He attended an all-boys Catholic school from kindergarten through 12th grade.
At around age 9, Father Ryan, a short, bowlegged, freckly Irishman with a nervous twitch in his right shoulder, started pulling him aside after math class, into a backroom, where he’d fondle the boy’s genitals as he jerked himself off under his long, black robe.
The boy never told anyone, and after a couple months of these encounters, Father Ryan abruptly disappeared.
When the boy turned 12, he began having fantasies about the opposite sex, but found himself unable to achieve orgasm by masturbation; instead, he’d simulate intercourse with his pillow, cuddling up to it in the middle of the night, kissing it, and rubbing his penis against it, usually imagining the pillow to be the wheelchair bound girl named Marlene who lived next door.
One drizzly Sunday afternoon following church, his mother walked in on him having sex with the pillow. The fact that the pillow had a bra he’d stolen from her dresser strapped to it only made matters worse.
Upon witnessing this scene, his mother shrieked loudly, grabbed one of his belts off the floor and beat him violently with it. Then she snatched the pillow off his blue NASCAR bed, stormed out of the room, and never once spoke to him about the incident.
With his pillow gone, he turned to having sexual relations with other objects, such as fruit. He’d steal cantaloupes, poke a hole in them, stick his penis inside, and fuck them, sometimes while spying on Marlene from his window.
He also tried anally penetrating the family cat, but its anus was too small for his penis to enter. The cat hissed and scratched him on his second anal penetration attempt and would later always scamper away in terror at the mere sight of him.
As a teenager he never had much luck with girls. He thought about Marlene daily, but could never summon the courage to approach her. A sudden debilitating fear overtook him whenever he’d even get close to any female, let alone speak to one.
Plus, being at an all-boys school didn’t provide many opportunities to mingle with the fairer sex.
Secretly, he wished women were as easy in real life as they were in TV and movies, but grew to accept that they seemed to be better in fantasy than reality.
Following a brief stint at community college, he got a job and moved into a one bedroom apartment by himself and was delighted to be able to have pillows again(his mother had removed and never replaced the pillows in his room following that day).
He was also able to have his own computer and internet access for the time and was soon surfing the web daily, exploring such subjects as sexual voyeur sites, toilet spy cams, upskirt pics, and snuff films.
But he really found his niche in amputee fetish, or “Acrotomophilia” as it is known medically.
For hours upon hours, he’d watch video of men with large penises engaging in sexual intercourse with women missing legs and/or arms, and would often place his laptop on his bed, in front of his pillow, with a melon underneath the pillow, fucking the melon wildly as he streamed video of amputees or stared at their pictures.
Soon enough, though, he wanted more, and decided to purchase a realistic humanoid sex doll online. When he received it, he sawed off its arms with a hacksaw, and named it Marlene.
He’d spend hours sitting with it, kissing and hugging it, and fucking its synthetic vagina until his penis burned raw.
He had intimate, personal conversations with his Marlene, and got to know her in a way he’d never known anyone else.
She became the most beautiful thing he’d seen in his life, and he swore she had a halo hovering above her head in the morning when slivers of sun shot through the venetian blinds in his bedroom where they slept together in his single bed.
But it still wasn’t God.
He began to feel unequal to Marlene, disgusted at himself, and unworthy of her presence. In addition, every night he was plagued by horrible nightmares about hands and arms.
Hands and arms would appear from nowhere, break through walls, poking, punching, and clawing at him. And anytime he looked at his own hands or arms, he started to feel a pain, embarrassment, seething hatred, and shame erupting from the deepest dimensions of his soul.
One night, while watching an internet video from Iraq of black veiled women being executed in a ravine via machine gun fire, he received a telepathic message from one of the corpses, taunting him, telling him he’d never achieve the angelic innocence and cosmic purity that he saw in Marlene’s prosthetic eyes.
The next day, after work, during a particularly violent thunderstorm, he brought home a bouquet of rain soaked roses, placed them on Marlene’s lap, pulled out a small power saw from his closet, fired it up, and, still wearing his three piece suit from the office, buried the humming saw into his upper right arm near the deltoid, cutting quickly through the bone.
