Blood Lite

A Good Psycho Is Hard to Find Will Ludwigsen

At least with the Chainsaw Guy, you always knew where you stood. When he came lurching between the palmetto fronds, swinging that Husqvarna over his head, there was no question that he wanted to lop off your arms and send them flying in a bloody spray into the bushes. There was no debate, no discussion, no feasibility study or Microsoft Project resource allocation chart.

Nobody at EnAble Technical Consulting has the straightforward, no-nonsense attitude of the Chainsaw Guy. Like an algae-coated stone at the bottom of a shallow mountain creek, our CEO Mr. Wendell has been worn into a rounded disk of corporate pliancy: everything just flows above and around him. He deflects responsibility to people like me, still idealistic and energetic from college. Like him, everyone here is safe, friendly, professional. Worst of all, none of them have ever threatened to kill me with a garden tool.

The summer before I started here, I worked one last time as a counselor at Camp Soaring Osprey. Maybe it was my way of saying good-bye to my young adulthood. Maybe I also hoped for one more chance with Misty, the girl at the canoe paddock I'd always dreamed of helping to—well, fill a canoe, anyway.

When the Chainsaw Guy came to kill us, I got my chance.

The newspapers distorted the story. Yes, an escaped mental patient wearing camouflage fatigues hunted the children at Camp Soaring Osprey. Yes, the scalp of a diner waitress who'd spurned him hung from his belt. Yes, the chug-chug-chug sound of a chainsaw cranking up growled across the lake. Yes, children fled for their lives, and their camp counselors managed to stop him. But no, we weren't naked and making love in the moonlight on Rowboat Island. We'd just gotten there.

Mostly, I was pissed. Together, we had paddled across the lake after lights out. Beneath the moonlit sycamore leaves, I'd finally told Misty how I felt about her, and we'd started our negotiations—mostly with our hands. I'd just managed to unclasp her bra when that crazy asshat came stumbling out of the underbrush.

You'd think it would ruin the mood, but there's some­thing existentially inspirational about the possibility of death. It's as though your genetic code knows it's now or never. I wish I could say I bravely stood up to fend him off, but frankly, my DNA still wanted to get as far as it could.

Misty, fortunately, had more sense. With her lovely left breast surging from beneath her shirt, she rose from the grass and took a swing at him with her canoe paddle. The screwball parried with the chainsaw, and sawdust salted the air.

Annoyed, I grabbed the other paddle and got in the perfect dueling stance I'd learned from watching Star Wars. I wondered which of us was Qui-Gon Jinn and which was Obi-Wan Kenobi while she lunged and jabbed toward the Chainsaw Guy.

I spun dramatically, swinging my paddle in a motion that was more Bambino than Jedi. The water-treated spruce thocked against his skull and he tumbled backward onto his ass. The Husqvarna fell against his chest, nearly cutting him. Misty squished his balls with her paddle, and we ran to the trails.

You saw the rest of the story re-created on American Justice. We got the kids together, hid in one of the cabins, and tried to wait out the night until the police came. They squirmed and sobbed, but we managed to keep them all contained—except for Gordon. We begged him to use a bucket, but he insisted on making a run for the latrine. We heard his scream echoing against the tiled walls followed by the slurp and smack of his fat-streaked giblets.

Enough was enough. We had to stop the maniac before he came looking for us.

Misty and I hatched a plan. She'd run out into the quad, lure him into the electrical shed, and I'd finish him off by shoving him into the old non-OSHA-compliant circuit breaker.

We left Reuben, the crazy tough redneck kid, in charge and stepped outside. There, huddled beside the door, I held her hands. "Are you sure he'll follow you?"

She grinned and unclasped her jeans. "I think I can persuade him."

In the movies, the psycho killer is a little smarter than to chase the panty-clad teenager into a trap, but ours was a dumb-ass. Misty had just passed the flagpole when he came staggering out from behind the dining hall, chain-saw snarling above his head.

She played her part well, prancing across the quad and stumbling to give him time to catch up. She shrieked a few times to seal the deal, begging for her life and clutch­ing her breasts. She even made a token effort to close the electrical shed door before he zipped through it. She cow­ered and shielded her eyes as he raised the chainsaw, and she had to be scared. A little, anyway, despite the grin I saw just as I crashed through the split door.

If you've never pushed a guy into a zillion volts of elec­tricity, let me recommend it to you. He stumbles back, stunned look on his face. Then he clatters against the panel, his skin turns black, and he sizzles. He literally sizzles. It rocks.

When the cops arrived the next morning, they were impressed. The medical examiner bagged up Chainsaw Guy's charred skeleton while they all laughed with us and reenacted the scene. We should have gotten a medal or the key to the city, but the camp administrators chose to focus on the one kid we lost instead of the thirty we saved. We preferred to think of the camp as ninety-seven percent full instead of three percent empty, but they didn't see it that way.

At least we had each other. When the Morning After occurs postmurder instead of postcoitus, you skip several levels of dating. Unfortunately, some of those are the fun ones. We jumped straight to the "something missing" stage.

We'd established some weird Pavlovian connection between groping and fighting for our lives, and nothing we could do ever got our hearts racing like they did that night. It was all anticlimax, if you'll pardon the expres­sion.

When I took this job in the fall, managing regional sales representatives for a global e-business outsourc­ing firm, I discovered that it wasn't just the sex that was anticlimactic. It was everything. It was driving to work all belted in safely. It was drinking coffee from one of those cups with the extra-stable bases. It was sitting at an ergonomically calculated perfect height, distance, and angle from my computer.

