Illustration Credit: Aaron Cooper
Note from the informational ether: “Nosedive” is a collection of essays and narrative prose written by Ben Lee over the course of a year prior to his death. Per his will, I am posting these on his behalf with no changes made to his original text. He’s not that Ben Lee. He’s also fictional.
Part 1: Is Suicide Punk?
Chapter 10
Each weekend Allison left was a dare whether she knew it or not. If she took Dame with her on a short trip to a friend’s or some family, those weekends were double dares. Triple dares if she left me alone with the older car that clearly emitted more carbon dioxide. Quadruple if she would clearly be too busy to check in on me very often.
The dares piled up until it became chickenshit for a guy who claimed he wanted to die, and who tried to kill himself two times already, to deny it was time.
My issue with suicide has always been an aversion to pain, which one may find a weird statement given how much pain I’d already caused myself. It’s not that I can’t take pain. My pain tolerance is very high in general. The ass kicking of a mosh pit has always been a source of ecstasy for me, throwing myself around in a hellhole of energy. But that’s a kind of pain wrapped in endorphins and adrenaline. It’s a pain from manic activity.
Suicidal pain is different because it’s hard to kill a person and even harder for a person to kill oneself. Death doesn’t typically happen without a lot of pain. Look no further than capital punishment to find that it’s all tantamount to torture that just so happens to end in death, usually.
Although, while we’re on the subject, let me say how bullshit it is that capital punishment exists. I won’t say if it’s pu… something or not pun… something because I don’t even want a certain word I love to be associated with capital punishment in any way.
Forget that many people who are executed are innocent. Don’t argue against capital punishment by whining, “Even one innocent person executed is a tragedy.” That implies one can decide the threshold where it’s okay to kill another person. That implies that murder is okay as long as powerful people say it’s okay.
Murder is not okay. I can’t believe I even have to type this, but it isn’t okay. It’s not okay when a person goes out on the street and kills someone for a thrill. It’s not okay when the government does it. It’s not okay when it’s anything in between. Capital punishment is premeditated murder in the first fucking degree, and we should put on trial anyone who has had a part in allowing it to happen. This includes any judges involved in executions. This includes any governors who haven’t overruled executions. This includes any president who allows a single person to be executed within their country during their term.
Even one person executed is a tragedy the same as any other murder or war or act of evil. No society can consider itself civil while it allows this to happen. Every war is a mass execution. Every murder of any kind is a tragedy.
Keep all this in mind as my story unfolds, but also remember I’ve outted myself already as a hypocrite and unpunk. From the beginning, I’ve said this, which does not excuse me for any of my actions. If anything, it only makes my actions worse because I know their weight. I know my own evil. (But we’ll get to all of that later.)
This applies to an execution of oneself as well. And though I have more to say on this subject as a whole, I am ready to answer the question I’ve asked myself running on decades.
Is suicide punk?
Let’s look at the what I’ve answered already:
Self-Immolation: In its purest form, this is punk.
Revenge Suicide: This is unpunk.
Disillusionment Suicide: Unpunk.
But I have yet to answer if Accidental Suicide or Mercy Suicide are punk, so I’ll address that now before I give my final ruling on the question at hand.
Accidental Suicide is so passive, it makes me sick. Passive actions are not punk because, as I’ve mentioned previously, punk is about doing shit. If one is going to kill oneself, don’t do it by avoiding going to the dentist until cavities rot into the brain. Take a gun and shoot that brain. Don’t be like me and miss. So yeah, this form of suicide is not punk.
That leaves Mercy Suicide, which is suicide to relieve oneself from pain. I’ve had mix feelings about this one for some time. On one hand, compassion is punk. And when I say this, I don’t mean compassion for oneself because who gives a fuck. I mean feeling compassion for someone in pain and allowing them the mercy of killing themselves without anyone judging them or saying they aren’t punk for doing it.
On the other hand, pain is punk. Look at that aforementioned mosh pit. Look at the existence of being a punk. None of it is easy. All of it hurts. Being punk kind of sucks.
