HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA

MAY 2018

“Nice to meet you. Norman IS his mother.”

That was how my pissed-off aunt greeted my father’s hot date to see Psycho, when not spoiling the ending was all the rage. Hitchcock had nurses stationed at theaters across the country, in case the ladies fainted at the sight of a knife, or a mummified mother.

The iconic split personality of Norman Bates has remained an incestuous Freudian trope so culturally impactful that its next incarnation in Sally Field’s Sybil made Sybil not just a name, but slang for nutso female. The Urban Dictionary includes a definition of “sybill” as “A girl that is hot, yet crazy. Might have several different personalities and may use all of them on you.”

The clinical name for the largely cinematic trope of “multiple personality disorder,” is dissociative identity Disorder. DID is both a fun idea to kick around and a powerful metaphor for the compartmentalized lives of even the most “normal” among us. In the movie version of this shattered self, distinct characters named Brad, Sunshine, Bruce Lee, Miss Toyah, and Uncle Morty hang out playing Yahtzee in the green room of your shattered subconscious until their number gets called. This extreme iteration is quite rare, if extant.

Still, the fragmented mind, the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario, speaks to fundamental questions about how even the most “normal” among us organize and integrate a sense of self. Compartmentalization, at its most extreme, enabled many notable serial killers to commit grotesque and sadistic acts for pleasure, only to return home to their wife and kids and apologize for being a little late for dinner. It’s difficult to imagine the pathological cognitive dissonance of those who torture and kill someone else’s child for a fuck, then go home to kiss their own family good night.

Is serial killing somewhere on the spectrum of DID? Or is it a cruder process of wanting, taking, and justifying? I’m not a diagnostician and can only explain what it felt like to talk to Samuel Little over a span of years.

I experienced Sam as three different people. Call it a metaphor. Drop me a line if you figure it out. In my notes, I alternately called him:

Three-Card Monte

Snake Monster

Perv Grandpa

I learned the actual game of three-card monte from a world-class carny—magician Penn Jillette.

Three-card monte, to be specific, is a trick, not a game. You play, you lose. Yet some version of it has been played all over the world for centuries. We know we’re being fooled, but we will pay handsomely to watch it done well or to think that we’re going to be the one special person with the hawk eye who catches the huckster mid con. We’re all going to game the game.

We’re all vulnerable. We’re all greedy. We’re all marks. We’re all hustlers.

Snake Monster was the killer. I only met him a few times, when he reared in anger at me, like a cobra. I will not soon forget it.

Perv Grandpa was his go-to. He was that endearing, mischievous old codger with terrific stories…but you had to sit on his lap to hear them.

I give everyone nicknames. If I know you, you have one. That’s how I code information. The nicknames are organic, the first thing that comes to me. Sam is the only person I’ve ever known who had more than one.

All three of these shady characters knew me. They all had similar if not identical memories but different ways of articulating them. Were they distinct personalities, or was it more like a braid you couldn’t quite tease apart? I don’t have the answer.

Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung transformed the field of psychoanalysis in the early part of the twentieth century by shifting the focus off Freud’s libido-driven model of consciousness (see: Norman is his mother). He favored the concept of a core personality informed by the collective unconscious—a level of consciousness we share as part of the organism of humanity, including memories and ideas inherited from our ancestral and evolutionary past.

Jung organized his ideas into a set of symbolic imagery called archetypes. The main twelve are ruler, artist, innocent, sage, explorer, outlaw, magician, hero, lover, jester, everyman, and caregiver.

The heavyweights are the four archetypes to rule them all.

The persona is the mask we use to face the outside world. It’s our public self. The one we show.

The anima/animus is the mirror opposite of our gender identity. If one identifies largely as female, it’s the unconscious masculine and vice versa.

The shadow.

So much to say about the shadow.

The shadow is the enemy of the persona. It is akin to Freud’s id, everything we keep hidden…the dark side of the moon. The shadow is the source of both our deepest creative and destructive energies and is neither inherently negative or positive.

The shadow is irrational, impulsive, prone to projection. Projection is the process by which we take a perceived inferiority or an unconscious desire or unfulfilled need—or desire to confess—and smear it all over another person until we can’t see them. We see only our shadow.

We all have a shadow. Samuel Little, while obscene and monstrous, has no monopoly on the shadow. Nor does he absolve yours, however banal.

You may protest, “Monsters go berserk.”

You probably don’t go berserk and hang little girls, bludgeon coeds in their beds, strangle women and let them regain consciousness over and over. Are you fucking kidding? Incomprehensible.

We like our monsters unrecognizable.

The self is the unification of these four archetypes into an ecosystem of a core personality.

