“Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne, Rambo, Marshal Dillon?” – Alan Rickman, Die Hard.
When I meet
new people, it will eventually come up that I lived in America for over a
decade. “Oooh, that must have been amaaaaazing,”
(as one young woman put it to me) is basically the tenor of their response. They
ask me where, and I tell them Chicago, and its suburbs. They ask me what it was
like, slightly breathless, glassyeyed, excited, their own USA-dwelling dreams
made jaded, experience-educated flesh right in front of them.
Depending on how my mood is that day, and how diplomatic I am feeling, I will either tell them it was alright, and that America has its good and bad points, like anyplace else. Or I will say the place is a shithole (I said this to a woman I met one time, and she sounded appalled: “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that!” I am chuckling here) and I couldn’t stand it. Both responses are equally valid, and both are equally true.
People will ask me what I didn’t like about it. I mean, I could give you a laundry list (don’t get me wrong, though, America did give me a lot of things Scotland never could have, writing and experience and family-wise, I freely admit) and I tell them that the complete disregard for human life, and the casual violence, were the things that really got to me. This response is also valid, and true.
Man, I could just never get over the gun violence over there, at least in East Rogers Park, where I lived from 2011-2015. The idea that you could get killed by a stray bullet just sitting at a bus stop was just beyond comprehension, so meaningless, so stupid. That tragic event happened in July 2014, just under a mile from my address at 1145 West Morse Avenue. An attempted hit on a rapper (a subject I will be writing in general about soon) went horribly wrong and a bystander waiting at a bus stop was killed:
https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20150130/rogers-park/rapper-targeted-two-shootings-that-killed-others-instead-now-jail/
The two young laddies arrested for it were all of 15 and 17 years old, and those ages are hardly unusual in Chicago gun and gang violence:
http://chicago.homicidewatch.org/2014/08/04/update-two-more-held-in-photographer-wil-lewis-murder/
I just learned, in researching this, that another innocent bystander, who had been in Chicago for all of four hours to go to college, was also tragically killed at a bus stop by a stray bullet in 2018, just over a mile from my old Rogers Park address:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/killed-hours-city-mother-phd-student-fatally-shot/story?id=57590455
I moved from East Rogers Park to North Ridge Avenue in Edgewater in February 2015, which would be my final address before moving back to Scotland in March 2016. The catalyst for me moving hoods was a double shooting I will go into more detail in a minute. But four months after I moved into Edgewater, a young black gang member with an ankle bracelet was murdered at a car wash he was working at by a guy who just walked in, shot him several times, then ran off. The car wash is a hundred yards from where I was living at the time, and the murderer ran off down the side of a car park right next to my building:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/edgewater-shooting/1996424/
In 2015, six months after I moved from West Morse in East Rogers Park, there was a young guy shot and killed in the building I had been living in. I was told he was thrown in a dumpster out the back of the building after being shot in the head, but news reports dispute that. I hope it's not true, for his dignity, and that of his family. The photo in the news story below is that selfsame building, and my apartment was the one on the second floor (first floor to Americans) whose window you can see behind and just below the sign on the telegraph pole to the right:
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2015/08/19/man-found-shot-to-death-in-rogers-park-apartment/
Then in 2016, five weeks after I moved back to Scotland, a woman was shot in the head in an SUV just literally across the street from where I had been living at my last address in Edgewater, and half a block from the gang-related car wash murder of the previous year:
https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160502/edgewater/edgewater-shooting-kills-woman-21-police-say/
Now. I am only talking about those murders specifically because they occurred so frighteningly close to where I lived, to give you an idea of the kind of strange, abstract fear of death that floats through your head when living in a place where people get murdered all around you all the time. I would be walking down the street and think damn, I could get shot to death by some random nut or gang member for no reason at all, by accident or design. It was disconcerting, and it really got under my skin.
I could give you many more examples of gun violence just from the last few years in Rogers Park alone. Moving from a country with no gun culture into one that gleefully revels in its psychopathic obsession with weaponry was a massive culture shock I never, ever got over in all the time I was there. The first place I lived in when I moved to America in 2005 in the Chicago suburbs was called Morton Grove, and it was relatively safe; ironically, it was the first town in America to ban the possession of handguns in 1981. This ban was, unfortunately, overturned by various jubilant gun-masturbating psychos in 2008, and I remember being offended by that at the time:
https://reason.com/2008/07/31/chicago-suburbs-repeal-their-h/
And what can you say about complete and utter madness like the following? "It's all legal & fun — No permits or licenses required!!!!" (see article) Indeed.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27399337/ns/us_news-life/t/boy-accidentally-kills-self-gun-show/
Still, it keeps gun manufacturers in business, I suppose.
