A Very Good and Evil Man

What makes me one or the other?

I am the man who sat on my victims body and smoked one of his cigarettes after having literally fought him to the death. I had my own but I wanted to smoke his.

I am also the man who took a pair of malnourished girls, 3 and 5 years old, from a McDonald's construction site while their drug addict parents slept on drywall. They're my daughters now.

I've taken human life and I've saved human life. There are simultaneously fewer people on this Earth, and more than there should be, because of direct actions I've taken. And in both instances, I can give examples where those decisions had nothing to do with me personally.

They were simply the actions I believed those moments demanded and nothing more.

What makes a man Good or Evil?

Is our definition based on the things he has done in the past alone or is it influenced by the things he does currently? I don't mean in the sense of redemption where a villain simply sees the light and changes his ways, but rather in that he's capable and continues to do both.

Do the wrongs he commits negate the good he does? Do they cancel each other out? Or, for the sake of this moral thought exercise, do we wonder if perhaps things aren't quite so black-and-white?

This article is not meant for me to provide you answers but rather, by my listing of examples, for you to provide them to me. I'm not here to tell you, I'm here to ask you.

Before we get started there needs to be a clarifying note. I always knew right from wrong. Even when I was little. I've just never cared when making a decision in the moment. So let's not worry about the “he didn't know any better” excuse. Yes I did.

I was a mule as a kid but even I'll give myself a pass there since what 8 year old really has a vote? However, I graduated from the kid who brings the re-ups to drug corners to the teen who robs them.

I was good at it too.

I did a lot of harm to a lot of people during those years. Things you can't undo. Obviously, stealing and home invasions and absolutely insane levels of violence are bad but it didn't feel bad to me. I was The Game when it came to play you. At least, that's what I used to tell myself. I saw everyone I went at as someone who chose to be there.

I'm not implying that it was good simply because of who they were, only that I felt no remorse due to that fact. We're supposed to go after and get each other, that's how The Game is played. It's how you determine a winner for each round. Those were the unofficial rules for the small circles I ran. You can only win against other men who are playing.

I'm a bad guy who targeted bad guys. What's the black to white, good to evil ratio there? I'm serious, this isn't a lecture, it's a questionnaire.

We robbed a place once and there was a teenage girl, my own age, sitting on the couch in a private school uniform. I recognized the patch and knew which school. Having witnessed what we did to the guys she was “partying” with, I doubt her terror could've been more genuine.

Her hair was sweaty but combed. Her eyes were bright red, yet not sunken. The uniform was stained but wrinkle free. Her lips still had color, her buckled shoes still shine. She may have been high but she was brand new to all of this.

They weren't partying with her, they were turning her out. I stumbled into what may have been the last day of her former life.

I beat her.

With a fist full of her hair I yanked her around, struck her face with the butt of my knife, taunting her with threats of rape before throwing her through a glass coffee table. Afterwards I spat on her and told her to get out. She fled through the front door and down the street sobbing and a little bloody, but ultimately in one piece.

I went to that private school some weeks later. Looking through a chain link fence as the students left for the day. From a distance I saw her walking with classmates to get into a friend's car in the student parking lot. She seemed fine. She looked just like every other kid there.

She'd never entertain trying anything like that again I imagined. Though I didn't understand it then, I had hoped she was the right kind of traumatized. The kind that makes a person never come back. She didn't belong.

That said, she hadn't been the only girl in that house that day. The others though, I knew the moment I looked at them, were a part of it. I had no reservations about them being there. They were in the Game too and could get played just like everyone else.

How muddy is that for a moral compass? Where does right and wrong, good and evil separate? Are they even separate? Once again, I'm asking, not telling.

I did things for selfish gain so I don't want anyone putting a Robin Hood spin to any of this. I don't want excuses for my actions, I just want to know what they look like from the outside looking in. My life belongs to me, I don't need or want it explained away. I don't want or need excuses for myself.

In Prison, I've done genuinely horrible things to men for no other reason than the tone of their voice was wrong. I've also rolled into life and death situations that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Walking into it with a knife taped to my hand simply because I didn't think the guy I was there to help deserved to be in that degree of trouble. That said, I've also stood aside and watched a friend fight and fail to survive because I did believe he deserved that degree of trouble.

The circumstances were always more important than my feelings about those in them. Including myself. Is that psychopathic? What's the brand of evil? Is it bad I hurt men I knew on behalf of the guy I was helping? Is it good I allowed a friend to suffer the consequences of his own actions? I've lost sight of my footing in this muddy water.

Back to where we started. I killed that man, fought him like an animal and ultimately choked him to death, because I saw him trying to kill my friend. The reality of the situation didn't come to light until later. All I knew was I was going to kill him first. He was going to have to get through me to get back to his son. But the reason I thought I was doing it was flawed. I didn't prevent my friend from being a victim, I helped him be the victimizer. I killed a man who had been defending his own life.

Where in the hell do I fall in the good and evil scale there? Does what we know at the time matter? Why should it? The results are the results. I don't know.

Those girls I took. Technically, by the law, what I did was kidnapping. When I found out what was going on, it took a few days but I tracked them down to that McDonald's construction site. The girls were awake and running around while their drug addict parents slept a dope fiends sleep. They were so dirty, so skinny. The 3 year old couldn't even talk.

I loaded the two of them into my car and went back in to kick my brother awake. Kicked him clean in the head. With wide eyes he woke to me crouching down to his face. “I took your fucking kids, so don't bother looking”.

That was 7 years ago. I was aware permanent custody. They're both still asleep upstairs as I'm writing this. I'm going to make pancakes here once they get up. One does ballet, the other fancies herself a gamer like her brother, my son, is. They're my daughters no different than my other daughters.

Does that balance anything? Does it even matter? Does one thing have anything to do with the other? Is it the individual actions that are measured or is it a big picture? Do we keep score? Is it a scale where our actions push us one way or the other? Is it like prison where a man is measured by his worst and nothing else?

These are the things I've wondered for many years yet can't trust my conclusions as they're about me. Self diagnosis is never trustworthy as we can't trust our judgment to not be self supporting.

Are good and evil separate things with no overlap or are they ingredients in a blender where the results are based entirely on the portions by which you add them? Am I an evil man who's done good things or a good man who does evil things?

What makes a man good or evil? The angel and devil on my shoulders aren't being helpful. They always think their own advice is right.

What do you believe?