You're Still On About That?

You’re Still On About That?

I recently joined the Facebook cause in support of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, two students studying in Perugia, Italy who were convicted last year (unjustly, I believe) of murdering Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher. 

Shortly after I posted the link to my profile, a friend pinged me back with the following message:

“You’re still on about that?”

Several months ago I had shared my interest in the case with this friend, mentioning that I thought that Knox and Sollecito had gotten a raw deal and expressing hope that their conviction might be overturned on appeal. 

That this friend would now be surprised (and, from her tone, incredulous) that I still followed the Meredith Kercher story took me aback.  I felt defensive; as though my interest was somehow suspicious and she had caught me red handed engaging in a shameful self-indulgence.  In the finest tradition of thin-skinned petulance, my mind began cycling through the list of arguments that justified my fascination and proved - proved, I say - that every right-thinking person should be as interested in the Kercher murder as I am.     

It was as I completed about the twentieth lap in the course of concentric circles I was walking in my office that I realized that I had actually been muttering under my breath and gesticulating at invisible debate opponents who’d taken up seats in the bleachers of my mind. 

For whatever reason, the Meredith Kercher story has gotten under my skin.  An inclination to midnight monologues directed at my dog (who, by the way, now agrees with me) and my cavalier use of the term “right-thinking person” are symptoms of just how deeply this story has wormed its way into my mind.  Intellectual honesty compels me to concede that they might not be healthy symptoms.  Moral honest compels me to admit that I’m hooked. 

My interest is, admittedly, odd.  I do not know Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito personally, nor am I acquainted with anyone who does.  While they are convicted of horrible crimes, Meredith Kercher’s murder is not outside of the normal “bandwidth of horror” served up for each of us every day on the evening news.  Third world infant mortality, sex trafficking from the East Block, the plight of baby seals or bigotry in my own home town all, arguably, produce victims more worthy of my time and interest.  Yet every day I find myself doing a Google search on “Amanda Knox” to catch up on the latest developments. 

“You’re still on about that?”

Although the tone of my friend’s comment was a little snarkier than was probably necessary, I owe her a debt in that it compelled me to look critically at own behavior and ask myself why it is that I am so interested.

Why in the world do I care?

My initial interest was stirred by coverage about Amanda’s “peculiar behavior” in the days following the crime.  Although the press offered several examples, it was a particular story about Amanda doing cartwheels in the lobby of the police station that especially grabbed my attention.  In the article I read, these antics were presented as evidence of “suspicious behavior” that the authorities later used justify their interest in Amanda as a possible suspect. 

See…here’s the deal…I have a couple of kids who are about Amanda’s age.  The thing about young people that age is….well…how do I say this?  Yeah…they’re fucking idiots. 

While as young adults, the minds of our dear knuckleheads are endowed with measures of intelligence, decency and common sense sufficient to ultimately see them through lives well lived, youthful enthusiasm, a sense of immortality and unimaginable ignorance about the impact their actions have on the impressions of others lead them to do thoughtless, stupid things. 

One wouldn’t think, for example, that it would be necessary to explain to my bright, handsome “young-adult” son that a torn “South Park” T-shirt with an Anarchy symbol painted across the chest in red nail polish might not be quite “the look” for good ‘ol cousin Jim’s wedding but, indeed, to my utter frustration exactly that instruction proved to be necessary.  Between the ages of 18 and 20, my daughter couldn’t make up her mind whether I was greatest man she’d ever know, or a gaping asshole maliciously intent on ruining her life.  From one day to the next I was never sure whether she’d come home and want to cuddle up in my lap or throw a book at my head. 

Kids (and I used this word deliberately in the context of then-Amanda and then-Raffaele as they are, sadly, kids no more) of that age are not adults.  Although they look like grown up people, and have the statutory rights of grown up people, they are, in reality, proto-adults – beings equipped with everything they need for greatness, but having progressed only half way through an instruction manual written in 3pt font.  Until time, experience and maturity tempers their understanding of the world, one can certainly hope for reason but should not be surprised by acts of inexplicable stupidity. 

The point of all of this is that when I read about Amanda’s cartwheels and how this, and other so-called “odd” behavior was being seriously interpreted as evidence of her guilt, I grew suspicious.  While cartwheels were certainly inappropriate, it struck me that her’s was a brand of inappropriateness typical of a proto-adult; especially, it seemed to me, if the proto-adult in question was innocent.  To take the story of my son one step further, had he been in that same situation and turned up at the police station in a suit and tie, I would have immediately known something was up.  Had he, on the other hand, shown up in his “South Park” couture (I am convinced he will wear that damn shirt at his own wedding unless someone puts their foot down) I would have been exasperated, but certainly not surprised. 

I am not arguing that “because my brats are morons and Amanda acted stupidly, she must, therefore, be innocent?”  However, to accept guilt as the only plausible explanation for her behavior struck me as narrow and inconsistent with my own experience as a parent.  The cartwheels were not necessarily the behavior of a guilty person, but rather, could just as easily be attributed to the behavior of a naïve proto-adult who, unburdened by a guilty conscience, lacked the maturity to realize that an impromptu gymnastics routine (she was actually doing yoga) in the police station lobby might strike skeptical viewers (e.g. police officers) as suspicious. 

While the descriptions of her behavior certainly did not convince me of her innocence, the narrowness of its interpretation caused me to question the presumption of guilt taken for granted in the press. 

After reading the “cartwheel” press my interest in the story moved from complete ambivalence to mild curiosity.  If I happened across an article about Meredith Kercher’s murder, then fine, I’d read it.  If not, I didn’t go looking for them.  Notwithstanding my initial skepticism, the result of these occasional updates brought me to slowly embrace the generally accepted conclusion that Amanda and Raffaele were, indeed, guilty murder.  After the initial barrage of coverage following their arrest, the press seemed to slowly forget about Amanda Knox. 

So too, I must admit, did I. 