And funeral homes.
Of course,
Scotland disarmed itself after the vile Dunblane massacre in March 1996. So it
was really weird to go to a primary school (grade school in America) and see an anti-handgun sign on the
door, then go into the gymnasium and remember what the scum Thomas Hamilton had
done to the poor kids in Dunblane in their school gym. That random gun death
thing is always in your mind over there. I’m not sure if it’s as bad with
people brought up in America, they probably don’t even notice it, and different
areas of the country will be different violence-wise. But I would say it’s
definitely one of the contributing factors to American paranoia and gun
obsession.
There is a kind of magical thinking at play in America about being shot: “It won’t be me, it will never happen to me”…until it happens. Every person ever shot in America by some loony probably repeated that exact same internal mantra at some point…and they were all wrong. What can you say, for example, about an insane country that sells bulletproof backpacks for children?
https://tuffypacks.com/
Or builds hiding places from bullets into the walls of their new schools?
There is a kind of magical thinking at play in America about being shot: “It won’t be me, it will never happen to me”…until it happens. Every person ever shot in America by some loony probably repeated that exact same internal mantra at some point…and they were all wrong. What can you say, for example, about an insane country that sells bulletproof backpacks for children?
https://tuffypacks.com/
Or builds hiding places from bullets into the walls of their new schools?
https://www.newsweek.com/newly-built-high-school-was-designed-hiding-places-curved-hallways-make-things-harder-mass-1455827
Or sells fucking kitty litter for terrified kids to shit into during long lockdowns with an active shooter at their school?
https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-schools-issuing-buckets-kitty-litter-students-go-bathroom-during-lockdowns-school-1455261?fbclid=IwAR0A4Trb9c_SF4T6nx188sdLpeDFVcpYYCisTefxw4e2W1fKgTwLLKQTPis
And you want to tell me any of this is sane? It's absolute fucking lunacy. Listening to reports about mass shootings held a kind of morbid, disgusting fascination. Various deranged freaks would immediately jump out of the woodwork after a shooting screaming about how they wished they were there, spewing deranged “good guy versus bad guy” shit they learned from rubbish cowboy films, and how they would have been proud to shoot the shooter. America is basically one huge open-air insane asylum and murder fantasy, where flesh-fearing, religion-sodomised natives want to kill somebody else to commit vicarious suicide because they are so fucking miserable in their own lives. Take, for example, that mass shooting at the Batman film in Colorado in 2012:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora%2C_Colorado_shooting
You had the usual pack of mouth-frothing madmen salivating over the thought of having been at the scene with a gun and taking out the shooter. But can you imagine somebody in a dark cinema full of tear gas and running screaming crying flying dying people shooting at the shooter? Can you imagine how many more innocent people would be killed before this gung-ho fuckhead potentially killed the killer, if they didn’t get shot themselves by some other gun-wielding loon who thought they were the shooter? It’s an Escher hall of mirrors and multiplying horrors stretching out into the infinite distance, and there’s not a shred of logic or sanity in any of it.
“I've been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe
you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you
know that you're insane? Maybe you're just sitting around, reading "Guns and Ammo", masturbating in
your own feces, do you just stop and go, "Wow! It is amazing how fucking
crazy I really am!"? Yeah. Do you guys do that?" - Brad Pitt, Se7en.
It’s all just mentally ill freaks who grew up watching too many violent films, with the genocidal murderous myths of the Wild West in their fevered schizoid minds, wanting to shoot somebody. It’s something these hopeless, unhappy people wait for their whole lives. And sometimes they very occasionally get their chance, but the amount of (sneer) ‘good guys’ killing mass shooters as they are on the spot with a gun is vanishingly small in comparison to the numbers killed by mass shooters.
