, to do that.
The victims?
They're just women. Dead women. Safely dead and reduced, as in the Harry Bosch novel, to dolls. And now Amy Young and her crew pass them around as such.
I suppose there was a decent crowd at Perihelion last night. What kind of people are they, I wonder? I don't know, but I know it was the asafoetidic stink of real murders, not fantasy ones, that drew them. I hope at least one member of the sicko squad was there undercover, though.
Phoenix may call it The Burgeoning; we call it The Rebarb. And we condemn it.
UPDATE: A reader emails that Gidget Gein, on his website, brags about stealing things off of dead bodies.
While I'm here, let me add a prophecy from Leonard Cohen, a verse from "The Future," written fifteen years ago:
You'll see your woman hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets comin' 'round
Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson.
Manson is a piece of human trash, and no poet, and anyone who vamps on his stinky aura, or Gacy's, or Gein's, is reprehensible, too.
Posted by Jerome at September 17, 2005 08:06 AM | TrackBack