A murder about a diaper.
Imagine: A murder about a safety-pin.
A murder about a molecule of rancid milk.
But people have already murdered for less than that. Downward disparity has already been plumbed— been sonar-ed and scoured. People have already murdered for nothing. They take the trouble to cross the street to murder for nothing.
Then there’s copycat, where the guy’s copying the TV or some other guy, or copying some other guy who’s copying the TV. I believe that copycat is as old as Homer, older, older than the first story daubed in shit on the wall of the cave. It precedes the fireside yarn. It precedes fire.
You get copycat with suicide too. Fuck yes. They call it the Werther Effect. Named after a melancholy novel, later suppressed after it burned a trail of youth suicides through eighteenth-century Europe. I see the same thing here on the street: Some asshole of a bass guitarist chokes on his own ralph (or fries on his own amplifier)—and suddenly suicide is all over town.
There’s a recurring anxiety, with every generation, that a shook of suicides has come, to blow the young away. It seems like everybody’s doing it. And then it settles down again. Copycat is more precipitant than cause. It just gives shape to something that was going to happen anyway.
Suicide hasn’t changed. But what if it did change? Homicide has dispensed with the why. You have gratuitous homicide. But you don’t—
-+=*=+-
It’s 2:30 and the phone is ringing. I suppose that for a regular person this would mean drama, or even catastrophe. But I picked it up as if it was ringing in the p.m.
“What?”
“Mike. Are you still up? I got another one for you.”
“Yes, Trader, I’m still up. Are we going to do ‘distressed’ now?”
“Consider this a preamble to ‘distressed.’ I got one for you. Are you ready?”
His voice wasn’t slurred—it was slowed: Idling at around 33 rpm.
“Wait a second. I’m ready.”
There’s a widowed mailman who has worked all his life in a small town. A small town with extreme weather conditions. Retirement is nearing. One night he sits up late. Composing an emotional farewell to the community. Stuff like: “I have served you in ice and in rain, in the thunder and the sunshine, under lightning, under rainbows…” He has it printed up. And on his last but one day he drops a copy into every mailbox on his run.
The next morning is bleak and cold. But the response to his letter is warm enough. He has a cup of coffee here, a slice of hot pie there. He waves away the modest cash gifts he’s offered. He shakes hands, he moves on. A little disappointed, maybe, that no one seems to have been stirred by the—by the quality of his dedication. By its poetry, Mike.
Last stop on his round is the house of a retired Hollywood lawyer and his nineteen-year-old wife. She’s a retired hatcheck girl. Gorgeous. Full-figured. Wide-eyed. He rings the bell and she answers. “You’re the man who wrote the letter. About the thunder and the sunshine? Come in, sir, please.”
In the dining room there’s a table groaning with exotic food and wine. She says her husband has just left for Florida on a golfing trip. Would he care to stay for lunch? After coffee and liqueurs she leads him by the hand to the white fur rug in front of the glowing fire. They make love for three hours. In the amber light, Mike. He can’t believe the intensity of it. The strength of it. Was it that very poetry that had so moved the young woman? Was it the rainbows? He thinks that, at the very least, she’s his for life.
He gets dressed in a daze. Wearing a flimsy housecoat, she leads him to the front door. Then she reaches for her purse on the hall table. She offers him a five-dollar bill.
And he says, “What’s this for? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
And she says, “Yesterday morning, over breakfast, I read your letter out loud to my husband? About the ice and the rain and the lightning? I said, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do about this guy?’ He said, ‘Fuck him, give him five bucks.’ And lunch was my idea.”