A Dime Store for Your Thoughts

The four of us met for breakfast without the remotest intention of discussing murderers.

It was Sunday; we were off duty. Even if they are attorneys, and even if two of them are prosecutors, my three friends have other matters to occupy their weekends than human mayhem. That amounts to shoptalk, and we were off the clock.

But once our orders had been taken, and coffee refills poured, the synapses started to crackle, randomly splicing oblique connections, hooking up one to another like so many bad party lines.

One of us had just seen “Men in Black.” Newt Gingrich has a video cameo, and Newt reminded us of the Chinese influence-buying scandals, and that put us onto the Hong Kong takeover, which prompted Sue to reminisce about the jade she got there in the good old days, and then I had to mention my new Chanel pearls, which detoured us into big-name designers, and there was only one place that could go: to Gianni Versace, now scarcely mentioned without his putative killer, Andrew Cunanan.

How, Maureen wondered, can a man on the 10 Most Wanted list not have a tabloid nickname? (Arthur Flegenheimer’s criminal ascent would have ended with his first mug shot if he hadn’t been reborn as Dutch Schultz. The Alphabet Bomber’s crimes have faded from my memory, but his dazzling nickname, never.)

We came up with a few for Cunanan. “HIV Avenger”--stylish, but not PC. “Chameleon Killer”--better, but mindful of a lizard exterminator.

He has to have a nickname, Maureen insisted. All mass murderers have nicknames.

He’s not a mass murderer, said Marilyn. He’s a serial killer.

And here is where I started taking notes on a paper napkin.

*

The horror of nowadays is an age that wades so deeply and casually in shed blood that four women at Sunday breakfast can discover a crying need for a system to classify the shedders of that blood: a taxonomy of murderers, grouped by phylum, class, order, family, genus and species . . . natural history bringing order to unnatural history.

Mass murderers, for example, kill a lot of people, often strangers, in a very short time--your James O. Hubertys--while serial killers can operate for years, either in situ (the homebodies, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer) or as wanderers (the Night Stalker and Ted Bundy).

What differentiates a spree killer from a multiple murderer? Where to classify Edmund Kemper, the Santa Cruz endomorph who killed family and strangers and kept souvenirs? By the time the check came, we were clicking like flash-card prodigies: Manson, Jim Jones, Green River, Zodiac, for-profit killers and the nonprofits. Family, genus, species.

Well, that was fun, but we must dash. Outside, the car radio reminded me that Woolworth’s was closing its dime stores, and that, too, suddenly, serendipitously, synaptically, seemed of a piece with murder, American-style.

*

While the rest of the country was sorrowing over the extinction of Woolworth’s, what I remembered most was the underside of five-and-dime lunch counters, a disgustingly cool moonscape of dried-up wads of Blackjack and Topps and Doublemint, stuck there just as the grilled cheese with carrot curls arrived.

It was in thinking of Woolworth’s, and the people I used to see eating there. And that got me from lunch counters to diners to Edward Hopper paintings to loners to modern murderers to modern-day victims, the way I started thinking about Newt and ended up at Cunanan.

D.H. Lawrence said the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. The “killer” would not have racked up such a bloody track record if the “isolate” were not so deeply a part of us.

The mythic American is the pioneer striking out alone, cutting ties, chancing life in a restless, rootless culture. Pioneers can make it big, or be lost forever.

The five-and-dime lunch counter is the essential architecture of American solitude. Its very design makes of lunch or dinner not a convivial affair of family or friends but an act of self-isolation. Lunch-counter architecture is of a piece with thousand-unit apartment hives--strangers sleeping and eating alongside strangers.

In Preston Sturges’ black comedy of the early ‘40s, “Sullivan’s Travels,” the shabby man at the lunch counter is a big-name movie director trying to lose himself in the anonymous struggle of the Depression in the interests of researching his next film. He succeeds so well that his friends believe him dead--and so he nearly is.

You find him in the papers every week or so, a body long dead, discovered by the mailman or the cops. He had not been reported missing, for there was no one who knew him or his habits well enough to miss him. In neighbor-code, a quiet man who kept to himself.

Unremarkable in life, he may go unremarked upon in death. Yet sometimes the infamy of his killer makes him known, and puts both of them, forever isolated together, side by side at the counter.