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Kroll’s hands lay slack on the table as if he meant to abandon them there. I wondered what an investigating judge was obligated to do about a man like Kroll, and whether, in calling me to this cafe, the judge now shirked her duty or bent to it. 

The cafe was still shuttered against scorching daylight, now dimming. Soon the night markets would open: divining beetles, sea-petroleum, delicate bottles of attar of orange. A skink without a tail darted up the wall. 

“You’re very quiet,” the judge said. “Have I mistaken myself in you?”

The judge needn’t have worried; my autobiography of Kroll would not lack color or incident. Kroll had traveled, and that could go into the book, as could the melancholy of the packet-boat, and waking cold and disconsolate in grimy pensions. A stranger here, Kroll had been overcome by “a disease of the will,” as Kroll had called it. I wondered whether there still issued from Kroll some few of those small, threadlike goings-out which could be called hopes but are actually something subtler and more various, largely hidden, hardly coming up to the bearer’s awareness; we are all of us burred with them; they lend to our souls a kind of slubby nap against which others stick or glide with pleasure or aggravation, other people, also projects, objects, events of a certain order. This napped or ridged surface of ourselves is delicate as the flanged underside of a toadstool. It is subject to collapse, in certain lives. It is crushed.

 “You appear to have depths,” the judge said. “But don’t wear them out. No one likes talking to someone who doesn’t like talking.” 

“I am new to this city,” I said. 

“That can’t be helped, can it?” said the judge. “Immerse yourself; recollect; report.”

From outside came the shouts of water-sellers and lottery-foreseers working the knots and queues of stalled autobus traffic. 

“We know where you’re staying,” said the judge. “You’ll be contacted about payment.”

Kroll rose from the table. 

“Am I expected to begin now?” I asked. “How?” 

We kept pace, Kroll at first wavering as if to consult my pleasure in choice of paths. Then he struck a tangent off the ring road, uphill from the harbor and the nighttime souk, along a narrow street lined with corrugated-metal shacks and dead-fronded jacarandas. The book could begin here, with Kroll marching uphill as toward a destiny, perhaps to perish in some strange and somber way. Or let it begin later, on the downslope, as I followed Kroll along a dirt path that ended on a litter-strewn canal-bank. 

The open secret of the so-called sparrows’ meeting place was in all the guidebooks. Some of these particular sparrows looked runty or otherwise plain, as if in flagrant spite of their legend. I hoped this meant the bar was low enough for Kroll to join in—I so wanted to see him hailed or even merely slapped—but he lingered on the edges of the group. The sparrows had come here to play a complicated game. There were no monomaniacs among them; instead, the sparrows had inherited a picture-language, a dramatics, which they wielded with scorn. What mattered was not to declare oneself, nor to lose oneself, but to be seen to operate the picture-language with disdainful ease, the better to gesture to still other schemas, other contents: rich, inexpressible, well known. By twos and threes sparrows would depart for the dark. Gravel skittered down the scree. 

Kroll lingered, forcing me to linger, too, in appearance even more furtive than Kroll. I looked down at a puddle; I thought about fetid water’s integrity as a body, its durable skin. I could not stand to look up from the puddle and see Kroll: his dumbshow of awkwardness, his further dumbshow indicating that this awkwardness was only a costume, that underneath lay passions like anyone’s, like everyone’s. Most painful to me was Kroll’s apparent pride in having concealed from the sparrows what was in truth not at all concealed: that his awkwardness was hateful to him, that he himself was hateful to himself, and that he hoped—in this he was still young—to be proven wrong. It was not sophistication that separated Kroll from the sparrows, or not only. 

Kroll edged closer to a group standing around a trash-barrel fire. Like Kroll, I braced myself for his rejection. How could the sparrows not notice his incompetence, his shocking lack of address? I watched instead their indifferent tender welcome, Kroll’s dazed and beaming gratitude. I told myself that what the sparrows seemed now to give would soon be withdrawn, proffered just this once and then no more, that Kroll did not see this but I did: one day soon he would find it difficult to recall this happiness, though he would never forget it so thoroughly as would the sparrows. To recall happiness is to realize that you are without it, bereft. 

Kroll opened his wallet. He held out a folded bill or maybe a visiting card. I came closer.

“I am not a mystic,” Kroll said.

No one replied. 

“I am not an adventurer,” Kroll added. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands wide in demonstration of his innocence. One sparrow snatched at his hand and another took Kroll by the arm. In the dark, Kroll and the sparrows took up the customary poses. Was the picture-language really as limited as this? I stretched myself out on the ground next to Kroll; at once the posture yielded me its idiot thrill but it seemed to say nothing to anyone else. No one engaged me; no one stepped on my head. And yet a convention of the autobiographical genre requires me to furnish this account with sensations. Gravel pricked my palms; I shivered; the earth smelled vegetal, marine. Nearby, a soft sound, as of a nightjar’s rustling wingbeats. Listening to Kroll shriek and mewl, it seemed to me I could stay like this always, in Kroll’s noisy proximity, envious and grateful, when one of the sparrows leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Enough for you.” I stood up and tried to brush the filth from my clothes. Kroll was gone. I thought of asking the others if they’d seen which way he’d been headed. Ship’s horns sounded in the distant harbor. Someone lit a pipe of dense and crumbly kif and we passed it hand to hand, cupping the ember. 

The next morning, as I came out of my hotel, I noticed several men loitering across the square. All were men of one type, Type Kroll: indrawn, bowed, dressed in serge despite the heat. I was sure I recognized Kroll among them. With a single glance back at me, the man who must have been Kroll set off down the twisting street, toward the casbah or the funicular or some other vista as yet unknown to me. 

I watched him go. 

I bought myself a tiffin of boiled cashews and returned to my room. Let Kroll look to himself today. Much of the autobiography would consist of scenes à faire: Kroll pays the asking price for pirated video cassettes in the bazaar; Kroll, at the butcher’s stall, stands mesmerized before a flayed sheep’s head black with crawling flies; Kroll goes to the pier to watch the divers plunge down and bring up lumps of sea-petroleum (the water sluicing off their seal-slick bodies, the shock of their ulcerated hands); Kroll lingers in an ancient and desacralized temple, gazing up at the bone-white vault of the ceiling. These pleasures of travel initially disappoint, but, considered autobiographically, each reveals an edifying mortificant: the bitter lure of novelty, the picturesque immiseration of the global south, the hollowness of the self. This much was as good as written already. 

I worked until the shadows had long since lengthened and the lottery-foreseers were again calling out in the street below. Of the projected scenes and their accompanying skein of aperçus, something less than I’d hoped had written itself: Butchered head. Vault. Slick body, black with flies. I was not disappointed. I read the words as Kroll would have; I felt Kroll’s delight on recognizing his own story.

My room had no proper desk; to write, I had slouched in the only chair, a wicker throne woven in the local style. Now my back ached as if I’d been beaten. Everything in the room, even the latticed wicker, radiated heat. I stood at the window, hoping for the cool of evening to come lapping in. Above flat rooftops of staggered heights, the last remnant of the gloaming had taken on a humid, chemical radiance, a darkness tinged with green and violet, as if malevolent spirits had botched the granting of a childhood wish: to breathe the air of distant planets. I touched my forehead to the windowpane. It was warm as blood. Out there, a figure hung from the glass: conjoint, pendant, peering in at me. I raised my hand and I felt a shudder, a lag, in our doubled motion. 

There was a knock at the door. Before I could answer, a woman swept into my room, dispelling phantoms. She had with her a pair of snorting, gasping dogs; their eyes bulged and their tongues lapped the humid air. 

“I am Ndidi Morchiladze, daughter-adjutant to the judge,” the woman said. 

“Daughter-adjutant?” I asked. 

“Don’t let’s stand on ceremony,” she said. “Show me what you have so far.”

“I haven’t written anything yet,” I said. 

“Have you not?” said Morchiladze. The dogs flopped down at her feet and lay panting. 

“The judge mentioned payment,” I said. When a lie is not ready to hand, I temporize. The Kroll-book would have to arm itself. The weak exotica I had concocted—sorrows, vistas, subtle perceptions—all this could lend Kroll only so much cover. Then too, it was not lost on me that the judge knew only one verdict. How else would a judge judge? It might be best to set Kroll loose in the book as nothing more than a plurality of positions, a series of discontinuous Kroll-functions. 

“Don’t overestimate your faculties; you are not tasked with prophesy,” said Morchiladze. “Your memoir has only to fill in some forensic gaps; let us see events from the perspective of this ‘Kroll.’” 

But why always Kroll, I wondered. I might just as well write about somebody named Schropf, or Dozhd. Or Majeroni. 

“Your book will be a dagger in the head of anyone who thinks they can wait the judge out.”

Morchiladze yanked her dogs to their feet. To the accompaniment of a strangled wheezing, she stalked from the room. 

I believe that Schropf must have foretold his own death, often, and not only boastfully and foolhardily. Dozhd and Majeroni would have recounted the expropriations and the liberations, the sheltering for weeks on end in borrowed apartments in the ugly new-rise blocks. The flight under assumed names, the beginning of the long wait here in this tropic land. And then Schropf would say that he’d seen another of their countrymen today, another today, as if following them. Schropf had foretold, too, the un-worlding pain of it, and the quailing irrectitude of his murderers, the police. He’d known that he would have to prop them up at the last, hew them to their duty as executioners while they larked and giggled and pitied themselves. 