It was working for levelheaded, evenhanded, mild-mannered Mr. Wendell. "Good morning, Chet!" he'd say, giving me the thumbs-up or the "OK" gesture or some other corny thing. "Ready to satisfy our customers today?"

Vrrrrrummmmmm! I'd imagine the chainsaw clawing for wood or flesh in the nighttime air and smell the burnt two-stroke engine oil that portended my coming death.

"We surely appreciate all your hard work, Chet," Ger­ald from Marketing would say, putting a hand on my shoulder that I wished was a hook. "You're an invaluable part of the team."

My veins ached for that rush of adrenaline you can only get on a sweaty summer night when swinging a canoe paddle at a psychopathic assailant.

Why did I have to electrocute the only person who'd ever made me feel alive? Maybe the Chainsaw Guy and I could have come to some kind of agreement: We'd fight a little every night and then go our separate ways. He'd show up whenever Misty and I were on a date, remind us of our Darwinian duty to procreate, and then discreetly leave once Misty and I got our pulses racing.

The Chainsaw Guy couldn't be the only serial killer willing to ply his trade on us, could he?

Despite what the media tells you, there really aren't that many serial killers around. The best ones burn out quickly, and all the others are incompetent. Misty and I waited in every lover's lane within sixty miles for some disgruntled woman hater or sexual sadist to find us, but no dice. We wrote to some of the old Manson family mem­bers, but they just wanted to lecture us about saving the Earth. Hell, we even considered writing a controversial and blasphemous book challenging fundamentalist Islam, but, well, neither of us knew enough about it to provoke a good fatwa.

I tried hiring an actor to pretend to murder us, but it just wasn't the same. First of all, you know it's just an act in the back of your mind. Second of all, it's almost impos­sible to find a person who can convincingly portray a psy­chopath. The drama program at George Mason had some close candidates, but certainly no Christopher Walkens or Dennis Hoppers to really get the electricity sparkling across my neurons.

I even offered a mental patient some dough to come kill me in the middle of the night, but he got lost on the way and the police found him frozen to death by the Jefferson Memorial. To his credit, he was clutching a scythe in his hand, but I still probably would have taken him.

The truth is that a good psycho is hard to find. Pissing off a biker is too iffy, poking a bum in the eye will just get you panhandled to death, and even calling old high school enemies just shows you how much crazy people mellow with age.

Bungee jumping and race-car school didn't capture the same feeling. The risk was too arbitrary, accidental. I needed the personal touch of another human being going out of his or her way to kill me, not the capricious hand of fate.

Misty felt it, too. We talked about our boring jobs and our boring lives, about the strange void a dead serial killer tends to leave in your life after you kill him. Everyone else at the bar talked about their IRA accounts and their BMWs, but all we wanted to discuss was the best way to knock a murderer through a fiftieth-story plateglass win­dow.

We'd imprinted on each other. The ancient test of sur­vival had proved us a worthy match, if only we could re­create the circumstances. Some couples try to regain their senior year of high school or a magical summer in Paris; we went to Lowe's and looked at the chainsaws.

We finally tried to make love the only way we knew how. She rode atop me, rocking back and forth with the chainsaw held high. I knew we'd never hurt each other, though, and the neighbors banging on the wall to shut it off distracted us anyway.

But the chainsaw itself gave us an idea. Dressed all in black, we snuck out of the apartment complex with it and slinked several blocks down the street to another apart­ment building. We mounted the emergency stairwell— unwisely left open—and climbed to a random floor. Then we tiptoed to the end of the hall, fired up the chainsaw, and rang the doorbell.

When that ten-year-old boy answered the door, we almost wet ourselves laughing. The expression on a kid's face when faced with the rapture of dismembering doom is something one of those Renaissance painters should have captured to hang in the Louvre. I think his freckles actually fled to the back of his head, that's how pale he was.

Still convulsing from laughter, Misty stumbled for­ward and just barely nicked the kid's forehead with the chainsaw. It cracked open and his brains sprayed in an arc like a pink Mohawk.

"Oh, shit," she said, still compulsively giggling.

The chainsaw by now had cleaved his skull, and his father shuffled barefoot to the door just in time to see his son collapse to the ground. I'd like to say the look on his face was priceless, too, but all I saw clearly was his .357. Misty and I ran for opposite exits and managed to evade the bullets shattering the drywall around us. His son probably distracted him from having better aim.

We wiped down the chainsaw and tossed it in the Dumpster. Then, making peace with our twitching hearts, we slithered home through the shadows. We didn't talk much. We were both scared and a little guilty about what had happened.

When we got back into her apartment and crawled into bed, though, we tangled beneath the sheets and made love, happy to still be together for just this one night, happy to have survived.

I guess that's how we started creepy-crawling the city. That's what we call it when we sneak into buildings with a chainsaw and scare the shit out of someone. It's best in neighborhoods with a lot of Bush stickers: they tend to be gun owners, and there's nothing as invigorating as a pistol leveled at you by an angry Republican anxious to prove the Second Amendment works.

It's a strange kink, sure. We try not to kill anybody, but sometimes things get out of hand and we have to. There's something primal there, too. Something exciting.

Work isn't so bad anymore, especially since Mr. Wendell—poor, friendly, Christian-deacon Mr. Wendell— has been stalked from home to work at least twice by fiends the newspaper likes to call "Mr. and Mrs. Chainsaw."

Silly media. We're only dating.

One of these days, though, we might just tie the knot. The only question is whom we'll invite to the wedding.

And what we'll do to them.