Savoring the Suffering of the Bad Guys
On certain rare and incandescent mornings, one 25-cent newspaper can light your face with a million-dollar smile. It can put a lilt in your step and sass in your eye and make the world, for a moment, a righteous place.
It is not tales of rescued kitties and recovered life savings that do it, worthy though they are. It is the pleasure of reading that, from time to time, bad things happen to bad people.
My two bits recently bought me the happy news that Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Mexican cocaine trafficker of the first order, was definitely dead.
And that wasn’t even the best part.
This man--dodger of assassins, evader of drug agents--had kicked off under the plastic surgeon’s knife.
Who says newspapers are all gloom and doom?
This morsel was even juicier than the happy ending from a few years back, when Carlos the Jackal--scourge of capitalists, terror of imperialists, inhaler of baklava--got arrested just as he was about to get his love handles liposuctioned away.
Of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, it could be said that he was done in by his own product, cocaine. He didn’t inject, he didn’t inhale, but he needed a fix of plastic surgery to keep ahead of the law. He expired after nine hours of facial altering and the liposuctioning of fat measured, like coke, in kilos.
It was, in sum, a neat little Faustian boomerang, and not one of us can be faulted for enjoying it immensely.
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In a world where no good deed appears to go unpunished, where the meek never inherit and may get sued for costs, and even well-earned gloating gets PC scowls, we have only the secret, guilty solace of comeuppance.
At video-age warp speed, justice appears so slow, so inadequate, so random, that even the laws of nature get impatient. How good to know there is another justice, serendipitous but satisfying, older than trial by jury, older even than trial by fire, crime and punishment in a convenient two-pack, bottled by Hubris. Take a long, deep, primal draft:
* The three-story luxury vacation home being built by the president of the nation’s second-largest tobacco company caught fire and burned to the tune of $750,000. They say the blaze was evidently touched off by (you know what’s coming, don’t you?) a discarded cigarette.
* A Montana hunter caught bubonic plague from the carcass of the antelope he killed.
* A South Carolina murderer who beat the electric chair was sitting naked on the steel toilet in his cell, trying to fix his stereo headphones, when he bit into the wire and got electrocuted.
* An Arizona man blasting away at the base of an endangered saguaro walked over to inspect his marksmanship, and the cactus toppled over and killed him.
Some I remember only in multiples: fitness fanatics who scold us on video and in print for our flabby ways, then keel over in their traces at 40; bully-boys who taunt and torture zoo animals, then get an arm eaten off.
I’ve saved these over time, to browse through like vacation snapshots in wretched weather, when one too many embezzlers prospers and one too many killers walks. They make brief and irrational amends for the relentless awfulness that washes in on us as unflaggingly as the Pacific tide: parents at a Chicago school’s Christmas party who steal the kids’ presents; a 13-year-old Oregon boy who tells police he killed the couple he was staying with because they made him do his homework; the body of a Texas man, dead of cancer, that was left on his son’s doorstep because he could not pay the full cremation price.
It’s not simply the torment of bad people that comforts me, but the karmic succinctness of their punishment, as in, say, a young graffiti tagger falling a hundred feet off a Los Angeles freeway overpass he was about to adorn.
Or the four people killed in Ontario when their car slammed into a tree; police think they were shooting off a gun as they went 110 down a 35-mph suburban road. Who can deny a sneaking faith that technology is working hand in hand with natural selection?
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Lest anyone think I am picking on others, I was almost such a story. A traffic accident a few years ago sent my car tumbling down the freeway. It landed upside down. My seat belt saved me, but as the car was rolling, I heard a scarier sound than screeching metal--my old typewriter, left in the back of my hatchback to go to the repair shop. It was flying around the car like dice in a cup.
In what I thought were my last few seconds of life, I wrote in my head the story that would appear: Reporter killed by her own typewriter.
I would have read it and laughed. How could I blame anyone else for doing so?
