American Victim [excerpt] – Meg McCarville
August 28, 2020
Editor’s Note
Within a couple of days of the publication of Four Circles, Amphetamine Sulphate received this message:
“You are really stupid for publishing that book. She abused people who were in our shelter and she messed around with drug cartels.
It’s good you are in Texas because all the people who want revenge can get the right wing and the cartels after you.
She’s committed murder and a bunch of other crimes and we will also be organizing a class action lawsuit.
She has another book where she talks about cartel trafficking. Your little book company should be worried. She’s a piece of human shit. Lawyers are also looking through the book for libel.
We have photos of her murders. Not kidding. You should pull the book. She’s also a neo-Nazi.”
It was signed Inez Ramos and used a spoof email address from a very corporate homeless charity based in Austin. The following tale from Meg McCarville is both a response to and explanation of this message.
SM
I came back from living in Oakland. The short duration of being there turned out to be perhaps the worst four months of my adult life. I had to get out. Back to Chicago. Back to where I was trying to escape from in the first place. I had done my time. I had stopped having my texts tracked by the FBI because of my relationship with hacktivist Jeremy Hammond. He had made the front page of the paper and was now in Supermax. I had successfully weaned myself off of the 600 mg of methadone a day I was on. Some fat stupid cunt drove my bus that I lived in into the ground and I could no longer move it for “street sweeping” or whatever the fuck the signs said in that fucking toilet of a town. My one eyed schizoid boyfriend had slammed my head into a brick wall. And I had spent a week in two mental hospitals and a prison for domestic violence against him. Beyond that the hypocrisy and stupidity of the fucking white saviors in the bay were driving me to a spree killing. So the rush of excitement when I looked on Craigslist and found “rooms for rent” in Chicago a mere two blocks from the place I had left was UN FUCKING BELIEVABLE!!
I immediately gathered my cat, wiped the blood off my ear, left that one eye schizo, called myself a limo to the airport, boarded a plane and proceeded to wash the Bay and Oakland off me for good. Blood down the drain. Raped. By those progressive hypocrites. When the big earthquake happens and that repulsive deranged piece of earth, including its residents, gets drowned completely by the Pacific Ocean I will cum buckets. Until then… I am away… safe. Back in Chicago.
I returned to my mother’s house and the same week go check out the Craigslist ad for the rooms for rent. This was really the only place I had even thought to look at. It just drew me. I mean how crazy was it that these rooms were beyond cheap and two blocks from where I used to live? I got to the building. I had been here many times. I knew people who lived there. This was definitely strange.
I was greeted downstairs by an old Polack with two teeth. I always wonder about people who have two teeth. At that point, you just get ‘em yanked right? People can hardly tell when you have a mouth of no teeth compared to a mouth with two. It looks repulsive. Now one tooth, maybe it’s your last fucking stand with dental hygiene and I understand, you won’t give up. But when you are 82 and have two fucking teeth, just get those repulsive things out your fucking mouth hole already!
Besides the teeth, there was a lot to wonder about when it came to the two toothed Polack and his bizarro third floor of single rooms which had just been opened up and were now being rented out for dirt fucking cheap. I heard from some of the downstairs residents who I already knew that they’d often sneak onto that floor and fuck around, and they always thought it was weird as fuck. I also heard that the two toothed Polack had run up a gambling debt to the tune of 40 grand and decided that despite the EXTREME SUB PAR condition of the third floor, like for example being wired for one resident and not ten, and only having one bathroom for those ten people, he would rent it out anyway.
There was also a lot to wonder about what kind of people would literally come running to a super hot deal like this, fully knowing that they could blow up at any time. Also knowing that they would have to be pissing and shitting and puking in bags. Needless to say this place drew quite the array of characters from every aspect of life. I was of course on board for yet another blundering adventure. I had no choice! My finances did not offer me much of one. My look tended to deter any potential Craigslist roommates away and I fucking hated people anyway, and had a revolving door of Craigslist dregs in my last place in Chicago. That place was left with a garbage bag twice the size of my bedroom filled up in the middle of the floor, bed bugs, every door broken, almost every window shattered, and my roommates telling our illegal Mexican landlord he had to pay THEM $1,000 to ever get them out. And then you have the Craigslist “normal” people I guess who clean the house and ask you to wash your dishes and not to piss in their dishes and they’re 10,000 times worse.
