The Story of O

de·prave [dih-preyv] verb (used with object), de·praved, de·prav·ing.

1. make morally bad or evil; vitiate; corrupt.
2. Obsolete . to defame. Origin: 1325–75; Middle English depraven (< Anglo-French ) < Latindēprāvāre to pervert, corrupt, equivalent to dē- de- + prāv ( us )crooked + -āre infinitive suffix

Related forms dep·ra·va·tion  [dep-ruh-vey-shuhn] noun de·prav·er, noun de·prav·ing·ly, adverb non·dep·ra·va·tion, noun

I have always been fascinated by the occult. As a young child of five, I remember one of the first times I ever lied to my mother. I was forbidden from watching the show “Are You Afraid of the Dark.” Many children who grew up during the 1990s remember the show well. It began with a small campfire flickering in the dark, tended to by children much older and more sophisticated than me. I recall feeling a swell of respect in my chest whenever I watched those children. Though I now know they could not have been older than twelve or so, I knew they deserved my adoration and attention. They were alone! In the dark! With fire! All the things I was certainly forbidden to do. And even more importantly, they were on TV! They were famous! I couldn’t even comprehend the far-reaching implications of that at such a young age. And it was rated TV-Y7, meaning I was too young to watch it. My mother claimed it would give me nightmares.

I remember sneaking an episode one afternoon when she thought I was napping in my playroom. The episode chronicles a vampire that jumps out of an old movie and becomes real, terrorizing the patrons and employees of the old movie theater that is showing his film. She was right, my mother. I did have nightmares. For a solid week, I refused to be in a dark room alone, and for months after that, I would lay every night jumping out of my skin every time I heard a noise. Aging is inevitable, however, and “Are You Afraid of the Dark” became less and less scary; vampires coming out of movie screens were no longer terrifying. Even at a young age, as my interest in the occult began to change, my attention remained riveted on the macabre. What terrified me, now transfixed me. I remember going to Medieval Times for a friend’s birthday once. It was fifth grade. At the tender age of ten, I conned her father into a trip through the Medieval Torture Museum. She took two furtive steps before covering her face and running through to the end, bumping into signs and bouncing off corners. I made her wait with her father and took my time. I remember my attention being so curiously aroused by simultaneous fear, repulsion and utter fascination. From that point on, I absorbed my spare time with collecting…facts. Things like: in November 1934, Mrs. Albert Budd received the following letter from Albert Fish concerning the disappearance of her thirteen-year-old daughter six years earlier: “…On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.” The cruelest torture is not always the infliction of physical violence.
“The definition of sexual sadism is sexual attraction to pain, suffering, terror or humiliation: simply put, sadists hurt people for the sexual thrill it gives them. They don’t just rape people: they torture them. Sadists are not common, fortunately, even among sex offenders. Roughly two to five percent of sex offenders across studies are sadistic.”

“So, have you ever just been like, fucking a bitch? And then just, pulled out a baseball bat? And hit her over the head with it?” –Overheard at Loyola University Chicago, 2008

Although I can be frightened, I love horror movies, especially obscure ones. I’ve seen some extreme simulated violence, and this is by far the worst death I could ever imagine. Tom Six of Human Centipede fame has yet to venture close to this, though his films could instigate an entirely different and complex discourse. “It had been hastily concealed under a pile of branches and leaves. The clothes below Francis’s waist-stockings and shoes, underpants, khaki knickerbockers-had been violently ripped from his body. He had been, as the newspapers put it, ‘atrociously assaulted’ then strangled with his suspenders, which were twisted so tightly around his neck that they seemed embedded in the flesh.” I realize my interest in the darker side of human nature is one that few some people share and others find distasteful. Indeed, I have close friends that find my taste in film and literature troublesome, to say the least. My favorite authors are Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Toni Morrison. Much of my writing, as of late, reflects their style and personality as I try on their personas while molding my own. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted, the short story “Guts” begins as follows: “Inhale. Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.” I had to employ this strategy the first time I ever viewed Jackson Pollock’s paintings in person. The dizzying array of colors in lines and droplets raised mountains of interwoven color. I was transfixed and simultaneously nauseated. On that same first visit, I also viewed what still is to this day my favorite painting: Ivan Albright’s Picture of Dorian Gray . It haunts you. The canvas’s height is imposing, and the bloated figure that stares out at the viewer is fearsome and foul. Every time I stand before it, I find myself intoxicated by the colors, the background and the texture of the canvas. Even the frame catches my attention from time to time. When I stand before the Picture of Dorian Gray, I silently thank Ivan Albright for having the ability to paint the things that reside in my imagination and infiltrate my nightmares. “But despite all this, I found myself missing the forest for the trees.” I never actually dipped my feet into a real ocean until I was a few months past my twenty-first birthday. Living on my own in California, I resolved that I would go to Venice Beach before I left. On Thanksgiving, I did. The first holiday away from home, and I stood on an embankment of sand two stories high taking pictures of the sunset as my parents and siblings carved into turkey at home in Chicago. I remember crying because the sunset was so beautiful, because I missed my family, because my grandfather was riddled with cancer, and because I knew that I was running away from all my troubles in Chicago by going to California in the first place. My first salty kiss of the Pacific Ocean was bitter sweet. As I turned to leave, I closed my eyes and recited one of my favorite lines of Sylvia Plath’s villanelle “A Mad Girl’s Love Song:” “I close my eyes and all the world drops dead.” I took a deep breath and a few slow, clumsy steps. “I think I made you up inside my head.” The fact is, most of the things we think about: our dreams, our insecurities, our fears, they all take root in our imaginations. And yet, there does really exist the stuff of nightmares, the inspiration for the monster in the closet or boogeyman under the bed. As we age, that faceless evil shifts forms and becomes a stranger, then later still: a mugger, a rapist, a thief, someone of another race. For me, the vampires of the world have become today’s Albert Fish’s. The questions that lingers then, isn’t he a more infamous character in today’s society? Is it that theres so much evil in the world these days that all of the Charlie Manson’s and Jack the Ripper’s and John Wayne Gacy’s are hogging the spotlight? Is it that what he did was simply too despicable to retell and keep alive? Or is it just that we as a society simply cannot acknowledge that one person can be so broken, so perverse, and so depraved. I tend to think the latter. While it can be said that I love the shock value of the darker side of human nature, it can also be said that fear has shaped who I am, who you are, and who we all are. I simply choose to examine that evil and to question how and why people like Albert Fish happen. Fear can motivate, fear can destroy, and in my case, fear can shape a career. What began as an interest in childhood has blossomed into dreams of writing books about serial killers, interviewing them and retelling their stories. I will be applying to graduate schools for psychology in the fall, and all I can say is that maybe we’re all just a little depraved.