index


Message-ID: <40392asstr$1042279814@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: "Sean Farragher" <sfarragher@nj.rr.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Importance: Normal
Subject: {ASSM} TxM6: Journal of Henry Ezra Whitman "Fuck Ethics"
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 05:10:14 -0500
Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail
Approved: <assm@asstr-mirror.org>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d

Journal of Henry Ezra Whitman: "Fuck Ethics"
"PERFECT SYSTEMS LIKE WAR ARE NOT SEXY"
(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






"Honesty is a rash political thought like blowjobs. Don't worry I won't
come in your mouth unless you want it."

"Why worry about cause and result. There's no perfect system. Fuck ethics!
What goes down was. Can't explain it. I guess murder wins. Why did he kill
those girls and cut off their tits."

Henry wrote this in his taxi notebook. Every phrase buzzed in an almost
illegible scrawl across the page.

"I love lies," Henry wrote. "I love truth," he countered.

Never politically correct, Henry also wrote: "I hate gooks. I hate their
slanted fucken eyes. I can't escape them. I dream about them. I don't
give a fuck if they are Japs, Koreans, Vietnamese, Charlie, slopes or
some bottle sucker washer from some whorehouse in Manila; they
can never be trusted. Sneaky fucks, they will slit your throat while
giving you a blowjob. I saw it happen in Nam.

Hooch girl fucked up this old time Sgt looking for some snatch. She
turned him inside out and then stuck him in the neck. He bled to death
while she finished sucking him off."

Silently, Henry hated "that war" as he called it. He claimed it ruined and
saved his life at the same time, but he also knew the easy roads of bigotry
and prejudice were mind fucks.

Knowing right from wrong, fair from bullshit makes it hard to live private
nightmares. In public Henry never wore the racist camouflage. In private,
he seethed with unrepentant anger. In public, he tried to be reasonable and
sometimes passed his own hard test. When Henry was with his best friends
Aaron and Angela, he never descended to that slime. Henry know how to act
in what he called "polite company." He kept up the front. Bigotry disgusted
Aaron yet he loved Henry. He never let Henry blame his rage on Nam. "I was
there too bro," he would say. "You are wasting your life Henry."

Henry agreed with Aaron, but he could not emotionally separate himself from
the sad, disagreeable sacrilege of fucken jungle rot.

Aaron's presence was physical and ethereal. His large abstract
expressionist paintings were subtle visual puzzles that resolved. Henry
loved his paintings. Aaron loved Henry's poetry. When Aaron spoke, you
listened just to hear the spaces within his voices. When Henry recited his
poetry, you saw every image as a new painting of a unique mind. 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 fucken darkie cut me down."

Aaron looked at Henry. "You shit." "Why, you think I care about them when
they cut me off just as easily as any white trash rebel."

In his context of grandiosity and hypocrisy Henry recorded general
conversations in his notebook as testimony.



***


Suddenly, I could hear death clearly like a bell, Henry wrote in Notebook
#63. "All we said was always abstract. Intellectual? No, we were full of
crap. You had to really be there in Nam on the streets carefully propped up
on your toes watching the tree-line for loss."

"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's notes bridged to murder as he pressed pen to the paper losing his
mind in the process of recording his fear as one common requiem. "Murder
was an easy wave of words out of the trenches," Henry wrote.



***



Katherine Dahan Murdered

"I love the thrill of the tabloids," Henry wrote. "There is purity in their
bullshit."

"Murder sets arguments, draws warriors around opinions to leave rhetoric as
a great political river in topography too bare for results. Murderer and
the victim circle each other as victor and the lost. Men kill men murder
woman murder the air. Blood is drawn from the lists of the dead strewn as
toilet paper on top of the shitter. From darkened slights we walk away from
the fight or larger struggle by joining it. No, the disturbance is just and
ironic. 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 nations screwed with
frags?

"We are 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 2003 in disarray. Murder owns war possesses
innocent indifference. If you don't know what you
have done, then you can't defend yourself or make out that you are good. No
one can atone for evil denied or ignored. What is history but one future?

We abstract meaningless paths from the multiples of choice. I live in too
much mental territory. I will paste a newspaper photograph of the murder
victim in my journal.
"How many have been slain," Henry wrote? "No one is certain. Depends on
whose account. The reported killer Abel says one thing and the police task
force another. Always jargon. 'Task Force,' now that's a gem of a term.
Word implies we're doing something. When we are frustrated we seem to build
language to signify our importance. We get to know the players, especially
when they are anti-social so we can vicariously live with them. Still, the
cops don't know the fucken body count or they lie about it."
"Graves Registration did in Nam. Ten Gooks was fifty. A hundred dead were a
thousand. Our dead or wounded were called casualties. No one really died in
country. Acronyms settled in speech to mitigate the stab of the letters KIA
and MIA.  We do love violence and its possibility."

