Wild Thing: A Novel Page 28

  It’s kind of a détente, because if the Russians or Sicilians ever do manage to find me and kill me, Locano will no longer have any reason to keep his mouth shut. Whereas if they stop seriously trying, and Locano finds out about it, he’ll turn state’s just to be able to get out and come after me on his own.

  The obvious solution, it seems to me, is for someone to get off their mafia asses and have Locano whacked in prison. But it’s possible the Feds have realized this, too, and have him too well protected. If that’s true, and I were the Sicilians and Russians, I would probably try to take me alive to retain a bargaining position. Then again, Locano’s son tried that once, which is how this whole mess got started.

  * This is probably wishful thinking on my part.

  * Like most people raised on American movies, I have poor access to my emotions but can banter like a motherfucker.

  * That they’re deluded racists who will vote their rights away to any plutocrat willing to name-drop Jesus. Just as conservatives blame poor people for not being wealthy, progressives blame them for not being educated.

  * I listened to some early Bob Dylan a few months after having this conversation, and it seemed full of ambivalence about being from Minnesota. For example, “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, has a spoken introduction that sounds like something Sarah Palin would say: “Unlike most of the songs nowadays are bein’ written uptown in Tin Pan Alley—that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays—this, this is a song, this wasn’t written up there. This was written somewhere down in the United States.” But when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out, Dylan had been living within walking distance of Tin Pan Alley for two years.

  * Zagat’s on a Greek place I used to go to in Ozone Park: “You’ll ‘shop for guns stolen from luggage at JFK’ at this ‘intimate’ ‘bazaar for sociopaths,’ but you may want to ‘Bring your own food from the chicken place next door’ and ‘Borrow your neighbor’s Purell.’ ”

  * How I know this: Information for this exhibit, as well as for Exhibit J, comes from personal interviews and from testimony and surveillance transcripts included in the unsealed (public) redaction of Final Report of the Grand Jury in Re The People of the State of Minnesota, Plaintiff, v. Schneke et al., Defendants (CJ 69-C-CASP-7076).

  * It has reached that stage.

  * I stuck around these people, by choice, literally until they started trying to kill me. It’s something I like to think about whenever I feel that some shitty thing that’s just happened to me is anything other than justified.

  * Factors believed to increase the success rate of tooth reinsertions: minimal time outside the mouth, transport of the tooth in an appropriate medium (ideally cold milk, next best the patient’s saliva), and minimal trauma to the root while cleaning the dirt off of it.

  * The singular of “triceps” is “triceps,” because “triceps” means “three heads,” referring to how the muscle splits at one end into oh, shit, I drifted off there. “Biceps” and “quadriceps” are similar.

  * How I know this: Violet Hurst, various easily made conjectures.

  * “Pint glass”: 470 ml in the U.S., 570 ml in the U.K. (Britain’s not on the metric system either, which is why the pickup line “Funny how it’s ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love’ even though Britain’s on the metric system” doesn’t work as well there.) So Violet may be onto something.

  * Although as someone who, in strictly medical capacities, has hauled my share of corpses around, it never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to move someone who’s sleeping but alive—and therefore still balancing—than someone who’s actually dead. Moving a dead body is like moving a futon.

  * Now Boot Lake, Minnesota.

  * How I know this: Sheriff Marc Albin, Lake County Sheriff’s Department.

  * Known to Whitey as the Teton branch of the Sioux.

  * Now known as Corners Lake. What, are you going there?

  * Known to Whitey as the Chippewa.

  * I still don’t know. Autopsy privacy laws vary by state and are complicated by the fact that the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 protects in perpetuity the privacy of any medical conditions the patient had while alive. Which, it seems to me, would include whatever it was the patient died of. Wasn’t every victim of a fatal bow-hunting accident once just some geek with an arrow sticking out of him?

  * This is evolutionary biology talk, but it’s interesting.

  There are two great schools of junk science in evolutionary biology. One is people claiming to know the specific environmental pressures that led to the development of complex zoological phenomena, like when psychology textbooks say that people hate mimes because striped shirts set off our ancestral fear of tigers. Although that happens to be true. The other is people claiming that complex zoological phenomena can arise without any environmental pressures. Like when biologists call something a “spandrel.”

  Technically, a spandrel is an evolutionary side effect—a trait that comes about not because it raises the likelihood that an organism will reproduce its genome, but as the result of the development of a different trait that does raise that likelihood. Ronald Pies calls a spandrel “a kind of genetic hitchhiker that does nothing to improve the ride.” It’s not that spandrels aren’t real, because they probably are, the classic example being nipples on men—which serve no known evolutionary purpose, so may only exist because nipples are beneficial on women, and get formed at such an early stage of fetal development that it’s easier to just hand them out to everyone. (The same argument used to be made about orgasms in women. I am but the messenger.) Usually, though, identifying any specific trait as a spandrel just means you’ve been too lazy to work out the real reason it evolved. (Or that you’re up to something worse. The history of people trying to judge human traits as either contributory or not to some idea of evolutionary “progress” is horrible, with individuals judged to have “decadent” or “degenerate” traits inevitably labeled as parasites—“a kind of… hitchhiker that does nothing to improve the ride.” Things that have been labeled as evolutionarily useless even though they clearly aren’t include grandparents, gay people, and the appendix.)

