Desire for Blood*
Larry Fondation

I wanted to kill somebody real bad, but I didn’t want to do any time. I had to come up with a plan. It would have to be self-defense. I thought about my options.

To conceal a gun, I’d need a coat. Not cold enough—especially in Los Angeles. I’d have to wait until winter. I couldn’t wait that long. And, besides, carrying a concealed weapon is itself a felony—no matter the circumstances. I couldn’t contrive a circumstance that I could explain.

Stabbing or clubbing some one was out of the question. Too messy, for one, and, too dangerous as well. I’m a small guy—five-five and skinny. Poisoning a person. No. Too distant. Too British. I’m not an Agatha Christie fan. It had to be somewhat visceral. But visceral for a guy weighing a hundred and thirty? Come on. Who am I kidding?

Out on a walk one night, just off Sunset, near Echo Park, I spied part of my answer. A martial arts studio.

“Do you teach deadly force?” I asked

“Yes,” the teacher assured me. “But, more important, we teach how to avoid the use of force at all.

“Of course,” I answered.

I knew this was the place.

I got real good real fast. Yellow belt, brown belt, then black. Within 60 days. I was a natural, the teacher said. Of course I didn’t tell him I’d done some of the basics in the Army. My past was my secret; my pension kept me alive. I did this stuff ten hours a day. Seven days a week. When the studio was closed on Sunday, I worked out at home.

OK. Now I was an expert. A black belt with a couple of stripes. Enough to do the trick. Now what? I couldn’t just go out and chop some one in the neck while I was walking down the street. I still wanted to. All that meditation hadn’t tamed my desire one bit.

I came up with a great idea. I bought a wheelchair. I faked an accident. I went straight to a crime-infested neighborhood. I had plenty to choose from. I picked Pico-Union. Time: a little after two in the morning. Bars getting out. People getting rowdy. Chances were that I’d get accosted. Plenty of justification on its way.

The first night, nothing happened. A couple of Salvadoran guys gave me quarters. They assumed I was homeless.

The next night, I went to Compton. I didn’t quite know where to go and I found myself sitting amidst a bunch of warehouses. I didn’t see a soul. I had to take a cab back. I couldn’t find the bus route. I wasn’t taking my car. If my vehicle was parked in the neighborhood of the justifiable homicide, it would raise questions, hurt my credibility. I’d always planned to say I got lost on the bus. I took the bus because I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t drive because of my injury. That’s how my story would go.

The third night I went to Boyle Heights. Nothing. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get trouble to come my way. The newspaper headlines had been blaring murders for a decade. I couldn’t even attract a mugger.

The fourth night I decided to take the evening off. Go to a movie. I went to Beverly Hills. A special screening. A French film. Godard. No, not “Breathless.” I still took the bus. I didn’t want to do anything out of the ordinary.

When the movie let out, I took out my wallet. Not for that reason, I swear. I’d been sitting on it the whole night, and the film was kind of long, the way those European movies are, and I was uncomfortable. That was my only motivation. Of course, I was jumped from behind. Instinctively, I leapt from my chair and started waling on the guy. He never knew what hit him. Within two moves, I broke his neck. My fourth shot slammed his nose through his brain and he died on the spot. Not in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Not DOA in the ER. But immediately. You didn’t need a paramedic or a doctor to tell you the guy was gone.

The shit of it is that, during the court proceedings, during which I was pretty quickly exonerated, the guy’s story came out. It was straight out of Les Miz, which I never did see while it was playing here in LA. You know the story: the guy gets thrown in jail for stealing bread. Well, get this, the guy I killed, he was trying to pull together money for an operation for his younger brother. Or maybe his mother, anyway, some close family member; I don’t remember the details. But you get the point. He wasn’t some murderous son of a bitch, but a tragic case. A sob story.

They let me go anyway, of course. A mugging’s a mugging. He started it. Even if it was for a good cause, so to speak. I got a doctor to testify for me. The guy’s lawyers asked—a reasonable question, I guess—that if I was so hurt, how did I leap from my chair to deliver lethal blows? Smartly, my doctor compared me to old ladies who can lift cars if a loved one is pinned underneath. You know, adrenaline flow, and super-human strength under extreme conditions. He went on at great length and in fine detail. He was extremely convincing. I was nodding my head vigorously in agreement in the court room, almost forgetting he was talking about me.

It’s been five years. I’ve thought of confessing. But what good would it do? It wouldn’t bring the guy back. You hear that all the time. And, there’s a lot of truth to it. I have done something positive though. Made lemonade out of lemons, if you will. I’m making my contribution to society. I started a group called “Self-Defense Killers Anonymous.” Yeah, I know, we need to work on the name. But the LA chapter alone now boasts nearly two hundred members. And, we’ve got groups up and running in ten major cities around the country. I hear through thee grapevine that the Japanese are latching onto us big time, too. The groups are amazing. They really are. We’ve got this one jeweler on Doheny. He’s blown away six guys—six different incidents. Some of the accessories got away, but never the principals. All six of them, stone dead. The guy tells his story at least every other meeting. No one ever gets tired of it. It’s the best story and we all love it. He cries at just the right times, but if you look closely enough—and you have to see him eight, ten times to catch it—you can see just a slight smile as he puts the finishing touches on the tale.

*This story appears in Fondation's upcoming collection Unintended Consequences (Raw Dog Screaming Press 2009). It was originally published in Fiction International.

Larry Fondation is the author of two novels, Angry Nights and Fish, Soap and Bonds, and two collections of short stories, Common Criminals and Unintended Consequences, the latter of which is a collaboration with London-based artist Kate Ruth. These four books are part of a planned sequence of five books of fiction focusing on the Los Angeles underbelly. Fondation has lived in L.A. since the 1980s and worked for fifteen years as an organizer in South Central Los Angeles, Compton, and East L.A. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in diverse publications including Flaunt (where he is Special Correspondent), Fiction International, Quarterly West, Los Angeles Times and Harvard Business Review.