Schropf had been mistaken in much: there had been no extradition, and consequently no long walk through fog-shrouded streets of home; no eerie quiet in which to gather the necessary equanimity; no faint scent of the city market (salt-cod and cut flowers); no face glimpsed at a slate-roofed gable window, eyes downcast in scorn or love. 

The death of Dozhd had gone without saying: as Schropf, so Dozhd, all their life.

Just before he bolted I made Majeroni promise never to tell anyone how I let him escape: loping, zip-tied and bloodied, over the garbage-strewn plain, unaware how his white shirt shone in the van’s headlights; dragged back, stumbling and sobbing, laid down among them, face-down, like them. How the vault of the sky must have wheeled above them all the long night through; like sleepers, they could not know it; like dreamers, they only thought they woke. 

Kroll and I walked along the canal. Snake-birds perched on fence-palings, drying their outspread wings. Kroll had broken cover just after dawn, sauntering out the doorway of a shebeen. I could have caught up to Kroll right then, or at any point since. I hung back. The gravel towpath became a broad cobblestone causeway; we were nearing the city proper. 

The morning was already hot. I had gone without sleep, keeping watch for Kroll’s emergence from the shebeen. Outside, I had had to imagine the scene within: the conviviality of submerged hostility, the slow and fumy self-poisoning from wood alcohol, the dancers and the sharpers and the barman all wrecked on kif and shine. 

By dawn I felt leached of life, parched and hollow. 

“Kroll,” I called out. He might be prevailed on to slow down. 

The morning air was close. Sweat dripped down the small of my back. I felt, rather than saw, a slackening of my perceptual field, followed by a suffusion of dreamily parti-colored spots. I lurched; a wall of ground rushed up at me. 

“Kroll,” I said again, but it came out softly, murmured into the ground. The mud beneath the paving-stones smelled vegetal, marine. By the time I had struggled to my feet once more, Kroll had put quite a distance between us. To gain on him, it seemed to me I had to command my legs with an undue deliberateness, inwardly telling each in its turn, “Go, go.” This effort of mine was registered by that steadfast inhabitant of the pilot-house we all carry high in the crown of our head; he took up residence there the moment we learned to speak; he is no pilot at all, he has merely been on watch all this while, aware of all that comes and goes within the dome spread out beneath him. Thoughts and feelings have been the least of it; he is keen; he registers all subtle, all barely detectable motion: faint tremors, ghosts of abandoned longings, pale shadows that flit by. Now, after long years, he knows us so well he can predict what we will do next, and what in turn will happen then, but he never intervenes; he will not so much as issue a timely warning; he is like a doorman who neglects to tell you that you have had a caller. If only we could prise him from his stronghold.

I shouted Kroll’s name. He seemed to hear me, even at such a distance; he halted without turning around. 

I called out again: “Kroll! I know you, what you are. Confess your aberrant tendencies: mysticism and adventuring.”

I did not know Kroll, what he was. But what other gambit did I have, what appeals did I know how to make, other than imprecations? Perhaps I was the judge’s creature after all. 

Kroll walked on. The canal passed under a bridge and Kroll vanished in darkness. Traffic streamed over the bridge under a brightening mackerel sky. I could see nothing in the darkness beneath the iron vault of the bridge, and nothing beyond that. Kroll might have already walked on. Soon Kroll would make himself part of that rushing world, lost to me for good. Soon, or already, lost to me for good. I hurried. 

“Kroll,” I said as I came into the shadows. I stood still. It was cold in the sudden dark; the air smelled of canal-borne pollutants and whatever ichorous algae survived them. I was afraid I might not be able to resist the temptation to hurl myself into the black water that sluiced and rushed in the dark. I made ready to enjoin Kroll once more to confess to mysticism and adventuring. 

“Kroll,” I said again.  

“Kroll,” said Kroll’s voice in the dark. 

I took faltering steps toward the voice. Space pressed in on me. 

Now I saw how to write Kroll’s book. It would not in the least resemble the one the judge had commissioned of me. To attain the greatest dispersion of Kroll-functions, to array them in unforeseeable constellations, I would have to seize the inhabitant of pilot-house in his stronghold. What he knows, what we will know as soon as we take hold of him, is the discontinuous: the ghosts of urges and recoilings (pale shadows); and how people pressed themselves on your mind and even your heart, before they revealed themselves for what they had been all along, phantoms, nothing but phantoms; and the way we used to sense, while in the grip of fever, that there was another schema behind the schema to which we thought our thoughts appealed. And more than that, the Kroll-book would be written in the language of the pilot-house, which shares not one word with our own.

Kroll did not see the ground rush up at him this time. Gravel pricked his palms; he shivered.

Excerpts:

 11/13/2012

Dear Professor,

I just got out of the doctor’s office:

they wanted to scar my face and kill what’s inside me.

I ran out and did not pay.

Jacob A.

12/5/2012

Dear Professor,

Things on the streets have been really crazy. I have been very distracted watching and listening to what is going on, it is somewhat out of my control. But, I miss you and class. I will be in class on Monday.

Thank you,

Bye

Sandra

5/29/2014

Dear Professor,

I have registered for your [Course Name] starting June 4th and very much look forward to these sessions. Unfortunately two weeks ago while in the Sahara desert I fell off a camel and fractured 4 ribs. I am in Paris recuperating but as you probably know only time and pain killers are the treatment. I will not be able to travel in time to make the first session on 4th June but hope to be in New York in time for the second and subsequent sessions.

I would appreciate your input on the following:

–venue as to where to meet at 3:15pm stating on June 11th

–should I obtain any reading or other materials needed or desirable for the course

–would you have an outline or any notes you could let me have on the material you will cover (and I will miss) for the first session.

I look forward to meeting with you.

kind regards

Paul C. 

4/18/2015

Dear Professor, 

I am very sorry about the lateness of my assignments. And my absences during the semester. I am graduating after this semester and I found myself swamped with a ton of work I was not expecting. All of this piled up with vet visits, caring for my new puppy, and other things getting in the way I lost a lot of my energy this semester. I’ve attached all the assignments in this email. And if there is anything else I can give you please let me know. 

Thank you for a great semester and for understanding,

All the best,

William

12/7/15

Dear Professor,

Excuses section: I’m sorry that I had to leave early on Tuesday last week and was additionally unable to attend on Thursday. On Thursday something came up and I was sadly unable to attend any of my classes. For Tuesday I do not have such a good reason, if I am honest I left 20 minutes early because of a beautiful girl (the only and last time I would use this reason and I apologize, I let instinctual hedonism take over for better or worse!)

Interesting section: I have been working on this piece “To Fear with Love” and thought you might appreciate it as per our earlier discussion about writing. It is attached below for your enjoyment and I would love any feedback/criticism! 

Best,

Abraham

I

Ask anyone connected to the legal system, from the circuit court clerk tucking motions into folders to the convicted gangster paying off guards to mule Marlboros: there’s no one more reviled than a sex offender.

Most prisons and jails have “protective custody”—use of solitary confinement as a safety protocol—for sex offenders: in “general population” they’re easy pickings for stabbing and beating, which is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons operates low-to-medium security penitentiaries devoted mostly to their incarceration, with some prisons having a sex offender population of up to 85-90%. Even for a convict with the ethical compass of Whitey Bulger—wherein robbery, drug peddling, and cold-blooded murder are fair game—taking a child’s innocence is one step too far.

But a child molester is not a monster: he (they’re almost always male) is still a human being. In her debut true crime book, The Fact of a Body (Flatiron, May 2017), former attorney and writer Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich delivers this point—no matter how heinous the crime, there are few monsters, just men who commit monstrous acts.

On Feb. 7, 1992, 26-year-old Ricky Langley, a twice-convicted child molester, strangled Jeremy Guillory inside a home in the small town of Iowa, Louisiana, a town so small, the streets have no names. Even the Law had trouble finding Guillory’s address when his mother reported him missing. After Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s investigators found Guillory’s corpse stuffed in Langley’s closet, the recently paroled sex offender confessed multiple times to the homicide and was convicted and sentenced to die at the state’s notorious Angola Prison.

It’s debatable whether or not Langley sexually assaulted Guillory prior to the crime—a minor point Marzano-Lesnevich brings up, but never tries to resolve, in her work. Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to decide, just as three Louisianan juries would decide throughout Langley’s appeals process.

Fast forward to 2003, and Marzano-Lesnevich is interning at a law clinic strictly dealing in death penalty appeals. The daughter of two New Jersey attorneys, Marzano-Lesnevich has been opposed to capital punishment since she was a child. The clinic just overturned Langley’s death penalty conviction, knocking it down to a lifetime bid. With the practicing lawyer of the clinic absent from the interns’ orientation due to an appeal in Texas, the clinic shows the aspiring attorneys Langley’s confession tape.

At this point, the book takes a turn:

        “I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came here to help save men like him. I came here because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t what will my life hold?

