Conversations With Evil Men

I've spent an embarrassingly large portion of my life consorting with very bad men. Countless mad-dog-loner career criminals, staggering numbers of addicts and alcoholics, some of the kind who had poison for blood and hate in every thought, quite a few who claimed to be killers, and a very few who actually were. There was the guy who methodically knocked out every single one of his neighbour's teeth with a ball-peen hammer because he was late on a two hundred dollar loan repayment, the man who had spent the past seven years of his life sustaining his heroin habit by pimping out his girlfriend, another man who sustained his lifestyle by dint of extreme physical and psychological intimidation of his own mother, and a very softly spoken African of my acquaintance who had a little row of wooden figurines - one for every life taken - on his boarding house windowsill, and who was careful to explain that his collection did not include those he had killed at any distance greater than five metres. "It doesn't count if you don't see the light fade," he'd say, before donning his Dominos uniform for another night of delivering pizzas to pampered English kids.

The usual portrayal of men like this (and they're almost always men) is pretty two dimensional. The most sympathetic of fictional villains is generally, though not always, written by a person who at best has sympathy for them, but little to no real understanding. There are some stand-out exceptions. Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy spring to mind as authors who seemed to really understand what it is to be a bad man. Shakespeare, strangely, also makes that list. But the overwhelming trend is to hollowness - a sense that the villain exists as a construct to serve the righteousness of the hero, or the anti-hero, as the case may be. In fact, in stories which contain an anti-hero, this cyclostyling of the villain is often at its most egregious. The less 'heroic' the hero is, the more 'villainous' the villain.

In fact, the whole idea of villainy is prey to classist prejudice. The word itself derives from a French word for 'peasant labourer', and it's telling that of all the various terms for antagonists - blackguard, cad, devil, etc. - the one which has stuck in literature is 'villain'. There is a strong sense that the villain is somehow lower than the hero, that their desires are degraded and base, their motives carnal and worldly. One can see, in this binary categorisation, an echo of deep Christianity in the idea that simple human desires for power, sexual gratification, wealth, or revenge are somehow less worthy than more high-minded goals, and therefore deserving of defeat and punishment in the artificially just universe of literature. What's interesting about this is the fact that villains, like monsters, serve as unflinching mirrors held up to the very same qualities and desires which exist in heroes. The lust of the villain is offset by the purer spiritual yearning of the hero's love. The urge to vengeance in the villain exists as a counterpoint to the hero's high-minded service of justice. The villain seeks wealth and power as a bulwark against the world. The hero seeks it as a comfort and resource for their loved ones, or to perform some altruistic goal. The difference between the two is painfully subjective, and film and literature provide us with the illusion of objectivity by creating artificial flaws in the villain. Fanaticism versus faith. Random violence versus measured force. Fear and hate versus courage and love. But faith must always contain a seed of fanaticism, force isn't really possible without exactly that same rotten core of violence in the heart, and courage and love are practically dependent on fear, either as a thing to be overcome, or of the loss of that which is loved.

I remember sitting in a living room with three very bad men. Two were younger and one, let's call him One Shot, was older and acting as a sort of mentor for we three. It was the shank of a very long night, and we were enjoying that contemplative space in the grey of the dawn, sipping on the dregs of the alcohol supply and, for the moment, utterly relaxed in the strange liminal zone between an all-nighter and a three day bender. Moments like these can be very dangerous, as they are so often confessional. It's important, if you're young and inexperienced, that you be very selective of the people you do this with, as the confessions of some men can be fatal to the one acting as priest. But I digress. We were swapping stories about moments of fear. I don't mean stage fright or starting a new job or any of the other petty terrors of ordinary life, but rather the kind of fear which paralyses - moments when the balance of life and death hangs, pauses, and holds its breath for the kind of eternal brief second peculiar to existential danger. There were some excellent stories being told, of cars tumbling over and through roadblocks, kitchens awash with blood, knives and guns and mobs pummeling lone bodies with fists and bricks and bars, but I don't really remember them. Like movie villains, there was a kind of familiarity - a kind of sameness - to them all. Each one of those stories could have been mine or theirs or practically anyone's.

The one that sticks in my mind is One Shot's. I think I'd just finished telling some half-lying, mostly embellished story of being saved by dumb luck - the kind of story which is a compression, an indication, of a lifetime's worth of unmerited escapes. Immediately after I'd finished, there was one of those particular moments of silence which usually preceded one of One Shot's rare and quiet pronouncements.
"What about you?" someone had said. "I'm guessing you ain't scared of shit."
"Unconditional love," said One Shot, which, as you'd imagine, confused us enough to shut us all up. "The most scared I've been in my entire fucking life," he explained, "was when I had this woman. Longest I ever been with anyone. And I remember one day when she turned and looked at me, and all I could see in her face was pure, unconditional love."

I remember understanding this instantly. The terror of being suddenly naked before an image of yourself you know you can never live up to. A threat which cannot be defeated by anything in the armoury you've so painstakingly built, because the teeth of this enemy exist within the self. This has always struck me as the essence of evil men. Slice them how you like, at bottom they are formed by fear and necessity and pain, and so often the source of these is coded deep into the bones of a society which seems to simultaneously create, revile, and crave their existence. I've always wanted to catch that in a script or a novel or a story - in anything really. Mainly because there is a yawning gap in the portrayal of villains, and this gap is shaped pretty well exactly like that sudden revelation of One Shot's humanity. And because a gap in our literary portrayals usually corresponds with a yawning, egregious gap in our understandings of the world and of each other.