A Lesson in Pain

Mama always told me never to play around the hot stove.  I never quite understood why,  sure I’d smell something a little weird and there’d be a red mark in the spot I placed my hand, but what’s bad about that.  Why’d they rush over and wrap my fucking hand in some toilet paper looking shit?  

Speaking of my parents, everyone who sees my face around these days say Mommy and Daddy must’a smacked my head and cracked my skull open with every blunt object in the south side.  That ain’t true, or at least THEY didn’t do that.  They were alright people, at least by society’s standards.  Mom kept the house clean, dad went off to work in a tux doing boring business things with other boring business people.  He never told us much about his job, but I never cared to learn anything either.  As far as Mom was concerned, if it paid well and kept food on our table she was happy.  It was a fairly big house for Chicago, two stories, three bedrooms, two bathrooms.  Mom claimed she kept the extra bedroom as a bedroom in case the stork delivered me a brother or a sister.  I wasn’t dumb, even as a kid I knew the idea of a sea bird wrapping a baby up in a fucking blanket and mailing it to expecting mothers was bullshit.  I’ve never understood why parents don’t tell their children that babies come from female pussys.  Humans are born from humans, it’s not a fucking risque idea.  I’ve gotten off-track though, somehow this turned into a conversation about vaginas.  

No what’s more important, is there’s a certain sensation I’ve never experienced.  As a little kid, I’d experiment with it a bit.  I’d poke my fingers with sewing needles, little droplet of scarlet water pouring out.  Didn’t feel it.  When I got a few years older I’d slice off pieces of flesh with a butcher knife, smack my head with a wrench.  I’d laugh hysterically as my mom ran to my room in a panic wrapping the red gooey parts with toilet paper and embracing me with care.  A nervous giggle, is what she called it, but I simply laughed at her concern for my well being.  

When I was old enough to start education, the kids at my elementary school, they’d be tripping all over the place, accidentally poking themselves with plant thorns, start screaming and crying like a shitty broadway singer.  Never made sense to me the time.  But I found it oddly fascinating.  It’s like there was something different about them, some kind of invisible cloud of paranoia hovering over their bodies, watching their every move.  I guess I was immune to that cloud, or it didn’t like me much because I didn’t believe in it.  Maybe that’s why I don’t believe in God either,  I was never a fan of abstract concepts.   And pain… as I’d soon learn it’s called, both God and pain were abstract concepts to me.   I remember one day I was walking along the same dusty street I always did, somewhere around 5 or 6 years old, running towards the baseball field with a wooden bat.  I never quite understood why all the kids loved baseball, but I figured there was something to it.  It felt like a chore with too many rules to it, and it seemed to have no purpose.  Whenever I heard really important people like the president talk on the radio, I never heard him mention little Johnny Fisher making a homerun, or Benny Miller stealing a base.  All the kids had some kind of thing they loved to talk about though, hobbies they call them.  Apparently watching drips run down windows during rain storms and outside pedestrians march towards an unknown destination didn’t qualify as hobbies.

Back to what I was gonna talk about, I accidentally stepped on the tail of a big ole rat as it scurried along one day.  It let out a teeny scream just as any other living creature experiencing that pain thing would.  It was twitching a little bit, as if forced to read those dimestore romance novels with the shirtless men.  I decided to take it a little step further, Grabbed the squirming little thing, placing it on top of a shiny looking pristine trashcan to elevate it a bit.  That trashcan was kept in cleaner condition than half of my young friends, and because of the foul otherworldly stench erupting from that house whenever they’d open the perfectly carpented maple front door I’m still not convinced they ever used it. I raised my bat above my head and slammed it on the trash can.  A curtain of red ooze spread over the formerly pristine trash lid, slowly drifting toward the edges like those Window raindrops I loved.  I wasn’t unfamiliar with blood, obviously I knew it was the red stuff that spills out of a hole in someone’s skin.  This was different though, usually I’d just see little splotches of blood when someone skinned their tiny little knee, or a large patch after all those time I used a butcher knife on myself.  This time the red ooze covered most of the trash can lid, bathing it in scarlet.  I could see a tiny little rat leg twitch though, and driven by intense curiosity,  I wanted to see the extent of pain this creature could take.  So I raised my bat again, and slammed it onto the trash can.  Suddenly the twitching ceased.  The creature, now resembling a sloppy joe more than it did a rat.  It was dead.  That was the day I learned why people don’t like pain.

I ran home in excitement and wonder upon this epiphany, joyously sprinting up the old redbrick steps bursting through the door as if I had discovered the cure for polio or something.  “Mom!  Dad! You’ll never guess what I did!”  I rushed towards the bedroom where she set up her radio, tuned to those dramas where everyone cheats on each other and gets angry.  I told her about what I did to the rat, about how much pain it must have been feeling before it stopped moving.  I’ll never forget that haunting look in her eyes, as she stared down at me, a look that must have carried just as much pain as that rat felt.  “Listen to me Jimmy, sweetie, you did a really bad thing” she said “That rat was just minding his own business, doing it’s thing, and then you kill it with a baseball bat.  That isn’t nice”  I was dumbfounded, it was the first time I’d ever heard that word… kill.  “What’s, kill?” I asked her with a profound thirst for new knowledge.  “It’s what happens when… animals… and people… stop living...  Jimmy didn’t they teach you this at all in school?”  She planted herself onto the bed, raising her brows with concern.  “They mentioned something kinda like that once when Bobby said his grandpa died, said he ain’t living anymore.”.  I dropped onto the ground in confusion, my entire young worldview slowly beginning to form.  I was beginning to discover that pain and death share some kind of deep connection.  It was fascinating, maybe a little too fascinating. I wanted to experiment with it more, discover what this barrier was between pain and death.  I wanted to pinpoint the exact moment when pain is at its most excruciating level before it results in death.  There had to have been something almost euphoric about that shit.  The way people scream and curse during it.  It was magical.  
And twenty years locked away in High security prison was worth it.  It was worth killing  all of those bozos after all.  I guess I’m a bit of a scientist, and scientist has to experiment, ya know?