I’ll give you a perfect example of what I am talking about. In 2014 in Chicago, I saw the Australian comedian Jim Jefferies do his skit about gun control (two words akin to ‘child molester’ in American gun fetishist circles) in Chicago live (“You’re bringing guns to a drone fight!”):
I’ll give you a perfect example of what I am talking about. In 2014 in Chicago, I saw the Australian comedian Jim Jefferies do his skit about gun control (two words akin to ‘child molester’ in American gun fetishist circles) in Chicago live (“You’re bringing guns to a drone fight!”):
When it went online, it created a storm in America, with the usual pro-and-anti-gun, cold dead hands gibberish babbled, including death threats. What is interesting about Jefferies is that he moved to America round the same time I did, and you can just hear some of the same stuff that went through my head – and that of other immigrants to America no doubt – popping up in his material over the next few years. Met and had a drink with him a couple of times years ago. He’s more settled in now, a father, and seems to have stopped trying to rattle America’s cage as much. Probably partly cos he was scared fucking shitless. In his show Legit, you could see his fear of getting murdered entering his material during a stand-up skit in the running time. But watch the footage below, from where he’s on some radio show, and listen to what the jock talks about, and how he talks aboot it. At the start he’s talking aboot wanting to shoot some invaders who broke into Jim Jefferies’ home:
The guy cannot wait to shoot somebody! It’s disturbing, and totally typical. What kind of person happy and secure in themselves harbours a desire to hurt others? America is a country that has never gotten over its violent birth, and never will…because it doesn’t want to, and loves and masturbates to violence, and hates sex and life in general. This inarticulate murderous rage is what happens when you take people who don’t speak the same language from all round the world, sling them all together in one country for a couple of hundred years when they have nothing in common except breathing and chasing money, have no real social net, nobody cares aboot anybody else, they don’t truly assimilate, and they don’t like or trust each other. Easier just to shoot somebody who doesn’t look or sound like you than try to understand or reason with them.
And if I sound like I am being cunty on this subject, speaking in generalisations….so what? Fucking sue me! What are you going to do, shoot me? I’m just getting all this shit out of my system permanently by writing it down. When I first moved to America, I read a lot of books aboot the sociology and psychology and popular culture of the place, to try and get a bit of a bead on where the fuck I had ended up, as it was so utterly alien and confusing to me. The whole gun thing was – is – utterly incomprehensible to me, as it is to any sane person. Gun-loving Americans just don't fucking get it, tragically, and probably never will. Sighing. There is no disputing this. There are non-gun-lovers in America too, and they are roundly, soundly shouted down by the crazed flesh-loathing gun wankers all the time who reserve the right to be shot to eroticised, self-mythologised death by some freak with a fucking Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle.
The irony of all this is that some Americans like guns because it makes them feel hard (physically and sexually), and sneer at people who don’t like or own them. It’s ironic because, in hiding behind their big bad cannon, they are showing they are small, weak, fearful, pathetic, and probably lacking in the penis department if they’re male. And by the way. Absolutely none of this is soluble. People in the gun control ‘debate’ just scream at each other, and nobody hears a word the other side howls. America is far too in love with easeful, ballistics-blasted death to want it to be solved and the NRA, a terrorist organisation putting profits before human lives, would never let it be solved either. If you want to read up a wee bit aboot all that Second Amendment shite aboot militias and such, and how they fucked it over for fun and money, here’s a teaser taster:
https://theunitedstatesblues.com/nra-changed-second-amendment/
All you can ultimately do is shake your fucking head aboot it all and let the mad cunts get on with it, and stay as far fucking away from it all as you can. Though the Americans have exported their violent, murderous domestic violence round the world, in the form of their foreign policy (biggest military in the world, bro! Awesome!), so what happens in that country is only mirroring them blowing brown people off the globe for fun and profit and orgasm. You can’t talk to many Americans aboot gun control, or even banning semi-automatic weapons, because that raises their paranoia loud and proud. “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands,” and all that ludicrous and pathetic John Wayne horseshit. ‘Murica, dude! Cos you can't argue with insanity like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFLj3DeKT-E
And every white American should own a gun. Because, deep in the heart and mind and guilty conscience of every gullible white American (read: a good many from either side) there lies a ludicrous paranoid fear that black people in America are going to rise up and kill the whipcracker honkies because of slavery. I mean, it’s a ludicrous proposition at best, psychotic at worst, but it’s still a valid salient factor in American gun paranoia and ownership. And their grovelling self-abasement in identity politics as well, but that’s a whole other kettle of pish I am not getting into here.
Like a shadow in
the dark
Except when I unload
Except when I unload
You see a spark and jump over hesitation
And hear the scream of the one
Who got
the lead penetration
Feel a little gust of wind and I'm jetting
But leave a memory no one'll be forgetting" - N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton.
Feel a little gust of wind and I'm jetting
But leave a memory no one'll be forgetting" - N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton.
Anyway, after that cage-rattling interjection…where was I? Oh aye. Chicago, guns, murder, violence, gangs, drugs, poverty, racial segregation. When I was living in Chicago (Morton Grove was completely different – the suburbs and city itself are chalk and cheese), apart from the usual don’t-shoot-me magical thinking, I have to say I was not scared to walk the streets at any time of the day or night, even coming home from the Oasis along the road after it closed at 4 a.m. The reason for this is disgusting, disturbing, tragic, and completely indicative of the racist mindset of America, or at least of Chicago and many other places. If a black gangbanger kills another black gangbanger there, they’re regarded as collateral damage in gang drug warfare.
