The Killer

In honor of the coronavirus quarantine, and because April 1 is coming, here's another fiction story for you. 

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“It was a joke. A JOKE!”

I screamed it as I was strapped to the gurney.

A doctor approached, holding the first of the syringes that would soon end my life. Across a window, a small group of witnesses looked on with anger. All except one man, of indeterminate middle age, thin, with a salt and pepper beard and glasses, who just shook his head mournfully. The man I’d spent my life hoping to meet.

It was the first execution in California for many years. It was real. It was happening to me. And it really was just a joke. This was the punch line I’d been waiting for.

I was born after my father joined the witness protection program, in Massapequa, on Long Island. I learned much later he had been born Giacomo Moroni, but the feds made him change his name after his career as a contract killer ended in Arizona. He got out by ratting on his capo, Don Julio Pasquale, the boss of Phoenix.

My dad’s mind didn’t work well back in the 1980s. I think it was coke. He didn’t remember things all the time. He said he couldn’t just make up a new name for himself, so he’d just take the vowel off the end. But that made his name moron, and that didn’t make any damned sense. So, he tweaked it just a little. He became Mike Maron.

I’m his son, Matt.

The Massapequa I grew up in had seen better days. Famous days, when the suburbs were new, and giants grew up on the shaded streets. Giants like Jerry Seinfeld, the Baldwin brothers, and Peggy Noonan, the political commentator. Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends lived there. He’s the dark haired one.

By the time I graduated from Massapequa High School, in the middle of the first decade of the 21^st century, the school system had shrunk to a fraction of its former size. The ceremony was held in the gym, renamed for the Baldwins’ dad, who once taught there.

Once the ceremony was over and we all had cake, I got kicked out into the world. First stop, Nassau Community College. Then on to Boston University, the school my hero had once attended. There, I tried to do what he’d done, stand-up comedy. I did open mikes and wasn’t asked back. I tried sketch, commuting from my parents’ home to the UCB in Manhattan. I wasn’t good at that, either.

But I did get a commercial. I’m sure you saw it.

“I want cash now!” I wailed, turning it into a song that was joined by other actors, some wearing casts because of auto accidents, others in open neck shirts or beaded dresses because they’d won the lottery. It ran in strong rotation. I took every dime it earned me, because I didn’t have to pay my dad rent, and told him I was going to Hollywood to become a star.

Hollywood! The dream factory. I had a portfolio, I had my commercial, I was on my way! I dreamed of going on my hero’s podcast, while I slept on the couch of a friend who had built a successful marijuana retailing operation. I made the rounds. I had many doors slammed in my face.

It got old.

What I learned was this. I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t tell jokes. I couldn’t dance, either. My brain wasn’t fast enough for improv, I couldn’t write worth shit (as you’ve noticed). I got into a writer’s room for a sitcom once, but they sent me away after a week, and the thing wasn’t picked up anyway.

Finally, Dealer McDope said I couldn’t sleep on his couch anymore. He’d gotten a girlfriend, a blonde with straight teeth and an overbite named Peggy. They wanted to see if they could make it work. I didn’t fit in.

This was at the end of the first month of the Coronavirus epidemic. There I was, on the street, unable to reach out to anyone because they might have a deadly germ. I couldn’t go home because the planes weren’t flying. I didn’t have money for a bus anyway.

I went to a Ralph’s.

I’d heard they were hiring, you know, to deal with the increased business they’d gotten because people couldn’t go out. I got on a long line of other victims. As I approached the front this schmuck snuck right in front of me. He claimed he had kids, he needed it desperately, As I stood there steaming, my last good shirt making pit stains in the California heat (because they were doing all this outside), he tearfully pitched the manager, who gave him the store’s last job and told the rest of us to clear out.

I guess I snapped.

Instead of just walking through the parking lot and out to the Los Angeles street, I got an evil idea. I admit, it was an evil idea, a very evil idea.

First, I walked back into the store, like I was going to buy something. I grabbed a cart from the parking lot and walked right in.