A few months later I happened to pick up Douglas Preston’s, “The Monster of Florence.”  My purchase was actually a mistake as I’d confused Douglas Preston with another author I’d previously read and enjoyed.  I was pissed when I realized the book was by another guy, but hey – twenty bucks is twenty bucks - so one evening I pulled my accidental purchase from the bookshelf and began to read. 

The title of the book is a clever double-entendre invoking the press’s sensationalized name for a brutal Italian serial killer as well as the process whereby innocent lives fell victim to a sickening brand of bureaucratic ambition that did not shrink from accusing the guiltless if it advanced a career. 

Preston became one of his own characters when, having developed theories radically different from those held by the then-presiding prosecutor, he was brought in by the Italian authorities for questioning.  Preston’s vivid narrative describes how, over the course of a three hour Kafka-worthy interview, this prosecutor stated that he viewed Preston as a murder suspect and threatened him with imminent arrest.  In short, the prosecutor didn’t care for noise Preston was making about the case and so used his authority to intimidate the man.  It worked.  The experience so terrified the seasoned, well-respected author that the next day he gathered his family and fled Italy.   

Squeezed into the book’s final chapter, almost as an afterthought rushed to the printer before a deadline, Preston describes how this same prosecutor, Guiliano Mignini, was currently making news in connection with the prosecution of a young American college student accused of killing her roommate in a sex-game turned murder.  Noting similarities between the police interrogation this student was subjected to and his own interview, Preston suggested that although the student evidentially confessed, there may be more to her confession that meets the eye.

I recalled having read something about a case in Italy involving an American co-ed, so the next time I was on the computer I did a search for….what was her name….what was her name….???? Oh.  Yeah!  Here it is on page 328….

Amanda Knox. 

I hit enter and was suddenly reintroduced to my old friend, Foxy Knoxy, the cart wheeling proto- adult.

It turned out that I was wrong; the press had not forgotten the Meredith Kercher story.  The search string “Amanda Knox” produced references to more cyber-ink than any reasonable person could ever hope to read. 

My Meredith Kercher-meter, having received a healthy shove to the right by Preston’s book, had moved from “mildly curious” to “intrigued”.  I sat for a couple of hours and busied myself with some of the articles available on-line.   

By this time, call it winter of 2008, the friends and family of Amanda were struggling to launch a counteroffensive against so much of the bad press Knox had received immediately following the murder.  I very quickly became less interested in the minutiae of the case than I was in the mean-spirited reader’s comments that inevitably followed any article suggesting a rehabilitated Knox. 

What struck me was that for many of these commentators (the vast majority of whom were British), convicting Knox had become an objective in and of itself.  Amid rants about confessions, DNA, knives the size of guillotines, bleach and sexy underwear were other, far more vicious comments suggesting not only a hatred of Knox, but of everything they believed she represented – a vain, spoiled, self-indulgent American brat-princess.

“Foxy Knoxy” (regularly translated in the Italian media as “Evil Fox) her MySpace page announced, as if that said it all.  As if her participation in Kercher’s murder was little more than the pretext for doing what should have been done at birth…tie her up in a sack and drop her off the nearest bridge. 

What I read was hatred; pure, unadulterated loathing that would be satisfied, regardless of guilt, with nothing less than Amanda Knox’s blood.    

I lived in Europe for seven years.  Very much like Amanda, I was fascinated by European culture and intrigued by the prospect of learning a foreign language.   So, when an opportunity presented itself, I moved with my young family to Frankfurt, Germany to work as an accountant.  As my then-wife and I were eager to learn as much about our new home as we could, we worked hard to learn German, quickly made German friends and lived exclusively on the German economy. 

The years I spent in Europe were some of the richest, most fulfilling of my life.  I came to love our new home, and through my relationships with countless intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate European friends, came to learn many valuable lessons that shaped my outlook on life, people, and the world. 

As with any good set of lessons properly learned, there were both positive and negative experiences.  While I could gladly go on for pages about the positives, fidelity to my interest in Meredith Kercher’s murder leads me now to address an unfortunate negative. 

I went to Europe believing that my nationality would be a matter of utter ambivalence to my hosts.  For the vast majority of people I met there, this was happily the case.  Indeed, for some, my nationality made me interesting beyond my merit.  However, I quickly learned that for others, my nationality was a very big deal…a very big negative deal. 

It is simply human nature to corral individuals into defined groups and then categorize these groups by common perceived characteristics.  As a group subject to a definition, I learned that for some Europeans, Americans are not held in particularly high regard.  We are considered by many to be arrogant, loud, superficial, ignorant and yes, slightly dim.  Did I forget vulgar?  Yeah...we’re vulgar, too.  Given this unflattering portrait, our relative success and the influence America enjoys in matters of world politics, economics, media and entertainment becomes, for some, downright galling. 

For these individuals Americans are like the ugly girl at the prom who has forgotten her place…and, incredibly, gets away with it. 

To say that all Europeans are inclined to wanton bigotry directed at Americans is simply wrong.  However, to ignore the vocal minority who do derive prurient satisfaction in reviling all things American is disingenuous.  These individuals exist and their enmity is real.  They are typically of lower class, perform menial jobs requiring no particular educational accomplishments, have never ventured far from their own places of birth and read “newspapers” filled with large pictures narrated by brief, easy to read blurbs.   

As I read the hate laden comments directed at a 20 year old American college co-ed I could not help but think about the few unpleasant experiences I had in Europe where I, or my wife, or even my children were derided because of our nationality.    The hatred was blind.  It was ignorant.  It was intractable.  For these, thankfully few, individuals who disliked us “just because”, their hatred gave them meaning, and any attempt to disabuse them of their prejudices through good manners, kindness or reason only made them angrier. 

Such were the forces arrayed against Amanda Knox. 

While at this point I knew very little about the actual evidence supporting the couple’s arrest, what I had learned just smelled wrong.  Notwithstanding views of the hate corps for whom it was evidentially well within the bounds of reasonable expectation that an honors student with no history of criminal behavior could commit such a crime, it just didn’t seem reasonable to me.  It was when I added Preston’s account of Mignini to the sense of desperate longing by so many on the comment boards that Amanda be guilty that I began to feel a little sick inside. 