  The appeal of spandrels, I believe, is that if things can exist that have a looser-than-usual relationship with cause and effect, then maybe things can exist that have no relationship with cause and effect. Which would mean they were outside reality, and therefore magic. Terms like sublime, supernatural, paranormal, epiphenomenal, etc. do their best to make this sound legitimate. But objects outside reality can’t be studied. And objects mistakenly thought to be outside reality, then shown to actually be within it, instantly become as boring as everything else. By definition, the Beyond stays out of reach.

  * Namely yellow, orange, and red respectively. The presumed benefit being that leaves that reflect more (and absorb less) IR are less likely to catch fire as they dry out. Still, see the footnote here.

  * Mine too.

  * Apparently this is a large amount of energy.

  * Treating STDs on a cruise ship is mind-blowing. It’s like an episode of Iron Chef where the special ingredient is genitals.

  * The role of the security guards is strictly to observe, in case a lawsuit is filed later for which the cruise line needs friendly witnesses.

  * I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t the Aryan Brotherhood—who, sure, want you dead, but only on principle—famous for contracting prison hits to outsiders?” Well, yes, and they’re also famous for fucking those contracts up. If the AB couldn’t kill Walter Johnson in Marion for $500,000 from John Gotti, are they really going to kill David Locano in Florence for $85,000 from me? Plus, come on—sometimes you have to vote with your dollars.

  * Here’s how I know Chris Semmel Jr. and Christine Semmel were good parents: they didn’t name their only child something with “Chris” in it.

  * Guest Footnote by Violet Hurst: Actually, only about half the trees in the Boun
dary Waters have been logged. The reason the trunks of the trees are so skinny is that the area has a natural “burn cycle” of only 122 years, meaning that if the forest were left alone, every part of it would randomly burn to the ground, mostly from lightning strikes, during a period averaging 122 years. The Dakota and Ojibwe peoples managed to live in the Boundary Waters without changing the length of the burn cycle at all, but Europeans shortened it to 87 years through accidental and intentional fires, and then, with modern fire-fighting techniques, lengthened it to 2,000 years. Predictably (in hindsight), a 2,000-year burn cycle has even worse unintended consequences than an 87-year burn cycle, in the form of things like out-of-control insects and plant diseases. Current thinking is that the original 122-year cycle should be restored, but no one knows how to do it—particularly without aggravating the government-subsidized logging industry that still operates in the unprotected parts of the National Forest. You sniffed your fingers?

  * How I know this: Reggie Trager, various supporting documentation.

  * I’m not going to get too far into official and unofficial terminology used by the U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War (according to which, for example, Rear Admiral Norvell G. Ward was the CHNAVADGRU, for “Chief, Naval Advisory Group”), even where I’ve been able to sort it out. But here are the essentials:

  “Ruff-Puffs,” or RF/PFs, were the South Vietnamese Regional Forces / Popular Forces, i.e., the guerrillas who fought for the South as a kind of counterpart to the Viet Cong. According to Reggie, they were required to get tattoos saying “Sat Cong” on their chests to prove their loyalty—“Sat Cong” meaning, depending on the translation, either “Kill communists” or “Boy am I fucked if the North wins this war.”

  A “shitcan” was an STCAN—a boat made by Services Techniques des Constructions et Armes Navales for the French, then transferred to the Americans when the French fled.

  A “commandement” was the shitcan that the commanders of a RAG (River Assault Group) rode on.

  “Dai-uy” was the South Vietnamese Navy rank equivalent to lieutenant.

  And the Cuu Long Giang, aka đồng bằng sông Cửu Long (“Nine Dragon River Delta”), aka “Cool and the Gang,” was the Mekong Delta. The Delta is at the southern end of Vietnam but was vitally important to the war because most of South Vietnam’s population and rice production were there. Since Vietnam is crescent shaped, the more-or-less-straight “Ho Chi Minh Trail” from Hanoi in the North to the Cuu Long Giang in the South cut through Laos and Cambodia, which is the reason the United States gave for bombing those countries.

  * Sorry, one more: “FOM” = France Outre Mer, essentially “French but built overseas.”

  * Psychos are at heart just people who think they’re smarter than everyone else. If they’re wrong it’s a debilitating condition, because education and hard work are galling to them, yet being exposed as unexceptional enrages them. The ones who are actually clever, though—as long as they stick to fields that prize social manipulation and high self-esteem over technical skills—can do anything.