Capitalizing War and underlining Vietnam many times Henry scribbled in his
notebook to obscure fear and guilt from bravery and pride. On the next page
he wrote: "I hate murder," and next to the sentence, he doodled jagged
pictures of the female genitals. Continuing, focused, Henry wrote on the
next page: "I love clean pages, but KIAs mean kissed in action. Acronyms
disturb the dice. Who are the wounded?

We can lie in simple placeholders. Why is the lie the backbone of symbols?"
Skipping to another subject, or perhaps the same one, he wrote, "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. Death and fucking, birth and chastity are idols crumbling on the deck
of sailing ships borne out of the black soot of waves and the heat of
factories where truth is fudged. "Death stinks. She was dead at least four
days. Malodor gags. I laughed. I was a medic in Nam. Only killed a few
gooks."

Henry laughed and wrote, "I was in the service. Lived in Ramstad. I
protected Germany from neo-Nazis Librarians."
Writing that night in the margin of his notebook, "I meant all this as a
joke." It's all up front taxi dribble. You realize that, don't you?"

Digressing, Henry wrote, Bill said the trunk wasn't locked. Couldn't be a
driver. Cops interrogated Bill for twenty hours. Bill said they spit at me
and insisted I was lying. Good thing I was out with five guys drinking and
then my girlfriend. Yes, "Bill had his alibi," Henry wrote. "No one can
escape some blame."

"I am not a killer," Bill said. My girl friend Mary told the cops that she
was fucking Bill when the woman in the trunk of the cab was murdered..

"Yes, he was sucking my pussy," Mary said. "Want to check my cunt?"

Mary Steinel yelled the dirty phrase at the cops. "Leave Bill the fuck
alone. That queer fuck Henry must have done it."

Anyone could have opened the trunk of the cab. Many of the cabs are
unlocked. All you need to do is push the button on the dash or the side of
the door and the truck pops open.

"You should have seen the dead woman, Bill told Henry. He stuffed her with
a plastic cock, and shaved the hair, and all. Dressed her pubis with
lipstick. Must have been twenty fucken Polaroid's scattered in the trunk.
Get this: The killer left letters bragging about the murder and how easily
she died. 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 murder have to do with Vietnam, Henry? Hope my girl friend
doesn't take any of this personal, but she told the fucken truth. My ass
would have been grass had she lied.

"The dead cunt was dressed in plastic, Henry wrote what Bill said. "Her
tits cut out, she was curled up face pushed into the spare tire."

The drivers loved Bill's story about finding the body in the trunk of his
cab. Star for a day or two, "all I did was open a trunk making sure there
was a spare. Just doing my job," he said. "Great risk, right. Opening a
trunk and i sure got myself in shit," Bill settled down in the seat of his
cab on the taxi stand. Next week, he would be telling the story again. He
would never tell the story twice the same way.

Henry continued to write in his journal: "All of them would lie to mark the
dead bitch a speed freak and reformed heroin addict. Dead woman had a
record for prostitution. Clean for five years, she worked as a bartender
and had two small children that her mother raised.

"Who the fuck cares how many murders that shit claims, Henry wrote. "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, explain to the dead why they died early."

Henry threw the newspapers away when he checked after finishing his shift.
He wrote, "keeping score's important. Body counts are essential. Newspaper
headlines that set up the event as a singular act contribute to the fallout
of the murder. "What if I measured the sky inside and out, and planned the
cemetery before the battle was lost. We get tired of deaths during wartime,
and we forget how easily it is to lose both mind and body in one half
second."

"Are we," Henry wrote turning the page again. Writing fast with intention,
"I am just angry and horny. I am sick. War turns me on."

"What else is left? Where's love," Henry wrote the word love like the word
anger.

In these short seconds before dawn, when the artificially lit nighttime GW
bridge stings the river below with hallowed lights, a portal opens and then
closes quickly to allow the victims a moment to be buried.

Yesterday, Henry wrote. "I saw the sky respond with pale death. After a
calm rain and a clearing, the calm, not as calm as when it started, the
sunrise rose in a peach colored haze from the shore of the Hudson River to
the terminator's horizon line at the ridge line of the Palisades to the
tall buildings trapping Manhattan inside the hard aged stones from the base
rocks to the sea.

"My notebook is my sacred fire, and I write it down when it happens. What's
next?"

Henry stopped writing and read what he just had finished. Neither angry nor
sad, he wrote: "You bet motherfucker. If I could have prevented Katherine's
death, I would have. Why are we too late? Suffering seems to be a human
soup made of gristle and blood with loneliness that garnish as the ultimate
boon."









For more TxM6  http://www.seanfarragher.com







XXXX

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| alt.sex.stories.moderated ----- send stories to: <ckought69@hotmail.com> |
| FAQ: <http://assm.asstr-mirror.org/faq.html>  Moderator: <story-ckought69@hotmail.com> |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Discuss this story and others in alt.sex.stories.d, look for subject {ASSD}|
|Archive at <http://assm.asstr-mirror.org>   Hosted by <http://www.asstr-mirror.org>      |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+