          But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe.

            I want Ricky to die.”

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a sexual abuse survivor. As the memoir moves forward, the author reveals that her grandfather molested her during childhood—how her family handles it, well, that’s her story to tell.

Interweaving Langley and his clan’s past, along with her own, Marzano-Lesnevich explores not just the crime, but the human condition. Ricky Langley didn’t want to molest kids, but he did nonetheless, almost like a drug addict who cannot resist a dose of heroin; he tried to seek help for his pedophilia, but was turned away prior to going into the system. Marzano-Lesnevich tries to make amends with her family, but she never quite gets there. Unlike Ricky, who grows up in poverty and is subsequently at the receiving end of the justice system, Marzano-Lesnevich’s background allows her to flee the bad memories by attending college and later, Harvard Law School.

Despite this blind spot about her own privilege, which I’ll address later, Marzano-Lesenvich’s juxtaposition of a predator and a victim shows the difficulty of achieving salvation—both Langley and herself are caught in a struggle to save their futures from their pasts, to prevent repeating the sins they either perpetrated or suffered. Yet they come up short each time.

What’s impressive about this work is not just the subject matter, but the true-crime vibe: fast-paced storytelling; hard deep looks into the lives of the prosecutors; the sheriff’s investigators; and the victim’s and perp’s families. But unlike the seminal true crime work, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, this memoir does not read like a lawyer’s prose. While Bugliosi delivered a truly genre-defining work, trudging through his account of the Manson Family murders is almost akin to reading a primer for a first-year law student, weighted with explanations of legal procedure and law. Marzano-Lesnevich doesn’t fall into that trap—if anything, she writes more like Joan Didion:

          “With only two days left in Louisiana, I know what I’ve been avoiding. In the tens of thousands of pages I’ve gone through, the transcripts and serology reports and bodily fluid reports and the documents from Ricky’s life, his mental health records from Lake Charles and then from when he was imprisoned in Georgia, the only photographs I’ve seen of Jeremy are the ones in which he’s alive.

          But that’s not how his story ended. I have been driven all along by the belief that there is a knot at the heart of the collision between me and Ricky that will help me make sense of what will never be resolved. The way my body is evidence, yet I will never fully know what it contains. I carry what my grandfather did in my body. I carry it through my life. All the records I’ve seen have made me imagine Ricky, imagine family, begin to empathize with him. I can’t not know—I can’t not face—what he did. I can’t allow even any part of myself to think that Jeremy remained the boy in his school photo. Unchanged and alive.”

For The Fact of a Body, the crime is the frame; the story’s in the raw emotion Marzano-Lesnevich delivers across the page, much like Didion’s exploration of the Patty Hearst case in California Notes. As with Didion’s work, Marzano-Lesnevich uses the great gift of empathy to explore her subject, instead of only relying on rhetorical flourishes. The facts in this work provide a vehicle for a deeper exploration of human emotion in the aftermath of an evil act—indignation, forgiveness, fear, resentment, understanding, etc.

What the average reader might not know about The Fact of a Body is that the murder of Jeremy Guillory, and the author’s own experiences with sexual abuse, are tragically mundane—take it from me: a burnt-out small-town newspaper reporter. Marzano-Lesnevich’s judicial aspirations petered out after one summer at a death penalty clinical; it took two years covering car wrecks, homicides, and child rapes for the toll to catch up with me, and I’ve been paying the emotional price ever since. Like Marzano-Lesnevich, I view the legal system as a necessary evil, one that sorts out the facts well, but fails to address the circumstances that lead a human being to commit crimes in this world—circumstances that often take years to develop.

When I read this memoir, I could feel the pain Marzano-Lesnevich went through—I’ve seen that pain too many times, when a child placed on the stand confronts his or her abuser. I’ve since taken a hiatus from newspaper reporting.

II

Here’s how the murder of Jeremy Guillory would go down in my newsroom experience. First article: the reporter flips a press release about the missing boy, maybe goes to the scene and interviews neighbors and relatives once the search truly gets underway. Second article: our reporter writes up the arrest by dropping in a few quotes from the sheriff’s small-town press conference—along with dirty little details about the homicide contained in the criminal complaint submitted by the investigator to the local judge. Then comes the victim profile: a sympathetic write up about the victim’s life, accompanied by a front page spread of his grieving mother, clutching his framed picture while sitting on a front porch. If the victim is even somewhat innocent, a jury will be sworn in to determine not if the defendant is guilty, but to what degree.  Most murders aren’t “who dunnits” like on TV; they’re “why dunnits” or “just how bad they dunnits.”

After a year of small “briefs”—250-word articles updating the case—one day the courtroom is filled with 100 citizens. It’s trial day, and somber justice is in the air. For a crime reporter, the case will finally be resolved, after a long season of sitting on wood benches and scribbling away in a notepad, hands cramping. Perhaps it will last a couple days, maybe a couple weeks. Either way, the crime reporter worth his or her salt will be there from gavel to gavel, from selection to verdict. Tears will flow and tension will hang in the air until the foreman reads, “Guilty.” And because it’s murder in the first-degree, the crime reporter knows there isn’t going to be a sentencing hearing—the judge will send the defendant up that night.

There’s an old adage in the news industry that “if it bleeds, it leads,” referring to the typical reader’s inability to prevent themselves from consuming horrible, horrendous content. We’re repulsed while drinking our morning coffee, but we can’t seem to fold up our newspaper and put it down until we’ve read the full article. But in the small towns that dot our land, where one can’t wear jeans to church without catching an earful from an aunt the following Monday, the murder of a child takes on a different tone—the readers buy the paper to read about the crime because they’re bleeding, too. No matter whether they’re bleeding with despair, hate, anger, pity, or curiosity, the reader bleeds nonetheless. And the crime reporter with a heart bleeds as well. I recognize that feeling in Marzano-Lesnevich’s memoir.

The murder of Jeremy Guillory, if it made the Associated Press wire service, would be about 250 words, pure filler for the papers around Louisiana. As for the crimes committed against Marzano-Lesnevich, that type of sexual abuse is sadly about as typical as jaywalking. The public’s perception of the ski-mask-wearing rapist waiting to jump a female jogger in the park after dark is pure BS—it’s the uncle, the step-dad, the father, the boyfriend, or in Marzano-Lesnevich’s case, the grandfather.

And that’s the hugest tragedy of all: it’s someone we trust who harms our children. Marzano-Lesnevich explores this idea, with pain and hurt I could never imagine resonating from the page. Maybe she wouldn’t like to hear this, but I’ll say it anyway—by sharing her experience, and humanizing it from all sides, she gives voice to the voiceless, one of the highest virtues of journalism and nonfiction writing. She is a hero. When it comes to child molestation, there’s rarely a “pedophilic monster,” a ghoul lurking in the shadows of playgrounds waiting to trap children inside a windowless van. Instead, the perpetrators are seemingly well-adjusted gentlemen, generally without criminal record, who have one compulsion. Marzano-Lesnevich appropriately humanizes Ricky Langley for the reader, but in the same breath reminds us that Jeremy Guillory is dead, and Jeremy Guillory had a life, too. In a world with Serial and Making a Murderer, Marzano-Lesnevich pushes true crime to the next level—she humanizes the perpetrator, without turning him into a hero, or still worse, a victim.

III

In this proud Southerner’s opinion, Marzano-Lesnevich does a good job not “othering” the South when she describes the struggles and trials of the Langley and Guillory families. Descriptions of gun racks on pickup trucks and “welfare motels” in Iowa, La., are a little on the nose. The Southern reader might throw the book across the room at that point, but I would urge them to pick it back up; she doesn’t dwell on these details, nor does she poke fun. She also doesn’t caricature Southerners as toothless hicks, white trash. Marzano-Lesnevich instead treats them like people, although at times I felt she stretched herself when relating her own experiences as an upper middle-class Northerner with the lives of poor Southerners: pain is pain, but the pain of poverty will never be understood by the wealthy. Struggle is struggle, but no matter how much empathy Marzano-Lesnevich expresses, she makes the jump a little too suddenly without checking her own privilege.

This becomes evident in the closing third of the book, when Marzano-Lesnevich begins to tie up the two main strands of the memoir, her struggle as a survivor and Langley’s struggle as a perpetrator. However, in her effort to link these ends, she reveals a hole in her perception; Langley and Guillory were both poor, while she came from privilege. The fact is, Marzano-Lesnevich can, and to a large extent, has exorcised her demons because she has the resources to do so. While sexual abuse transcends class, Marzano-Lesnevich had the opportunity to escape her condition and put her past in perspective, a reprieve afforded to Ricky only in a Georgia prison. Somehow, with all the empathy Marzano-Lesnevich displays throughout the memoir, she seems to miss this point.

Ultimately, The Fact of the Body isn’t just true crime, and it isn’t just memoir: it’s Gonzo-style journalism at its finest. Unlike Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s chemically induced rants and ravings, Marzano-Lesnevich uses a writing aid much deeper than cocaine, LSD, mescaline, and Wild Turkey—she uses the ghosts of her past.

by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,

Is not extinguished fully in my soul;

But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:

To trouble you is not my wish at all.