The question becomes how much pain is necessary for Mercy to cross the barrier from unpunk to requiring compassion and what other considerations (if any) should I make outside of that?
Every day, my amputated foot is agony. That’s a lot of physical pain, but it is pain others have managed without the complaint I put forward now. I suffered sexual abuse as a child, which haunts me still. That’s more emotional pain than anyone should have to face. My son’s death. I’ve lived with various mental ailments my entire life, and those are more torture than my foot could ever be.
But even all of that is not enough for two simple reasons. The pain I’ve felt is not more than the pain I’d cause if I killed myself, which means the pain I’ve felt is not enough. And the pain I’ve felt would not give the people in my life any relief that my suffering is done, which means the pain I’ve felt is not enough.
Several facets go into those two points. It is not punk to cause pain to other people. This fact is the backbone of those points. For a Mercy Suicide to be punk, it has to make people feel relieved after the deed is done. Rather than conjuring a curse of depression and evil, it must conjure a blessing. Weight must lift from the survivors.
I’d go as far to say it doesn’t count as Mercy Suicide unless the suicide is a relief, even a sad relief. As such, I’ll differentiate between Mercy Suicide and Intended Mercy Suicide. One can intend to enact a Mercy Suicide but fail – not because they lived but because the act was not a relief. Intended Mercy Suicide is unpunk. Mercy Suicide is as punk as compassion, which is very punk.
That’s such a small subset of Mercy suicides, though. Pure Self-Immolation is such a small subset of suicides. When something is only punk as an exception and not the rule, the answer is clear as to whether that thing is punk or not.
Suicide is not punk.
That implies all the subsets of suicide are also not punk. I don’t hate that line of thinking, and for now, I’ll just say that it’s complicated (more on this as part of a discussion in Part 2 of this book).
On the day I failed at killing myself for the third time in my life, I called Biscuit. I’d blown him off many times since the funeral. Being a good friend was not a strength of mine and continues to be a weakness. I don’t feel good about roping him into my attempted suicide.
My suicide device pulled into his driveway, and a funny thing occurred to me. This moment right then was the first time I’d ever picked him up to go anywhere. Most of my life was spent without a car until I met Allison. Since that was the moment forward when I yanked him from my life like an annoying weed, he did not know this new, responsible, car-owning version of myself. It’s a version he would soon hate.
“Where are we going?” I asked when he slipped into the suicide device.
“I’ll give you directions on the way,” he said.
Every intersection became soundtracked with “left”, “right” or “straight”. Greys’ Outer Heaven shambled below the volume of comprehensive hearing, not so much music as ambient sound natural to the world through which the device passed in the early night. A snare beat could be crickets or a coyote in Forest Hills Park. A yelp could be the chorus or some kid down a side street. Music and nature collided.
“Amanda is meeting us there,” Biscuit said, tapping at the passenger side window.
“What?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“We’ve sort of been dating the last bit. I wanted to tell you, but you know.”
I’d been blowing him off.
“Wait,” I said. “How long have you been dating her?”
“Since the funeral,” he said. “I know! I know!”
“You picked up my sister-in-law at my son’s funeral?”
“I’m really sorry, man.”
“Damn,” was all I could say. Truthfully, I found myself impressed.
“Damn?”
“She’s not playing tonight, is she?”
My life had slipped away from me so much that I couldn’t place the last time I went to one of her shows. This predates the bad thing. It had been years – probably before Damian was born, even. She never once complained about it to us.
“Nah,” he said. “Just a spectator. She has this label she’s going to start, and there’s a band she might want to sign. She doesn’t know it yet, though.”
“She doesn’t know she’s starting a label?”
Biscuit laughed at that dumb joke and said, “She doesn’t know she wants to sign this band, but they’re rad. Maybe she’ll let me a talent scout because I’m always right.”
In general, that statement was false, but Biscuit’s reputation as a punk band taste maker precedes him for a guy who never did anything with that talent until this very moment. He was an account or some shit. Maybe a lawyer. Something boring.
Amanda put a welt on my arm when she met us at the bar.
