A FEW SEMI-COHERENT, RANDOM THOUGHTS ON SUICIDE

I am never surprised when someone commits suicide. Whenever the subject comes up, I always say I’m surprised more people don’t kill themselves. I don’t know if this makes me a sociopath, a realist, or an asshole. Probably all three...

When I heard last week that an old friend shot himself, I had this sudden, blinding  sense of the kind of pain you have to be in to aim a gun at your own head. And a second later - more like a half-second - I got this rush of up-from-the toes shame at the rank arrogance of thinking I could ever, on any level, know the pain another human is in.

For that matter, who’s to say it is pain? Maybe it’s exhaustion. Sadness. Or maybe, this being America, money worries - that general, all-purpose regret that gnaws like a pack of rats at your fucking frontal lobe every minute of every fucking day. (But enough about me….)

My father, I was told, did not leave a note when he pulled into the garage, at the ripe age of 49, and left the motor running in his Oldsmobile. I like to think he had the ball game on. But who’s to say if a Pirate rally in the ninth could keep a man from Hara Kiri? Speaking of, novelist Yukio Mishima – subject of a truly mind-blowing film by Paul Schrader - actually did take himself out the ancient Japanese way: ritual seppuku. As described by Kirsten Cather, author of a strangely riveting book called Scripting Suicide in Japan, the practice involves self-disembowelment by a short sword, followed by decapitation with a long sword at the hands of whoever you corral to do you the final favor. “Hey man, listen, I know this is a lot, but if you’re not doing anything Tuesday, I was hoping you could do me a solid and slice my head off after I unpack my intestines…” (For my money, still not as bad an ask as a ride from the airport.)

 As an ignorant American, scion of suicides young and old, the idea of ritualizing the act, seppuku style, packs a certain dramatic appeal. Though I know, if I tried, I’d fuck it up. Would somehow discover, at the last moment, I’d picked a prop sword, and end up trying to pluck my guts out with a nutpick while my buddy stands there checking his watch. I’m not good with tools….

The point is, Mishima left no doubt as to why he committed the act. He wrote 35 novels, 25 plays, eight volumes of essays… All of it, on some level, one long suicide note. The author pined, like the rest of Japan’s extreme right, for a return to his country’s former military glory. (Though he’d faked an illness to get out of serving, he loved to pose for photos of himself dying, often in battle.) In 1970, Mishima, along with other far-right figures, tried to topple the government and return the nation to its long-ago power. When the coup failed, the author did what he thought was the honorable – if unimaginably brutal – thing: he gutted himself, in public. (As opposed, say, to blowing a coup, then just screaming the whole thing was rigged for the next four years. And no, we don’t know what kind of ratings the self-disembowelment snagged.)

Anyway, forgive the digression… The whole point is that you just don’t know why people commit suicide if they don’t tell you. If they don’t leave notes. And – God rest her tortured soul -  my mother never mentioned there being a post-it note on the dash when she found her husband. Then again, my father didn’t talk much. As a child, before I even knew the word, I knew the old man was depressed. Like his father before him…. Why wouldn’t he be?  I’m no cytogeneticist, but – at least in my family – there is no question a gift for misery is passed down, like mismatched nostrils or hammer-toe, from generation to generation. Close your eyes, and you can almost picture the droopy Depresso Chromosome, slumped-up and woebegone on the bench alongside the normal-dormal DNA: all the ambitious, go-get’em, Put Me In Coach! genes waiting to jump right into life and keep things perking along. 

Which begs the question: is it worse or better when suicides explain themselves? Well, listen: I had an aunt who threw herself out the 38^th story of the Pittsburgh Hilton. This was decades ago. (I think it’s an Omni now.)  The window, according to the cops, opened in, and ran horizontal half the length of the room. So my aunt, who was what my Jewish relatives called “zaftig,” would have had to struggle, for God knows how long, to squeeze her body out of the hotel room and into the air.  That struggle, to me, is the note. It tells you everything.

In the immortal words of Clifford Odets, “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.” Which makes sense. Though I prefer the line from Italian poet and novelist, Cesar Pavese, “No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.” Something he said before he deliberately OD’d on barbiturates, distraught over a bad affair with actress Constance Dowling, shortly after completing his masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires. Like his fellow Italian, the writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Pavese survived hell but - ultimately - could not survive what came after….

All heartbreaking. If not shocking. But what are we doing here? One wrong move and I’m going to wake up on Viktor Frankl’s lap….. (And if you haven’t read Frankl’s post-Auschwitz masterpiece, Man’s Search For Meaning , you’re cheating yourself.)

