The Harvesting Effect

- In loving memory of Eric S. -

“The cosmic vacuum of the desert was a perfect place to program young minds.” – Charles Manson

Saturday.  As day turned into evening I was battling back the hangover with more alcohol.  Too exhausted to even leave the couch, my X-Box fried beyond repair, I was watching movies on my laptop.  I had flashbacks to Iraq – sitting in the sweltering heat, watching my life ooze out of my body as I stared mechanically into the glowing screen.   It seemed the only thing to do.  There was no real escape from this place or the oppressive heat.  I had been working outside all week and now I was completely exhausted.  My phone rang, it was my old buddy Joey.  He was drunk, upset, and driving over to my place as we spoke.  I clicked up google maps and guided him in like a passenger jet in which the pilots have been incapacitated.  He pulls up to my place and steps inside.  His face and shoulders burnt and red from the sun, a Bud Light six pack and a pack of Camel Wides in the white plastic bag dangling from his hand.  His shoes are soaked, smell like dead fish, and as he takes them off and drapes his soggy socks over the edge of the rail he tells me he’s been fishing all day.  He also tells me that his brother is dead.

It’s been miserable hot all week.  Mid nineties all day, mid eighties all night.  No wind.  Sirius burns hot in the night sky, the dog days of summer.  The weather is killing people, making them insane, making them violent.  The heat accelerates death as it amplifies rage.  This is part of the ‘Harvesting Effect’, a short-term forward mortality displacement.  Immediately following the heat wave there is a compensatory decrease in overall mortality.  This compensatory reduction in mortality means that heat affects especially those so unwell that they would have died in a short time anyway.  The sick, the elderly, the weak.

Heat does funny things to people, fucked up things to people.  In addition to physical stress, excessive heat causes psychological stress, to a degree which affects performance.  Heat causes an increase in violent crime, assault, mutual combat, and spousal abuse.  My own head is clouded by the heat, dizzy, eyes have difficulty focusing.  I’m constantly sweating, sticky, clammy, and uncomfortable.  I feel out of balance, move slowly, anger easily, am intolerant, frustrated.  Everyone is an asshole, drives like an asshole, talks like an asshole, moves like an asshole.  People are losing their fucking minds, it makes everyone just that much more irritated.

It’s the goddamn summertime.  Of course there are going to be more people out on the streets.  More alcohol being consumed, and the opportunity for petty disagreements to occur will be augmented.  But there is something more.  There is a link between hot weather and the levels of serotonin released in the brain, a side-effect of which can be heightened aggression.  Violent crime and riots increase as temperatures rise.  The majority of riots in the US occur when the temperature increases to between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit.  Rape and murder rates peak in the summer months, a trend reflected worldwide.  In the sweltering summer of 1988, the murder rate in New York jumped by 75%. The connection between heat and violence has a venerable history. In 18th-century Italy, the effect of the sirocco – the hot, humid wind that sweeps annually through the Mediterranean – was thought to have such a distorting effect on human judgment that it was considered a mitigating circumstance when cited in court.

Formal experimentation has been conducted.  Ehor Boyanowsky, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, in one test had a set of volunteers subjected by a researcher to a series either of insults or compliments. The volunteers were invited to retaliate by administering electric shocks. Those volunteers held in temperatures of 75F reacted aggressively when insulted and delivered the shocks; those in temperatures of 90F-95F were so aggravated that they administered shocks even when the researcher was complimenting them. Differences “of formal civility and higher violence rates in the southern states versus greater bluntness and lower violence rates in the north have been observed”, he notes. Global warming could be making the problem worse.

People with psychological problems suffer deeply when the temperature rises.  Many medications used to treat psychological disorders lose their efficacy by excessive perspiration.  The crazy people get crazier.  Dehydration affects everyone, but it only becomes evident in hot weather – made worse by overheated offices or air-conditioning systems, which can cause sweltering workers to lose the equivalent of 10 glasses of water a day.  How do you quench your thirst?  In the summer it’s often with alcohol.  Adding to the oppressive atmosphere, psychologists have identified a phenomenon they call “summer depression”, the opposite of ordinary seasonal affective disorder, brought on by the fading light of winter.