Then, I admit it, I coughed. I hadn’t learned to cry in my acting lessons, but I’d learned to cough. These were loud, wracking, dry coughs, the kind that start in the base of your diaphragm and go right to the top of your head. The kind that hurt and take on a life of their own.

It was then that I did the most terrible thing. I continued coughing on the produce. Then I abandoned the cart and started touching people, tousling kids’ hair, rubbing up against young women, even grabbing old ladies. Still coughing.

The fit lasted three minutes, but it was enough. There was no way to test me, but everyone knew.

Everyone figured I had coronavirus. Covid-19. The great scourge of 2020. The closer of cruise lines, the bug that took away LeBron’s last shot at an NBA title. The germ that took out Trump.

Of course, the joke was on them. I didn’t have coronavirus. Not then, anyway. I had been on my friend’s couch all that month. I wasn’t feverish. I was making up the cough.

But no one knew that.

The manager must have made the call as soon as I walked in, because two minutes after my coughing fit ended two big cops came into the store. They were wearing masks over their faces and had gloves on their hands. They were taking no chances. One of them pulled a gun on me, told me to “freeze.” Which I did. The other came at me with a funny box and stabbed it into my guts.

He tased me, bro.

I fell to the floor, shuddering and crying in pain. Each cop grabbed me under a shoulder and dragged me off to the squad car, while all the witnesses at Ralph’s cheered them on.

No one knew this at the time, but one of the stock boys must have had the virus and didn’t know it. A full dozen of those people in that store succumbed to the germ over the course of the next month. I damn near joined them. I wish I had.

That would come later. For now, I was thrown into the back of the car and taken to the Hollywood Police Station. The same one they show on Bosch, which the dealer watched because it was free with Amazon Prime delivery. I’d auditioned for it, as third punk from the left. Didn’t get it.

I was processed, very rudely, everyone wearing masks and gloves, then tossed bodily into a cell. From there I was taken to another cell, then another cell. I was taken to a prison hospital but didn’t need a ventilator. They wouldn’t have given me one anyway.

By the time I reached a judge, the first of the Ralph’s 12 had died.

The charge was murder. Murder in the first degree.

I couldn’t believe it.

My dad disowned me. He didn’t want the publicity after all these years. He had a good life now, programming apps in his basement. He had a new wife, a young one. He was legal and wasn’t going to risk that by charging out for this broken-down kid who had taken and taken from him and never gave him a damn thing back – not even grandkids.

I wound up with a public defender. I spent months in the lock-up as the publicity built, helped along by said defender, who wanted a book deal that he could turn into a teleplay and sell to Netflix as The Plague Year. Maybe you’ve seen it. Shia LeBeouf played me. I think he missed that look I get in my eye when I’m mad, but it was a sort of credit.

The trial took two days. Guilty. The sentencing phase took one day. No one stood up for me. I’d grown depressed and didn’t even speak for myself. The prosecutor, who was hoping to run for D.A., demanded the extraordinary step of the death penalty.

After 10,000 deaths statewide in that horrible, terrible, no good and very bad year, California had someone to pin it on.

They had me.

You’d think this was Texas they were in such a hurry with the appeals, which of course came to nothing. My public defender now had an agent, and the prosecutor had a new suit. What did I have, other than notoriety? I was the biggest thing since O.J., but they’d convicted me.

I was gonna fry.

Well, not fry exactly. More like expire on a gurney, shuddering and bouncing because the drug cocktail California bought for me was Mexican. People against the death penalty tried to stop the execution by keeping the state from getting any good drugs. They failed. The state got crap, crap that was at least going to work.

This was to be my last view of this life. There, across the glass, stood my hero, with the famous salt and pepper beard and glasses, the man whose fame had lured me to California, the man whose inspiring life story had brought me to this place. The guy I’d gone to B.U. for. There he was, in the flesh. I wanted to wave. Did you know he’s Jewish?

But all Marc Maron did was give me that mournful shake of his head, and finally mouth, “What’s with you, man?”