It was either living with mother, saving up money for longer, and forced into my bedroom every night after Jimmy Kimmel, or this twisted Narnia where sharing a very intimate space with ten total fucking weirdos, being terrorized by a two tooth Polack, and shitting in plastic bags lie ahead! I was more than in the moment when I saw the look on my mother’s face when we went inside. It was sheer terror. I had seen that look many times before when she had somehow accidentally entered one of my dwellings. For example helping me carry an extra grocery bag in and witnessing what no human should ever have to witness except a homicide detective or a Special Ops Marine. The thing about this place was that my mother had that look on her face BEFORE I ever moved in… And that was impressive!
I had the biggest room on the floor, besides Daniel, who had somehow scored the room with the secret second bathroom. Daniel was a 65 year old lunatic who was constantly breaking into song and had a long list of tall tales behind him, including that he was currently on parole from doing three years in a “white collar” federal penitentiary for some super intelligent white collar crime that I cannot remember. I soon found out it was complete bullshit and that Daniel was a delusional compulsive liar. And a pervert. This place seemed to draw ‘em like flies. Go figure. He could, however, sing the song “Sherry Baby” in full falsetto and that was beyond impressive!
Besides Daniel, living there was Dan. Dan was probably the most normal of all of us and was a 20 year old gay Mexican immigrant. Besides Dan, there was the “really nice Mexican guy” who honestly had no business being in such a bleak terrible hellhole. He was so nice!
Then there was Deborah. Deborah was the perfect example of a “cougar” minus the having money part. In fact I have no idea how she even came up with the $300 a month to live there. Deborah was super sweet. I really sincerely liked her. Except for the fact that she literally spent 2 hours a day putting on makeup and fixing her hair and refused to buy a mirror. This daily routine took place in the much needed bathroom shared by the ten of us. Needless to say, Deborah’s desperate daily attempt to look like she was a thirteen year old girl sneaking out of the house for the first time was beyond infuriating. Deborah had a thing for Dan, the young gay artist, and at one point I believe they might have even gotten married for Dan’s citizenship.
There were many people in and out of there. Notably the Asian man who lived on the other side of the floor and was often seen bringing women in late at night and heard by the “really nice Mexican guy” and Dan beating the shit out of them every night. That was a very strange situation.
There was one other notable fly drawn to this sea of shit. He was always in the common room immersed in his laptop, typing furiously. He did not look completely out of place. His clothes were always dirty and he just looked like he could really use a makeover. I really had no interest in speaking to him but the door to my room opened to the table he was always typing on. I wondered what he did on that computer which demanded such fervor but did not care to ask. I might remind you that I came to this place after running to Oakland after running from the bullshit in Chicago that came with dating one of the most infamous megalomaniacs ever, Jeremy the “hacktivist.” I was beyond glad to be away from furious typing on the computer, and even technology in general for awhile. Besides TV, the Michael Jackson Dance game for PS3, and Netflix, I was done remembering computers existed.
Of course one thing I learned from dating the hacktivist was that this furious typing on the computer did not happen without a lot of showmanship, bragging, telling stories, lying, general narcissism, and making goddamned sure that everyone within 500 miles of you knew exactly what the fuck you were doing and how awesome, subversive, and heroic you were for doing it. This furious typer was no different. I immediately gathered that when I noticed he picked that common table in the hallway and not his own room to do whatever gay shit he was doing to show someone something or tell a fucking story. And boy, I could not have been more right.
This stranger was just full of stories. Whether they involved his background at Booz Allen Hamilton, which honestly took me years to care enough to even google, or his constant rambling about his horrific childhood and his adoptive parents, or the fact that his brother was a big time criminal wanted by the Latin Kings so the Kings were trying to get him out of the neighborhood and his life was in danger, or the time he brought a fucking pitbull home that he had literally TORN out of the hands of a dog fighter walking the dog on the south side and rescued it and brought it back to safety in this fucking hovel we lived in.
These stories mostly went in one ear and out the other with me. I mean I have a literal encyclopedia in my head of crazier-than-shit-but-totally-true stories. So in cases where I meet people who could possibly be insane pathological liars like this fellow, I tend to just believe their stories. Plus the “WHO THE FUCK WOULD EVER LIE ABOUT SHIT LIKE THAT?” was a constant flashing neon sign in my head, but I have long since stopped asking that question and just accepted that for one reason or another, people lie about the craziest shit.
