Human beings have invented the tools to completely exterminate themselves — Sigmund Freud.
I was thinking about the expression “death wish” recently. As early as 1930 Freud coined the impulse thanatos, after the god known primarily for being outwitted by Sisyphus. Thanatos repeatedly sought extreme danger; he harbored a general wish (some said instinct) for death. This day ruminating on mortality wound me back to my early teens. What was wrong with me, I asked myself. Was whatever was wrong with me wrong with Patty Vance too? Did the two of us have a death wish? Patty Vance was my best friend, but a friend for only a season. And if also for a reason, it was to help me become more compassionate, more forgiving.
We first met because I couldn’t open my locker despite having the numbers written on a corner of binder paper. I was a sucker for an offer of help. She was fair skinned. A red head. She had small imperfect freckles that looked as though they were flicked across her nose with a paint brush. She was one of these people who could smile and talk at the same time. At first I was impressed, found this warm and engaging. Later the same day I suspected her of trying to sell me something.
When you are thirteen, you don’t think about death. You kneel at the altars of immortality and impulsivity. The prefix itself winks at cancellation, negation. You’d think we’d have known better.
I know now at that age the brain is wired to reject the notion that anything truly bad will ever happen to you. The frontal lobe of a thirteen year old is like a brake with a snapped cable. The young see their lives stretched out before them and imagine themselves Tefloned against the slings and arrows.
A statistic recently made it into the headlines: If you are a prostitute, you’ve only got about 7 years to live. TV host Rebecca Quigley backed up her claim citing ”AIDS and homicide as the top killers.” Consultant Devon D. Brewer begged to differ. True the risk of homicide that women prostitutes face is higher than any other set of women. It was at least the profession you’re mostly likely to be murdered in.
No one really knows the life expectancy of a prostitute. But it’s not seven years. This is how disinformation gets started.
“If you had a life expectancy that short, you’d have difficulty replenishing the pool with new prostitutes,” said Brewer. Despite using evoking the image of a fish tank that is simply “replenished” when there is a floater, Brewer’s argument is the more rational.
All experts agree on one thing: prostitution is a very dangerous profession.
I blame it for being the thing that got my friend killed.
When my father asked me “why do you care?” about my friend’s death, I was hard pressed to answer. I think he was asking not why I cared that she died, but why I care about solving her cold case.
“She was wronged,” I said to my dad over a cup of coffee.
“So what? Why waste all this time. She’s gone.”
“I want her to be righted,” I said.
Maybe I wasn’t making much sense to him. From my vantage point he spent a good part of his life worrying about only himself. How could he understand?
It was the furtherest thing from natural conversation for my father and me to be talking about the deaths of loved ones over a cup of coffee. Normally we talked baseball or relationships. I had no love for baseball and my father would sooner swallow screws than talk about my relationship troubles. But we had no topic we could share that interested us both.
He would die of lung cancer before the year was out. I often talked to my father, not caring if what I had to say mattered to him. I suspected it didn’t. He was not a family man. He never shook that demeanor of a man ready to dash. He was one of these men always pointed towards the door. Always waiting for the starting gun to go off. That was my father.
My friend Patty had a son before she died. I often think about him. I wonder if his nose is covered with her same paint spatter of freckles. I’m guessing it is. Does he smile and talk at the same time? Do people assume he’s slick because of it. Maybe he doesn’t even recognize in himself what is coded in his DNA. Maybe I was wrong about his mother — she wasn’t trying to sell me anything. She was being friendly. She was signaling she was no threat to the tribe. I take that back. She was trying to sell me something — herself. And I was buying.