Of course they’re not, they’re human beings, pure and simple, and it’s deeply tragic, and their friends and family and community cry for them. Black impoverished self-genocide is a modern outrage. But if a white person is mugged or killed by a black gangbanger, then the full force and might and fury of the police force descends on the area, and they’ll do their damndest to find the killer. Which didn’t stop them from finding the sick and evil wee serial killer fucker who killed two people randomly in a square mile radius of where I was living in East Rogers Park, in 2018, mind you:
http://loyolaphoenix.com/2018/10/rogers-park-gunman-hasnt-been-seen-in-area-since-murders-police-dispel-rumors/
It’s a sobering thought to think that could have been you, just walking home and shot dead for no reason whatsoever except probably skin colour by some random murderous gun nut. Which is why an event that occurred in August 2014 convinced me that I should move away from the area, and at least try to get to someplace slightly better. I was driving home down Morse one Sunday when I had to take a detour, because the street was blocked off by the police, notorious yellow “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” tape fluttering like death-omen symbols everywhere, cops milling, investigating, supposedly serving and protecting, walkie-talkies crackling, onlookers milling, tongues cracking, theories and half-facts flying.
Aha, I wonder who’s been shot, I thought, cos that, in a way, is how blasé you become aboot complete insanity on your front doorstep. Back here in Falkirk, this would have caused an uproar, but there it was simply business as usual. And I mean almost literally on your front doorstep - I was a hundred yards from home (not that I ever truly regarded the place as home), and detoured off to try and find a parking spot, which could be difficult at the best of times. I found out what had happened shortly afterwards. Two people had been walking down the street just in front of the Morseland (a bar where the owner skipped out owing a hundred grand in taxes in 2012) and been shot:
http://loyolaphoenix.com/2014/08/shooting-wounds-morse-red-line-stop/
After some scary, incredibly freaky shit that had happened in my building in 2013 (which I will get to in another blog post soon) I decided this was the last fucking straw for me, and I was going to get the Hell out. I didn’t renew my lease in the shithole I was living in when it finished in February 2015, and moved to Edgewater, just two miles from where I had been staying. Still, the place was a wee bit better (or so I thought until the car wash murder!) and my apartment was much bigger there, a two-bedroom as opposed to just a studio. I was glad to get the Hell out of East Rogers Park, cos it was just getting too scary.
Anyway, time moved on. On July 14th 2015 (I wrote aboot it on Facebook and just looked back to check the date), on a typical Chicago summer hot summer day (random fact: in Chicago, come spring, shooting murders creep up, having slowed over the winter, because it’s too cold and snowy for people going out), 80-odd degrees, I drove down to the beach in Rogers Park. The four-minute walk to the water was one of the only things I missed aboot the place. I went down to Juneway Beach, right by 7755 North Sheridan, where Vivian Maier, the oddball photographer who become famous posthumously, had lived at the end of her life:
I had been fascinated by the documentary when it came out, where art met disturbing voyeuristic pathology, because her North Sheridan address was just over a mile from my old West Morse one, and I had gone along to where she lived to take a couple of photos of the building:
Anyway, time moved on. On July 14th 2015 (I wrote aboot it on Facebook and just looked back to check the date), on a typical Chicago summer hot summer day (random fact: in Chicago, come spring, shooting murders creep up, having slowed over the winter, because it’s too cold and snowy for people going out), 80-odd degrees, I drove down to the beach in Rogers Park. The four-minute walk to the water was one of the only things I missed aboot the place. I went down to Juneway Beach, right by 7755 North Sheridan, where Vivian Maier, the oddball photographer who become famous posthumously, had lived at the end of her life:
I had been fascinated by the documentary when it came out, where art met disturbing voyeuristic pathology, because her North Sheridan address was just over a mile from my old West Morse one, and I had gone along to where she lived to take a couple of photos of the building:
Anyway, I was just aboot to encounter another fascinating story from Chicago’s dark history.
There was a heavily pregnant white woman in her late twenties lying sunning herself near me on the beach, and I struck up a random conversation with her, what with being a pregnant woman fetishist and all. Chuckling. We got talking aboot this and that and the other, the usual. At one point I told her I had lived in Rogers Park just a mile along the road, but had moved away five months earlier because of two people getting shot with the same bullet just a hundred yards from my front door.
“That was me and my boyfriend,” she said, stunning me.
“What? What happened” I was shocked and flabbergasted and couldn’t believe it, for obvious reasons. I mean, what are the chances of encountering one of the two specific people involved in a random conversation on a beach a mile away from where it had happened, just under a year later?