Whether I liked it or not, whether it was fair or not, it began to dawn on me that Amanda Knox seemed far more credible as a victim than as a criminal.

 At this point, my doubts were little more than nods to my own prejudices.

·         Proto-adults are stupid, but not malicious.

·         College honor students with no history of violence don’t suddenly turn into sex crazed murderers six weeks after arriving in Europe for a semester of study abroad.      

·         Guilters (those who wanted Knox guilty, regardless of her actual guilt) are sad, pathological assholes.  

·         If malice furthers their own interests, there are people like Mignini in the world who would happily use their authority to incarcerate an innocent and truly think themselves clever for having done it. 

This is a dandy list of my own personal biases, and as such, proves absolutely nothing about who killed Meredith Kercher. 

The thing about biases, though, is that they are kind of important.  Biases help us set expectations against which to measure actual outcomes.  When the outcome doesn’t match the expectation, it (should) cause us to cock our heads and start asking questions.  When the questions are asked in the spirit of honest inquiry, their answers can either validate or disprove our biases, and so lead us to new learning, new insights and new wisdom.  A guilter is not obnoxious because his biases lead him to an unfair expectation; he is obnoxious because he is unwilling to internalize answers he doesn’t like and that might teach him that his expectation was unfair (see “sad, pathological asshole” comment above).  While my biases didn’t prove that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were innocent, the contradictory outcome represented by their arrest and evident vilification pushed me to the next step, and caused me to look hard at the evidence. 

For the benefit of those keeping track, my Meredith Kercher-meter had moved from “intrigued” to “fascinated”.  

What I learned about the evidence supporting the couple’s arrest and conviction appalled me.   There are whole websites sites devoted to the evidence in the case, and I feel no inclination to repeat it all here.  What follows is a list of my “Greatest Hits” of deficiencies in the evidence used to convict Knox and Sollecito:

            The Confession – On the evening of November 5, 2007 the police requested Sollecito to come to the station to follow up on some questions they had about what he saw at the crime scene the morning after the murder.  Knox, as she had done on other occasions, accompanied him.  As she waited for Raffaele, the police invited into a room to likewise answer some additional questions.  What neither Raffaele nor Amanda realized was that they were being set up.  Unbeknownst to them, the police had come to target the couple as their main suspects.  Through wiretaps on Amanda’s phone, the police had learned that Amanda’s mother was scheduled to arrive from Seattle the next day.  Anxious to confront Amanda with their suspicions before her mother arrived, the police invited Raffaele in for the follow up session, certain that Amanda would accompany him to the police station. 

Once they had Amanda alone, they sprung the trap.  What followed was not an interview, but rather, an interrogation.  Using techniques proven effective against Mafia soldiers suspected in capital crimes, no less than twelve different interrogators (some brought up from Rome for the occasion) worked in shifts throughout the night to break the young co-ed.  Depriving her of food, water and legal counsel, they ultimately succeeded…almost.  What they actually got was less a confession than it was a response to their request that she “imagine the crime scene as if you had been there, and tell us what you see”.  Desperate and terrified, she told them what she thought they wanted to hear.  They scribbled down her words in a document, and made her sign it. 

Confession! 

Case closed. 

Later, after she’d regained her composure and had gotten something to eat, she wrote a letter essentially repudiating the document she’d signed earlier.  Expressed in the words of a terrified proto-adult desperate to declare her innocence, yet equally desperate not to further antagonize her tormentors, this document is simply heartbreaking.   While the confession was ruled inadmissible by the court, its contents and that of the subsequent retraction were widely publicized in the media and, through a legal loophole, presented as evidence in her trial.  To this day, one of the guilter camp’s most cherished chestnuts is that Knox confessed and then changed her story. “She lied!” they crow, as if words extorted from a human being through torture have credibility, and so, should be a legitimate standard by which the victim’s honesty can later be measured.  

The Blood – Meredith Kercher died a horrible, violent and bloody death.  Her killer held her from behind, stabbed her twice in the neck and then slashed her throat.   When the forensic team arrived, they found an orgy of blood and other trace evidence in the Meredith’s small bedroom.  Upon examining the materials gathered at the crime scene the investigators found no evidence suggesting that Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito had been in the room.  Independent forensic experts agree that it would have been impossible for Knox and Sollecito to have been in the room when the murder occurred and not have left evidence of their presence.  In short, the evidence proves that Guede killed Meredith, and that Knox and Sollecito were not present when the murder happened.

 

The Knife – Knox and Sollecito both maintained that on the evening Meredith was killed they’d spent the night together at Sollecito’s apartment.  When investigators searched this apartment, they opened a drawer full of utensils and discovered, among many other articles, a large kitchen knife.  During the trial, the prosecution presented evidence that Knox’s DNA was on the knife handle and Kercher’s DNA was on the blade.  Leaving aside questions about why investigators took into evidence only that knife and none of the other knives found at the apartment or how the knife supposedly used to kill Kercher came to wind up in Sollecito’s kitchen drawer, there remain only two additional facts that are relevant.  First, the techniques used by the forensic expert to identify Kercher’s DNA on the blade are highly suspect.  Upon initial attempts at analysis, the sample of material tested was so miniscule that at standard calibration the testing equipment failed to detect it.  After running and failing the test multiple times at successively lower calibrations the technician finally coaxed the equipment into identifying what might have been DNA.     As a result of the testing the sample material was so compromised that it was unavailable to the defense for further testing.   In addition, the prosecution has refused to provide the technical documentation supporting the assertion that the material on the blade did, indeed, belong to Meredith.  The second fact is that after committing the murder, the killer briefly set the bloody murder weapon on Kercher’s bed sheet, leaving behind a blood imprint.  The knife seized at Sollecito’s apartment did not fit the pattern of the imprint.  Further expert testimony revealed that, while with respect to the slash across Kercher’s neck it was impossible to preclude Sollecito’s knife, the two stab wounds in her neck were clearly inconsistent with the knife investigators found.  In other words, to believe that Sollecito’s knife caused the slash across Kercher’s neck, you have to believe that over the course of a violent assault with a girl fighting for her life the killer stabbed the victim twice with one, as yet, unidentified and unlocated knife, then stopped, replaced that knife with Sollectio’s kitchen knife and then used it to finish the job.   

