The Killer Inside Me: The Candid Confessions of your Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer

Catch me, catch me, if you can, for when the sun goes down I shall kill again, and again and again. Now, not all of you need to worry for I am not a random serial killer. I am not a believer in the “my-mother-told-me-to-pick-the-very-best-one-and-you-are-it” style, which to me is a disgrace to my glamorized profession. No, being an educated man I select my victims with a rigid set of methodological principles that is entirely too complex for the sane mind to comprehend. Therefore I have reduced this formula to layman’s terms so all you morally righteous pinheads can take good warning. Simply, if you mess with me your dead … dead as a doornail … eating dirt … swimming with the fishes … flushed into the haunting abyss of nothingness. Take some comfort in the fact that death is eternal life; a life filled with darkness and decay, but eternal life nonetheless.

Now before you think I’ve booted reality out of and welcomed insanity into my life, allow me to share with you a “real” experience I had just the other afternoon. While waiting in line at the Pak-A-Sak, methodically leafing though one of those mind-bending word finds, guess who I saw bagging my groceries? Yes, it was no other than the lizard king, Jim Morrison. That’s right, the Peace Frog himself was going to bag MY creamed corn and MY Sharkleberry Finn Kool-Aid. “Paper or plastic”, he crooned as only Jimbo can. He then stopped bagging, glared at me, and grabbing my arm with his dirt-filled fingernails whispered into my eager ear, “Death makes angels of us all, gives us wings where shoulders were, smooth as ravens’ claws… Have a nice day and thanks for shopping Pak-A-Sak.” So take heart you cowards, if Jim who loved life more than anyone can enjoy the luxuries that death can brings, by golly so can you.

I am not looking for the fame or notoriety that my profession can bring. I am not a pathetic wienie that kills for some false feeling of importance or some self-serving radical cause. I have cable, so my life is very fulfilling. No, I kill because there are just some people in this world who should die. My victims are not war criminals, ruthless dictators, or mad bombing terrorists. Those guys mean nothing to me other than faces I see in the news. My victims have committed personal atrocities against me and are punishable by death in anyway I, being of sound body and mind, deem appropriate. What you are about to hear is not pleasant. At this time I would like to issue a Parental Advisory Warning to all of you parents whose kids think that years of watching Roadrunner cartoons have braced them for the grim realities death can bring. In other words, “Beep-Beep, get the fuck out of here.” For those of you with inquiring minds and strong stomachs that are left, it is time to begin.

I know that killing is in my blood, for I have been killing people for many years now. I would like to start by taking a long journey down memory lane to those wonderful, formative, and imaginative childhood years that have left rosy-red rainbow memories in all of our hearts. I had a fairly normal childhood. My dad was an emotionless, corporate workaholic and my mother a disgruntled, pill-popping housewife, two real lovebirds. I also had a brother and sister, both about the same age as myself, and we had lots of fun playing Duck-Duck-Goose, Mother-May-I, Smear-the-Queer, and all those other warm, imaginative and educational childhood games. Of course that is until I killed my sister. You see at age seven, my sister, being a year older, was bigger and stronger than I was. She used her physical superiority to dominate my younger brother and I. She would take our toys from us, scrape her veggies on our plates, chase us around the yard with doggie-doo on a stick, and perform other unspeakable acts of childhood cruelty. Despite these intolerable injustices, I stoically restrained my anger and frustration until one day she crossed the line of decency. You see, back in the day I was a skilled finger-puppeteer. Finger puppets were my sole passion in life. My sister was very jealous over the standing ovations and countless accolades my craft had brought me. One day she had enough. She snatched my favorite finger puppet, Grover, off my middle finger, and then she walked on down the hall, yeah…. And she came to a door…it was the bathroom…

“Brother”

“Yes, sister”

“I’m gonna kill him”

Little did I know Grover was to be giving his last performance. She stretched her arm out to display Grover just out of arms reach.

“NEAR”, she said teasingly.

I swung desperately to save him but, alas, it was hopeless, for my arms were too short. She began to cackle wickedly. She then tossed him into the toilet and proceeded to flush.

“FAR!” she screamed.

Mortified, I gazed into the bowl only to see his inanimate blue corpse swirl into oblivion

“This is the end. My rubber blue friend the end.”

