The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

didn’t think it was right to deny myself the chance of causing someone to die either, especially someone whose existence meant so little to the world and to herself. At the time, taking someone’s life seemed like a necessary growing and learning experience, like losing your virginity or having a child. I began mapping out different ways I could carry out my threat to Nancy with the least possible risk to myself. Was there someone I knew who was so desperate that they’d kill her for fifty dollars? Or could I do it myself, perhaps push her in a lake and pretend it was an accident? Maybe I could sneak into her apartment and poison her food? This was the first time I had ever seriously considered murder. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I called the one person who I knew was an expert: Stephen, our keyboardist, who we had started calling Pogo at this point because neither Madonna nor Gacy seemed to fit his personality and Pogo was John Wayne Gacy’s clown nickname.
    I asked Pogo everything there was to know about murder and the disposal of bodies. I wasn’t going to accept any other alternative. She had to die. In my mind, I built her into a symbol, a representation of everyone who had ever tried to possess me or control my mind, whether it be through Christianity or sex, and I wanted revenge—compensation—for the boy they had warped and destroyed. Pogo and I went about this task very meticulously. We plotted the perfect murder, with not only no evidence that we had been involved but no evidence that there had even been a murder. We followed her, cased out her house and figured out her routine before coming up with the solution: arson.

    P OGO
    That Thursday night, Pogo and I put on all black (which wasn’t that much different from how we usually dressed); filled a shoulder bag with kerosene, matches and rags; and drank some courage at Squeeze. Before leaving the club, I phoned Nancy to make sure she was home. As soon as she answered, I hung up. We were on.
    She lived in an area of town called New River, underneath a bridge that sheltered much of Fort Lauderdale’s homeless population. As Pogo and I neared her house, a black vagrant chased after us. “Hey, what is this, Halloween?” he yelled as he approached, the fetid stench of his breath signaling his arrival. He had a large gold-colored ring across his knuckles that spelled out his name, Hollywood, and he kept telling us about the drugs he had for sale. The fact that he looked like Frog, the kid who had beaten me up at the roller-skating rink, only served to compound the hate I felt at that moment and add to my determination to kill this girl.
    But Hollywood kept following us, all the way to Nancy’s door. Pogo and I looked at each other. We didn’t anticipate there being a witness in this deserted neighborhood. The look we gave each other was a question mark: Do we kill him, too? Or do we abandon the plan for tonight?
    We decided to walk around the block and pretend Nancy’s building wasn’t our destination. But he kept trailing us and trying to get us to buy crack. If I had known better at the time, I probably would have taken him up on the offer.
    As we neared Nancy’s house a second time, we heard sirens. Two fire engines whizzed by, followed by a police car and an ambulance. We were so tightly wound that we fled in the opposite direction, leaving Hollywood, Nancy and New River alive and unscathed.
    I’ll always wonder if Hollywood was some kind of messenger, a portent of the better things I had to accomplish. Because after that night, I became too paranoid to kill Nancy, too scared of getting caught and sent to prison. I woke up to the fact that I had told too many people of my hatred for her, and even the best plan Pogo and I could come up with wasn’t good enough to protect us from chance events like passing police cars. So I set about harming Nancy in a way that could never be traced back to me. In every malicious moment of my waking day, I visualized her destruction, her misery, her disappearance from Fort Lauderdale and my life. I walked down the streets enveloped in a cloud of hatred. For a curse, Satan and The Necronomicon weren’t necessary; the power was within me. And the next afternoon, after telling Carl (the only friend she had left) that she was breaking up with him, Nancy disappeared.
    Instead of holding this against me, Carl began emulating me. Perhaps it was his way