I ask Joey what the fuck happened.  How did he die?  What is going on?  He tells me that Eric, his brother, had OD’d on heroin.  I pour him a shot of whiskey as I top off my own drink.  We sit down on my back balcony.  The air is slowly cooling off, the harsh colors of the day are melting away being replaced with less tyrannical shades.  He sips at his whiskey shot as he talks, his face locked in conflict between sadness and anger.   He starts and stops several times, it is obvious that his mind is a whirlpool of memories and emotions while his brain drunkenly, futilely, tries to make sense out of it all.

The drinks and the coming darkness are helping but it’s still a dangerous world.  Joey is unsure of what he wants to say or do.  I tell him to start at the beginning, it’s usually a good place to start.  He agrees, takes another sip of whiskey, and begins.

This is his story:

Joey, “I don’t know if I can do this right now.  I might have overstepped my bounds.  I guess my first memory is when I was a kid.  You know.  That stuff about Eric’s mom and my mom, when we first met, that stuff when we were young. He wasn’t my full brother, we were step brothers and my mom was pregnant with Mandi and all fat and his mom beat her down and threw her on the grass with all the dried dog shit.  Because his mom didn’t know about my mom until we came over.  Stuart and Eric were standing there at the front door.  I can still remember that.

But we formed up this crew.  Me, Stuart, Eric, and me.  The “Cheesers”, and the “Sockers”, that’s what we called people.  Cheesers were the people that did not put their socks on, and Sockers were the people that wore socks.  And it was a real popular style for a while that you would wear your Flojos sandals with your socks on.  Medium to the knee, to school, with your socks on.  And Eric and me would be like, no – that’s not cool.  Cheesers are cool.

Stu and Eric fought an awful lot about their ideology about music.  Stuart liked this band called Ratt, that’s “R-A-T-T”, but Eric liked the heavier stuff like Metallica.  I had to be at least 9 at this time, and Stuart liked U2, but Eric liked Slayer.  And Stuart also liked Slayer and Metallica as well, but they both had a competition to see what I liked better.  The real competition was to see what my mom would let me listen to better.  Stuart was more mainstream, more pop music, more variety, more open to more streams of music.  Beastie Boys, Eazy-E.  More different streams of music.  But Eric said ‘all rap is crap’.

They were both into rap for a while.  They both liked ‘ah push it’, Salt n Pepa.  It was the sexual incantations. Probably both better than ‘horny’.

As far as Eric was concerned, they both lived in our house.  I was young.  And um.  Eric um.  Lived on a bunk bed on top of me.  Eric, at this time of my life, even though he was in high school, was looking to me for advice.  Punk, girls, music, heavy metal.  I had grown my hair out long.  He had good speaker knowledge, you know, to play the best heavy metal music at the time.  He was also into guns.  Very republican with all the guns at the time.

At the time, I have to say that Eric decided to idolize the life I lived for a short period.  I ran away in my life and lived on the streets.  I was getting beat up by my dad, my step dad.  We slept on sleeping bags in sewer tunnels, eating food out of dumpsters.  For a period of time I lived with a white supremacist gang called the “Hammerhead Skins”.  They lived across the street from me.  I was a young kid.  And we robbed my parents’ house of food. We, not robbed, but took all the TV dinners.  We took them across the street and mircowaved the meals and ate them after the drugs, after the hard drugs, when I was hungry.  When I ate the drugs that made us hungry.  And I would see Eric over at his house.

It was a weird experience to see his house that he lived in.  We robbed him too.  Took the TV, the stereo, and everything else.  I would sometimes bring him hard drugs.  He would hang out when we did that.

