Naked news is what I'm after,
news as explosive and hard
as a metal pipebomb.
That's why I've come to drug rehab,
where Clarice rises from her chair
and speaks to me of lost loves,
lost chances
and her lost daughter,
now warmer in the grave
than she was in the freezer,
where the killer, dubbed "The Ice Man"
stored her, along with his other victims.
"Froze them alive," she says, shivering,
and falls back into the director's easy chair,
which he gave up as a kindness I guess,
or maybe on effort to impress me.
I’m a reporter, but you knew that.
My beat is the street.
My paper is Naked News,
once Naked City News,
but when the owner ran into charges
of copyright infringement,
he came up with this substitute.
Now Naked News is known
for getting down to the nitty gritty,
when every other rag is crowing about
being the voice of the city,
but the city's multiracial, multicultural
multigender and bender of people into shapes
the other rags can't accommodate,
so we stand alone inside the barricades
the rich have erected around the guerrilla soldiers
of the urban jungle.
Clarice is one of these, pregnant at fourteen,
turned out as a prostitute
by the baby's thirty-year-old father at sixteen
and the mother of a dead child at twenty-five.
She thought that by surviving her daughter would too,
but an unexpected evil pursued her daughter,
a man of the suburbs,
who cruised the projects looking for drugs,
so everyone thought,
but he only bought them as a cover it turns out.
He had another mission which was revealed
when his mother finally got around
to cleaning out the basement.
The old freezer she'd forgotten about
stood in a dark corner.
Surprised to find it still working,
she opened it, then looking inside,
found the ultimate deep freeze.
Her screams resounded
through the neighborhood.
All girls, all Hispanic, or African American,
wrapped in clear plastic
and stacked one atop the other.
Bobby Benedict, a sweet kid once
but not worth a damn now
she said, as she apologized
to the families of the dead girls whose rage
swirled around him at the trial.
Bobby only smiled, when he was sentenced
to death by lethal injection.
The question I ask Clarice
is how she feels now that he's scheduled to die tonight.
She’s the last interview,
the follow up story we'll use tomorrow.
I'm shocked when she tells me,
"I forgive him." "God bless him."
"No one else does," I tell her.
When she looks at me, I see tears streaming
down her cheeks
and then she's leaning close to me.
"I done bad things too," she says.
"Not like this," I say, goading gently.
"The way she died… Doesn't that--"
"My pride killed her," she says.
"I wouldn't let her go to a foster home.
Left her with my grannie, who was just too old
to look out for her."
I nod. I'm finished. I mumble a few words
of consolation, then I 1eave.
I wander by the precinct on my way back to the office.
I want to see what's going down on the crime beat.
I find the usual acts of misanthropy and aggression,
cold blooded murder
and sessions of violence,
followed by calm menace and expressions of hate.
Nothing to make me a story
nothing to add to my résumé,
but wait, another child is missing.
"A white boy this time," says the officer.
"What's he doing here?" I ask.
"Exactly," he says, but nothing more
so I start asking questions of a homicide detective
and he says, "It's your type a' story."
"Why?" I ask."His family is homeless. Human interest, right?"
He shakes his head and goes home for the night,
but I don't. I head to the morgue,
where the corpse of a girl
lies split up the middle.
Her body’s so white
if I turned out the lights I wonder
Would she glow in the dark?
Would she light the way
to the next victim of foul play?
On that cheerful note, I leave.
I’m off to receive the next transmission
from the dead, or soon to be.
The streets are crowded tonight.
A kind of sexual heat is rising like steam
from the sidewalk,
which seems to dissolve beneath my sneakers
and caress my feet.
I need to nosh, so I stop for a slice of pizza.
"Going once, going twice," says the counterman
who’s holding my change.
"Lot’s on your mind?"
"I s’pose so," I tell him, then I say, "I don’t know."
"Is it me, or does tonight seem…"
Crazy? Every night."
"Yeah, I guess," I say.
Just then a voice on the radio
announces that Bobby Benedict is dead.
"I’ll drink to that," says the counterman
and I say, "so will I," and I do,
remembering how his eyes
were as blue as robin’s eggs
and seemed to look through
to the other side of the world,
which is made of ice
and the girls, abandoned by design,
by mistake wait so patiently
to be taken hostage and murdered
for murder’s own sake.