The pain was immense; blood spurted, splattered, and eventually gushed out as the arm fell to the hardwood floor with a loud thud.
Seeing the limb had been severed, he turned off the saw and sat down on the red crush velvet couch, next to Marlene.
He softly smiled, stroked her hair, and then his vision slowly faded to grey, and he drifted silently into the mouth of the most peaceful sleep he’d ever known.
He was a chunky, awkward, and short 15 year old who wore coke bottle glasses, spoke with a slight lisp and walked with a gimpy step due to his left leg being two inches longer than his right.
School was not a kind place for him, and, because of his lisp and awkward walk, nearly everyone called him “faggot.”
Although he was tormented by the majority of the student body, the jocks gave it to him the worst.
When walking through the hallways to class, they’d regularly slap him upside the head, shove him into a locker, or play keep away with his glasses.
On account of a medical condition he’d occasionally have to use crutches or a wheelchair and the jocks especially enjoyed kicking his crutches out from underneath him or dumping him out of his wheelchair.
As bad as his walks through the hallways were, gym class was most horrific for him. He’d always be picked last for teams, tripped up, spit on and intentionally fouled roughly during games.
After class, in the locker room, was where he got it the worst.
One of the most menacing jocks, a 6’4, muscular linebacker everyone called “MadDog” would administer the boy a variety of wedgies, such as the “Melvin” which involved pulling the boy’s tighty whitey’s up from the front, causing much pain to his genitals or the “atomic wedgie,” where Mad Dog’d sneak up from behind and hoist the waistband of the boy’s underwear up and over the boy’s head.
The most painful wedgie of all, though, was the “hanging wedgie,”in which the boy would be hung by the waistband of his underwear elevated from the ground and sometimes twirled around in airborne circles, and, once released, flung clear across the distance of the locker room.
Every once in a while the jocks had contests to see who could make the boy fly the farthest via such maneuvers.
The wedgie attacks, name calling, and hallway beatings turned increasingly violent, eventually reaching a crescendo one day after school when a group of jocks ambushed the boy in the bathroom while he was urinating.
They seized him from behind, pushed his face into the piss filled urinal trough, pulled his pants down to his ankles, and forced a hard green banana up into his ass.
Laughing madly, the jocks raped him brutally with the piece of produce, yelling such things as “you know you like it, faggot!” among other taunts.
Mad Dog even filmed the incident on his cell phone, joking about how he was going to put it on the internet.
After sodomizing the boy for a minute or two, the jocks removed the banana from his bleeding anus and threw him to the cold tile floor.
One of the jocks plucked a live cockroach off the graffiti covered bathroom wall and shoved it into the boy’s mouth and held his jaw shut and made him swallow it, which elicited a boisterous round of applause from the group.
The jocks then filed out the door, high fiving each other, still laughing hysterically.
The boy stumbled up to his feet, vomited into the urinal trough, pulled up his pants and limped home where he showered and brushed his teeth several times.
That night the thoughts of revenge that’d swirled in his head for years began to rapidly intensify.
Stealing his dad’s guns and carrying out a Columbine style attack.
Planting a car bomb in Mad Dog’s Confederate Flag painted monster pickup truck.
Hurling a Molotov cocktail onto the field during a football game.
Poisoning the punch bowl at the prom with liquid LSD or cyanide.
All types of ideas crossed his mind…
But for now, he just sat back in his bean bag chair, unsheathed a hunting knife he kept under his bed, rolled up his left pant leg, revealing a large patch of scars, and slid the tip of the knife about four inches down his upper left quad, drawing a small stream of dark red blood, which trickled slowly over his inner thigh.
Watching the blood drip pierced through his cocoon of learned numbness like millions of needles.
His eyes then welled up and he started to sob uncontrollably. He got up, locked his door, crawled into bed, and yanked the covers over his head.
That night he prayed for anything to happen that’d prevent him from having to go to school the next day.
A tornado.
Snowstorm.
Earthquake.
Terrorist attack.
Anything.
