a look back on how the carnage committed by 2 people I once knew led me into thoughts of war and to a man by the name of Vaclav Havel:
DOWN THROUGH THE YEARS, MY OWN...
DOWN THROUGH THE YEARS, MY OWN...
CURIOSITY HAS CARRIED ME TO MANY places. I've paid rent in Fargo and Houston and New York. I've written articles and a book and stage plays in New Jersey and California and Texas. There was always a world out there and I wanted to see it. People out there I wanted to get to know. And due to my own curiosity, I was about to meet one of them.
It began on a cloudy January morning in 1979, immediately after I had finished interviewing A.J. Foyt, the automobile racing driver, when he suggested that I might be interested in writing an article about the former wife of one of the employees at his Chevrolet dealership in Houston, informing me that she was about to go on trial for the murder of her second husband, and that he could make arrangements for me to meet with her before the trial began. I was instantly fascinated by the attractively-petite young woman, as well as the unusual circumstances surrounding the murder itself; and was eagerly awaiting the opportunity of sitting through her trial.
Her name was Diana. She had been accused of shooting her common-law husband Lloyd through the head as awakened one morning after a good night's sleep, dragging his corpse out into the garage, hacking his body apart with a chainsaw into 5 rather grisly pieces, then stuffing him into several hefty trash bags before her 2 children came home from school. Diana then prepared dinner for her children, read them a story, tucked them safely into bed, lugged Lloyd's remains into her Cadillac trunk, then coaxed her first-husband Bernie into babysitting the children while she hauled the body 1,300 miles from Houston to San Bernardino over the next 24 hours. Bernie would later testify under oath that he was totally unaware of the reason for her rather unexpected trip. Upon her arrival, Diana's hope was that her father would lend a hand in getting rid of the corpse by burying the remains beneath the trees of his orange grove stand. After the initial shock had worn-off, her father did what any sane father would do: he immediately handed his daughter over to the local authorities. She was then flown back to Houston in order to stand trial.
Within a week, Diana was acquitted, due to the skill of an able attorney who claimed she had been suffering from dissociative amnesia and was completely unaware of what she had done. It was a year-and-a-half after the trial had come to an end that Diana married for a 3rd time, and Bernie vanished into thin-air. On the night he went away, it seems that Bernie had managed to loot a large sum of A.J. Foyt's money out of the Chevrolet dealership's safe, apparently attempted to call me that evening, and I wasn't home. When I arrived back at the house, the police were there waiting for me. They quickly brought me up-to-speed on what had transpired at the Chevrolet dealership, informed me that they had traced his last known call to my number; then inquired as to why I thought that he would do something like that. I gave them the same answer I have given to this day: "I did not know." And yet, I truly do believe that he may have had some sort of a confession to make, and regret that I had been out for the night...
...Eventually, I would write a play about this rather lurid tale called Miles to Go, which was produced in London and at the Samuel Beckett Theater in the City of New York.
Shortly thereafter, another story came my way through a lawyer who happened to be a very good friend of mine, as well as an associate to the attorney who had earned Diana her acquittal. His name was Emmett, and this story involved a man that he knew by the name of Steve. In theory, Steve was a former soldier and DEA Agent who I would, in due course, cross the Texas-Mexican border with in order to take a peek at an nuclear weapon which he said had been taken from an East Coast armory and transported into Mexico. He had been sent by our government to disarm the weapon, which had been scheduled to be sent to Cuban rebels, who intended to destroy the Castro regime. I initially thought that he was either lying or exaggerating, but went along-for-the-ride in order to see it for myself. It turned out that he was telling the truth.
I not only actually saw the bomb: Along the way, we also had banditos shoot at the two of us, fended-off a pack of rabid coyotes, he taught me how to track animals and toss a Bowie knife in order to nail a rabbit on the run, just in case we got hungry and needed a bite to eat. We eventually stopped to see the most glorious sunset I have ever seen as it hung above the village of Boquillias del Carmen on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, as we were heading back home to Texas. Although most folks I knew thought I was insane to have done something like that, I wanted it in my resume...
It began on a cloudy January morning in 1979, immediately after I had finished interviewing A.J. Foyt, the automobile racing driver, when he suggested that I might be interested in writing an article about the former wife of one of the employees at his Chevrolet dealership in Houston, informing me that she was about to go on trial for the murder of her second husband, and that he could make arrangements for me to meet with her before the trial began. I was instantly fascinated by the attractively-petite young woman, as well as the unusual circumstances surrounding the murder itself; and was eagerly awaiting the opportunity of sitting through her trial.
