Too scary. Happens too often. Once is too often but it happens more
often than that. In the States, Australia, Europe. Do people in 3rd
world countries kill their kids or is one of the maladies of privilege?
Happy families are all alike, unhappy ones wind up on the police blotter?
A few years ago a Snap of mine, one of my first...a man who was a ritzy
suburban Jersey house-husband, out of a job, wife has the hot New York
job. Poor bastard kills their kid, then walks casually down to the
railroad, lays his head on the tracks, timed so the next train can't
stop before it beheads him. I dated the damn thing. It's really the
story Max tells in a context of Basking Ridge, NJ.
Star-Ledger, 10/1/03
(for Lynda Hull)
Not another yawnful knock on an easy target,
but a glimpse behind the stucco, a finding:
the moldy guitar, worm-eaten beneath the shored-up porch,
million dollar houses harbor the lives
we'd love to think belong in trailer parks.
A former investment bank executive
has not worked since late 2000.
After his death his former employer
will not disclose the reason they separated.
One may be married to his job
but business divorce is a private horror.
So he has, still, the high-priced house,
a beautiful wife with a UN job,
he spends his days keeping pace and losing groud,
running up credit card debt,
and caring for their young son.
Perhaps he cannot ask.
And if he can, what matter?
Community dissolves: cancer
is more easily handled than unemployment.
Lose your job, you are a Death's Head,
the fate awaiting others who cross the street
when you walk toward them.
So he floats adrift on the raft of the Medusa
and sees at last her snaky hair,
his heart turns not to rock but magma.
He strangles his son, age seven,
walks to the local railroad station,
hears a train, kneels on the tracks before it
as though in worship of this final God
of his eternal deliverance.
When his wife arrives home from New York
she is met at the door by local police.
"Ma'am, maybe you better sit down."
Suburban brickface crumbles,
porches rot, there is no music left.
Don't recall if I ever mentioned this, but Jersey seems the breeding
ground for imaginative writing about unimaginable things. A man named
Alan Saperstein published a book in 1985 called "Mom Kills Kids, Self"
that was never turned (AFAIK) into an HBO special, a theater movie, or
even made it as a best-seller. If you want it from Amazon you have to
get a used version. Man works in New York, arrives home (Montclair, NJ)
on Friday evening to find a house of carnage: his wife dead by suicide
after murdering their children. The books is his mental "trip" as he
sits in their home over the weekend, immobilized by grief and memory. I
read part of it. It was too hard to handle: at the time my wife was a
stay-at-home mother with two young boys. To this day I am thankful she
was (relatively) stable.
We didn't have a dog.
Ken
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