I lived in H.B. for a while with some skinhead gangs that were there.  I would go around, not deal with issues, had a horrible life.  Living off the land and that stuff.  I took the bus and would see Eric and some of his friends.  One of his friends took me in.  He liked my style and my white supremacist attitude.  Which was weird because he was like an American Indian.  We lived at his horse ranch in Yorba Linda.  He had guns and drugs and grenades and stuff.  They all went to high school together, Eric and these guys.  They all loved the lifestyle of doing drugs and guns and punk rock and heavy metal and skinhead lifestyle.  That’s when his paranoid schizophrenia took hold.  There in Jim’s house in Jim’s room.  He started manifesting some stuff that took place in his sleep.  We took part in some satanic rituals, drank blood, and a bunch of stuff.  Eric, even before the internet, taught us how to make fully automatic weapons, silencers – home made silencers at the back of the horse ranch.  This was all before 9-11.  We all had silencers, anarchist cookbook style.  We thought we were at the top of our game.  We took weapons you could buy at the thrift store and made fully auto weapons out of them.  We thought we were really cool.  We shot them into his mom’s pool, we were really into all the rounds and stuff.  To fast forward – Jim got his house raided by the cops.  According to the story he used his high powered rifle to snipe some cops.  He is no longer allowed to own a high powered rifle or anything else.  He’s working at Chic-Fil-A now.

Eric got paranoid about living at the ranch.  There are so many stories to tell about this time.  So many stories.  We took a walk together and talked.  This was a moment of change.  I took the train back to Dana Point.  He moved into his grand-ma’s house.   He never got off the drug lifestyle.  He still had the rifles we modified.

When I turned 18 he was no longer allowed to live at the house that my mom and dad had owned.  He got into a different part of the drugs.  Come to flash back is that Eric had never done drugs until he had met me.  At this church meeting, my mom sent us off to it.  We met these girls and I had all this speed, and we did all this speed, and Eric felt all gimp because he never did anything.  So I got him into the drugs.  That’s all my fault.  That is the back-forward. But we had been doing drugs for a long time.

But um, Eric had, in the end, in the short story, he ended up getting up getting an apartment in Santa Ana.  He got into doing heroin.  Not by choice, it just happened to be around when he was doing speed and coke and somehow he got into it.  We used to smoke the speed at this time.  And I got married in 2001 to this girl.  Eric came to our wedding but had to leave early.  I hadn’t seen him since then until 2008, February.  And all my family members were like – “Fuck Eric!  I don’t want to see him, he’s on drugs”.  And that was like 8 years.  2001 to 2008.  And so I was like working from home at the time because of my DUI and my sister said she wouldn’t live at the house while he was there.  Stuart his true blood brother didn’t want to hang out.  My dad didn’t want to see him.  And Eric wanted to pick up the firearms that we made.  We had nowhere to go, no car to drive in, no pizza brought, no drugs to do.  We were all kind of scared of him because of all the drugs he was on.  And my dad would tell him ‘leave Joey alone because he’s working’, but this is my adopted dad, not my real dad.  But nobody wanted to hang out with him.  He was one fucked up, drugged up, motherfucker.  He got arrested on the train ride down.  He saw my truck and wanted to know my story, I told him about the way I got abused and smoked cigarettes with him.  He understood, smoked cigs, drank alcohol with him.  All my parents’ alcohol.  He got really drunk.  I had to carry him into my house.  My dad was there, watching me carry him in, neighbors watching.  Nobody wanted to deal with him.  He was addicted to heroin.  I bought him lots of cough syrup.  He needed it to surpass his addiction at the time.  They left me with him for the whole week but nobody wanted to hang out with him.  Nobody wanted to hang out with him.  It was so disgusting. This whole house full of people and my sister stays with her friend for the week at her house.  My dad didn’t want to deal with him, he stayed late at work every night.  My mom didn’t want to deal with him.  She stayed in San Diego for the whole week.  My brother Stuart didn’t want to deal with him, he had his own house, would never let him come over, didn’t want to see him.  So since I worked from home, because of my DUI and all, I got stuck with him. It was sick. It was disgusting to see a family act like this.

And then, nobody said goodbye to him.  It was me and my stepdad and he woke us up at 7 in the morning and it was to take the train home.  And then everyone came home, and was relieved, but I was sick to my stomach.  But I was sick to my stomach because they didn’t want to deal with the monster that they created.  They were the ones who were really sick though.  They were sick of themselves.  They were sick of themselves for what they had created.