A part of me was lost that fateful day. My first experience with death had left me numb, destitute, and impervious to all feeling. I stayed awake for two nights plotting my revenge. She had to be stopped before she killed again. I remembered hearing something from the Bible in Sunday School class about an “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, and decided to put it to good use. I lured my sister into the bathroom by telling her that the Tidy Bowl Man had a present for her. As she peered down into the toilet I quickly slammed the lid on her head and began flushing wildly without abandon. One, two, three, four, five…. 2000 flushes later she was gone. From her pigtails to her Pooh slippers, she was sucked into the slimy sludge of the sewer forever. For many years afterwards, when you flushed that toilet, you could hear her ghost rattling against the tank. I soon learned that by jiggling the handle a little it would frighten her off, and the rattling would cease. My parents hung up a few “Lost Child - $50 Reward” posters all around the neighborhood, which seemed like a small bounty compared to the $100 reward the Petersons’ were offering for the return of their cat. No one ever found out what really happened to my sister, and after a few weeks, no one ever asked. As for me, I learned an important lesson that day – if you feel your life would be a lot easier if someone wasn’t in it, just do away with them. They say you always remember your first kill, and even though I was only 6 years old, I remember it like it was just yesterday. But there were other memorable kills as well.

I had my eighth birthday party at a place called Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre. Chuck E. was a big gray mouse that entertained all the kids while everyone waited for pizza. All my friends were there, and I was so excited. It was going to be the “bestest” birthday party ever. But unfortunately it seemed Chuck E. was having domestic problems at home, and he came to work an hour and a half late and half-drunk. By this time, the pizza was cold, my friends were bored, and I was pissed. When he finally did show up, he was in an ill mood. He came over and sung the lamest version of Happy Birthday I have ever heard, handed out autostamped pictures of himself, and then the dirty rat left the room. Boy was I steamed. I excused myself from the party, grabbed an empty pizza pan off the buffet table, and followed him out the door. There he was, sprawled out on the back steps, smoking a cigarette, not even thinking about how he spoiled the birthday party of a cute little ten-year-old boy. I took the pan and smashed him on his snout until he looked more like a Picasso painting than a lovable, oversized, pizza-pushing mouse. I took the pizza pan inside and grabbed one of those foamy hammers used in that “Smash the Gopher” game and placed it in his mangled paw. I never liked that game because it encouraged cruelty to animals. The next day the headlines read “Troubled Pizza Mouse End It All With Foamy Mallet”. As I reflect back on it now, I can say it wasn’t my favorite birthday party, but it certainly was the most memorable. Besides, it was my party and I could kill if I wanted to.

My killing ceased until I reached my college years. The stress of working and going to school took its toll on me, and I was growing tired of the intolerance coming from both ends. Don’t ask me why but I was taking one of those pointless Political Science classes my sophomore year. Fifty percent of the grade in that class was on the big end-of-the-semester research paper. In usual fashion, I forced myself to stay up all night to finish that paper. It was early morning when I was finally done and I had an hour to kill before turning it in, so I figured I would watch one of those morning news shows to keep me awake. I laid out on the couch and was watching Willard when I fell asleep and woke up an hour late for my class. I raced to campus in a panic and went straight to his office. I handed him the paper and explained to him about my untimely misfortune. He just looked at me and said that he couldn’t help me and that I would have to settle for an “F” in his class. Dejected I turned away and headed out the door when I saw a box of chalk sitting on his bookcase. I worked too damn hard on that paper to have nobody read it. I grabbed the chalk and crammed twenty pieces into his mouth, and one up each of his hairy nostrils. I then commenced to read my entire paper to him, as his face turned every color in the rainbow and even a few Crayola colors too! I have to admit he was a very good listener, for he not once interrupted me. I’m not exactly sure, but I think he died somewhere between the Cold War and the New World Order. Anyway, I ran his body thru the school’s paper shredder, which of course is located in the basement of the Political Science Building. I dumped his remains in a recycling bin with a bunch of old newspapers. You know, now that I think about it, he always said he wanted to write a book. Well, now he probably IS a book. Funny how things work out, isn’t it.

As I have said before, those college years were really tough, and it seemed like the harder I worked the more stressed out I became. I had been busting my hump in a hot greasy kitchen for four years when a few years later I was up for a raise. My kitchen manager told me he really appreciated the hard work and dedication I was putting in, and that I should expect a “whopper” of a raise. Wow, I was so happy. “You know, it’s nice to be appreciated”, I thought. When I got my next paycheck I saw just how big my raise really was – a whole dime an hour – that adds up to a “whopping” four dollars a week. Furiously I marched back into the kitchen where he was in the walk-in cooler pulling out all the rotten meat to use in the Soup O’ the Day. I grabbed a meat mallet and clubbed his noggin like it was a baby seal. I dragged him to the slicer where I proceeded to slice him into fifty, precisely weighed six-ounce portions. I mozied up to the front lobby and wrote on the Special’s Board:

Manager’s Special: Mystery Meat Surprise – Six heaping ounces of fresh savory meat, sliced thin and piled high on a Kaiser Bun. Specially priced today for a whoppingly low price of only four dollars!