I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,

Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.

I loved you once so gently and sincerely:

God grant another love you thus once more

June 25, 1939

by Arseny Tarkovsky

It’s frightening to die, and such a shame to leave

This captivating riffraff that enchants me,

The stuff so dear to poets, so very lovely,

I never celebrated; it somehow wasn’t to be.

I loved to come back home at the break of dawn

And shift my things around in half an hour.

I loved the white windowsill, and also the flower,

The carved faceted glass, and also the water,

And the heavens, greenish-azure in their color—

And that I was a poet and a wicked man.

And when every June came with my birthday again

I’d idolize that holiday, bustling

With verses by friends and congratulations from women,

With crystal laughter, and gay glasses clinking

And the lock of that hair, unique, individual

And that kiss, so entirely inevitable.

But now at home it’s all set up differently;

It’s June and I no longer have that homesickness.

In this way, life is teaching me patience,

And turbid, my blood now is stirring this birthday,

And a secret anxiety is tormenting me—

What have I done with my great destiny,

Oh my God, what have I done with me!

by Aleksandr Blok

Night, avenue, street lamp, the drug store,

Irrational and dusky light;

Live another decade, two more—

It stays the same; there’s no way out.

You’ll die, then start again, beginning

And everything repeats as planned:

Night, the cold canal’s icy ripple,

The drug store, avenue, and lamp.

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Last Poem

Note: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s final poem before his suicide. The Oka mentioned is a tributary of the Volga. “Cloved” is an attempt to translate VM’s pun on ischerpen (“exhausted, finished’) with the neologism isperchen, (“peppered up”). 

It’s after one. You’ve likely gone to sleep.

The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.

I don’t hurry, I don’t need to wake you

Or bother you with lightning telegrams.

Like they say, the incident is cloved.

Love’s little boat has crashed on daily life.

We’re even, you and I. No need to account

For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.

Look: How quiet the world is.

Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.

At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak

To history, eternity, and all creation.

Anna Karenina: #MeToo

Ah, Merezhkovsky: to you I was a mare

ridden badly by a man; and because of him,

his error, I had to be destroyed. And Lev, my dear:

You never gave me my own voice, you didn’t dare.

What did I talk about when I did talk, after all:

Abortion with Dolly? Every damn thing

Vronsky did, that I did better? The problem

was not that I was sexual: (Men, you

count on that.) The problem was that

I was smart. But sexual women must be killed;

All the books attest to that.

Merezhkovsky permeates the consciousness

of Slavic scholars, is the Anna story, still,

but I fault you most, Lev. You knew, soon

that the problem was not one woman

and one man; it was all women, all men. You had

Vronsky climb in society, while I—damn, I even

knew more about horses than him!—I was

the scarlet woman, though our offence was the same.

Did I abandon my child? Or did a martinet

bar me from him? Ah, she holds Vronsky back!

Ah, the guilt!

Oh, there is no talking to you.

You sent me the dream

that haunted your ruling-class sleep,

a peasant with an iron,

the proletariat that said, fuck you

and your landlord’s way of life.

You killed me with the railroad that they built

for you. Because you “had to.”

Where was your Resurrection then?

You repudiated Karenina, it’s true,

but you abandoned me to my fate.

And so, Lev, I still struggle,

a century and a half later,

to have my story told.

They’ve renovated the Gates of Hell since the last time I was here, some four years ago. Now when you come in the front door—the glass broken, replaced with stained, graffiti-covered plywood with a dangling steel pull-ring—there’s a bigger living room than there used to be, full of filthy couches and grubby lay-z-boys broken in the recline position.

I get here late enough that the place is already packed. Crust punks are sprawled out on the couches, gathered in groups against the walls, and pushing their way to and fro through the crowd. A few dogs follow them, trailing ropes. It’s the dogs here that always bother me—given how little care they’re willing to give themselves, I worry crusties (gutterpunks, scumpunks, squeegee kids, oogles: whatever you prefer to call them) don’t seem capable of taking responsibility for the animals they adopt. My friend Renée, whom I meet as I come in, agrees with me.

“I bet they don’t get walked very much,” she says sadly. I concur, adding the deafening music and air thick with cigarette smoke can’t be good for them either. After all, the Gates of Hell does not comply with city regulations banning smoking, assumedly because they’re not going to bow to what The Man tells them to do. You expect an unhealthy atmosphere coming out here, though. As always, the air is choked with smoke, accented by the smell of cheap beer, dirty hair, armpit, and because it’s raining, a hint of wet dog.

A fellow with a rat on his shoulder ducks in through the plywood door, removing a rain-drenched hood. He’s a friend of a friend. I comment that his is a nice-looking rat and he says, “Put out your hand: you can hold him.” I do; the rat lithely ascends my arm, circles my neck, and finds a comfortable spot in the shoulder of my sweatshirt. His small body is warm and his fur is soft: he’s like a tiny cat, except for the leathery tail, and I can feel him breathing. The cavorting dogs are on the other side of my head, so I try to shield the rat from their view, though the guy tells me not to worry, saying, “Some dogs are cool with him.” We talk for a while, the rat relaxing on my shoulder, then determine it’s time to move into the closely packed crowd.

They’ve been having shows again at the Gates of Hell for the past two years—at least, shows that outsiders might have heard about. Whoever lived here three years ago spread the word they’d stopped putting bands on due to hassles from police. However, a friend tells me, they never really quit having gigs—just stopped advertising, knowing enough of the east-end punks would find out anyway.

The Gates of Hell is a former shop of some variety turned into a kind of loft in which various rooms, big and small, surround a larger central chamber where bands can play and practice. It’s part of a sort of krusty komplex nearly a half a block long, consisting of squalid lofts, storefronts, and apartments inhabited by a legion of punks. The most well-known loft, the Loud House, is next to the Gates of Hell and connected by a doorway. Though they haven’t had shows there in a while, a lot of people still think of the entire krusty komplex as being “The Loud House.”

The first time I visited the Gates of Hell, in 2002, the bands played in a centre room with concrete walls and plywood floors. Halfway through the evening’s six-band bill, the floor was already slick with beer and spit and whatever else makes plywood slippery; many in the crowd were making it worse by shaking quart-bottles of Black Label and spraying their friends. By the end of the night, crusties confounded by PCP or just bull-doses of alcohol were staggering around to the lightning throb of headliners (Saskatchewan’s superlative thrash band Destined For Assimilation [D.F.A.]), slipping in the half-inch of beer on the floor, falling on one another, being pulled to their feet, and falling over again. One short-haired guy in his mid-30s, shirtless beneath his patched and studded denim vest, came careening across the room, tripped, and slid on his belly with surprising force headfirst into the rim of the bass drum. Then he lay still. His friends lurched forward and hoisted him upright; he looked perplexedly at them for a moment, then some spark ignited in his blank eyes and, raising his fist in time with the charging music, he rejoined the fray.

Later still that night a small mob besieged the singer of one of the earlier bands, who were from Vancouver. During that band’s set, the singer bowed to the demands of a group of shouting women in the crowd and admitted onstage to having raped one of their friends. (Years after the fact, a friend told me he had heard second-hand that the accuser had later recanted and said publicly that singer had not, in fact, raped her. Because I did not hear this from the woman herself or anyone closely connected with her, I had doubts. I frankly have no way to determine which parts of the story beyond those I witnessed myself were true. The whole situation was and remains totally mystifying.) As I was leaving, the group had the singer loosely surrounded and, joined by other members of the crowd, were debating what to do with him. One person asked, perhaps rhetorically, why they shouldn’t just take him to the river and drown him. The members of D.F.A., who were staying at my house, insisted I get in their van and we left without seeing the issue resolved. Years later someone showed me the singer’s Myspace page, whose existence attested only that the mob ultimately decided against drowning.

I find my way through the crowd in the changed layout of the space, looking for the inside room where the bands play. Between the front and the show space, there’s an antechamber that’s both a hall and someone’s bedroom: by the door there’s a chest-height loft bed, its linens in a twisted pile. Next to it there hangs a defiled mannequin and some piles of assorted crap. Beside one of these someone’s set up a distro table and punks are pensively flipping through records, many of which are black and feature white images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls (some depicted with punk hairstyles, some without). Graffiti covers the walls of the room—band names, vaguely intentioned messages, and in-jokes between friends. At the end of the hall is a door with a large sign on it reading “RAT POISON IN THIS ROOM!! NO DOGS, EVER!!” Just before that, there’s a carpet-and-foam-covered door into the show-space.

Beyond it stands a guy who looks like Neil, the sad hippie on British sitcom The Young Ones. He’s got long, bluish dreadlocks and is wearing a shirt featuring a circle-slash through a swastika, stating a position that—like being opposed to child molestation or tainted food—most feel is a basic prerequisite to humanity. The line takes a long time because every person who passes him has to listen, as they pay, to him complain about how he wasn’t supposed to be working the show, someone else was organizing it, they asked him at the last minute if he could help and he said he would, but only if he didn’t have to do the door, and now here he is, doing the door.