I met my future wife, and then I get this phone call, and he had passed away.  He had so many family and friends.  Me, his sister, his dad, his stepdad, his other stepdad.  But nobody was there.  But nobody was there.  They were all not there.  They told me don’t blame yourself, you can’t blame yourself, but they all blame themselves.  And it’s disgusting.  We had the most amount of money and the most amount of support and we could have done so much for him.  But nobody did nothing.  They were all selfish and greedy.  And we can all go visit his grave.   And everyone wants to be there for him now, but how easy is that.  What a joke.  It’s so lame.  It’s so easy now.  It’s disgusting.  Everyone wants to be your friend when you’re dead.  It makes me sick.  Eric’s dad, his real father.  He said it since I was 16 until Eric was 30 something that he knew Eric was gonna kill himself.  Well if you knew it and you had all the money to stop it then why didn’t you do something?  Fuck you!  I got in a fight with my wife tonight because of this.  My heart is broken.  And Stuart doesn’t even want to deal with it.  But Eric was the only one I could ever talk about the past and the hurt.  But I can’t do that anymore.  He’s gone.  The stories are gone.  But the hurt is still there.  And I want to talk about all the other stories, there are hundreds of stories, but nobody would even understand.  But maybe you will.“

I ask Joey of some of his best memories about Eric, some of the good stuff.  He looks at his hands and gets angry.

Joey, “Whatever dude, whatever.  Fuck Eric!  He wanted to be an asshole.  Do drugs.  Whatever.  And now I’m over here.  I got a wife and a baby.  Whatever.  What am I doing?  Darlene doesn’t understand what’s going on, baby Cash.  But he’s dead.  Fuck.  Maybe the rest of the family is how it should be.  And Darlene is there all sleeping there all passed out…  Happy.  Deal or no deal?  The deal is over.

Eric, out of all my brothers, would have been right here when I died.  Everyone, when he goes to his grave, does it to say it’s cool or something.  But I’m right here.  I’m not crying or anything.  There’s something in the air or something in my eyes.  I just miss my D-girl.  But my D-girl’s all mad at me.“

Joey lights up a cigarette.  Smokes it hard.  I walk inside to get a refill.  I can hear him talking to ghosts out on the balcony.  Arguing with them while he puffs his cigarette.  He feels the strife… “the hurt”.  He knows what is real.  His private words are like prayers to a godless sky.

He starts again, “You know what I think?  Here’s what I think.  People need to hear some stories.  And the most fucked up stories people never write about.  I want to say a lot of things, but I don’t want people to write about them.  Things about me when I lived on the streets.  I’m serious.  Like we had these yuppie friends with mansions and arcade games and everything else.  But I can’t do it man.  You do fucked up shit for money.  Way outside of the way.  And you’re hungry.  And you just want to eat some food.  So you dig out of a trashcan to eat some food.  It’s just some ghetto shit, you know.  You rob people.  You steal shit.  You sell fake drugs.  You do a lot of other shit I don’t want to talk about.  But it just fits into the next story of my life where I’m like in kindergarten.  Creepy stuff. Creepy stuff people do.  Creepy stuff people do to you.  Creepy stuff you gotta keep secret.  Creepy secrets.  Creepy stuff you do to make money.  And dead men want to fight you.  And you become a man.  You hurt people, stab people, beat people down.  You don’t do it to survive, but because your hurt.  And you gotta do it to forget it.  You gotta do it just to forget it.  Drugs, sex, and rock and roll…  And never-ending money.

I am such a bad husband.  I mean I’m over here, drinking beer.  And she’s home, dealing with crying baby.  She has no car, no license, crying baby.  And I don’t want to ruin my reputation.  Aw fuck it.  I’ll puke on your fucking furniture.  And your girlfriends coming over and she thought I was such a good father but I’m not.  Fuck it.  Fuck all of it.  I’m done.”

We sat and talked for a few more hours until he sobered up a bit.  I had already texted Darlene and told her where he was and that I wasn’t going to let him get a DUI.  At around 2:30 AM I had him drive home.  I could have had him sleep on the couch but he needed to get back to D-girl and baby Cash.  He was ok to drive, and even though I told him that I’d buy everyone breakfast the next day he didn’t answer my phone calls.  I would have heard if something had gone wrong.  It’s just another day in the relentless sun.

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