AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas

11. Outtakes

T ransforming the deviant into the sacred is one thing when carried out in the spirit of enlightenment, quite another when done with malice. The political unconscious ofAIDS is a roiling bloody mess. From it arise possibilities for the sickest imaginations. And as suggested by the two stories from Canadian newspapers that I retell here, opportunities to draw on it are not restricted by gender, class, or race. In the two preceding chapters on crime, the misdeeds of the characters are related to systems of oppression or belief. In contrast, the characters presented here are so twisted, they are beyond needing alibis. Their stories should be outtakes , their violence so eccentric that they cannot be used to think through practical problems of law and disease. They're way out there on the bell curve, cracks running deep into the rubble of our AIDS consciousness, where needles lie coated in medical waste and fetuses grow AZT-resistant viruses. The chapter is brief but necessary. Cocaine Insane • Terry Fitzsimmons and Donald Hebert made a suicide pact.' Two whrte men "like a brotherhood ofthe doomed," said the lawyer who spoke for the defense. Cocaine insane, a three-city rampage ensued. In Montreal they stabbed a cabby several times in the chest. In Toronto they beat their dentist friend to death. 163 Copyrighted Material • CHAPTER I I ... E a: u It all started in a Kingston, O ntario, jail. the journalist explains, where Terry was serving time for robbery. A friend of his was stabbed to death; the grapevine t old him he was next. So he acted first, stabbing the inmate-killer w ith a kitchen knife. The next seven years he passed in a Saskatchewan prison solitary cell. Paroled in '92, Terry served six of his nine years. He settled down in Kingston, Ontario, got married, and impregnated his w ife, w hich is how he left her when he ran off with Don. D on's a man with w hom he shared some symbiosis but no sex, said the lawyer for the defense. Their spree took them to Ottawa on August 4, 1994. After partying through the night. they ended up in an abandoned restaurant. "I can't bear to go to jail for the crimes we have committed," said Don to Terry. Terry then injected himself w ith two vials of Don's tainted blood, strangled his friend w ith a T-shirt,then plunged a fifteen-inch butcher blade through his friend's chest. After washing off Don's blood, Terry went to a phone booth to call 91 I. He shot more cocaine before gettingt o the station, t o tell police that the killing'sgot to stop. Terry was disinterested in court procedures, for after all, he said, he'd already sentenced himself. He thought they wouldn't be satisfied with just a prison term. And so he gave them the capital punishment that he thought the good citizensdeserved. Terry tested positive in January 1995. We tend to think about homicide and suicide in separate behavioral categories, but the Fitzsimmons-Hebert story reveals their overlap . When a man randomly kills a bunch ofpeople, then his friend and himself, the distinction between homicide and suicide impedes understanding : It's all of a piece. Terry Fitzsimmons intentionally injects himselfwith his friend's Hlv-infected blood (a method of administration more efficient than dripping blood in coffee!). Sure to be condemned for multiple murders, he substitutes a penalty ofhis own devise , implying by his equation that popularity for state-mandated killing is driven by the same blood-thirst as his own. (This despite the 164 Copyrighted Material OUTTAKES . n fact that there is no death penalty in Canada.) Which is more mad, his or the systemic brutality that brews fury in solitary confinement?Like multiple murderer Darnell Collins (Chapter 8), Fitzsimmons' pOStrelease dementia is fed by toxic doses of injected cocaine. Bur this madman doesn't get the benefit of insight. Unlike the description of Collins, which set his crime in the context of personal history and community, the brief Edmonton Journal anicle on Fitzsimmons goes no fanher back in time than his prison stay. It tells us nothing abour his panner Donald Hebert except his serostatus, pannership in crime, and his own untimely death. The story hangs in space. Inexplicable , it must be spit our, undigested and forgotten. She Ran with High Society. but the Blood...