I finally get to the front of the line and ask how much it is. He says it’s five bucks and I say, “Priced to move!” But he only looks at me a second with confusion, then says, “Well, it’s two out of town bands, right? And gas is cheaper these days, but it’s still pretty expensive. Gotta support the out of town bands.” I nod in lieu of explaining that $5 is pretty cheap for a five-band show, especially since five-band crust punk shows have remained $5 since I went to my first in 1993, when $5 was just less than you’d make working an hour at minimum wage. (Now you can practically get two crust shows for an hour of flipping burgers!)

Inside, I take up a position near the front of the stage but away from the centre, hoping to avoid getting badly knocked or sprayed with beer. I’m holding onto my jacket, in part because I’m never sure it won’t get stolen, and otherwise because leaving it somewhere is an invitation to have it puked on, or to have beer spilled on it, or for it to improbably pick up an infestation of fleas, bedbugs, or, god knows, fire ants or something. Nathan, a friend, more bravely leaves his bag, though not before conferring with me as to the place to best avoid vomit.

“Put it high,” I suggest. “People are going to puke straight ahead or down; nobody really pukes up.” He puts it on top of a pile of crates and I leave my umbrella with it, but even with jacket in hand, I’m sweating already, watching the band set up.

In contrast to the filth and neglect throughout the Gates of Hell, there’s at a few thousand dollars’ worth of musical and sound equipment on stage. Beyond that, the room is a wretched shithole. Soiled mattresses of different sizes are lined against the back wall to baffle the noise, while the side walls are covered either in foam insulation or graffiti, some of it just insults and other bits advertising promising acts like the Dead Hookers. It actually makes the eponymous Loud House next door look classy by comparison with its all-black walls decorated with large white images of skulls wearing German army helmets. Two spotlights, on either side of the stage, dangle woozily from loops of wire that don’t look like they’ll hold. These lights are plugged into open outlets half-way up the wall and pointed at the ceiling, which is a sheet of transparent plastic holding in layers of yellow insulation. The surface of the plastic is mottled with pocks of dried sputum and fresher amber droplets of beer. Above the stage, someone has spray-painted THE GATES OF HELL in red across the wall. They’ve continued onto the wall on the other side, adding BURN THE RICH in similar-sized letters near the ceiling. Farther down they’ve appended BLUDGEONED, which I learn is the name of the band belonging to the sad door guy, who lives here and runs the space.

The guiding emotion of this particular brand of hardcore punk is utter hopelessness from which one may be distracted only by the most extreme inebriation and chaos. The bands sing about atrocity, war, slaughter, injustice, oppression, evil, etc., but do so from a position wherein it’s impossible to do anything at all about it. There are lax nods to the idea of revolution from time to time, as most here would identify as “anarchist,” but only to the moment of revolution when punks fighting cops in the street actually win for once—not to the months of gruelling decision-making by consensus on issues like replacing capitalism with advanced barter, establishing a system of mediation for solving disputes to replace courts and police, and the rest of what would follow an anarchist revolution. It’s hard to write really ripping songs about that stuff.

Surveying the gathering crowd, I notice that the Gates of Hell punks are, now more than ever, sporting primarily dreadlocks—usually in the form of the dread-mullet, a combination of close-cropped hair with a few dreads sprouting like udon noodles from the back. Some have longer locks, a few have long hair or shaved heads, and a handful have traditional punk cuts like mohawks or spikes, but really, there isn’t much variation. No one, for example, has jolly pigtails; there’s nothing bouffant and nothing carefully combed that hasn’t been combed into a point. Many sport hairdos that bespeak time and effort, but only the time and effort to make the statement—in accordance with tradition—that one doesn’t care.

Likewise, most in the crowd wear identical crust punk uniforms: black jeans covered in black band patches; black band t-shirts featuring images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls; black ballcaps with black patches sewn on the front; and black denim vests with several hundred studs covering collar, shoulders, flanks, etc., and patches in between. Inevitably featuring images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls, these patches seem chosen to advertise the obscurity of one’s tastes. A few people endorse bands popular by crust standards, like Sweden’s Totalitär and Wolfbrigade and Australia’s Pisschrïst, but most opt instead for groups that only those committed to a life of crust would have heard of. That is, except for Discharge: throughout the room, logos of British hardcore/metal band Discharge are everywhere, on patches, on t-shirts, and painted on the backs of leather jackets. If the crowd was naked, god forbid, I’m sure there’d be a plenty of Discharge tattoos as well. Gates of Hell/Loud House punks wear Discharge paraphernalia the way Italian Catholics wear crucifixes—no one would ever doubt they believed, but true faith demands a constant display of devotion.

Most here come to hear d-beat bands—that is, bands that play the driving, non-melodic hardcore punk with insistent double-downbeat drumming pioneered by Discharge in the late ’70s. The fashion and décor are also in line with Discharge’s view of the world—a monochrome apocalyptic nihilism that assumes that either capitalism or nuclear war is going to destroy humanity very shortly, and there’s nothing to be done except to get wasted and live in filth, listening to music reminding one of the necessity of doing so by underlining the inevitability of the coming end.

The two chief attractions to this life, as far as I can tell, are a supposed total severance from the “conformity” of “the mainstream,” and the freedom that comes from living very, very cheaply. At various points when I was younger, I considered making choices that might have found me living in some variation of the Gates of Hell. Imagine: freeing myself from the tyranny of work by finding a room that cost $75 a month, decorating it with whatever furniture I found in the street, and eating from the vast bounty of unspoiled food squandered in supermarket dumpsters! Imagine not having to pay to be alive anymore! Imagine cheating the system by simply dropping out of it!

The other attraction to the lifestyle is that being “punk” is about separating one’s self from the evils of consumer society, and being extremely punk means doing so extremely. The more fashion has taken up the aesthetic of punk over past years, and the more pop-punk bands have found their way to mainstream fame, the farther crust punks have pulled into the obscurity of fanaticism. Few punk lifestyles are more extreme than those lived around the Gates of Hell and the Loud House. Surprisingly, many who live and congregate here are into their 30s and 40s: some are missing teeth, and while others’ tattoos have gone blue and smudged with age. Old enough that I wonder why they haven’t been struck by the contradictions and failings of this lifestyle, they are, in both senses of the term, lifers: they’ve committed themselves to this life, sure, but it’s hard to imagine them being able to escape from it now. Or, as a couple have said to me, they do recognize the structural failings of crust punk, but they can’t see an alternative they find less ethically conflicting, so they’re stuck with it.

What brings people here, and keeps them here, is the emotional draw of the lifestyle. A small minority of people actually feel it, but some years ago I was one of them. Product of an erratically hostile divorce, bullied by peers (and, occasionally, teachers) throughout my childhood, disquietingly aware of the global rush of the 1980s toward environmental or nuclear holocaust, my circumstances and upbringing made me a perfect candidate for punk rock. Kids with such a background who discover the lifeboat of punk cling to it desperately, and I was no exception. In my adolescence, punk rock and our culture made sense of the evil of the world for me and provided a position from which I felt empowered enough to stand up for myself and respond to it.

To me and many others, the music, mindset, and community were a stupendous revelation: we were all astonished, after years of isolation, to discover a whole scene full of people like us and places we could congregate together. Naturally that congregation carried with it an almost religious sensation of salvation. We had been saved, after all. The rooms of punkhouses like the Gates of Hell were virtually consecrated: there, we were aligned with hopeless weirdos all over the world finally escaping from the devastating bullshit of normal life, refusing and resisting it together and somehow building something new and better.

So, for a while, as a teenager and into my twenties, I took pleasure in ugliness and filth. I was done pretending that the there was a future, that the end wasn’t coming, that personal hygiene and grooming weren’t symbolic of our consumer selfishness in the face of imminent annihilation. Or something. And I felt as though my natural revolutionary state was to be among the punks, an allegiance to which I clung even as it seemed increasingly that most of what many punks wanted to do was get trashed.

The majority of the crowd at shows—comprising­­­­, for better or worse, “punk” as I experienced it_­­­­—didn’t seem like they were drawing the same deep inspiration from the music at all times to fuel the active resistance I’d always believed punk was supposed to represent. They wanted to get shitty (really shitty—punks aren’t believers in moderation), hear some bands, and socialize. To some extent, they wanted to do so in an atmosphere that perpetually reminded them of the brutal truths of existence—bombs, war, slaughter, injustice, oppression, evil, etc.—expressed in images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls. Yet in the absence of some serious challenge to those brutal truths, punk’s statement seemed to diminish to the same thesis argued at nightclubs, taverns, and sports bars the world over: “Shit’s fucked up: let’s get wasted.”

The medium by which the Gates of Hell expresses that statement is different, however. Despite the clammy sorrow of a sports bar or nightclub, those places at least play upon some kind of novelty. The central premise of the Gates of Hell is regurgitation, literal and cultural—it shapes itself in the image of what’s come before, the futureless boozing-rioting-barfing edifice of chaos that defines punk for some, but which mainly consists of intoxicated people maybe breaking the law a bit—while accomplishing almost nothing. That would be fine for a nightclub, except that some of us who arrive at places like the Gates of Hell in search of social revolution discover instead a scene that offers no solutions at all beyond the continual restatement of the alienation that brought us all there in the first place. And most of us don’t even live there full-time.