In Jungian terms, Sam wasn’t all shadow, but his shadow was definitely in the driver’s seat. He did a lot of driving. He hated his anima with such passion it became his life’s work to kill it. His persona was why it confounded people that he was such a nice guy, essentially not violent with women, except for that little strangling-to-death thing. He might have even believed it himself. I’m not sure. I know it was what he wanted others to see, and to really sell a story, you have to believe it, at least in the moment.

What he did not have, as far as I could tell, was a self.

Talking to an absence was an extraordinary experience. I thought of Sam telling me drawing gave him the same rush as stealing. I looked at his art and saw emptiness.

When I saw him in person, he pointed at the drawings and pantomimed going down on these dolled-up Venus de Milos. He dug his nails into the skin of his arms until white crescents appeared beneath them. The tone of every woman he mimicked—even when he quoted their pleas for their lives—sounded like vicious bitchery.

I warmed Sam up with stories of my humdrum life. I told him about my cousin Jill, who lived across the street when I was a kid and had two sons around my age, both close friends. When I was small, the family called me Little Jill, and she was Big Jill. Big Jill is barely five feet tall, so by the time I was eleven, I was Big Jill, and she was Little Jill. We remain so to this day.

I made a throwaway joke—no girl likes to be called Big Jill.

Three-Card Monte called me Big Jill after that.

He said, “Some of them, I licked their pussy for hours. They died in sexual pleasure, not hate, you understand? I’m not like these, what did you call it? Homicidal sexual maniacs.”

“That’s one thing I’d call it.”

“What else you call me?”

“Which time?”

“Ooooh, that’s right. A pervert. Well, you a ho, Big Jill.”

Sometimes Sam was boring and rambling with the endless phone calls. When he was really annoying, in the background, I did my homework and watched brain dissections:

the occipital lobe for visual processing

the parietal lobe for sensation

the temporal lobe for memory

the frontal lobe: the last gift from the fairies…

You don’t grow a frontal lobe properly until you’re twenty-seven: impulse control, language, judgment, sexual behaviors. The right hemisphere of the frontal lobe controls the left part of the body and vice versa. The frontal lobe is also the most common place for brain injury to occur. Damage to the frontal lobe can create significant changes in personality.

With their Fibonacci sequences, double helixes, and inseparable dualities, I’m pretty sure the gods were tripping balls…

“Okay, that’s so messed up already, but wait for it—let’s split it in half!”

Like the mother and the whore, the hemispheres of the brain are opposite as can be, but if the corpus callosum (tough body) nerve path between them is severed, the body they govern loses an essential piece of perception, and the world fragments. The left brain is for words, the right brain for pictures. If you show a person with split-brain syndrome an orchid on the left side of their visual field, they can’t recognize it. They name it only by feel, as if blind. Put it in their right visual field, they recognize it’s a…something, but they can’t find the word.

There are many types of strangulation, all of which involve increasing hypoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen to the brain, sometimes to the point of death. Manual strangulation is achieved with the hands or a blunt object and can either interfere with the flow of blood in the neck, the airway, or both. Depending on the amount of pressure applied, it may also damage the larynx and fracture the hyoid and other bones in the neck. It can take as long as you want it to, if you know what you’re doing. Sam loved the sound of a snapping hyoid.

“Ever played the wishbone game? Sounds like that.”

It was always refreshing to interview a scientist and get a break from hearing from a murderer yet again about the pleasurable sound of a hyoid bone cracking.

I interviewed Dr. Del Paulhus, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Paulhus is one of the world’s leading experts on half of the iconic duality that trumps even the Madonna and the whore: evil.

Paulhus’s research has done much to explore and elucidate the dark triad, or malevolent personality. As defined by the gold standard if ever-shifting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition, the malevolent personality is made up of a cluster of personality disorders that, put simply, make you a really, really bad person. These are antisocial personality disorder, Machiavellianism, and narcissistic personality disorder.

Paulhus’s innovation to the dark triad is a sneaky little sister, sidling up to make it a tetrad: everyday sadism.

I intuitively understood everyday sadism to be exactly as it sounded. Unless we’re shockingly abhorrent, like Sam, cruelty works on a spectrum. With Sam as a yardstick, most of us are the Dalai Lama.

I stared out at the same square of yard I did every morning—the half-painted fence with thorny bougainvillea crawling over the top. I fought not to wonder when the darkness would swallow it all.

Dr. Del Paulhus was witty, whip-smart, and a delightful conversationalist. It takes a hearty, essentially optimistic nature to make a career of juggling the dark triad like so many bowling pins. Paulhus had been drawn to the dark triad by his mentor, Dr. Richard Christie, who conceived of Machiavellianism as a distinct constellation of personality traits.