He just didn’t want to see those faces anymore. He didn’t want to hear the laughter. He just wanted to stay in bed.
Where did that girl go?
The one that punched me in the throat
Stole my kidney
Abandoning everything
Cuddling two weeks candle-lit bathtubs
Giving backrubs to strangers with butcher knives
She’s a modern day Medusa, I tell you!
Totally and unquestionably…
AWOL
Disconnected
Out of reach
Not in service
A user that is NOT currently online
After sloshing through ten thousand puddles of deceased roses,
I WILL slam her closed doors!
I’ll KILL all those tear ducts dry
Because SOMEONE has to slaughter the calf
The innocent little calf of hope
The creature no longer so prim and precious
Now that I step out of this Jacuzzi filled with ice cubes, clutching my side, I’ll feint this whimper:
“Oh, pale Ramon!
Where, where did she did go?
Did you, or anyone, see the burial plots?”
While waiting for the ambulance, I send an email to:
Pale.Ramon@Prozac.con
…so he’ll print this inept ad in the personal cesarean section,
:(because antibiotics alone won’t impede this infection):
“If somebody sees a slender silhouetted slut of 5’6
Sort of looks like Stevie Nicks
Has curly blond hair and soaking red hands
Vain with conceit and gluing back fallen strands
Is smuggling a cold kidney in a rotten purse
Is juggling souls in an old, forgotten hearse
Would they please present her with this restraining order?
AND TELL HER I WANT MY FUCKING KIDNEY BACK!”
Bobby Green’s mom never could figure out why Mr. Whiskers would run in terror at the mere sight of her son.
Little did she know how much Bobby enjoyed backing the animal into corners, mocking its cries, and lashing it with belts or electrical cords...
Probably the boy’s favorite thing to do was snatch up throw Mr. W down a flight of stairs. How the animal always landed on its feet! How its claws sounded on the hardwood floor as it'd scamper away afterward, so fast!
There were occasions when Mr. Whiskers got the upper hand, though. It'd slip Bobby’s grasp and leave him with bloody scratch marks along his hands or arms. But overall, the boy was usually the winner of their constant battles.
Eventually, however, Bobby took things too far. Following an ambush of the cat as it slept on his parents' bed, he stuffed Mr. W into a burlap sack and zipped it shut. Perhaps his subsequent onslaught of slaps and punches was too much, because Mr. Whiskers stopped hissing and moving around.
Alarmed, he unzipped and opened the sack and saw syrupy blood dribbling from Mr. Whiskers' nostrils. Mr. W’s front legs were all mangled, hanging limp. The cat was unconscious and didn't seem to be breathing.
Bobby poked the cat, but it didn't move. He starting panicking, envisioning how pissed off his mom would be. Worse even would be having to deal with his dad.
So he again zipped the sack closed, crammed it into his backpack, and went down to the wooded section in the back of his gated community, where there was a small lake.
Standing at the edge of the lake, he pulled out the sack and was about to give it the old heave-ho. But right before he could, the sack came back to life, shocking the hell out of him.
Mr. Whiskers wasn't dead after all. It cried and hissed like he'd never heard before. The cat mustered all its might and kicked with its hind legs at the bottom of the sack so hard that Bobby had trouble holding on.
He thought for a second of letting the cat go but decided against that, knowing it would be too hard to explain to his parents. He struggled to gain control of the frantically moving sack, but was able to exert enough strength to steady it. Then he flung it as hard as he could into the murky brown water.
Out of breath, he hunched over, hands on knees, and watched as the thrashing sack sank quickly. The cat's cries and hisses turned to silence once the sack dipped below the water's surface. A short series of bubbles followed its submersion.
When his mom asked him later that night where the cat was, he feigned ignorance and shrugged. Must have run away, he said, staring out the window.
Two weeks of flyers and a sparsely attended search party with neighbors followed. But still no cat. So his mom reluctantly gave up and bought a cute new kitten, but never fawned over it the way she did with Mr. Whiskers.
Bobby didn't care much for the new kitten, either, but rarely attacked it, instead spending most of his free time playing the new “Call of Duty” and shooting at squirrels with his air gun.