The Computer - On the night Kercher was killed….oh, what the hell am I doing?….I give up…

It has become something of a parlor game among Knox’s supporters to name key prosecution assertions and then list all of the reasons why those assertions simply can’t be true.  I could continue for another ten pages listing topics like “The Footprint” or “The Break In” or “The Bra Clasp”, the “Harry Potter Book(s)”, or, or, or; all key elements to the prosecution’s case that are of dubious merit when taken individually, and utterly contradictory when combined to recreate the prosecution’s theory of the crime.  It is as though the prosecution grabbed Occam’s razor by the blade and used the blunt handle to bludgeon Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito into prison. 

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are innocent of the murder of Meredith Kercher. 

What remains is, for me, the final question about the case.  If these two young people are innocent, then why do they face sitting for the next quarter century behind bars?  How did this happen? 

I think what happened was this;

Predisposed to mistake his own prejudice for evidence and under pressure to make a quick arrest, Mignini concluded that an attractive young American girl was guilty of a heinous crime.  Recognizing the prestige that would undoubtedly accrue to the man who successfully validated one of his culture’s most beloved prejudices, he coerced a confession from Amanda Knox, the American, and then proudly announced to the world “Case closed!” 

The same bigotry that made exploiting Knox a good career move for Mignini also inspired editorial policy for many of Europe’s most unscrupulous news organizations.    The beautiful Knox, so easy on the eye that she was easy to hate, immediately became the target of yellow journalists everywhere.    Being first and foremost good businessmen, journalists covering the case quickly recognized that the best way to maximize the value of the Knox franchise was to create of her an acceptably loathsome villain; while a pretty American murderess may sell newspapers, a vain, self-indulgent American nymphomaniac sells far more.    In the headlong race to vilify Knox, the fact that she was merely beautiful barely caused the press to break its stride.  Foxy Knoxy didn’t really exist, but with a little ingenuity and sufficient disregard for facts, she was easy enough to create. 

True to Mignini’s instinct and the press’ calculus, guilters across the continent rejoiced, delighted with their new American plaything.  Nice tender flesh to tear…good bones to chew.  Was that a nipple?  Mmmmmmmm…..yum.

Meanwhile, back in Purugia, things weren’t going so well for Mignini.  With the case now solved, it remained only for the authorities to tidy up the files by following through with an actual investigation.  Sadly, this pesky follow up revealed a number of flaws in the initial theory of the crime that, unless explained, made Amanda and Raffaele’s arrest seem...well...premature.  Patrick Lumumba, (an innocent alleged co-conspirator “implicated” by Knox during her interrogation) was able to provide an inconveniently good alibi.  More troublesome still was that the emerging body of forensic evidence suggested that neither Amanda nor Raffaele were in the room when Meredith was killed.  The evidence did, however, point to one Rudy Guede, a local petty criminal who (oh shit) fled the country shortly after the murder.

Confronted with a case that was crumbling underneath him, Mignini, rather than admit he was wrong, went on the offensive.  While the evidence was letting him down, he knew the press wouldn’t.  Information damning to Knox and Sollecito was leaked to the press that ultimately proved to be untrue.  Amanda and Raffaele bought bleach and tried to clean up the murder scene before the police arrived.  They did not.  Knox was captured on video at her apartment the night of the murder, although she claimed not to have been there.   The grainy video was not of Amanda, but rather, of Meredith returning home from an evening out with friends.  The Harry Potter book retrieved at Amanda’s house although she’d claimed she’s spent the evening at Raffaele’s reading Potter there.  There were two books.  These stories, published without questions and never corrected when disproved, painted exactly the portrait of Knox that publishers wanted and Mignini increasingly needed. 

I doubt that at first Mignini appreciated the impact his lies would have.  Character assignation and misleading statements to a salacious press were tactics he’d successfully used in other, less covered local cases, and I’m sure when he deployed the same program against Knox in the Kercher case he was merely following the instructions of a much beloved recipe.  The story, however, went international and quickly achieved a scope no one could have ever predicted. 

Seeing the piles of evidence mounting daily against Knox and sensing the sovereign confidence of the prosecutor, millions of people across Europe and the United States quickly bought into Mignini’s version of the story and concluded she was, of course, guilty.  To those for whom the case pandered to deep seeded bigotry, the story became more than just a thrilling who-done-it; it became a treasured and much bragged about jewel in a xenophobic crown. “See, it’s like I’ve been telling you all along.  She is one of THEM, and THEY are like THAT!” Once committed, these believers never looked back.  To later change their opinions as actual facts become known would be to admit that they’d been deceived and were wrong, would be to admit that the “bad guys” so delightfully reviled weren’t really so bad after all.

What Mignini didn’t count on was a set of pissed off parents in Seattle.  Living thousands of miles outside the blast radius of Mignini’s Purugian influence and determined to free their daughter, Curt Knox and Edda Mellas, Amanda’s parents, launched their own offensive.  Suddenly, Mignini was confronted with tough questions by an organized resistance who knew Amanda was innocent and was not content to simply accept half-truths.  Indeed, this group went the next step and dedicated itself to exposing the half-truths for what they were....lies crafted with the sole purpose of putting Amanda Knox in a cage for the rest of her life.

 

Mignini had, and still has, a tiger by the tail.  He can’t (or wont) risk the humiliation and dishonor that would come from now backing off the conclusions he announced as facts within days of Kercher’s murder.  The problem is that Knox and Sollecito are innocent; a fact Knox/Sollecito supporters have no intention of allowing the world to forget. 

 “You’re still on about that?”

