Joe Victim: A Thriller

So the chain of events was started. The police went to my apartment on a Friday night, only I wasn’t there. I was with Melissa. They searched it and found a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t too helpful for my cause. Then they waited for me, and I didn’t show up, and then they decided that I had run. Only I hadn’t. I came home on the Sunday morning and there was one police unit waiting for me. They radioed in, a minute or two later there were a dozen. I pulled a gun. I tried to shoot myself. The Sally stopped that from happening. She jumped on me and pulled the gun away.

From there I was taken to the hospital. I started making the news. Then I began to experience loss. I lost my freedom. I lost my job. I lost my cat. It was a cat I had found weeks earlier that had been hit by a car. When I made the news, the vet who had taken care of that cat recognized me, and they came and picked it up. I lost my apartment. My mom started getting interview requests, and my mom would say all sorts of weird shit. Life moves on for everybody on the outside, but inside these walls life feels like it’s come to a standstill. If anybody ever wants to know how twelve months can feel like twelve years, all they have to do is get arrested for murder.

My prison cell makes my apartment look like a hotel. Makes my mom’s house look like a palace. Makes the interrogation room look like an interrogation room. It makes me miss all of those places. It’s one room that’s about twice as wide as the bed and not much longer, and the bed I have isn’t that big to begin with. A real estate agent would call it cozy. A funeral director would call it roomy. I got four concrete block walls, one of them with a metal door stamped into the middle of it. No real view to talk of, just a small slot in the door that looks out to more concrete and metal and other cell doors if you can get the angle right. It’s a neighborly kind of place because there are people in cells to my left and right, people that won’t shut up, people who have been in here a lot longer than I have and who will continue to be in here long after I’ve been found not guilty.

On one side of me is Kenny Jefferies. Kenny Jefferies is a man of three lives. In one life he is, or was, the guitarist for a heavy metal band. They called themselves Tampon of Lamb. They released two albums and built up an audience of people who like their music on the raw and bloody side, and went on tour. Then they released a greatest-hits album, and then people found out about Jefferies’s second life, which meant no more tours and no more albums. It was his second life that made him a household name—the media began to call him Santa Suit Kenny. In his second life he was a child rapist who would dress up as Santa to draw his victims away from their parents. As one of the prison guards here said a while ago, only the children can know which of those two professions Jefferies was better at. The guard summed it up by saying I sure as hell hope he was a better rapist than he was a singer, because he was a fucking awful singer.

Jefferies’s third life is as a convict. Sometimes he sings or hums music I can’t understand. Sometimes he’ll play a guitar that isn’t there, he’ll strum the air and sing about torture and pain, which must hurt his throat. When I think about heavy metal music, I think the evolution of mankind has peaked and we’re surfing the downslope to becoming monkeys again.