Reaffirmed often enough in an atmosphere otherwise devoid of thoughtfulness, that alienation begins to decompose into its constituent elements of loneliness and despair, which become all the more acute the more the punk catechism of “no future” stretches farther into the unanticipated, and surprisingly degrading, future. Yet as the future’s end becomes more remote, punk’s true believers have shifted focus to underline instead the agony of “normality,” imagining the mechanistic hollow lives of the masses that long for the mercy of a mushroom cloud that will never come. If the future won’t end soon, then at least the veneer of normality is susceptible to the aesthetic attack from those willing to live in squalor even more miserable than the sadness of normality—a misery made worthwhile by the promise, never quite fully achieved, of total freedom. This tortured desperation, then, is what the crust punk lifestyle expresses loudest and most overwhelmingly to me, and what prevented me from ever giving myself completely over to it. My own despair is claustrophobic enough, but living inside someone else’s hopelessness—particularly that of the Gates of Hell crusties—is totally suffocating.

Transient, dirty, and hopeless, a lot of crusties here borrow their aesthetic, whether on purpose or by accident, from the film Mad Max, living as though that film’s apocalypse has already happened. My friend Simon once reported seeing, at a Loud House show, a one-armed punk he described as a “road-warrior crusty” wearing a prosthetic arm he’d embedded with studs “as though through sleeves of an actual jacket,” which he’d remove and swing around “mace-like” when the crowd really got going. It’s hard to imagine this scene being profiled in the New York Times Sunday Styles section.

Which is the point. Part of the draw of music like that at the Gates of Hell is that “normal” people will never want to hear it. Yet even the desire of the Gates of Hell punks to embrace that which the mainstream could never love has failed—one of the past two years’ most vaunted acts in the music press has been Toronto’s Fucked Up (recent winner of the 2009 Polaris Prize!), a hardcore band that’s carved its own style within the genre, and who played several packed shows at the Loud House over the years. One can imagine the Loud House punks disgustedly watching last year’s buzz-video of Fucked Up trashing a bathroom while performing on MTV, or, later in the same week, performing a Ramones cover with Moby. Certainly, some would be quick to brand Fucked Up (or, as they were called by MTV, F’d Up) “sell-outs,” but what I suspect would offend them most would be the realization that even the extremity of the Loud House isn’t inviolable—that forging a lifestyle so repellent it repulses marketability is far more difficult than it seems.

Unmentioned in discussions of groups like Fucked Up “selling out” is the notion that bands who pursue financial gain might do so because the underground—and particularly the extreme underground—can’t sustain them economically, yet all the same requires large financial investment. Many can’t break even on tour, instead sinking hundreds or thousands of dollars into the endeavour. Making music and touring without the support of adequately paying gigs therefore becomes an astonishingly expensive hobby when one factors in the cost of equipment, upkeep, a van, gas for the van, monthly rent on a practice space, etc.—making punk touring precisely the sort of bourgeois pastime to which crusty punks like to imagine themselves in opposition.

The complexities of that issue don’t come up in discussion, the same way the complexities of other issues like “burning the rich” (and doing what with their money?), “ending all war” (how?), and “smashing capitalism” (replacing it with what?) don’t get thoroughly discussed. After all, these slogans exist simply to attest wealth, war, and capitalism are harmful, but not to say anything much about the nature of the harm they do. In the same way, crust punk, as it appears at the Gates of Hell and elsewhere, exists just to express rejection—rejection of what’s perceived as mainstream, as conformity, as whatever now constitutes the world beyond the aural, aesthetic, and olfactory fortification that punks have built against “normality.”

There is no exploration of these adversaries, little interest in what normal people do or why they do it, and still less consideration of how life among crust punks might mirror, in its own way, the precise structures and problems of the society the punks oppose. These subjects never come up because many assume them to be solved already: normal people are robots controlled by the media and corporate interests, punks have pulled the wool from their eyes to see that capitalism and war are the enemy, and revolution and rioting is the solution, which, if they happen, we’ll figure out the logistics of when we get there. Until then: more rejection.

“Fuck, fuck, fuckin’ asshole, fuck, shit,” slurs the singer of the first band, by means of a mic check. A couple of his friends give him the finger, and the gesture seems as empty as his cursing. Almost every experience I’ve had of the Gates of Hell and the Loud House has been empty of wit and humour, save maybe the time Martin, the singer of ripping Toronto hardcore band Career Suicide, offended the crowd during their set by remarking, “Can we get a body count up here?” as several lolling, blue-lipped punks were dragged out of the bathroom and into the street to wait for an ambulance. For the most part, the shows here are free of humour. As the band launches into their set, the guitarist announces, “This song’s about dicks!” which is as close as we’ll come to funny. Then it’s d-beat, as promised, only sloppier, with the lead singer grumping hoarsely over two guitarists playing the same power chords and a drummer (wearing sunglasses) going through his paces. Someone tells me the name of the band and I instantly forget it, the same way I’ll forget the band itself. D-beat can be done better or worse, but it never amounts to more than what it aspires to be. Simon once told me that in developing an affinity for d-beat he’d cauterized his tastes, which is, in a sense, true—to devote yourself to such a repetitive and atonal branch of hardcore, you have to forego subtlety. But you also have to be willing to be bored, since d-beat by definition doesn’t do anything new.

By the end of the first song, the room has filled up. A considerable contingent of punks has stumbled in, king-cans of beer loosely in hand, dim eyes half-closed and mouths hanging half-open. Enjoying the music, they shake their fists at the band (the Gates of Hell’s most popular dance move) and knock into one another, spilling beer. Once it’s clear that the crowd’s beginning to get excitable, a blue-haired guy pulls himself up onto an amp and half-heartedly stage-dives into an area where there aren’t enough people to catch him; those beneath struggle to toss him backward onto the crowd behind and he ends up tilting headfirst into the floor. But it’s OK, he’s up and knocking around again soon enough, just in time for some other guy to make the same desultory leap off the amp and land it more successfully, only to be carried around by five or six people for a second before being deposited on the ground.

I watch one of the carriers, a smaller guy with short dreads. He’s got one of these vests just covered in shiny studs: little round nubs over the shoulders, pyramids on the back and flank, stars and pointier studs to accentuate the edges. It must have taken hours to put them all on; I try to imagine him spending the evening on a dirty sofa, in front of a stereo blasting In Darkness, You Feel No Regrets by Wolfbrigade (or a TV playing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond), pliers in one hand, bag of studs in the other, slowly crimping them on one by one in a careful pattern as though doing a home-ec project. It’s easy enough to picture—I’ve been there myself, have studded articles of clothing and sewn patches onto my shorts and hooded sweatshirts. There’s a strange tenderness in the moment between a punk and his or her favourite patched hoodie. But now he’s thrashing around the floor in his vest, colliding into friends with his shoulders. They’re drunk or dusted or high on whatever, and seem to be enjoying themselves, but I’m bored of the crowd and the band.

I’ve often wondered how many here really enjoy this music. I have more extreme tastes than most people I know and appreciate a certain sound in raging hardcore—namely the swift-and-loose variety, influenced by bands from the early ’80s like Detroit’s pissed-off but succinct Negative Approach, or Portland’s ferociously nihilistic Poison Idea. That’s why I bother coming here from time to time: bands that sound like what I like are more likely to play this sort of venue than elsewhere. But the crowd at the Gates of Hell goes for music often even more aggressive than I like it: while I can enjoy shouted vocals, they often prefer singers scream themselves hoarse, or grunt, or make that croaking barf popular in death metal. Likewise, I’m partial to fast drumming, but they’re far more open to the hydraulic noise of “blast beats,” drumming so fast it comes out in solid sheets with no apparent rhythm. This has no musical value to me, but many things I listen to don’t sound like music to a lot more people.

The d-beat band, whose name I’ve forgotten, goes on longer than it should, leaving me shifting my weight from leg to leg to keep my feet from falling asleep. When the set’s finally over, I talk with friends about tonight’s headliners, three bands from Texas. It turns out that the one I wanted to see, the difficult-to-pronounce but promising Deskonocidos, who play lo-fi garage-punk at hardcore speed—and in Spanish!—got turned away at the border because one of them had a criminal record. There are two other Texan bands but I’m not as interested in them. Nathan assures me I’ll like the next group of locals, who are not d-beat, but just angry hardcore.

Then we talk about how unlikely it is that a revolving door of hundreds of strung-out punks have lived in the lofts and apartments of this building for ten years, rebuilding and rewiring it, shooting heroin and snorting PCP, heating apartments with open ovens in the winter, and the place has never caught fire. I lived in my last cheap apartment for a year and it caught fire twice: what kind of justice is that? People have OD’d here, and maybe some have died; one guy got killed out front staggering into traffic after a show, but no one liked him. I gather he was the long-haired Neanderthal with fierce, dead eyes who I once interrupted smoking crack outside a show by trying to give him a flyer for another show. He just stared at me, wordless, with an expression of homicidal rage, until I moved along. I didn’t like him either.