At this point, a normal reader can not be faulted for thinking “ENOUGH! I’m confused…. You start off talking about a dead friend, then start babbling about your father, then veer off to a militant gay icon in post-War Japan before careening to your tragically depressed, slightly overweight aunt and a couple of Italo geniuses… I mean, seriously, all I wanna know is who’s your friend? Who are we talking about? I WANT A NAME!...”

To which I say “Never mind! Doesn’t matter!” A response, I hasten to mention, based on the grotesque appropriation of celebrity death on social media, where somehow everybody with an Insta, X or BlueSky account is best friends with whatever Big Name, or semi-Big Name, just happened to keel over. It’s a great way to up your own real estate, name-checking the celeb who’s too dead to turn around and say, “Shut the fuck up,  I met you once in an airport nine years ago… ”

I will note, for the record, my newly departed friend was not someone I talked to often. The last time I saw him, over a year ago, he was gracious enough to interview me live, for a book launch, in an actual bookstore. About as thankless a gig as you can imagine. (Short, of course, of the whole help-out-with-my-decapitation deal.) The fact that we rarely hung out, in some strange way, made us much tighter. Consider Henry Miller’s great definition of friendship: A real friend is somebody you might see once every ten years – but when you see them, you can’t stop talking.

Exactly!

My late compadre and I had that kind of friendship. Come to think of it – I don’t know if it’s me or the zeitgeist – that’s pretty much the only kind of friendship I have. (Even before Covid, I was trying to work my way up to isolation.) Weeks, months, years might go by between speaking with this friend or that. Then comes the out-of-the-blue-call and, two hours later, you can feel the 5G tumors sprouting in your brain like mushrooms after rain from staying on the fucking i-phone so long. (Am I only one who can hear the whine from distant cell towers at three in the morning? Is that the cancer crying?)     

But wait… What I need to mention is something I learned researching Nazis a few books ago. The SS, in their pre-death camp days, sometimes referred to themselves as “exterminators.” They would go from village to village, dispatching  their “vermin” - Jews, Gays, Gypsies, Politicals, Jehovahs Witnesses etc… - by shoving them in the back of a truck, then running a hose from the exhaust pipe back in to the sealed compartment where their victims were crammed. Hose in place, the Germans then drove the gas vans from town to town – or town to grave - en route pumping fumes from the tailpipe directly into the their victims’ lungs. Until, of course, the screams ceased, the pounding stopped, and the payload expired. 

All of which is horrific (overused word) enough. But the victims’ appearance, after they succumbed to carbon monoxide, is even worse to contemplate.

What happens is that high levels of carboxyhemoglobin in the bloodstream turns the deceaseds’ cheeks and lips cherry red. So victims appear to be wearing rouge. Indeed. The Nazis, not known for their humor, found the whole process of gas truck murder hilarious. Soldiers called the corpses schlampes, or tarts. You can guess where this is going….

Much as I don’t want to, I can not help think of my own father, newly expired behind the wheel, skin glowing as though someone just slapped him with Covergirl blush. A thought, I’m not going to lie, that makes me want to claw out my amygdala, soak it in Liquid Plumr, set it on fire and shoot it back into my eyeballs until they explode in chemical flame….

Separate issue: what is it that makes human beings obsess on things that will only drive them insane? Anybody? See, bad enough I’m thinking about this, there is an even worse angle to contemplate. Because - as I have a sinking feeling I’ve written elsewhere - this is surely the sight that greeted my poor mother (she of the lifelong Lucille Ball do) the fateful morning she stepped into the garage to find my freshly gassed father looking lipsticked and rosey-cheeked in the driver’s seat. I mean, what goes through the mind at a time like that? Oh my God, he’s died and turned into a drag queen?

Once I learned about the gas trucks, that’s exactly how I imagined my mother reacting. And I felt bad about it. Mind you, I never really got along with the woman. (Though, full disclosure, I did feel a certain connection when I found out, a year before she passed, that she’d been working the rest home doctors, saying she lost her prescription, then getting a replacement, then conning the pharmacy for another one, and trying to cash all the different scripts to get more pills. How could I not feel a surge of pride? That’s my Mom! But that’s a different story for a different time…. ) Let’s just say, after the old man killed himself, his grieving widow, during the last month I lived with her – I was sixteen, and out of there - was wont to lock the doors of our house from the inside, then scream that she knew I wanted her dead, and now she was going to make me watch her die…. She did this so often, the Pittsburgh PD would show up and roll their eyes. Until one day, when she yelled – “I took pills and you’re going to watch me die!” -  I didn’t call the cops. I didn’t do anything. Just mumbled something like “Fine… Yeah…. Whatever…” And drifted into the other room to watch television.

Because, really, what is TV for?