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From: "Sean Farragher" <sfarragher@nj.rr.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} TxM6: The Murder of Katherine Dahan --  Taxis, Vietnam and Serial Murder 
Date: Sun,  5 Jan 2003 17:10:18 -0500
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TxM6: Journal of Henry Whitman: Talking Death on the Taxi Stand
The Murder of Katherine Dahan -- "Perfect Systems"
(c) 2003 Sean Farragher
sfarragher@nj.rr.com



http://www.seanfarragher.com
http://www.seanfarragher.com/hyperfiction
http://www.seanfarragher.com/txm6
http://www.seanfarragher.com/Joss
http://www.seanfarragher.com/poetry





ON THE TAXI STAND: Friday, October 4, 1991


"Honesty is a rash political thought like blowjobs. Why worry about cause
and result. There's no perfect system. Fuck ethics! What goes down was.
Can't explain it. I guess murder won. Didn't they kill those girls and cut
off their tits."


Henry wrote this and what followed in his taxi notebook. Phrases buzzed his
mind as he often told the other drivers on the stand when they questioned
him about why he carried so many pens, notebooks and books with him.

"Shit," Henry answered. "Look in the bag. There is a camera a voice tape
recorder. I come prepared to use my waiting time in this piece of shit
cab."

Speaking about gooks, Henry wrote. "I still hate them. I do not want to see
their slanted fucken eyes. I dream about them. I don't give a fuck if they
are Japs, Koreans, Vietnamese or some bottle sucker washer from some
whorehouse in Manila. Now, if they are cunts, that's different. Henry would
speak this way on the stand to the other drivers just to keep his rep up
with them. Henry never spoke that way, nor really cared about gender or
nationality. He believed in himself and the easy roads of bigotry and
prejudice were deeper mind fucks. Actually, no one really knew what Henry
believed. He may have been a fucken racist bigot. He was. If you pretend to
be honest, then the image is a lie.

Who were they? What if someone had asked that question before slaughtering
millions of souls? Perhaps for penance we should help them hide the bones
of the dead to preserve their ancestors.

Henry knew how Aaron would have answered.

Abstract expressionist painter and Henry's companion, Aaron married Angela
when she was 20 and he was almost 40. Henry and Aaron shared Angela when
they all desired more than simple adventures.

Aaron, very different than Henry, would never use a racial slur or mock
anyone. When Aaron confronted bigotry, he stared it down. It disgusted him
and he let the person know. Aaron and Henry often fought about this issue
and Henry avoided that subject when Aaron was close.

Aaron's presence was physical and ethereal as speech becomes. When Aaron
spoke, you listened just to hear the spaces within his voices. We have no
program, Aaron could say. He would never have called anyone a racist or
sexist name.

What the fuck do ... you mean, Aaron asked, stunned when he heard Henry go
off on some black taxi driver who cut him off going on the stand. Henry was
angry. "Drivers should stick together. This nigger just cut me down, Henry
said.

Aaron looked at Henry. "you fucken asshole"

"Why, you think I care about niggers when they cut me off just as easily as
white trash."

One thing Henry liked to do on the taxi stand. He wrote down recent phone
and general conversations. He recorded them in his notebook as testimony.

Suddenly, I could hear it, Henry wrote in Notebook #63.

"All we said. Always abstract. Intellectual. You had to really be there on
your toes. Can't measure an atom, or design a mathematical function to
describe perfectly a single electron as it waves it name or form across the
arch of any bridge. What the fuck can you know?"

Henry bridged to murder. Recent press story about the murder of Katherine
Dahan had caught his eyes.

"Simplistic, you bet, to continued monologue. Murder (or do you mean a more
general death) sets arguments, draws warriors around opinions to leave
rhetoric as a great political river in topography too bare for results.
They really mean victory. Men murder men murder woman murder each other.
Blood drawn from fists, from the darkened slights we have arranged, just as
we walked away from a fight or larger struggle. No, the disturbance is
just. We are right, aren't we, I asked no one, as I set near the black
stone Vietnam wall memorial in DC. Now, that's a marker for wounded darling
nation screwed with metabolic frags?

"We are the fucken friendly fire. No one else is out there. Hands slit
brains for games and sport as the Brits said on the line defending Belgium
from the Huns; as the Huns did, dissecting the Hapsburg state, dissolving
Ottoman maps still, in 1896 or 1996, in disarray.

Murder owns war owns innocent indifference. If you don't know what you have
done, then you can't make out good let alone atone for evil. What is
history- but one future? We abstract meaningless paths. Too much territory,
I know, as I paste newspaper photograph of another murder victim in my
memorial book. What number ten or nine? They're not sure. Depends on whose
account. Genesis killer Abel says one thing; task force another. Always
jargon. Task Force, now that's a gem. Says we're doing something. Building
language for self-importance. Got to know the players now. Still, they
don't know the fucken body count or they lie. Graves Registration did in
Nam. Ten Gooks was twenty. A hundred dead were a thousand. Our dead or
wounded were casualties. No one really dies in the fabric of the
imagination, Henry wrote drawing a picture of a cunt in the margin of the
notebook.

