Chapter 22
October 1
No Sale
HAVING IMAGINED Rockwell Kingman, I seemed to be stuck with him, and he was becoming annoying. He wouldn’t dance to my tune. “I am not in the business of assisted suicide,” he said. He took me by the arm and urged me toward the door.
“What’s the matter?” I asked with a condescending sneer. “Scruples?”
He laughed a humorless laugh and said, “Scruples? Are you kidding me? I will kill women, children, cripples, your mother, or my mother, on contract or for the sake of deception. I have no scruples — but I do have a well-developed sense of self. I know who I am, and I know what I do, and I know why I do it. Let me tell you something.” He yanked me back into the room, pushed me into a chair, and began to lecture me. “Perhaps you’ve heard people justify the violent acts that they commit on the grounds that we are really just animals underneath our civilized exterior, and violent death, kill or be killed, is a fact of everyday life in the animal world — kill, eat, fuck — the pattern of life and death in the animal world, therefore the pattern of life and death in our world. Well, let me tell you what I think about that argument. We are elevated animals, blessed, or cursed, with the ability to distinguish right from wrong. We know good from evil. We have our appetites, we have our hungers, we have our animal urges, but we know how to control them, and if we do not control them it is because we choose not to control them, and so a killer who chooses to kill — a killer like me — is not simply being a slave to his animal nature. He is — and I say this with pride because I have made the choice, I have chosen to kill — he is evil. That’s what I am. Evil. I am an evil motherfucker. I have no scruples — they don’t even enter the picture — but I know who I am, and I know what I am, and I know what I will do and what I won’t do, and I won’t kill you. It’s not what I do. In fact, it runs against the grain of what I do. In my business, every killing starts with a triangle, a stable base: you’ve got the killer, the client, and the target. Among them there is a business relationship, and there is also a kind of social contract. Two are aware of the relationship: the killer is aware of it, of course, and the client has to be aware of it, too. The client has to participate in the choice to kill. The victim, on the other hand, has to be unaware of the contract. How can the victim be a victim if the victim is aware, if the victim has also made the choice? It’s a perversion of the whole setup. I mean, if you get right down to it, your wife would really be my client, since she’s the one who’s supposed to benefit from the killing, but she isn’t going to know she’s the client, and if I do my job the way I do my job, which is to say excellently well, she’ll never know it. You’re trying to take something away from me, do you realize that?”
I shrugged.
“My audience,” he said. “The only audience I’ve got for my work, besides myself, is the client. You’re asking me to give that up. If the work were successful, if I did it right — and if I did it I would do it right — you would never know it and she would never know it. Neither of you would know how good a job I had done. Nor would anyone else. Where are the rewards in that? Do you think I’m only in this for the money?”
He opened the door and shoved me into the hall. “Let me just plant a thought in your mind,” I said. “I am the captain of a launch that leaks.” I grinned and winked, and he slammed the door in my face. I was getting to him. I was sure of it.
I COMPILED my monthly letter to our sons. This has been my custom since they went away to school, some twenty years ago. Back then, I sent them a postcard or letter every day. I still write every day, but I now mail my letters only monthly, since asking someone to pay attention to you every day is asking a lot. Included was everything you have read here, reader, and more, since I didn’t begin preparing this for you until the tenth of the month and because I had things to say to them that would not have interested you, and because I had some things to say about you that I intended only for them.
ALBERTINE paid the month’s bills, but she couldn’t afford to pay them all. “I have two stacks here,” she said. “These I’m going to pay, and those I’m not going to pay. I just can’t believe the way it mounts up. It’s not just the mortgage. It’s the thousand little things that break every month and have to be fixed or replaced. This is a losing battle, and we’re losing it a little faster every day.”
I looked through the stack of bills that were going to go unpaid.
“You have to pay this one,” I said. “It’s my life insurance premium.”
“It goes up every year,” she said, “and now that Edward and Daniel are on their own, what’s the point? Why not let it lapse?”
“Because everyone needs life insurance,” I said lamely.
“I’m the beneficiary,” she said, “and I’m not paying the premium.”
She tore the bill in half and dropped it into the wastebasket.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
You can buy hardcover and paperback editions of all the books at Lulu.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
Share this post