Yes.  I am.  In fact, my Kercher-meter now reads a bright red “Mad as hell”

So, why do I care?

For me, the story has become about more than Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito or even, Meredith Kercher. 

For me, the story is about how human beings can be wicked. 

It is about how human beings can auger themselves into untenable positions, and become so invested in their own dogma that the option of sending two innocent young people to prison for a quarter of a century is preferable to admitting that they were wrong.

It is Lewis Carroll for the 21^st century. 

It is 1984 for 2007. 

It is …..

In the spring of 2001 my twelve year old daughter played (another) season of AYSO soccer.  In a ritual familiar to every soccer mom on the planet, the coach asked each parent for their kid’s size so that she could buy team uniforms.  Partly because she thought it would be fun, and partly because this particular coach worried about pre-teen girls wandering Southern California malls with their actual names posted on their backs, she asked the girls to use nicknames rather than their real names for the jerseys.   

My father-in-law, an inveterate California Lotto player, was fond of calling his granddaughter, Meg-A-Buck.  So it came to be that for that 2001 season, my now-21 year old daughter, Megan, played AYSO soccer as “Meg-A-Buck”, jersey number 02 (she’s very tiny). 

A few very short years later, when she opened her first MySpace account she was prompted to choose a screen name.  Excited to start her social networking adventure, she gave the question exactly three seconds of thought, and then typed in the first name that came to mind - “Meg-A-Buck”. 

A thousand miles to the north, another young girl encountered the same question when setting up her MySpace account.  Just as my daughter had done, this young girl from Seattle chose the name she’d worn on her soccer jersey in about the same year that Meg-A-Buck was terrorizing soccer fields in Southern California.   

Enter Screen name:  Amanda Knox typed “Foxy Knoxy”, and hit Enter. 

 “You’re still on about that?”

Hell yes! 

About Me

What in the whole wide world can I write here about myself that you’d ever believe?

When writing it’s always best to stick with what you know. Tempting as it may be to fabricate a bullshit persona rich in accomplishments that are not really mine, I will instead walk the high road and present honestly whatever unembellished truth is there to be found.

I am an Astronaut.

That’s right, I’m a card carrying, Buck Rogers style Astrocowboy.

OK, maybe that’s laying it on a little thick. While I really am an Astronaut, my area of experience embraces only a very limited, highly specialized field of space exploration. To be honest, the title “Astronaut” is just a technicality; while I have, indeed, flown several missions on the space shuttle my presence in space has been more in the capacity of cargo than flight crew. I am not allowed to touch any buttons, turn any dials or act in any manner whatsoever that might affect the outcome of a flight. While I am allowed to speak during missions, it is generally discouraged.

My job in space is janitorial in nature as once every six months or so they fly me up to the International Space Station to empty the trash cans and clean the toilets.

First, let me say that I really don’t care much for space travel – the ride is uncomfortable, cell phone reception is poor and the food sucks. Although there is a certain amount of prestige associated with the job, it is far less glamorous than one might expect. Being an Astrojanitor is hard work. It is a little known fact that Astronauts are basically pigs. Seriously! Especially the chicks! OMG, if you’d seen the things I’ve seen . . . look, I’m not even going to go into it. All I can say is that what I have seen in space is not what Kennedy had in mind. 

Still, the job has its perks. What I like best is the view. When I’m on mission (that’s what we in the Astrojanitorial Corps call mopping the floor) I’m pretty busy most of the time; but every once in a while I stop and call a “personal moment.” I set my mop aside, take off my rubber gloves, light a cigarette and just gaze out the window. It is thrilling to look down from orbit watching clouds roll along in thick, smog laden gobs as underneath them children play, lovers kiss and Arabs build car bombs.

I am frequently asked how I came to be the janitor on the International Space Station. Well, as is true of so many things, it all started with my father. Dad dropped out of school when he was 14 and ran away to join the circus. Having never graduated high school himself, he grew up convinced that school was for suckers and college boys were “pansies”. That is, of course, until he met a guy in the army who’d been a college professor in civilian life. Over the course of Dad's two year tour this pretentious bastard convinced my delightfully ignorant father and that college was a vital, life expanding developmental achievement that every young person should aspire to, regardless of their chosen profession. If I heard it once growing up, I heard it a thousand times, “Son, I don’t care what you want to be, you’ll be better at it if you go to college. You want to be a garbage man? Fine by me, (Ha ha haaaa), but you’ll be a better garbage man with the sheepskin, boy!” Through subtle maneuvering, cajoling, bribes and threats my father wove a tapestry of expectation.  I was to graduate from college, by God! 

“Go to college son!” he’d say, “People ‘ll respect you. You’ll wear a suit and tie, carry a briefcase and people will call you Sir!”

What a crock of shit that turned out to be.

Still, if I had to go (and believe me, my dad made it clear that I had to go), I resolved to defer life for long as was humanly possible. After earning my bachelor’s degree in philosophy from USC I hit dad up for the Master’s program at UCLA to study government administration. He balked at first, but when I explained that the city’s waste management authority was not accepting applications from philosophy majors, he relented. Having dallied at UCLA for two years, I graduated with a Master’s degree in French Literature (which is particularly impressive given that I never learned French). Dad was pissed, but when I explained that it was all a horrible mistake and that I’d taken all of those French Literature classes in the sincere (albeit, mistaken) belief that they were prerequisites to the engineering program, (“Believe me dad, nobody’s more upset about this than I am!”) he calmed down a little. He refused to finance any further study when, at my Phd commencement at Stanford, he learned that I had written my dissertation on the innovative china designs of Eva Zeisel, and had earned thereby an honest to God doctorate in "Russian Arts and Crafts". 

Having depleted most of my father’s retirement savings and all of his goodwill, I was 38 years old and thoroughly unemployable. Fortunately, dad was able to keep his job as a night watchman at the tire plant until well into his 70’s, but as his nursing home did not allow sleepover guests I was forced upon my graduation from Stanford to face some rather chilling financial realities. As luck would have it I still had facility available to me under my umbrella of Student Loans.  Temporarily flush with cash, I checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and used this transition time to catch up on some long overdue personal reading (Amy Tan – yummy) and worked hard to focus on myself and maintain the positive outlook so vital to any successful program of personal introspection.

