“You can do this for me,” he said. “Never mind everything else. This is important. This guy. Poetry & Aeroplanes, ever heard that? Beautiful. Did you know he recorded an album in the house where Ingmar Bergman died? Did you hear his TED talk? Whoa.”
These were the most articulate words (except perhaps for his Shakespeare quote at tea in the Golden house) and the only non-apocalyptic thoughts I’d ever heard coming out of his mouth. “And you know all this, how?” I asked.
His face darkened and, to keep it company, his vocabulary deteriorated. “Fuck off,” he said. “Never mind how.”
I was curious now and, as it happened, I did have an extra ticket in my pocket, because Suchitra, of course, was working late. “If you want to get in,” I said, “I need the story.” He looked down at the sidewalk and shuffled his feet. “My buddy turned me on to him,” he muttered. “Bagram Air Base. Back in the day.”
“You’re a vet,” I said, genuinely surprised.
“You want proof?” he snarled. “Give me a blindfold and a disassembled AR-15. I’ll give you fucking proof.”
This was when, if I’d had my warning radar switched on, I should have understood that all was not well, that this was a man near an edge. But I was guilty about my ignorance of his service, and then compounded my mistake by asking him a question about his “buddy,” and getting the response I should have known I’d get. “Didn’t make it. Ambush in Pakhtunkhwa. Now can I get the fucking ticket.”
I watched him during the concert. The songs were witty, even funny, but there were tears pouring down his face.
At some point soon after this unexpected musical run-in—maybe two days later, maybe three—Kinski got his hands on an automatic rifle, just as he had rhetorically requested outside the Fish. According to the deposition he later made at Mount Sinai Beth Israel—the deathbed confession, I should more accurately say—he neither bought nor stole it. He was kidnapped in the park, he said, and his kidnappers gave him the gun and turned him loose. It was an improbable story, even an absurd one, told in fractured mumbles and gasps, and in my view it wouldn’t have been worth taking seriously for a moment except for two things: first, it was a deathbed confession, and that had to be given its proper and solemn weight; and second, it was coming out of Kinski’s mouth, and given the crazy things that had always come out of that mouth, this was no crazier than the rest of it, so there was a tiny, crazy chance that it might be true.
The following, more or less, was Kinski’s version. When he was melancholy, he said, he went uptown to wander the relatively empty spaces to be found in the northern latitudes of the park. He got caught in a downpour and took shelter under a tree, huddling there until the heavens relented. (Note: On the particular day in question there had indeed been a change in the weather, a few days of unseasonal warmth and blue skies had given way to chilly rain.)—At this point, owing to his rapidly deteriorating physical condition, the account became fragmented and unclear.—He was approached by (two? three? more?) individuals dressed as clowns—or Jokers—he used both words—who overpowered him and put a sack over his head and bound him.—Or they didn’t bind him but just led him forward on foot.—Or not a sack but some sort of blindfold.—He couldn’t see where he was going because of the sack.—Or blindfold.—Then he was in the back of a van and the blindfold was removed and a new man, also disguised as a clown—or Joker—was talking to him about—what?—recruitment.—There was stuff about the presidential election. Its illegitimacy. It was being stolen. It was a coup orchestrated by the media—by powerful corporate interests—by China—and Americans had to take their country back.—It was hard to tell if these were Kinski’s own sentiments or if he was repeating what the supposed boss Joker in the van had told him.—Then at one point the words “We can learn from Muslim terrorists. From their self-sacrifice.”—After which, much incoherence, a mingling of self-pity, despair, and his old prophecies of imminent doom.—“Nothing to live for.”—“America.”—That was about it. The medical team intervened and stopped the deposition. Emergency procedures followed. He didn’t speak again, and didn’t last very much longer. All of which is my best effort at piecing together a coherent story from what was reported in the press and what, with some difficulty, I was able to dig out for myself.
His friend had died—who knows how many friends?—and he had returned from military service mentally ill. He had lost contact with those who might have cared for him and declined in every way and ended up as a bum ranting about guns. Over the years during which his path crossed mine his rant changed. In the beginning he sounded anti-gun, fearing the proliferation of weapons in America, coming up with the idea that guns were alive; then, with the addition of religious fervor, he amped up his end-of-days rhetoric; and finally, clowns or no clowns, Jokers or no Jokers, abduction or no abduction, he became a servant of the gun himself, the warm gun that brought happiness, and did its bidding, bang bang shoot shoot, and so people died, and so did he.
For what is an undeniable fact is that Kinski attacked the Halloween parade, and the fusillade of shots he unleashed resulted in a tally of seven people dead, nineteen wounded, before a police officer gunned him down. He was wearing a Joker mask and a Kevlar vest—a remnant, perhaps, of his days in Afghanistan—so his injuries were not immediately fatal. He was taken to the MSBI emergency room and lived long enough to make the statement above, or something like it, but it must be said that in the opinion of the hospital staff the balance of his mind was disturbed and nothing he said could be considered reliable.
On the list of the dead, two names stood out: Mr. Murray Lett and Mr. Petronius Golden, both of Manhattan, NY.