Two months passed and the boy'd forgotten all about Mr. Whiskers. Until that Tuesday, after dinner, when the gated community's groundskeeper appeared at the front door, holding a large black garbage bag.
His mom eyed the bag warily and then looked over at Bobby, who dropped his controller to the floor, rose to his feet, and stepped away from the TV. His dad got up from the La-Z-Boy nearby and gulped down a prolonged swig of beer.
The groundskeeper stared and nodded at Bobby, with a blank expression, but didn't say a word.
His mom stepped forward and reached into the bag and pulled out a partially deflated football that looked a lot like the one the boy'd lost last summer. On the side of the football was Bobby’s name, in capital letters, scribbled in permanent marker.
His mom chuckled and handed the football off to his dad. His dad just sighed and then threw the ball to him, with a bit too much pop, and it stung as it landed in his arms.
Miles Chester’s stories and poems had been rejected by all the small press magazines he read. And every single response, every single rejection letter was a form letter. Never once did he get a personal response from the masses of editors he'd sent his work.
And why not? His cover letters were personal. He'd praise the magazine, mention specific pieces, writers he enjoyed. He'd address the editors by name and even request feedback. But none ever came. Always it was the same form letters. Over and over again.
Following each rejection, he'd drink vodka to dull the pain. Sometimes he'd snort bath salts and sit alone in his ground floor studio apartment, on the mattress on the floor, watching infomercials all night and listening to his next door neighbors, that young Mexican couple with the crying baby, scream and curse at each other in Spanish.
Rejections and noisy neighbors aside, Miles often had trouble sleeping at night. He'd stay awake, lying in bed, dreading waking up in the morning to go to his job at the call center, where his bosses timed his toilet breaks and he had to repeat the same scripted greetings and responses to the angry voices in his headset.
Miles was happiest when he was writing. And when he was writing, he was writing. He'd slave over his compositions tirelessly, in front of his computer screen, until the small hours, editing and inspecting every last word. Then he'd fire off submissions to as many places as he could and hope that maybe, just maybe, he'd get finally get published and earn his big break.
But the end results were always the same. Form rejection after form rejection. And the more and more he got, the more disillusioned he became. His dreams of being the next John Cheever, Chuck Palahniuk or Raymond Carver dissipated further with each letter.
Little by little, he started to hate all the magazines he previously liked. The cute authors with their sharp wit and incomprehensible allegory! Their stupid little stories nobody other than a pompous critic could enjoy! And those oh-so clever poets and their overly metaphorical poems that no one ever really understood but somehow found so brilliant...
After receiving four form letter rejections in one day, Miles stood naked in front of his mirror that night, tears streaming down his face, and his hatred toward the small press boiled into full blown rage.
His body began to shake as he thought about the dictionary abuse by some of these writers, especially the “clever” poets. Like how many people actually use words like “mellifluous” anyway?
Damn them and damn their narcissistic diatribes! What good was poetry and stories that made no sense!? It suddenly dawned on him that most of the bullshit he had read in small press magazines was merely smug attempts by worthless authors at making themselves look smart.
Damn them! Miles thought, slapping his bathroom mirror lightly. What about his genius? Why shouldn’t he be heard? Why was it that everyone else gets published? Damn them! Damn them all, Miles thought, as he slapped at his bathroom mirror harder and harder...
Damn them all with their academic, look at how great I am writing! Damn their worthless Pushcart nominations! Damn every writer and his or her pithy bio and those annoying lists of places they've been published! What a bunch of phonies! No wonder it’s the “small” press! No wonder nobody reads these magazines! They all suck!
Miles then realized he’d been now punching his bathroom mirror and that his right fist was covered in bloody glass shards.
Miles saw himself hyperventilating in the shattered mirror and decided it was time to exact revenge and concurrently move beyond the incestuous small press world and really get himself noticed.
He’d recently read online about a convention, a gathering of the small press, that'd be happening in a couple weeks, only an hour away from where he lived. There, nearly every editor from every magazine that'd rejected him would be in attendance. What's more, their pictures and names were up on the website.