Her name was Diana. She had been accused of shooting her common-law husband Lloyd through the head as awakened one morning after a good night's sleep, dragging his corpse out into the garage, hacking his body apart with a chainsaw into 5 rather grisly pieces, then stuffing him into several hefty trash bags before her 2 children came home from school. Diana then prepared dinner for her children, read them a story, tucked them safely into bed, lugged Lloyd's remains into her Cadillac trunk, then coaxed her first-husband Bernie into babysitting the children while she hauled the body 1,300 miles from Houston to San Bernardino over the next 24 hours. Bernie would later testify under oath that he was totally unaware of the reason for her rather unexpected trip. Upon her arrival, Diana's hope was that her father would lend a hand in getting rid of the corpse by burying the remains beneath the trees of his orange grove stand. After the initial shock had worn-off, her father did what any sane father would do: he immediately handed his daughter over to the local authorities. She was then flown back to Houston in order to stand trial.
Within a week, Diana was acquitted, due to the skill of an able attorney who claimed she had been suffering from dissociative amnesia and was completely unaware of what she had done. It was a year-and-a-half after the trial had come to an end that Diana married for a 3rd time, and Bernie vanished into thin-air. On the night he went away, it seems that Bernie had managed to loot a large sum of A.J. Foyt's money out of the Chevrolet dealership's safe, apparently attempted to call me that evening, and I wasn't home. When I arrived back at the house, the police were there waiting for me. They quickly brought me up-to-speed on what had transpired at the Chevrolet dealership, informed me that they had traced his last known call to my number; then inquired as to why I thought that he would do something like that. I gave them the same answer I have given to this day: "I did not know." And yet, I truly do believe that he may have had some sort of a confession to make, and regret that I had been out for the night...
...Eventually, I would write a play about this rather lurid tale called Miles to Go, which was produced in London and at the Samuel Beckett Theater in the City of New York.
Shortly thereafter, another story came my way through a lawyer who happened to be a very good friend of mine, as well as an associate to the attorney who had earned Diana her acquittal. His name was Emmett, and this story involved a man that he knew by the name of Steve. In theory, Steve was a former soldier and DEA Agent who I would, in due course, cross the Texas-Mexican border with in order to take a peek at an nuclear weapon which he said had been taken from an East Coast armory and transported into Mexico. He had been sent by our government to disarm the weapon, which had been scheduled to be sent to Cuban rebels, who intended to destroy the Castro regime. I initially thought that he was either lying or exaggerating, but went along-for-the-ride in order to see it for myself. It turned out that he was telling the truth.
I not only actually saw the bomb: Along the way, we also had banditos shoot at the two of us, fended-off a pack of rabid coyotes, he taught me how to track animals and toss a Bowie knife in order to nail a rabbit on the run, just in case we got hungry and needed a bite to eat. We eventually stopped to see the most glorious sunset I have ever seen as it hung above the village of Boquillias del Carmen on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, as we were heading back home to Texas. Although most folks I knew thought I was insane to have done something like that, I wanted it in my resume...
...But due to the secretive nature of this little adventure, governmental restrictions prevented the story ever being published and it remains tucked-away somewhere within my filing cabinet.
It was, however, because of that journey into Mexico and back that I began to think about war, of Vietnam; the place where Steve had served. I realized that I had been alone in the vast wastelands of Mexico with a man who was apparently a real loony-tune. He enjoyed telling colorful and somewhat disgusting accounts of the people he had slaughtered, informed me that the war he had fought in had taught him to kill with ease and dispatch, and that he rather enjoyed doing it, adding that would not mind doing it again if he could find another war to fight. At that time, the war he had fought in Vietnam was a foreign place to me, but the presence of that war had led our country into the ominous year of Watergate and the steady decline of our economy in 1973 - the war was lost. It should have been the task of statesmen to arrange its conclusion with some dignity. They could not bring it off.
There were other wars too, which began to fascinate me: a long, grieving drizzle of a war in Northern Ireland; a dirty little war in Nicaragua; the horrendous civil war in Lebanon. In Beirut and Belfast, the killing was entangled with the dark certainties of religion. In Nicaragua, a similar impulse was in play: adepts of the Marxist faith fought against the hired acolytes of the anti-Communist faith, Sandanista against Contra, sometimes brother against brother. As a former minister, that began to bother me.
The warring creeds were everywhere in those places, each driven by visions of utopia, each prepared to kill or die to bring their version of God into existence. In all three parts of the world, the common result was more than human misery. I found myself trying to understand the motives of the various players, why they were slaughtering others in the name of whomever it was that their God happened to be, but most often I found myself in agreement with E.M. Forester's famous remark: "I do not believe in belief." From Bosnia to the Persian Gulf, human beings still killed each other over belief.
Ten years after Diana's trial had come to an end and my sojourn with Steve was over and done with, I witnessed one of the greatest changes in the streets and squares of Prague in 1989 on my television set. In a matter of days, the brave men and women of Civic Action led by a writer named Vaclav Havel, brought down the Communist regime. They did it by speaking truth to power. Human beings were free at last, and in spite of having once been in the company of 2 folks who seemed to enjoy killing other people, perhaps with men like Vaclav Havel, there was hope for mankind after all, and even if it was only via my TV set, I was glad that the entire world had a ringside ticket to his show...
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