THE BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH

Man turns up at an elevator. Hesitates for an unknowable moment. Pushes the button. Bell rings, door opens. There’s a masked man inside with his finger on the controls : “you rang, sir? What is it that you seek?” “I seek the light of knowledge!” Masked man hesitates for an unknowable moment, does a brief brain and body scan, invites the man into the elevator then pushes the button, “going up, first floor!” Door closes. The masked man calls out to somebody above : “Guiseppe, light me a candle!” Absolute silence. Bell rings, door opens. There’s a single flickering flame in the darkness. “Light enough?” “No, I seek more light!” Masked man hesitates for an unknowable moment then presses the button. “Going up, second floor!” Bell rings, door closes. He calls out to somebody above : “Benny, overhead!” Absolute silence. Bell rings, door opens. There’s a single overhead lamp lit dangling from the ceiling, lots of shadow in the corners. “Satisfied?” “No, no, I seek even more light!” Masked man hesitates for an unknowable moment, pushes the button. “Going up, third floor!” He calls out to somebody above : “Albert, full spot!” Absolute silence. bell rings, door opens. A spotlight floods into the elevator, blinding the man to everything but himself. “what do you think of it so far?” “No, no, no, I need to see the light beyond the darkness of my own light!” Masked man hesitates for an unknowable moment. “All in good time.” Pushes the button, bell rings, door closes. “Going down, basement!” He calls out to somebody below, who shall remain nameless : “knife to the throat, noose around the neck!” Absolute silence. Bell rings, door open. It’s all but pitch black, till out of the darkness another masked man appears, invites the initiate out of the elevator. Bell rings, door closes behind him. The second masked man puts a knife to his throat then a noose around his neck, hands him a skull to kiss, then points to a coffin, tells him to take all his clothes off, lie in the coffin and pleasure himself…as you repeat after me “dominus dominum domini domino domino domino…” the dominoes are falling, no bones about it, our hero is entering into the brotherhood of death, and he’s never felt more alive in his life!

All these masked men gather round to make sure he doesn’t fake his orgasm. Some orchestrated gang-rape, several indiscreet photographs taken, multiple oaths of fidelity and secrecy and the new initiate is now a re-made man! He need never feel alone and un-supported in this world again. He’s given his own mask and told he is now a pillar of the community. Taught some secret hand-signals should he ever need a nudge-nudge-wink-wink under-the-table leg-up from another pillar of the community. He may never have to pay a parking-ticket ever again. And all he has to do is not tell anybody who doesn’t already know what he knows. What does he know? maybe he’s still not sure. Maybe he’s still going up and down from the basement to the third-floor? hasn’t seen the full lucifer yet, but he lives in hope that one day he will break bread with the great grand master-builder himself in the pure light of perfect knowledge! Which may be something he might not really have wanted to know, but by then it will be too late. He’ll be in too deep to change his mind, on pain of death or at best social ruin. Meanwhile he keeps himself busy delivering milk and cookies to orphanages, old folks’ homes and other charitable organizations, posing for photo-ops with other pillars of the community, surrounded by all their sweetly smiling charity-cases. Re-pledging oaths till his tongue bleeds. Bonding through bondage, humiliation, sensory overload and secrecy, doesn’t get any deeper than that! Tribal or cabbalistic? Knoights of the round Table or pawns in a pyramid-scheme?

But what do I know about secret societies? I’ve never pushed that particular button, entered that particular elevator. All I know is what I can imagine. And being the melodramatist I am I tend to imagine the worst, it makes more fascinating copy. Let’s face it, many careers have been built on imagining the worst. To imagine the best a relatively un-imaginative leap into innocently mischievous frat-boy hi-jinks that can only be conjured up dramatically worthwhile if one of those faux blood=siblings had some really dark and dirty secret to cover up : that they’d just slaughtered and cannibalized a whole suburban family, who wouldn’t have known evil unless it rose up and stuck ‘em in the guts with a red-hot poker for no apparent reason other than to prove their own devilishly demonic superiority to basic human decency! Are you with me or against me? If you’re with me you’ll keep it a secret. If you’re against me, well, I’ve got a red-hot poker tucked in my back pocket! But I didn’t sign up for this!!?? I just wanted to organize bake-sales! But doesn’t it make you feel special knowing such a secret you’re not allowed to tell anybody??? Besides, we still have the photographs!

As soon as someone tells me they know something that changed their life, changed their whole relationship with the world and it would change mine, but they can’t tell me cause it’s a secret…Not someone I can ever trust to get me to enlightenment. And I know we all have our secrets. And sometimes it feels like our greatest strength is to keep them a secret, if we want to get ahead in the world. Nobody submits on their resume “I like to have a knife to my throat, a noose around my neck, kiss skulls, jerk off in coffins and be anonymously sodomized while I binge-watch on old Betty Grable movies, hate making deadlines, sometimes I show no initiative at all, I can lie in bed for days on end and I have chronic diarrhea….Am I giving anything away? Do I get the job? On the other hand it’s an undercutting axiom - or at least it should be - that sometimes revealing our greatest weaknesses can be our greatest strength, as human-beings, not wanting to appear un-equally not as fucked-up as everybody else, and therefore worthy of un-equally better treatment. Always looking up to some and down on others and too rarely across at each other and simply seeing another flawed experience of humanity doing its’ best to accommodate its’ weaknesses and exercise its’ particular strengths as best as it can.

As soon as we have to take oaths of fidelity to demonstrate our well-meaningness, shouldn’t we suspect somebody needs to keep a much darker and dirtier secret than we do? It should be written in our blood, etched into our hearts, coursing through our whole being that we’re here to help each other not hurt each other, cause only by helping each other are we helping ourselves, cause nobody in their right mind would want to hurt somebody who is trying to help them. Which leads us to the “right mind”, in a culture so mentally deranged to the point of knowing we’re not doing good enough if we’re not doing better than somebody else. And the best way to go about that is to keep what we’re really doing a secret. Not telling everybody what you think you know, what they might need to know, cause you need to know something they don’t. So we have to ask ourselves, who arranged and is deranging this and to what purpose must intelligence be kept a secret? To save humanity from itself? Cause let’s face it. left to our own natural impulses and devices we’d just proceed to rip each other’s throats out!!!!!!!?????