KIAs meant killed in action. Acronyms disturb the dice. Who were the
wounded? They don't know if Catherine Dahan is number seven or eight. Ask
her? She likes to ride in cabs. Found her body in the trunk of Car #4. Bill
Drexler found her. Opened his taxi trunk to check for a spare. Five thirty
AM. Almost morning. Drank his coffee anyway. Need a drink. Why I asked him.
Never saw a dead person before? Not even a wake? No that's different.
They're fixed up.

Don't stink. She was dead at least four days. Stink shows all. I laughed.
Too bad you didn't have a chance in Nam, I laughed. I was in the service,
he said defensively. I was protecting Germany from neo Nazis. Said it as a
joke. Just like that. Yes, it was plain up front taxi dribble.

He said the trunk wasn't locked. Couldn't be a driver, Drexler added. Cops
questioned Bill for twenty hours. Told him he was lying, tried to trick me.
Good thing I was out with the guys drinking with some babe until work. Work
her up, dragged her ass down to the station.

"She was scared. I am not a killer," he said. Bill's girl friend wasn't
sure, but Bill was home. Yes, he was fucking me, she said. "Want to check
my cunt?"

She yelled the dirty phrase at the cop. "How do I know who you fucked this
bitch lady cop yelled back at my girl friend. Leave me alone." You're not
worth it she said when we left. Don't call.

"Fucken dead cunt cost me a bitch, can you believe it."

"Usually not," I said.

It is too easy to open the trunk, ignoring the driver-victim.

"You should have seen her cunt," cop said.

He stuffed it with a plastic cock, and shaved the hair, and all. Dressed it
with lipstick. There was fucken Polaroid's everywhere, and get this: He had
letters. I

Bill read one while he waited for the cops. Something about Vietnam, the
letter said. You were there, right Henry.

Yes, Henry answered.

"What does this all have to do with Vietnam, the guy was truly fucked up.
Lost a bitch and I did nothing wrong. Fuck it. Plenty to go around, I
guess. Sure liked her. At least she told the fucken truth. My ass would
have been grass had she lied, and said I was not at her place, Bill
thought.

Maybe she'll call later, who gives a fuck. The dead cunt was dressed in
plastic. Her tits cut out, Bill continued, face up. Placed like a womb,
dressed in plastic bags, open to expose the artistry? The drivers loved it.
Bill was a star, the hero who did nothing but open a trunk.

Great risk, right? Opening a trunk. Yea. What can anyone do? "Count the
missing fingers and tits," you fuck, Henry said.

Fourteen? Four? Seven? Eight Bill answered the drivers. He was their hero
for the hour.

Henry continued to write in his taxi journal.

"All of them would lie to mark the bitch druggie. She was also pregnant.
She had no record. Honest woman. Worked as a bartender. No drugs. Got it on
good authority? How many are gone. Four, no three was one answer.

Find the bodies, Henry thought?

"Who the fuck cares how many that shit claims? Ten. Twenty. Does it matter?
If it is more than one then it is truly fucked up. Dissect murder to stop
it. Analysis solves problems. Right. What does understanding mean?

Nothing, really. Explain death. OK if you're not the victim. Tell her the
number. Think she cares?"

"Where do I keep my place, I asked myself, as I threw the newspapers away,
under glass, not intended for retrieval? I know. Keeping score is
important. Body counts, essential. Newspaper headlines contribute to
murder."

"What if I measured the sky inside and out, and planned the parties like a
planned the black crust as a monuments grown from routine deaths."

Henry measured the sky inside and out. He planned the black crust as a
monument grown from routine deaths. He did this out of some perverse habit
to help those who are the most fucked up dick heads in the fleet.

"Are we," Henry asked, "just angry misplaced silly childhood crayons? Are
we anointed with teachers who want an easy lesson plan today, so they let
the kids play with the crayons at will. That way the teacher can nurse her
migraine.

Am I Henry wrote "anointed by simplistic gods with too obvious an erotic
palette?

"Raw sex is not violence! Rape is not sex; it's terror, and another marker,
compulsion is a foil for lust. What else is left, where's love," Henry
Whitman rhetorically asked.

While Henry watched the rooms evolve into some safer more free of stress,
He created his latest epiphany: in that few short seconds before dawn, when
the artificially lit nighttime GW bridge as a portal opened and closed
shrunk and expanded all the victims won passage homeward.

One morning after that acceptance, Henry saw the sky respond.

After a calm rain and a clearing, the calm, not as calm as when it started,
sky turned gray and green with a peach as the subtle over color on the
terminator's horizon line.

Henry spoke quickly to himself, using this speech memory to hold what he
thought for later.

"My notebook is my sacred fire," Henry sputtered laughing. I did see my
taxi on fire, Henry wrote. I did see death and little ports on the top for
eventual escape.

What's next, Henry asked himself?

There's another fare at the foot of the bridge plaza. Hope so! Fucken A as
his grunt buddies lit up another bong, and we let it go, diddy-bopping
away.

"That is what we pretend. We do love our ghost-time, walkabouts. We remain
foolish to wastrels.

"You bet motherfucker. If I could have prevented Katherine's death, I would
have stopped her. We are always too late when it comes to death as a
suffering human soup with ultimate loneliness as boon."















XXX

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