The people that fall into this lifestyle don’t generally come from the wealthy families against whom their detractors accuse them of rebelling. For the most part, the people I’ve known who’ve ended up living like this come from terrible families, many of them reporting physical and/or sexual abuse. (A member of a well-known Montréal punk band has the word “abuse” tattooed on his penis. No one does that for a laugh.) If you want to escape from “normality” so badly that you’re willing to live in filth, with rats and roaches, drunk or strung out, allowing your teeth to give way, it’s probably a sign those representing “normality” did something pretty bad to you from which you’ll do anything to distance yourself. It’s true that the apartments upstairs from the Gates of Hell/Loud House can be nice enough—people can clean them up, paint the walls, pin up show fliers and movie posters, bring in some plants and books to put on shelves made of discarded bricks and wood and it’s home, suddenly—but to make a home amidst the noise and waste and misery nonetheless signals a genuine desire for escape that goes beyond any form of twisted vanity.

It’s a strange kind of escape, though: it casts itself as the ultimate rebellion, the apex of nonconformity, yet necessitates that people know what a punk is and what a punk belongs to. People on the street, agents of normality, see punks and recognize them as “punks,” and punks encourage that by adopting the traditional dress and hair and attitude of punks to make the game easier, because they want to be seen and understood as they understand punks to be. For the most part, they are. No one expects, at the Gates of Hell, to see someone wearing only a bathrobe, or a speedo, or a sweat-sock on their head: that would be formless, unscripted non-conformity that’d indicate madness. The uniformity of this lifestyle says, “Follow these rules so that we can present a united front of nonconformity against the forces of normality,” and it makes a bit of sense, but not really enough, especially given crust punk’s lip service to anarchy.

The second local band, Ilégal, gets started, and Nathan’s right: I like them. They’re short-hairs, which I sheepishly admit makes them easier to like, and they play fast, pissed off hardcore powered by a boyish, blond drummer with a perfectly erect back. Someone tells me that he used to be the drummer for the Finnish band Selfish, who I can’t remember if I saw or not, but that he moved here. I wonder why he’d do that, why he’d leave Scandinavia for this life. Anyway, it’s our gain, because he plays fast and hard, better than most drummers in the city. The band’s sloppy, but I’m into, snapping my body and my head like a whip in time as the crowd gets rougher and crashes into me a bit. There’s more stage-diving and the jumpers get caught and handed around. When the band is good, I don’t care that I’m surrounded by blank-eyed fuckups who could barely talk to me even if they wanted to. Earlier, Renée, a transplant from Newfoundland, cocked her head at the crowd and said, “This is what I always imagined punk shows in Montréal would be like before I moved here.”

“You mean you wanted to hang out with people like this?” I asked.

“I don’t want to hang out with them,” she said. “I mean, I never talk to them, and they don’t talk to me. But the shows are pretty crazy.”

They are, and when the band is good and going I feel impermeable to the filth and hopelessness of this life, or I flirt with it, charmed by nihilism and chaos and letting it win me over for while when I don’t care if I get showered with beer or puke and there’s only that moment of bristling extremity. I’m there again, so charged up with the rage of the music and the unruly energy of the crowd that I could almost float above it all.

But then the band plays too long again, and I lose interest. The sad dreadlocked door guy realizes the spotlights are pointed too close to the plastic sheeting holding back the insulation and he gets irritably nervous about fire. Climbing, cursing, up the amps while the band starts another song, he unplugs one light to leave us in near-darkness, and plugs in a large fan in its place. The breeze is welcome.

The band’s last song is a cover I can’t make out. Introducing it, the guitarist—the same as for the last band—says, “This song is for those fuckin’ pigs at the border, the fuckin’ fascist border cops! Fuck them all!” Someone told me earlier that some of the members of Ilégal were in the country illegally—hence the band name—but this is assumedly also a reference to the people who’d kept the Deskonocidos from coming up because some member had been convicted of driving drunk (an offence I happen to think is brutally at odds with anarchy’s demand of personal responsibility, but whatever).

The crowd knows the number and sings along, fists in the air, as I recognize I’ve had enough, that no matter how tight and angry the last two bands are, they won’t divest me of the feeling of aching futility at which I always arrive here. That uniform, alien hopelessness encircles me again and begins to tighten about me. I look around the room hoping that someone else is feeling it too, but the room is crashing into itself, or hanging back with half-lidded eyes, or talking among itself about nothing. I’m pretty sure I’m alone in whatever this is. When the last song’s over, I take my as-yet-un-puked-on umbrella off the pile of crates in the bedroom/antechamber, squeeze my way through the drunken crowd in the front room, and begin the long walk home in the rain. 

The protagonists of Euripides’ Bakkhai (New Directions, Dec 2017) are a new god and a cross-dressing conservative. Dionysos has just arrived from the east; though Anne Carson is quick to remind us in her new translation that his presence in Mycenaean tablets dates all the way back to the 12th century BC. This is not surprising. Dionysos is a perpetual stranger, and his religion a constant other. He is nicknamed Bromios (or “boisterous”), after his birth from Zeus’ thunderbolt, which killed his mother Semele and caused the god of gods, his father, to sew Dionysos into his thigh. From this “masculine womb” he is born again, which earns him his second nickname: “twice-born.” He stings the women of Thebes into madness with his thyrsos: a wand of giant fennel topped with a pinecone. He drives them into the mountains where they worship him with wild dances, ritual hunts, sexual escapades, and feasts on raw flesh and wine.

Pentheus, the young and hotheaded new ruler of Thebes, thinks this is all giving his town a bad name, so he imprisons the god’s followers—the Bakkhai, including his mother Agave. But the god liberates them. As is true for most radical conservatives, Pentheus’ fury and intolerance are mixed with irrepressible obsession. Dionysos, who has put on human form as a swoony, longhaired religious leader with “bedroom eyes” and “cheeks like wine” (Pentheus’ own words) is all too aware of this. He convinces Pentheus to dress up as a woman so that he may spy on the Bakkhai without being seen—thus quenching the young man’s curiosity and luring him inexorably into Dionysos’ followers’ claws. Agave sees Pentheus hiding in a tree, and in a fit of Bakkhic madness takes him for a young lion, slaying her son with the help of her maenads. The play ends with Kadmos, her father and the founder of Thebes, revealing to her the nature of her crime, which results in the family going into exile: each member cast out alone.

Anne Carson’s translation is all one would expect of her work: modern, frisky, precise, dense, completely original, and absolutely devastating. As in her other versions of Euripides and Sophocles (like Grief Lesson, Electra, and Antigone) Carson’s line breaks turn the play into a poetry at turns lush and riotous, at others glibly deadpan and ironic. The latter applies in both the dramatic and contemporary senses. At the hands of Carson, it’s a linguistic treat on every level: from Bakkhai’s cascading choruses, to the cast of characters’ rhetorical spars, to the final elegies spoken by Kadmos and Agave that leave one with a sense of raw and irresolvable trauma. Raw indeed on the level of character and drama, but air-tight as crystal in Carson’s economical verse. The result might remind us of what Nietzsche felt only Greek Tragedy could do: fuse the Apollonian and the Dionysian completely. But the play teaches us—and this might be its central lesson—that the Dionysian itself requires a balance of impulses.

The play is surprisingly fresh in its affirmative depiction of women’s spiritual, moral, and sexual freedom—in equal measure, it’s condemnatory of intolerant men. In the order of Bakkhai, the fury of a conservative cannot outlive his hidden fixations. A man of closeted compulsion, who subjects women to the duality of his voyeurism (desire and disgust) before he plans to destroy them for good, will suffer a horrible fate. The logic of Dionysos, in which these impulses must resolve themselves into consummation and release, will not allow this kind of stubborn and compartmentalized approach. The play’s Freudianism avails itself not only in repressed desires, but also ideological vision: the clash here is on the order of collective as well as personal fantasy, and is as frightening as it is fatalistic. And not too distant from the destructive results of our current politics.

Dionysos is no easy god to pin down. Carson associates him in her translator’s note (also a poem) with beginnings: “[he is] your first sip of wine / from a really good bottle. / Opening page // of a crime novel.” Tiresias, that blind prophet and traveler between sexes, summarizes him like no one else can: Dionysos is the “wet element”—“cool forgetting of the hot pains of day”—as well as “that flash across the peaks of Delphi / tossing like a great wild spark from crag to crag.” He fertilizes and sates by giving us drink and the knowledge to press grapes, and he brings forth visions and voluptuous pursuits, alongside the deep trances of terror and sleep. Tiresias instructs Pentheus to “pour his wine, dance his dances, say yes.” But Pentheus cannot be brought to yield, because he knows too well that in the case of Dionysos—who favors women—the patriarchy is at stake. He is unable to conceive for a moment that his mother Agave and her sisters, who are after all his “inferiors,” might know something that he doesn’t. His plans for the Bakkhai, who’ve taken up cymbals and drums, is to “sell [them] into slavery or put [them] to work at our looms.” And when it comes to Dionysos’ popularity abroad, he has few words: “foreigners all lack sense, compared to Greeks.” His prudish, belligerent, deeply misogynistic, and overtly xenophobic demeanor might remind us of Trump. As might his simpleminded diction: “This Bakkhic insanity is catching like wildfire. / What a disgrace! … we’re going to make war on [them].” Except, of course, Pentheus has the charm of being in his late teens or twenties, still somewhat malleable, and willing therefore to play dress-up for his basic instincts.