His plan began to materialize. He would visit the convention, with an M16, and shoot as many people as possible and then himself. But beforehand, he'd send a compilation of his writings to news agencies, big magazines, publishing houses, and popular blogs. Finally, after completing his mission, he'd be heard!
It wasn't the first time he'd plotted a killing spree. He'd done so in high school, inspired by Columbine. He’d thought up a similar attack against the jocks who'd terrorized him and his friends, but his friend who'd planned it with him chickened out, so they didn't go through with it...
Miles always had a fixation on spree killers. Sometimes he didn't agree with their motives, but he respected their courage and how they were able to make themselves heard. When he wasn’t writing, he’d usually be spending hours online researching mass killings.
He particularly admired those who’d been able to kill more than 20. Anything under 20 kills he often wasn’t too impressed by, except for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, due to their teamwork, charisma and meticulous planning. (He’d even signed an online petition demanding “the basement tapes” immediate public release…)
Though he didn’t care much for racists or politically motivated rampage killers like Baruch Goldstein, Dylann Roof, or Nidal Malik Hasan, probably his all-time favorite spree killer was Anders Breivik, due to his 77 kills, and use of both guns and explosives.
At number two was Seung Hui Cho for his high kill count and how badass it was that he’d chain-locked the exit doors to prevent “those spoiled brats'” escape, and that he’d sent an awesome video manifesto to the media, which Miles had watched over 100 times on YouTube.
He also quite liked Adam Lanza and felt Lanza didn’t get the respect he deserved among mass killers. Lanza was a writer and a student of mass killings, even editing Wikipedia pages and keeping a massive mass killer spreadsheet. Miles admired that and admired Lanza’s choice of targeting an elementary school, knowing it’d generate more press.
Rounding out his top ten were Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre; George Hennard of the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre; James Huberty of the McDonald’s massacre (enjoy your Happy Meal, motherfuckers! he’d always think while watching news footage of that one); the “DC Snipers” John Allen Muhamad and Lee Boyd Malvo; Woo Bum-kon, the kooky South Korean policeman; and Charles Whitman of the University of Texas shootings.
He also kinda liked T.J. Lane for his antics in the courtroom, especially the riff to his victims’ families about jerking off with the hand that killed their sons. What a laugh riot! And he loved Jiverly Wong's confession letter: "I am Jiverly Wong shooting the people..." That always cracked him up. He gave Robert Hawkins style points, too, even though he'd only killed 8 people...
Miles decided their way of making history would be his way. So he went to the gun store and bought a fully automatic assault rifle and plenty of ammo. Then he went to the army surplus store and bought some combat boots and fatigues.
When he got home, he found the movie "Taxi Driver" playing on cable. After watching it, he took a piss and stared into his reflection in the bends of his bloodied, shattered bathroom mirror and decided to shave his head into a mohawk, like the movie's protagonist, Travis Bickle.
Then he listened to Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" on his phone and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so he read "Catcher in the Rye" and thought about Mark David Chapman and wrote a quick poem about how Chapman should have shot Yoko, too, and sent the poem off as a submission to "Poetry Magazine", "The New York Quarterly", the "New Yorker" and even Yoko's publicist just for shits and giggles.
The next day Miles quit his job and spent the couple weeks before the convention preparing, putting together manuscripts of his writing, doing push-ups in his apartment and target practice at a local shooting range.
He repeated his routine of watching "Taxi Driver", listening to Pantera, and reading "Catcher in the Rye" every night. Every night he'd also write a poem about a different spree killer.
Finally the big day came. He was so amped up the night before that he only slept for an hour or so and when he woke up, he had a touch of vertigo, but, while taking his morning shower, he felt a tranquility and sense of calm he’d never had before.
After dressing up in his army fatigues, he grabbed his supplies, and headed out the door. Before getting into his car, he put on a pair of aviator sunglasses and dropped several packages of manuscripts into a mailbox.
He peeled out of his building's parking lot and drove to the convention. On the way there, he maintained the speed limit, listened to Pantera, and thought excitedly about how a movie might be made about him and his writings and wondered which directors and actors would be involved.