Paulhus took Christie’s research a step further and examined the connective tissue—the figurative corpus callosum—between what is human and what is monstrous without disconnecting it and leaving us lopsided.

“Maybe people are good in the same way but can be bad in a variety of ways. They could have an ordinary character, except for some extreme variable. We started creating a taxonomy to separate the bad characteristics and narrowed it down to the triad. We added everyday sadism later, which turned out to be our most novel contribution.”

“What distinguishes everyday sadism from plain old sadism?”

“Until now, people isolated sadism as something not normal, the epitome of evil. Instead, we looked at examples of sadism in everyday life: the enjoyment of violent sports, violent media. Sadism is not always the Marquis de Sade–type sexual sadism. We tried to cleave away the different aspects of it. It was exciting to reinterpret what was accepted.”

“I get spectrums,” I told Paulhus. “The intersection of strangulation and violent video games is a tough one for me. I want to understand the connective tissue. Tell me about the bugs.”

I was referring to a famous research experiment Paulhus devised in which the participants could choose from several different unpleasant tasks: cleaning dirty toilets, submerging their hands in ice water for sixty seconds, or grinding three roaches, named Muffin, Tootsie, and Ike, in a coffee grinder specially designed to drop the roaches first (don’t worry—Muffin, Tootsie, and Ike survived every torturous decision). Or you could be Igor and help an experimenter grind.

The number of people who chose to grind—with a dramatic slot-machine lever, not just a button—surprised the research team. Overall, 33.8 percent of those studied chose toilet cleaning, 12.7 percent chose pain tolerance, 26.8 percent chose to kill bugs, and 26.8 percent chose to help kill bugs.

The bug slayers had the highest scores on the sadism scale and reported having the most fun.

“We tried to anthropomorphize the roaches by giving them cute little names. It’s always a trade-off. It’s not that we want to hurt people’s self-concepts, but we need to push this as far as it can go to get people to reveal their dark side.”

“Are people’s self-concepts generally wildly different from their actions?”

“There’s a link between self-concept and actual behavior, but there’s also a general tendency to try to maintain a positive view of yourself. People get defensive when we use labels. We beat around the bush, ask people the extent to which they agree with statements or are willing to do things or even empathize with characters who do such things. That’s an indirect way of revealing their dark side.”

Scott yelled up the stairs while I was on the phone. The car had been there for twenty minutes already.

“Can we not with the murder tonight?” asked Scott as we pulled up to the Staples Center for some music awards show. Was it the VMAs, the Grammys? I’d been so preoccupied I couldn’t remember. It was definitely too late to ask.

“People don’t want to hear this poison,” he said.

“People want to hear nothing but this poison.”

“Edited. With a soundtrack.”

“How nice for them.”

Scott disappeared into the camera flashes while I was herded up a ramp like the one Temple Grandin designed to make cows less panicky when led to slaughter. There were band wives, hangers-on, a few moms of some artists either really rap or really country, and K-pop girl band boyfriends, who I suspected were actually the K-pop boy band boyfriends. I had a smaller notebook for evening bags.

It was the Grammys. Demented or decadent as the scene around me may have been, it was also worthy of close attention. But I had a hoard of impatient murdered sex workers lurking over my shoulder, and I didn’t have a thousand pairs of eyes. I had to choose. I chose to take notes on sadism, not K-pop. Anyone who made a run for the bar faced the wrath of the wife wranglers. I scoped the exits.

“OMG, Zendaya!”

Every head turned. I couldn’t believe people still fell for that one. In five minutes, I was at the bar. A friend of a friend put a glass of wine in my hand and asked what I was writing down.

“Observations about everyday sadism. Not sexual sadism, not serial killer sadism. You know what I mean? Like, casual sadism. What does that mean to you?”

“We met before at Mark’s party. You’re that writer. I invented The Bachelor.”

I laughed.

“What? I did.”

I could think of almost nothing as casually sadistic as treating our fundamental desire to be loved and seen as a competitive sport. I was just surprised the creator didn’t get the joke.

I crossed to the other side of the room to say hi to a “crossover” porn star, a cultural icon with an empire of her own. I asked her what she thought about everyday sadism.

“Which kind of sadism?”

“Okay, say, would you want your daughter in porn?”

“I’d kill myself.”

I was headed to our seats when my phone buzzed. It was Holland. I ducked behind a column.

“We found her,” he said. “Her name was Agatha White Buffalo. Omaha. 1974. Naked and upside down in a barrel, behind a tannery. Like you said.”

“You really got her?”

“Yes, Jillian,” he said, letting it land slowly, with what I like to think of as the patience of a guy who still remembered what it was like to hear those words for the first time. “We really did.”