Dionysos is Pentheus’ proper foil: composed, quietly determined, patient, and sharp-witted. His response to Pentheus’ qualm with strangers is that “there’s more than one kind of sense.” When Pentheus sends guards to arrest him, Dionysos exclaims, “Okay, tie me up!” and after he escapes, he relates to the Bakkhai: “Just between you and me, / I had a bit of fun with him and his ropes.” However, after Pentheus crosses him twice, the dovish demeanor is revealed to be a mere externality, and Dionysos begins to plot. After all, Bacchus is dual in nature: “god of the intensities of terror, / god of the gentlest human peace.” But even then, Dionysos does not lose his composure. In fact, his whole act rests on his suave seduction of Pentheus to act against his own interests. This might be another bizarre link to our political present. Once facts and sensible discourse (embodied in the person of Tiresias) fail to convert, the god resorts to wiles: to the coaxing of subterranean inclinations. Our centuries-old politics of manners is proof that this method of persuasion often trumps the verdict of facts: from Andrew Jackson throwing his forceful simple-man’s vocabulary, to Reagan hiding all culpability behind an actor’s poise, to Trump assuring his audiences with that brash New York baritone. But Bakkhai’s Dionysos embodies the message that true overcoming—on a cosmic, moral, and political scale—requires the synthesis of these two facets of life: reason and passion. The Dionysian leader does not so much “use” either as simultaneously “channel” both in an expression of truth.

Dionysos’ duality is best expressed in a scene where a group of herdsmen encounter the Bakkhai on a journey through the woods. When the men chance upon them, they are peacefully sleeping in three circles, each around the female elders of Thebes, the daughters of Kadmos: Ino, Autonoe, and Agave. Upon the beasts’ braying, the women spring up, “somehow instantly organized”: “with snakes that slid up to lick their cheeks, / some (new mothers who’d left their babies at home) / [cradling] wolf cubs or deer in their arms and [suckling] them.” Honey drips from their thyrsi, and the Bakkhai strike the ground to produce wine, or scratch with their bare hands to draw out milk. But when the herdsmen attempt to attack, in order to return Agave to her son Pentheus, all hell breaks loose. The women tear entire calves and bulls apart (“chunks of flesh dripped from the pine trees, blood everywhere”) and descend upon two villages, where the men’s swords fail to draw any blood, yet the Bakkhai’s thyrsi wound them badly.

This gory scene foreshadows Pentheus’ fate. The dramatic ironies of the sections that follow, that of Pentheus’ sprucing at the hands of Dionysos, and his death on the mountain, are impeccable. (Important also to note here that Pentheus means “grief” in Ancient Greek.) After Dionysos personally dresses and makes him up, the leader wonders aloud whether he looks like his mother. “I was tossing my head back and forth like a maenad inside the house,” he says, in a statement ripe with dramatic pathos. When the god offers to correct his hair, he happily submits: “You redo it. I’m in your hands.” And when Dionysos tells him he will be victorious, that someone other than he will return him home, Pentheus exclaims: “My mother!” The god tonelessly affirms him.

In the section that follows, the Bakkhai reiterate their mission: “the great clear joy of living pure and reverently, / rejecting injustice / and honoring gods.” Then they make their call against Pentheus: “Into the throat / of / the / ungodly / unlawful / unrighteous / earthborn / son / of Echion / let justice / sink her sword / !” Carson mirrors the Bakkhai’s fluctuating intents. Earlier, when she speaks of “skylarking,” and compares the Bakkhai to a fawn leaping free of its hunter, the prose cascades down the page like a peaceful river. Dionysos is freely dialectical here: both hunted and hunter, frolicking while calling out for punishment against Pentheus. But when actually rousing Agave and the women for Pentheus’ death, her words become tightened at the center of the page, turning into literal swords.

Carson translates the scene that follows from two perspectives: that of the Bakkhai, and a servant following Pentheus on his last journey. Once again, Pentheus’ pathos is sharply etched, when he calls out to his mother for mercy, and Carson’s lines chop back: “But she / was foaming at the mouth, / was rolling her eyes, / was out of her mind.” The irony continues into Agave’s slow coming-to. After she has fixed her son’s head onto her thyrsos and paraded it for the rest of the Bakkhic women, she says to herself: “What a fresh bloom he is, / just a kid, just a calf – / here, see the down on his cheeks, / the long soft hair.” She exclaims that she wants her son to nail this head to their house, as a trophy of her hunt and the success of Dionysos. Kadmos talks her awake from her trance. Even the sky begins to brighten, like a sign that Agave and the women were moving through an alternate dimension of their own, or that of the god’s: a pre-modern Upside Down. In response to her realization, Kadmos says the one line that could sum up all of tragedy: “Truth is an unbearable thing. And its timing is bad.” Agave remembers nothing of her deed, and where the text is missing in the original Greek, Carson works wonders through her curt poetry, this time of reckoning: “His body. / His dear, dear body. / This is my son. / This is what I did.” Here we learn that Agave too had denied the god, and this is her punishment.

What is amazingly refreshing in Bakkhai is the unquestioned triumph of Dionysos and, especially for the western reader, the pre-Christian (and pre-Roman) sense of Dionysian order as proper to humankind. The Bakkhai say so again and again: “ancient, / elemental, / fixed in law and custom, / grown out of nature itself” is Dionysos, and he’s therefore to be respected. This is amazing, bearing in mind that Dionysos did not fare well under the Romans. The Senate saw his followers as a secretive and subversive counter-culture: seditious to both civil and religious law. These cults were mostly lead by women, and at gatherings they outnumbered men. The Bacchanalia was banned by the edict of 186 BC, and its members threatened with the death penalty.

Carson captures the renegade spirit of the Bakkhai in her verse. This is how they speak of Dionysos: “He is sweet upon the mountains / when he runs from the pack, / when he drops to the ground, / hunting goatkill blood / and rawflesh pleasure.” The compound words may seem unmistakably Carson’s, but they’re in fact direct translations. The women refer to Dionysos’ emissary (the young religious leader) as their “comrade.” Later Livy, whose accounts of the cult were filled with exaggeration and outright lies, writes that Bakkhic devotees’ nocturnal rites included loud and haunting music, feasts, drunken orgies, murder, and even cannibalism. Shockingly, the Romans also accused early Christians of human sacrifice, and believed that the host was dipped in the blood of a child. In the second century AD, Christians turned these accusations against the pagan in their war against witches’ covens. The latter may not be surprising, given that Dionysos models what became the Devil for fear-mongering Catholics and Protestants, from medieval superstition through to the Inquisition, and all the way up to the Salem witch trials. Just like Dionysos, the Devil sprouts horns, shape-shifts into animals, and communes with and empowers women who submit to him with magic powers.

Here Christianity’s complete reliance on this other order—of the unknown, of magic, and of women’s sexual and moral liberty—is loud and clear: “Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinacy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy,” reads the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486.. The Malleus is the Inquisitors’ guidebook to the identification and persecution of witches, and it answers this formal query with a mighty yes. To read this bizarre and famous work today is to learn that witches’ covens were seen as a threat to the entirety of Christendom, including its masochistic-misogynistic dominance over all forms of spiritual resistance. In Anne Carson’s translation, the whole of this strange history glows through the page. Most notably in an early chorus where the poet inserts this chant into the original play: “green of dawn-soaked dew and slender green of shoots … green of the honeyed muse, / green of the rough caress of ritual, / green undaunted by reason or delirium.” These wizardly treats are endemic to her version.

And later, this spell by Dionysos himself: “Spirit of earthquake, shake the floor of this world!” This, however, is all Euripides. The difference between Bakkhai and the rest of Judeo-Christian history is that in the Ancient Greek play, Dionysos and the women are owed our full regard, and they triumph—though at a cost to Thebes. In Bakkhai, which won first prize at the Dionysia festival where it premiered in 405 BC, this god that reaches way down into our evolutionary roots and affirms everything about our bodies and desires—in good measure, as he repeatedly instructs—along with all the women who enjoy his blessings, are portrayed as impregnable forces. The play shows us that we cannot not revere them, as we’d do so at great cost to our own freedom and integrity. Dionysos is the “rawflesh” prelude to the human imagination that is inescapable even to its finest and most noble pursuits.

This message feels as important today as it did over 2,400 years ago. Hence the commissioning of this ravishing new translation by the Almeida Theater, where it was first staged in July of 2015 starring Ben Wishaw as Dionysos, Bertie Carvel as Pentheus, and renowned director James Macdonald at the prow—better known for his work with contemporary authors. The production opened to raving praise of Orlando Gogh’s score and Ben Wishaw’s acting, which the Guardian described as “insinuating and dangerous,” and “the most perfect portrayal of androgyny.”

With its due relevance in mind, let’s let Bakkhai have the last word: “Many are the forms of the daimonic / and many the surprises wrought by gods. / What seemed likely did not happen. / But for the unexpected a god found a way. / That’s how this went / today.”