As a result of my naïveté, when this “fighting pit bull” was torn from the hands of an evil man and brought home and all its scars and sores from fighting were shown to me and all the other weirdos on the floor, the fact that this freak was so sure about what happened kind of overrode the fact that I saw no sores or scars on the dog at all. That and the fact that I was basically more than anything pissed as fuck that this fucking idiot brought a fighting fucking pitbull straight from the pen into my dwelling. Those dogs are aggressive as fuck and you have to really care for and train them. I also could not even imagine the ignorance of someone who is walking in the hood and decides to “rescue” a dog from someone walking it. No wonder the Latin Kings wanted to kill him!
The other thing that I remember about him that in retrospect became of utmost importance was his bizarre relationship with Deborah the cougar lady. Like I had previously observed, Deborah had insanely low self esteem. Aside from the two hours a day she spent occupying the communal bathroom smattering herself in cover-up and spackling her face with eyeshadow, blush, foundation, serums, soaps, detanglers, de-emulsifiers, and whatever other chemicals helped her forget that she was no longer fourteen years old. Deborah was a trip for sure but never deserved the abuse that she endured at the hands of this bizarre egomaniac.
I would come home many a night to witness him literally screaming at her. Telling her she was spoiled, that she was a child, that she would never grow up. I did not understand it. I thought that perhaps they were in a bizarre abusive relationship for awhile.
These statements coming from him were compounded by the fact that he would claim that he was adopted, abused, oppressed. He was adopted as a “brown baby” to make his parents look progressive, or something. Except that he was barely brown and had Anglo-Saxon features. I digress. Despite the onslaught of prejudice and hardships he became a hero of his time. Brown Boy graduated from three Ivy League schools with masters degrees, worked for Booz Allen Hamilton (there it was again, this reference to this place I could give not a shit about but was so important to him). All the while criticizing Deborah and telling her she was shit and made nothing of herself.
I never knew this to be true. What I knew to be true was that Brown Boy was a complete fucking asshole. He picked on the easiest target. A woman in her mid forties who loved animals and had an extremely low self image. I thought it was absolutely despicable. This genius brown boy who literally stole a fighting pit bull, or shall I say “rescued” this pit bull was day in and day out abusing this woman who had extremely low self esteem and really breaking her psyche for no apparent reason. It was foul to say the least.
All of this culminated with Deborah banging at my door at all times and asking me why Brown Boy was so mean to her. I actually did have a theory. I tried to comfort her and then I’d approach him. Brown Boy would rattle off something thoroughly bizarre like that she was a child and stunted and that he was trying to help her grow up. A real humanitarian. Stealing dogs and screaming at women who already hated themselves. He would then immediately change the subject and would obsessively ask me about Jeremy Hammond and that he wanted to make an “app” based on my life… whatever that meant.
If there’s one thing I am very familiar with involving psychology it is projection. It is beyond prevalent now but I can spot it immediately. It was not Deborah who whined, it was him. It was not her who was a complete loser, it was him. Come on! THREE MASTERS DEGREES FROM IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS and you’re living in a two toothed Polack’s fire hazard ten-people-to-a-bathroom cat box shitting Mengele experiment to stay out of debt. I would definitely point the finger at Brown Boy the Genius being the more pathetic one. I mean, what happened to him to be stealing pit bulls and running from the neighborhood gangs in order to be housed in a room smaller than a prison cell?
Needless to say, I was beyond pleased when someone noticed that he had been gone for several days and all of his clothes and stuff were left in his room. I looked through it and wondered if perhaps all the Latin Kings in the hood that he said were after him finally offed him. Or maybe the ghetto dude he stole the “fighting pitbull” from finally offed him. Or maybe he stole another pit bull. I was beyond glad he was gone for so many reasons. I really hoped he was murdered because that Brown Boy was such a piece of shit.
He did plague my mind for a little while though. I always wondered how he had those three Ivy League degrees and ended up living in this fire trap shit hole. And what the fuck was he doing on his computer day and night in there? And where the fuck did he disappear to? While leaving all his shitty clothes and Kevin Federline hats inside? But again I had been with Hammond the hacktivist, and when you see someone hack into Congress or some shit from your house… at least for me I shut off. I just don’t care. And I don’t want to know. It’s way better off not to know In such situations. And the more they brag, the more I just picture them in Supermax getting raped by white supremacists.
Part two. Fast forward.
I could go into the between time, but it’s just a shitshow and my editor tells me it’s just all fodder for calling the WHAAAAMNBULANCE so I will spare you the details. Needless to say it was beyond awful all around but thankfully Brown Boy became a distant memory.
