Scattered Scenes of Sex and Violence

By Benjamin Welton

"That was my first brush with death, the final form of violence."

It's a cliché that all literature revolves around sex and death, but there's more than a bit of truth to it. Even in our sanitized, civilized world, sex and violence, when we experience them, often turn out to be defining moments in our lives. Whether its losing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terror House Press, LLC
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781951897482

Benjamin Welton

Benjamin Welton is a writer originally from Morgantown, West Virginia. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Military History, the American Conservative, and other publications. He is a former member of the U.S. Navy who now lives in New England.

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Copyright © 2021 Terror House Press, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of nonfiction. While all of the characters and events depicted in this book are real, names and identifying details have been changed.

ISBN 978-1-951897-48-2

EDITOR

Matt Forney (mattforney.com)

LAYOUT AND COVER DESIGN

Matt Lawrence (mattlawrence.net)

Excerpts of this book were published, in somewhat different form, by the following magazines and websites: Street Carnage and Terror House Magazine. The author would like to thank each publication for their support.

TERROR HOUSE PRESS, LLC

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Bodies on the Highway

Chapter 2: The Known and Unknown Dead

Chapter 3: Boredom is Violence

Chapter 4: The Failures of a Lonely Pervert

Chapter 5: Allen

Chapter 6: On College Town Debauchery

Chapter 7: Memoirs of an Execution; or, the Night Napalm Death Chickened Out

Chapter 8: Bad Thoughts and Worse Actions

Chapter 9: Joggers Are Pricks

Chapter 10: Reading Lovecraft on the Beach

Chapter 11: An American Virgin in Romania

Chapter 12: The Eternal Bacchants; or, Why American Undergrads Are So Cringeworthy

Chapter 13: Ocelot Days

Chapter 14: One Final Note

A word of warning: this is mostly a work of non-fiction, but not everything is 100 percent true. Memory is tricky that way. Allen, Memoirs of an Execution, and Reading Lovecraft on the Beach were all originally published in Terror House Magazine. Joggers Are Pricks appeared in Street Carnage (RIP). Some names have been changed to protect the innocent bastards who have the misfortune of knowing me.

Chapter 1: Bodies on the Highway

I was born dead. I came into the world black and blue. Or at least that is the story according to my family. I don’t remember that my heart stopped beating for a few seconds. I was too young.

Apparently the umbilical cord had managed to form itself into a noose in the womb. Like a condemned man on the gallows, I was pushed out and down, and when I hit the cradled arms of the nurses, I was DOA. The Chinese doctor freaked out, but not because I was a corpse. Rather, he lost his mind and started screaming because I was also born with my chubby little legs pinned behind my ears. The Chinese doctor thought he had just discovered a rare occurrence: a boy born without legs.

That was my first brush with death, the final form of violence.

Look, I am not a violent man. I also do not come from a bad background, nor did I grow up in some kind of concrete warzone like Baltimore or Chicago. I was born and raised in a small town, and although my parents divorced when I was seven, my upbringing was not especially turbulent. However, for whatever reason, violent scenes have stalked me my whole life, almost as if Thanatos or some black-winged angel keeps trying to reclaim me. When they miss (and they’ve missed often), I see their failures.

It was sunny and warm, which was frightening in and of itself. It was December, after all, and Dad and I were driving up among snowcapped mountains. We were on our way to see my grandparents. They have been married since 1953. Whenever I think of them or whenever I visit them, I see a better version of America. A version of America that has been lost and will never come back without a lot a tragedy in between.

Their quiet home sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in a small Appalachian town. Besides the bored teenagers who come by every once in a while to make donuts in the front yard at 2:00 a.m., my grandparents get along with their neighbors and are friendly with the locals. I am always amazed that they know so much about the people they live near and next to. They know about their kids, where their kids go to school, what the parents do for a living, etc. I live in a city in the Northeast. I live shoulder-to-shoulder with other tenants in a four-story building, and yet my only meaningful interaction with one of my neighbors was to tell a screaming Chinese woman to keep it down. It was past midnight and she was berating a slender Chinese male (her boyfriend?) right by our security door. I thought I asked politely, but they both gave me a defiant scowl.

Back there on that sunny highway, I saw a fish. The fish did dying pirouettes on the asphalt. I watched each movement as Dad continued to drive on. Then he slowed down. He slowed to a crawl. We both turned our heads. I saw that the fish was actually a man dying. The paleness of his skin stood out because so much of his chest was covered in crimson colored blood. His jerky movements were caused by the two good Samaritans trying to bring him back to life with CPR. It didn’t work. Dad and I watched that guy die there on the highway.

Besides us and the two makeshift paramedics, the only other mourners were two fat women crying into each others’ hoodies by the side of the road. Besides their red, hypertensive faces, they looked otherwise fine. They did not look like shell-shocked survivors. It was a one-car accident.

Dad and I looked for the story in the local newspaper like two ghouls for days after the accident. It was never reported. Even in a small mountain town with nothing better to do, one dead young man on the highway just days before Christmas did not register as newsworthy.

A year or two later, it happened again. This time it was September. I was driving back from Burlington, Vermont with my girlfriend at the time. I remember that it was cold, even abnormally so for northern New England. The other thing I remember was just how dark it was on Interstate 89. We were cruising at 65 somewhere in central New Hampshire, and yet it looked like