In 1998 I ran into a fellow UCLA alumnus who’d gone on after graduation to get a job as an administrator at the California Institute of Technology. I’d just finished wiping down the front windshield of a silky black Lexus at the corner of La Cienega and Wilshire and was approaching the driver for my tip when, contrary to all previous experience the car’s owner actually rolled down his window. “Bob?” asked the beefy man behind the wheel, his face scrunched in a mask of perplexed recognition. Despite my disheveled appearance and the unpleasant odor so common to the homeless, this long-lost acquaintance (who, to this day I do not remember from my years at UCLA) invited me to join him for breakfast. After reminiscing about old times (none of which I remembered), we spent the balance of this breakfast meeting exploring ways in which my unique background might be useful to the US space effort. The results of this pivotal meeting were overwhelmingly favorable as 1) I received a long overdue meal and 2) it paved the way for my entrée into the janitorial service industry, thus ending my prolonged post-doctoral career slump.

Although my academic achievements clearly weighed heavily in my favor, getting that first position at CalTech was not a slam dunk. Having lived in a cardboard box behind Trader Joe’s the previous three years, certain puzzling gaps in my resume were exposed during the course of the obligatory background check to which all CalTech employment candidates are subjected. Fortunately, I’d been a model citizen during my years at school, and for the rest, my father was all too happy to vouch for my subsequent period of self-employment after I made it clear to him that the result of this perjury would be to silence my monthly claim to a portion of his Social Security check.

This was actually the first “job” I’d ever held, and I must confess that my transition into the workforce was not without its issues and challenges. In the warm glow of my friend’s generous patronage, however, I slowly learned to pilot the stormy sea of employer expectations. Success breeds success, and after mastering the fine art of showing up for work on time each day, I moved on to broader areas of achievement including such skills as “speaking respectfully to supervisors”, “avoiding sexually inappropriate comments” and, my favorite, “while napping at work is bad”. Over the years I first mastered, then excelled in the execution of my janitorial duties. I had come so far, in fact, that by the time my friend was arrested by the FBI for selling secrets to the Bolivian government my star had climbed so high within the janitorial bureaucracy at Cal Tech that my career progressed unmolested despite the foul stench of my former friend’s perfidious treason. Indeed, it’d be vain for me not to acknowledge that the career boost I enjoyed in the wake of the whole nasty affaire was conferred (at least, in part) as expression of appreciation for my tip and the subsequent testimony that proved so pivotal to the government’s case.

In early 2004 I was approached by “Earl”, the FBI agent with whom I’d consulted during the course of my former patron’s investigation. Earl, who arrogantly referred to himself as “my handler”, explained that he needed my help on an ongoing investigation of “irregularities” suspected on the International Space Station program. He needed a man inside the program whom he could trust. In light of my earlier willingness to denounce my friend and sponsor, Earl made it clear that he did not trust me at all; however, given my demonstrated willingness to offer state’s evidence with nothing whatsoever to gain from the disclosure but mischief, he was comfortable that I was the right man for the job. Thus briefed, (Earl called it “turned”, as if I’d been heading in any particular direction to begin with) I was accepted into the space program, subjected to the grueling training and, despite having failed the psychological evaluation administered to all prospective Astronauts, given a mission date late in 2005. After our initial meeting I never saw Earl again; however, during the course of my training and until told otherwise, I was required to email periodic reports to “my handler” under the codename Templeton (a rather unflattering reference, I later learned, to a certain rat in E. B. White’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web”).

I remember my first shuttle flight like it was yesterday. My dad, of course, made the long trip to Florida to watch the launch.  He wept, I am told, as thundering rockets ejected me from the planet. 

The mission itself was uneventful. I went up, scrubbed some toilets and came down again. Easy, really.

Far more interesting than space travel, however, was the thrilling voyage of self-discovery launched as a byproduct of my periodic reporting requirement to Earl. Although from a National Security perspective I had absolutely nothing of interest to share, I had committed to weekly reports and so, by God, weekly reports Earl got. I tried to keep my briefs newsy and light, in the manner of a friendly note to an old buddy. In them I shared, among many, many other things my thoughts on public schools, what I’d eaten for lunch, interpersonal challenges and issues I was having with the other Astronauts and certain reflections about the meaning of religion in contemporary society. I wrote to Earl consistently every week for over two years. Although it was tedious at first I quickly came to find the writing process cathartic and grew to look forward to sharing my thoughts in these weekly missives.

For his part, Earl remained silent. In the beginning I’d send away a report and then excitedly return to my computer every hour or so to check my inbox for a response. None came . . ever. While initially I presumed that his failure to respond was the manifestation of some bizarre security protocol, over time I grew to crave some feedback and viewed his silence with mounting levels of resentment and bitterness. I mean, here I was bearing my soul as I laid my life on the line for my country and this asshole couldn’t be bothered to hit reply and send a quick “thanks for the note – I’m sorry about the whole situation with Tammy and, you’re right, she’s a bitch! Stay strong, Earl.” What did I get? Nada! Nuttin! Zero! ZIP!

Still, despite his obdurate silence I continued to write. And write. And write. The more profoundly I perceived his unresponsiveness as a subtle form of insult, the more prolific became my writing. By the end my friendly notes to an old buddy typically ran upwards of ten typed pages, complete with footnotes and annotated commentary.

It wasn’t until after I’d completed my fifth shuttle mission (the one in which I’d had to go EVA to roto rooter the waste disposal conduit underneath the port shitter) that I learned the true reason for Earl’s stubborn silence.