Life had become darker than dark, and not even remotely funny. I fell into a deep kind of catatonic depression and lost a lot of myself. This was honestly the worst time in my life and I was done living. Shit happens and I just laid in bed and watched LEAVING LAS VEGAS on repeat. Day in and day out. I was determined to drink myself to death, since all my other half assed attempts at ending my life had not worked. I do not like pain. I purposely don’t fuck with guns. I couldn’t make a noose if I tried so whatever… I lived.
Barely. I just pounded vodka every day and did not eat.
Well let me tell you that drinking yourself to death is a slow fucking painful road. As if most of my readers don’t already know this… And the results were nothing I desired. I was sick every day. Vomiting. You know the rest! Nothing like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. No hot Elizabeth Shue Hooker to feed me rice. No barely puking in the shower like Mr. Cage did. No peacefully sleeping then taking that last deep breath and upon exhaling forgetting all of the terror that was your life.
More like waking up with your guts wrenching, feeling like your ribs are going to snap open, wondering when it finally will end, but shit getting worse and worse. Just barely existing getting more and more difficult. Not ever being able to get out of bed.
Then it finally happened. My stomach felt as if it had exploded. Gut wrenching pain. Lying in the fetal position and finally giving up on giving up. It was too painful. Too much. I was finally at my worst point ever. Too pathetic to even kill myself. That’s such a terrible feeling.
I had to call mother and was admitted to a suburban hospital where I was thought to be internally bleeding. I stayed on a floor with a bunch of hundred year olds constantly shitting themselves. I had about ten IVs in and was being pumped full of Dilaudid.
The staff kept very politely telling me I was the youngest person to ever be on that ward, as if that made me feel better? I remember hallucinating, and retching and my heart rate being insane and nurses running in and out and my mother crying and everything passing me by so fast.
I was also getting so fucking horny from the Dilaudid that I just wanted to fuck any nurse who came near me and there was this channel on the television that showed the hospital chapel 24 hours a day and I just left it on and fantasized about fucking everyone I saw on that chapel altar and having it broadcast into every room in the hospital. I thought of the last thing people seeing right before dying would be me having the most deviant sex right there with Jesus Christ himself watching. That makes me almost cum even now thinking about it but those fucking IVs. I couldn’t reach my fucking pussy to fist myself. It was a really tough time in that hospital.
I remember the cutest little black 7 year old candy stripper coming into my room while I had the worst pain in my head I’ve ever felt. My head was buried into the pillow with a cold towel over it and I could barely move. Then this sweetheart approached me as close as she could and said in the most innocent loving voice, “I hope you feel better ma’am.” I could barely mutter THANK YOU into my pillow as I started sobbing uncontrollably and wondering what kind of cruel sick sadistic fuck sent her to torture me like that. That did not make me feel better. What did make me feel better was fantasizing acting out the stages of the cross with me as Jesus and her in that candy stripper uniform flogging and kicking and stepping on me as I retched and puked and screamed and collapsed under the weight of the cross. All of course broadcast on the altar channel for the entire hospital to enjoy my punishment for having this angel torture the hell out of my repulsive dismal ass. Then those IVs were almost ripped out again because I forgot I did not have enough leeway to fist myself.
This was all some strange blur and soon I was no longer getting sponge baths from Mary, the lesbian nurse who had a daughter named Meghan, who would slowly rub me down while I was naked and say my name over and over again. I was able to eat again and then I was discharged back to mother’s house.
I was told I had first stage liver failure and if I kept my lifestyle up cirrhosis would be my fate very soon, and I would spend my last days lying in the hospital in abject pain fantasizing about getting tortured by 7 year old candy strippers on the chapel channel. Then a trip straight to hell after that. If I stopped drinking my liver could regenerate pretty rapidly. I decided to never come close to attempting anything like that again. And for the first time in 20 years, I had no choice but to stop drinking. Needless to say it was a very confusing time in my life. I had drunk alcohol every day for 20 years. What the fuck was I going to do now? I sure as hell was not going to join that AA cult and recite stupid slogans over and over and pretend my life doesn’t completely suck while reminiscing about drinking every day of every week and getting addicted to meetings. And then sixteen years later still be sitting in the same dismal church basements giving sermons about how I’m still “one drink away from death.” No thanks. Not for me. What now? I was very weak mentally. I had never lived without booze. I was not looking forward to the future at all. I was alive. Now what to do with this life?