“Hi, fuck-o,” she said. “Takes this asshole for your own sister-in-law to hang out with you?”
“I saw you last thing at your mom’s thing,” I countered.
“That doesn’t count. I’m buying drinks.”
She ordered three of the cheapest beers. It’s popular to say a bad beer taste like piss, so I won’t dip into that toilet. It tasted like someone had just scrubbed a toilet with bleach, pissed in it, cooled it with ice cubes and served me the bleachy, cold piss. I almost never drank anymore. My body grew warm with the first sip.
“So, this guy?” I asked. “You’re dating him?”
“He’s not so bad,” Amanda said.
“Fuck both of you,” Biscuit said.
“Dude, you had me pick you up for this thing and then you had Amanda meet us here,” I laughed. “What? You couldn’t pick her up?”
Half the beer gone, and I was officially drunk already.
“You offered to pick me up!” Biscuit said.
“I could have picked up both of you,” I said.
“It’s fine,” Amanda chuckled. “I’m the one intruding on your date. The third wheel has drive herself. I get it.”
I was half in the bag by the time the supposed “needs to be signed” band went on. It sounded like noise, but everything sounded like noise. I tried to dance to look normal. Amanda put her arm around my waist, and I soon realized this was due to my stumbling dance steps. I was a tree in a hurricane.
“Okay, cool guy,” she said. “I miss this you. This is almost as cool as you were before you got your nose back.”
“Yeah, I’m fucking awesome,” I laughed.
“Allison misses you too.”
Not as much as I thought she would after the night was through.
I had a bit of a brownout through the rest of the bands, quasi-literally as I destroyed a bathroom stall in ways that would be inhumane for me to describe. Amanda and Biscuit dragged me to my suicide device and tossed me into the backseat.
“I need gas!” I yelled.
“Fuck no,” Biscuit said.
“I need gas, though. Get me some goddamn gas, Biscuit.”
“Just stop for gas,” Amanda said.
“It’s not even my car.”
“You can use my wallet,” I said, and I stuck my ass in the air for him to pull the wallet out of my back pocket.
“Fuck it,” Biscuit said.
The fumes while he pumped would be nothing compared to the fumes thirty minutes later when I sat in my closed garage with a hose duct taped to the suicide device’s exhaust and fished through the crack window (also duct taped around the hose, for the record). I breathed in the thinning air and the carbon dioxide like it was fresh mountain air. Maybe jumping off the side of a mountain would have been a better way to kill myself. I’ll keep that in mind for my final attempt.
When consciousness faded from me, I did feel regret. Dame didn’t deserve this. Neither did Allison, but mostly Damian. I broke the deal every parent makes when they have a child. Rather, I attempted to, and failed.
Another thought overtook my regret. This would crush them, but it wouldn’t be my problem anymore. All that regret wouldn’t matter anymore as soon as I pushed through the hardest part. Dogs howled somewhere on my street, cheering for me in my triumphant defeat.
It would have been preferable if someone had killed me in a random act of violence and gotten away with it. Everyone would have won in that case. I’d be dead. The killer, who would be doing me favor, could go on with his life. My family could mourn my death without the conflict of anger toward me for doing it to myself. They could even imagine me as someone better than I truly was. That would have been perfect, but that’s not what happened.
Sirens woke me. Also, screaming. Puke pooled in my lap like an uneaten pile of spaghetti, rich with sauce. Feces padded my seat. I would never be more disgusting than that moment right there.
On my own volition, I stumbled out of a car that was no longer running, tank empty for hours. The light of god illuminated my feet then my knees then my vomit crotch and last my withered, ugly face. Allison stood behind some firefighters, wailing an amount she didn’t even wail when our child died. Grief stacks like that.
“Um,” a firefighter said. “Is that him?”
She stepped out from behind the uniformed men and women, glared, waved a scrap of paper in her hands and read from the paper:
Call 911 and tell them to check in the garage. I’m sorry.
-Ben
I shrugged.
“What… the… fuck…” she seethed. “Ben?”
Suicide is not punk.