One day, about three months after the roto rooter mission I was polishing the brass hand rails outside the reception hall at the NASA training center in Tupelo, Mississippi when a thin, wiry man with graying hair and an odd limp humpled past me on his way to check in at the security desk. “Special Agent Flatbush, FBI” the man announced as he officiously flashed his badge at Lloyd, the day shift security guard. “I have an appointment to see the Director of Flight Operations.” Of course, I recognized Flatbush immediately. He’d been Earl’s partner when we’d originally met in 1998 during the Cal Tech investigation. Although Earl typically led the interviews, Flatbush was always present, listening and writing copious notes. Lloyd, in his typical laconic fashion, checked the man’s credentials, called upstairs to the Director’s office and, after briefly conferring with a secretary named Ethel (or, as Lloyd called her, “sugartits”), directed Flatbush down a hall towards the bank of elevators that would take him to the 17th floor and his meeting. Flatbush, barely waiting until Lloyd had finished, spun on his heels and limped off toward the promised elevator bank.

In this I saw, of course, an opportunity. On the very first day of my assignment Earl had made it clear that I was to tell no one about my mission; yet it had been over two years since I’d actually spoken to him or anyone else in the FBI. My mind raced, quickly calculating the risks of approaching Flatbush with the intention of passing along a personal “Howdy-do” to my old buddy Earl.

I’d just decided on a plan that involved tripping the cripple by means of a mop handle jammed between his legs as he passed, when the approaching Flatbush looked up and saw me. Our eyes met and within the space of two heartbeats his expression morphed from one of hostile boredom to rapt, frantic attention. Always appreciating having made an impression, I smiled broadly and lifted my hand in a friendly wave. To my horror Flatbush quickly brushed open his suit coat, reached awkwardly behind his back and produced an extraordinarily scary looking automatic pistol.

“Freeze, Templeton!” the lame FBI agent bellowed as he pointed the weapon at my head.

The reception hall, which had previously hummed with the innocuous buzz of people on their way to and from outer space, suddenly grew eerily still. Then, somewhere on the far side of Flatbush’s scary pistol, a woman shrieked.  As if they’d been waiting for the woman’s scream to signal “Go”, everyone in the hall scurried for cover.

“I said FREEZE!” shouted Flatbush, jerking the gun once towards my nuts for emphasis. I was frozen. I swear, I was frozen.  Every muscle in my body (including my heart) was stone cold frozen. Indeed, so frozen was I that I still wore the same stupid grin I’d plastered on my face as I’d raised my right hand to waive.  Bobbing like a cork on the swift current of my abject panic, the notion occurred to me that Flatbush might, just might see this smile as some form of threatening mockery; but I couldn’t figure out how to unsmile without violating his compelling freeze order and, thereby, earn myself a bullet in the head.

Jingle, Thwack, Jingle, Thwack, Jingle, Thwack.

Lloyd, who from armpits to scrotum was built like a sumo wrestler, but otherwise sported an Alfred E. Newmanesque frame rushed towards us, the ridiculous assortment of crime fighting paraphernalia on his Batman Utility Belt bouncing off his love handles in rhythmic slaps as he ran. “Freeze (gasp), Bob!” he contributed. I’m fucked, thought I - anything important enough to make Lloyd run must be pretty fucking awful.

Following Flatbush’s steely direction I lowered myself onto the ground and assumed a posture of abject submission that I hadn’t revisited since my transitional days in the alleyway behind Trader Joe’s.

No one ever actually told me exactly what was going on, but summarizing hints dropped during 36 hours of interrogation in a narrow, windowless room deep in the basement of the training center I finally came to understand why Flatbush was so pissed. Earl, I learned, was dead and Flatbush believed that I’d killed him. That’s right! Dead! Indeed, he had been dead for quite some time – a little over two years, in fact. Wrapped in a shroud of secrecy (which even his own partner had not penetrated) and employing the full authority of the FBI, Earl somehow managed to shoe horn me into the Astronaut training program, instructing those responsible at NASA that I was to be fast tracked and kept in the program at all costs – or else. Then he abruptly died under peculiar circumstances, of course, (security Nazi that he was) leaving no notes or memoranda documenting the suspicions he was following or my participation in the resulting investigation. Whether it was ever Earl’s intention that I actually fly in space is now, in retrospect, questionable; but as far as the guys at NASA were concerned I was just some spook who was to be moved through the program at any cost (or else) until they were instructed otherwise, even if this meant bumping other Astronauts from the launch rotation and sending me up in their place. Did you know it costs $ 5.5 million to send an Astronaut into space? I learned this little tidbit from the Director of Flight Operations at NASA as he clubbed me about the head and shoulders with a rubber hose during the initial phase of my interrogation.

Flatbush knew nothing about any of this until eighteen months after Earl’s death when, during a routine system update at FBI headquarters in Washington, a secret email account belonging to none other the deceased agent Earl was identified. It was there that Flatbush discovered and read the weekly reports I’d so religiously submitted since my recruitment in 2004. I must confess that I was a little put out when I learned that Flatbush had read the PRIVATE correspondence in which I had shared some pretty personal information; but in light of the gimpy agent’s suspicion that the key to his partner’s murder was to be found in my body of reports, I was prepared to give him a break.

Anyway, it’d taken Flatbush the last six months to actually read and digest all of my emails. Apparently, despite the sheer volume of my writings, neither he nor anyone else at the FBI could identify any tangible details in the body of work that indicated who I was, where I was, what I was doing and why, in God’s name, I was corresponding with Earl. As I hinted earlier, I viewed these reports more as “stepping stones on a path of self-actualization” than as “potential evidence in a federal investigation”, and as such, tended to dig deeper on interpersonal issues than would otherwise have been the case. Rather than edify and inspire, however, I’m afraid my scribblings provoked Flatbush to develop a paranoid fantasy scenario in which I played a rather unflattering roll. After reading, reading and then rereading my reports Flatbush, for want of any intelligent ideas, theorized that I was actually a criminal sociopath who’d viciously and cleverly (hence explaining how suspicion came to fall on me) murdered his partner. Further, he convinced himself that I was actually taunting first the FBI, and then him, personally, with an avalanche of seemingly nonsensical (bullshit ? his word) emails. At one point he actually thought that I was writing in code, and assigned several of the agency’s top cryptographers to decipher the “true meaning” of my reports. After spending literally hundreds of man-hours on the task it was their collective (and, to my mind, somewhat ungenerous) professional opinion that I was, indeed, not a national security threat, but rather, simply a “whiny, self-absorbed asshole with too much fucking time on his hands”.

