Richard Speck

I'm hunched at my computer in my little room in a city on the western coast of the United States. I have a
vicious cold. Crumpled tissues and Robitussin bottles everywhere. My curtains are drawn. There's a sea of
blackness out there. I go to a website that culls interesting clips from youtube. I click on one video. It's a
documentary about the mass murderer Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in 1966, and his
subsequent life in prison. The video is VCR-quality and seems to have been shot in the late 80s.

Richard Speck has breasts. He has been taking female hormones that have been smuggled into
the jail. He parades around in a pair of makeshift "panties." A voice asks him, "do you like being
fucked by men?" he says, "absolutely."

Cut to an academic-looking narrator, who describes to me the concept of "queen bees." In prison
some inmates feminize themselves and perform sex acts in exchange for treats like liquor and cocaine.
It is not made clear whether this is consensual , but you'd have to be an idiot to believe there isn't
some level of coercion involved. I start to feel very ill. I leave my apartment and stumble into the street hoping
for relief.

I don't live on a particularly comforting street. I don't know what I was expecting. My street might
as well be named Richard Speck Street. There are no lawns, no sprinkler systems, no stars,
and no kittens.

That video. This universe. Why? Our prisons show us how flimsy our concept of civilization is.
Put a group of homo sapiens in a room, and they will create hell.

I didn't always believe that life is hell. As a kid, I distinctly remember believing that the universe
is a beautiful work of art. That life is good. That everything is going to be all right.