In his honor I used the feet, the hands, and a few other miscellaneous extremities in the Soup O’ the ay, for he always used to tell me, “Barry, a good chef never lets anything go to waste.” I never tasted the special that day because I’m just not that twisted, but it was a big success and I heard it tasted like chicken and was especially tasty with country gravy.

After only eight years I finally graduated from college and received my diploma in the mail. O what a joyous day! I was so excited that I called my pop. He must have been holding back the tears when he said, “It’s about time, get a damn job.” I heeded my old man’s suggestion and began working on my resume that night. Midway through my second 40-ounce it was completed. If there’s one thing college taught me it was how to put a masterpiece together in a short amount of time (just ask one of professors that’s still alive). I was so pumped about joining the “real world” that I mailed my resume the next day to the local newspaper. Three weeks went by until one day I received a thin envelope back from them. Inside was an impeccably well-written rejection letter. It stated “your resume will be kept on file until a position that best suits your talents and abilities becomes available.” I had to settle for a job at the Post Office to keep the courtesy callers from MasterCard at bay. I was becoming disgruntled. Six months went by and I decided to resubmit my resume to the newspaper. I received the exact same rejection letter two weeks later. Man, was I steamed. In my cover letter I expressed I would be happy with ANY position, and that I didn’t mind starting at the bottom. I guess I was a little dejected that the hamster pellets weren’t dusted off my resume when the position of dropping shampoo samples in the bottom of the Sunday paper opened up. I suppose my having an English degree had some factor in that decision making process. I mean hiring someone with an English degree at a newspaper would be depriving them of their lifetime ambition to become Senior Fry Daddy at the local KFC, right? I had a theory and so I set out to prove it.

I changed into my gorilla costume from last Halloween, then grabbed my boombox, bookbag, and a balloon and hitchhiked over to newspaper headquarters. When I arrived I grabbed my stuff and thanked the Governor for the lift. Inside the lobby, the receptionist was extremely busy drawing a clown on her Etch-A-Sketch.

“EEP-EEP… EEP-EEP…Dammit EEP-EEP already!” I said politely.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She said apologetically. “I’ll bet you’re here about the customer service position, aren’t you?”

No, I have a monkey-gram for the editor!” I shouted to the rafters. “By the way, that clown is most impressive. Say, you wanna banana?”

She shot me a look and then buzzed me in. I two-stepped into the editor’s office. He lifted his head up off his desk, smoothed the sleep creases from his face, and gazed at me with childlike amazement.

“Oh Boy! A dancing monkey!” he squeaked as he clapped his hands furiously.

I tied a big happy face balloon around his finger and put a Ziggy party hat on his head. I then hit the play button on my boombox. Within seconds we were both gyrating to the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive”. I have to admit I was definitely cutting the rug, however my dimwit partner could of used a few pointers from Arthur Murray. What a spaz! He was soon in his own world, dancing all over the office. When he broke out into the Marcarena I knew that showtime was almost over, so I emptied out my bookbag. As soon as he broke into a rendition of the moonwalk that would have had Neil Armstrong cursing the day he ever came back to this planet, I broad-sided him with Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Before he could roll his eyes back into his head I smacked him in his nose with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, boxed his ears with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Generation of Swine, and finished him off with a massive blow to the back of the head with the hardback edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He had no reaction, no emotion, and no pulse. As the blood poured out of his nostrils like the Red Sea, I laughed inside because I had proven my theory – he wouldn’t know good writing if it hit him in the head. I looked around the office for a way to dispose of the body, and for a moment I thought I had finally made the big mistake that would get me caught. But divine providence must have been smiling on me that day for in the back of the office I saw a closet with a sign that read “Resumes on File”. I heave-hoed his body into the mountains of paperwork and buried him with the hopes and dreams of English majors everywhere.

Now, there may be those of you who think I’m a sick twisted fellow, or who may fear that you could be my next victim. The only people on my list right now are Mr. And Mrs. Daisy, a deceivingly sweet old couple who like to drive their powder blue Cadillac down the freeway like their the grand marshals of the rose bowl parade. Obviously they haven’t had their drivers licenses renewed since the Civil War, and someone needs to put a stop to it before innocent people get hurt. So fear not you spineless cowards, for I am a sane man of principle! I do not kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Just always remember to treat other people with respect, fairness, honesty, courtesy and compassion. If those seem like hard rules to live by then my advice to you is to gather ye rosebuds as you may, for tonight will be your last.


PEACE!!!!