She said she was pushing her boyfriend down West Morse Avenue in a wheelchair cos he'd injured his ankle, when some gangbanger fired a shot far up the road in some altercation. The bullet had sailed down the street, gone right through her back, and grazed the side of her boyfriend's head after exiting her chest. They were both lucky not to be killed. She was in intensive care, but, obviously, pulled through.
She was bringing out a book of her poetry, and she showed me the cover on her phone. It was a photo of the dress she was shot in, covered in blood. She'd put it up against a light and there was light streaming through the hole, beautiful and symbolic and cleansing. She said they gave her the plastic bag the dress was in and she opened it up when she got out of hospital. She then said I was probably going to think her weird for saying this, but it smelled good when she opened it, like watermelon or something, and maintained a decent smell for a couple of days before going sour.
“Well, at least you pulled through and you have this new life in you to look forward to, to help you forget,” I said, mind completely blown. What are you meant to say to something like that? You have no precedent for it.
“Yeah, my child is due on the first anniversary of my shooting, which is also my mother's birthday.”
Guess that will be, according to the news story I linked to here, August 31st. The child will have been born in 2015, so will be four-and-a-half years old. Unfortunately, I never got the woman’s name (I am really bad with names upon meeting new people, something that embarrasses me constantly), and none of the reports I can find on the internet aboot the horrifying incident mention it, or her boyfriend’s for some reason, maybe legal. She was an illustrator, and had done some illustrations for a self-published children’s book with the text by some guy.
She said it wasn’t very good, but went to her place nearby and gave me a copy, which was really kind of her. As I recall, it was aboot the adventures of some cartoon frog. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the book, and left it, along with a lot of other stuff, in Chicago when I moved back here. Said it wasn’t done under her current name anyway. God how I'd would love to know how that story ended, how she and her boyfriend and child are getting on. She probably wouldn't want the publicity, but it's still a helluva fucking story. I hope they’re doing well, and are happy. I don’t think it’s possible to get a stranger, more cosmic, more gut-wrenching-cum-heartwarming story aboot American gun violence than hers. It encompasses meaningless random gun and gang violence, bystander injury, life and near death through shooting, recovery, moving on in life (she did not seem bitter, though could not wait to move out of Chicago, for obvious reasons), and art as therapy.
It was so strange living in East Rogers Park, and Edgewater. You would sometimes hear a gentle quiet random popopops series in the middle of the night, and you'd know it wasn’t the firecrackers it sounded exactly like. You’d wonder if you would hear aboot any new murders in the local media the next day. You always did. Chicago and America never disappoint on that violent death-bringing stormfront.
Unfortunately.
Can any of this madness and pain and horror be overcome without a radical overhaul of the American psyche, an addressing of their emotional inarticulacy, obsession with violence, and overthrow or reeling in of the National Rifle Association? Your guess is as good as mine, though I doubt it. I’m just glad I don’t have to worry aboot getting shot for no reason walking down the street anymore, personally. I wonder how many died in Chicago tonight? RIP to all the lost murdered souls of the greatest nihilist country in the world.
THE (NEVER) END
Addendum: For anybody interested in the horrible subject, Michael Moore does a pretty decent job of dissecting some of the root causes of gun violence in the USA in his 2002 documentary Bowling For Columbine. Though he can be pompous and annoying sometimes, he’s especially good in his analysis of the connection between US corporate and domestic violence, and the effect on the psychology of the American citizen by the purposeful-fear-inducing media:
Can any of this madness and pain and horror be overcome without a radical overhaul of the American psyche, an addressing of their emotional inarticulacy, obsession with violence, and overthrow or reeling in of the National Rifle Association? Your guess is as good as mine, though I doubt it. I’m just glad I don’t have to worry aboot getting shot for no reason walking down the street anymore, personally. I wonder how many died in Chicago tonight? RIP to all the lost murdered souls of the greatest nihilist country in the world.
THE (NEVER) END
Addendum: For anybody interested in the horrible subject, Michael Moore does a pretty decent job of dissecting some of the root causes of gun violence in the USA in his 2002 documentary Bowling For Columbine. Though he can be pompous and annoying sometimes, he’s especially good in his analysis of the connection between US corporate and domestic violence, and the effect on the psychology of the American citizen by the purposeful-fear-inducing media:
And this is a great, deep-dish article by the excellent societal and psychological analyst Mark Dery aboot a few of the topics discussed here, with far more depth and clarity than a random person who lived in the USA for only a few years could ever hope to come up with:
https://thoughtcatalog.com/mark-dery/2011/01/gun-play-an-american-tragedy-in-three-acts/
Addendum 2: Fascinating update on that Rogers Park shooting story:
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