A break in the case came for Flatbush the previous week when I’d used the entire text of my report to discuss and rate the quality of shopping opportunities available in Tupelo and its surrounding suburbs. So proud of this discussion was I that I’d submitted the very same report (altered, of course, to include my own name rather than my rat cognomen) to the Tupelo Sun, who, being understandably impressed, reprinted large portions of the commentary in the newspaper’s Sunday Calendar section. I, of course, received a byline! The correlation between my “secret” report and the newspaper article somehow came to Flatbush’s attention. Armed with this Rosetta Stone, Flatbush set about to discover who I was, where I worked and how he could most efficiently engineer my arrest. As it turned out he was actually in Tupelo that morning to meet with the Director and discuss the details of the high stakes, multi-level sting operation he’d initiated to capture me, turn me (again with the turning, what is it with these guys?) and use me (what else is to be done with me after a good turning?) to apprehend my network of accomplices. Apparently I caught him off guard in the reception hall and when I shot him the goofy Gomer Pyle grin he panicked and, doing what any sensible federal agent would do when greeted in a warm and courteous manner, drew his weapon.

At its beginning the interrogation went poorly, and in the initial hours, as Flatbush pounded on the table and called me all manner of unpleasant names, I became convinced that I would spend the next 15 years of my life in a compound on Guantanamo Bay. Flatbush was invested in his paranoid theory and would not be moved from it. I, he maintained, was a secret agent for the Chinese government who’d infiltrated Cal Tech and passed along to my patrons all the sensitive information available to me in my capacity as a janitor. When Earl discovered my affiliation with the Asian menace, Flatbush’s theory continued, I executed him, and then avoided capture by becoming an Astronaut and flying off into outer space to mop up vomit on the International Space Station. Why this harebrained notion seemed more reasonable than the truth – that I was homeless Doctor of African Studies who was recruited by a now dead FBI agent to infiltrate NASA and was thus, shot off into space – is beyond me. Yet Flatbush clung to his theory stubbornly . . . pathologically.

The tide turned when, half way through the second day, a new team of interrogator’s arrived from Washington to support the now exhausted Flatbush. Thoroughly briefed, yet understandably skeptical, they attempted to carry on with Flatbush’s passion the same line of questioning pursued by my nemesis. The wind slowly leached from their sails as the manifest absurdity of Flatbush’s suppositions became as apparent to them as they were to me. “This is stupid,” announced one of the new interrogators to his partner half way through our session. Four hours later his exhausted partner concurred, pronouncing Flatbush’s case an “an idiotic pile of crap”. About this time Flatbush returned to my little cell, rested, refreshed and ready to tear into me. As a matter of good form the new investigators retired, leaving me for another 12 hours to the tender mercies of my demented tormentor. When they returned to find that Flatbush had not progressed one inch in the support of his claims, the replacement investigators quietly pulled him aside and instructed him to return with all possible speed to Washington. With Flatbush gone the new team allowed me to sleep for a few hours and then resumed their questioning. The tone of this interview was far more courteous and productive than our earlier sessions, and I explained to this sweetly reasonable duo every little thing that had happened to me from the date of my high school graduation until that very morning. They asked a few questions, but mostly just sat there with dumbfounded expressions on their faces as I recounted how it came to be that I was an Astronaut. At the end of this session the pair politely thanked me for my cooperation and offered, quite kindly, to drive me home.

It is my understanding the Flatbush is still with the FBI, and works as a field agent in bureau’s Boise office. His job, I hear, is processing asylum applications for foreign defectors requesting Idaho as their state of relocation. The former Director of Flight Operations at NASA is now retired, and tends orchids in a zero gravity hothouse in Shreveport. My father is well and, having been forcibly retired from the tire plant last June, now supplements his income by swing shift work at the 7-11 around the corner of his retirement home. He complains that the work is boring and that he’s perpetually exhausted, and I’ve suggested that he consider enrolling in college so that he might get a degree and thereby do a better job serving slurpees to the drug addicts who appear at his store in the middle of the night seeking refreshment.

Earl, as I’ve already mentioned, was dead.

For my part, I am still with NASA and am scheduled to take my seventh shuttle flight in April. Understandably, following my interviews with the FBI there was quite a bit of discussion among the top executives within the space agency as to my future with the program. Oddly, there seemed to be a certain element within this august group who felt that I should be immediately terminated (I’ve always assumed that by this, they meant my employment). Still, when it became clear that should the truth of my odyssey become public information the fact that NASA had spent over $ 25 million dollars training me to be an Astrojanitor and then launching me into space just because a lone FBI agent said so might prove embarrassing for the beleaguered bureaucracy. Thus is was deemed wise to keep me close to NASA’s bosom, and in exchange for a binding non-disclosure agreement and a promise not to prosecute the former Director of Flight Operations for his assault on me with a rubber hose I was granted a small monetary gift and allowed to keep my job (complete with scheduled missions on the shuttle).

I recently stumbled across the Blogspot web page and saw in it an opportunity to share my story in a forum which, as I am certain no one will ever read this, does not violate the provisions of my non-disclosure agreement. So to you blog-loving phantom’s who will never visit this website, welcome, and for you young people who’ve made it this far remember, go to college so that someday you too can serve slurpees in outer space! It has been brought to my attention that this "About Me" section is a little long and, without paragraph breaks, difficult to read, and I'm curious whether anyone has actually read this to the end. So, as an experiment, I'll pay $ 10 to the first person who reads this and emails me back with the answer to the following question - What is Lloyd's nickname for Ethel?

All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 by Robert Owen