  * “MMVA” must be some kind of motor vehicle accident—“marine” or “moving” or something. Probably not “moving.” What kind of motor vehicle accident doesn’t involve something moving?

  * Don’t get your hopes up. The history of human cryogenics is gruesome, particularly if you’re a Ted Williams fan. There are cases where children have survived without breathing for up to two hours in very cold water, but these seem to have been due to a combination of simple refrigeration and a circulatory response known as the mammalian diving reflex—which in humans, for unknown reasons, falls off sharply after early childhood.

  * Particularly the fantasy I’ve been having where Violet and I are sitting on chaise lounges on what used to be a ninth-floor balcony but is now a landing on what amounts to a private bay because the waters have risen and the world has ended, and she and I—there’s also a parrot around, I might as well say—are playing gin with creased cards and drinking tropical drinks. After which we go inside so I can chase her tan lines across our mysteriously cool sheets.

  * It may seem strange that a former criminal who’s dropped out of the federal witness protection program still has contacts in the Justice Department. But when I first entered WITSEC someone inside the U.S. Marshals’ office tipped off David Locano, who then murdered my girlfriend. And I would dearly like to find out who that person was.

  * When I say I have almost no curiosity about her, I of course exempt the question of how she came to quote Westbrook Pegler in her 2008 speech accepting her nomination as Republican candidate for vice president. (Pegler, a racist so crazy he was expelled from the John Birch Society, wrote among other things that it is “clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry,” and—in 1965—that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert F. Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”) But since Palin has said that she didn’t write the speech, which she gave six days after meeting John McCain for the first time in person (and, according to some sources, as little as forty-eight hours after McCain chose her as his running mate), and since Palin doesn’t seem to have quoted or mentioned Pegler on any other occasion, the questions raised by his appearance in her speech—Did she know what she was saying? Did anyone? If they did, what did they mean by it, and what audience did they expect to understand that meaning?—aren’t exactly personal.

  * What? It was warm out, and my sleeves were tight. No, I was not wearing a tank top.

  * This is what being Jewish has come to, by the way. Everyone you meet either believes the myth that Israel is an apartheid state built on land stolen from the Palestinians and given to European Jews by the U.S. and U.K. to make up for the Holocaust, and wants it destroyed, or believes it but wants Israel to stick around long enough to spark the Zombie Apocalypse. Either way it’s unpleasant.

  * How I know this: The Ely Daily Clarion, various conversations.

  * If I ever have a heart attack, I’ll probably do two hours of material.

  * I’m referring to the camping shit, obviously.

  * Unless that someone is me.

  * How I know this: Conversation with Teng Wenshu (westernized as “Wayne Teng”), various reference books.

  * “Tiananmen” meaning “Gates of Heavenly Peace.” Laugh it up.

  * Yongle’s status as an emblem of cruelty in China seems to come in part from his having sentenced historian Fang Xiaoru to “extermination of the ten agnates.” An “agnate” is a generation, so sentencing someone to, for example, extermination of the three agnates would involve killing them and all their relatives in their generation, their parents’ generation, and their children’s generation. How, precisely, this would work to the ten agnates is unclear, since it can’t be easy to execute someone’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, and if the condemned leaves four or five generations of offspring then it seems like somebody’s not doing their job. But apparently the previous record was nine.

  * It’s an eta, the Greek long “E” sound. “Jesus” is abbreviated “IHS” in the Greek Bible.

  * Then eaten by a fox. I looked it up later.

  * Some time you can’t consciously remember, I suppose.

  * Personally I don’t think technology’s all that bad. If digital devices really do make children less likely to develop the skills and focus to do things like design more digital devices, how is that not a self-limiting problem?

  * For longer answers to these questions, see Beat the Reaper, by “Josh Bazell,” Little, Brown, 2009.

  * I think it’s just this: the sharks I hate and am afraid of are the ones I faced with Magdalena Niemerover years ago. I carry them around, like I carry her around, and no real-life bull shark can compete. I doubt any real-life woman could either, despite any miraculous interlude with Violet Hurst I may or may not have had, and it’s unlikely I’ll get a chance to find out.

  * Reggie’s motives are a different is
sue. I was asked about them numerous times, and had the opportunity to discuss them with Reggie himself. What I think, for whatever that’s worth, is that they weren’t particularly nefarious. Reggie wanted to go live on the beach in Cambodia, and maybe even take Del and Miguel with him. But he probably could have done that with the amount of money he ended up spending on the hoax anyway—an amount he saved up in advance, managing to stay out of debt until the legal fees hit later. I believe him when he says he wanted to honor Chris Jr.’s hoax project and thought there was a chance of finding out who or what killed Autumn Semmel.