The convention was to be held at a hotel downtown. But when he arrived to the hotel lobby, carrying a duffel bag, the young lady at the reception desk eyed him curiously.
She asked him if she could help him and he asked her where the convention was. She warily pointed him to a conference room down the hall. Without responding to her, he turned and began to walk in its direction.
As he neared the room, he noticed there were only middle aged men hanging around outside the conference room's doors. They all had on three piece suits and a lot of them had slicked back hair. None of them looked like writers or the pictures of editors he saw on the website.
As he drew closer, a couple of the middle aged men went inside and, from behind where they'd been standing, he saw a sign that read: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.”
Dejected, he thought for a second of carrying out his plan, going in there and opening fire, but he decided against it. Instead, he went back to his car and drove home.
When he got home, he logged onto the Internet and tried to check the convention page, but when he typed the address, all it brought up was a blank window, containing an Error 404 “Page Not Found” message.
He lived in a ground floor apartment, next to the playground. Through his blinds he liked to watch the children. Especially the little girls.
There was one girl in particular, must have been 10 or so. He didn't know her name so he gave her one. “Melody” he called her.
Melody always wore ballerina clothes. Tiara, tutu, all that. She'd carry a fairy wand and wave it around and dance and pirouette near the jungle gym.
Her movements dazzled him. So graceful and smooth. That slender frame. Those budding breasts.
He loved the way the sun would glint and sparkle off her golden hair. The way her pig tails rested on her shoulders.
She occupied his thoughts endlessly. Sure, he fantasized of her sexually, and would pleasure himself while watching her from behind his blinds. But his feelings were more than merely sexual. He genuinely longed for her romantically.
He'd picture the two of them slow dancing somewhere in the forest, Mozart in the background. Them having candlelit lobster dinners in posh restaurants. Walking through the streets of Paris. In a gondola in Venice. Them in a convertible, top down, cruising the Mediterranean coast.
The majority of his free time was spent on Melody, but he liked other young girls, too. Not only on the playground but also on various non-nude preteen model sites.
He enjoyed viewing the photos of scantily clad prepubescents in high heels, makeup, and thongs. Especially when they bent over. Pretty much every time he visited those sites he'd wind up masturbating.
After masturbating, he'd wash his hands in scalding water. Then he'd delete the photos and clear his browser's history. Sometimes he'd cry. Sometimes he'd pray to God. Sometimes he'd cut himself w/a razor blade, usually near his armpit.
Curiously, he never cried or cut himself w/Melody, though. Not even w/the photos he'd taken of her from between his blinds. She felt different.
However, shortly after the crash of Flight 150, his relationship w/Melody took a turn for the worst.
He began having unsettling visions, which'd usually occur while he surfed the Internet. In them, he'd be alone on a white sandy beach w/her. They stood naked, facing each other, on the shore, crystal clear blue water lapping at their feet.
He'd hear a soft sibilance and see a raging fire somewhere off in the distance. Ashes floating around them, he'd gently finger her bald vagina while she cried into her hands.
His erect penis would then grow, into a boa constrictor-like snake, and it'd wrap itself around Melody's neck and strangle her. As she gasped for air and slapped at it, he'd come to, out of breath, screaming and grabbing and punching at his crotch.
These visions disturbed him terribly. He hated them. To cope he cut himself more and in different places. Sometimes even the tip of his penis.
But it didn't help and the visions evolved into a series of night terrors, which all took place in his kitchen.
In every one, teeth unloosened in his mouth as bent Melody over, in front of the kitchen sink, which was running and producing a deafening hissing sound. The window behind the sink would burst into flames and he'd pull a plastic bag over Melody's head, yank her tights and flowery panties down to her feet and his snake-penis'd shove itself inside her and rape her, under her tutu, blood streaming down her legs.
He'd often awaken from these nightmares w/o clothes, in the kitchen, sweating, out of breath, holding his penis in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. A few times, upon awakening, he found he'd defecated on the kitchen floor.
The nightmares were so vivid and disturbing that he didn't want to sleep anymore and decided he wouldn't. So he went over to