Chivalry's dead.  I killed it.  Along with a great number of women, a handful of men, and a smattering of varying forms of human detritus.  The first person I ever killed was a woman.  There I was, beside The Professor, seated within the leathery confines of an idling Lincoln Town Car.  We were parked on a tree-lined street in a Long Island town called Winderch or Winedance or Winedanche or something like that.  You visit so many places in life it's difficult to keep track of them all.  He handed me a pistol and told me to get out and shoot the first person who wandered past.  I took the pistol and we waited around for a couple of minutes in complete silence.  I suppose The Professor and his companions were wondering if I'd pass their test, thinking they'd amp up the pressure if they all watched me without saying anything, but I was thankful I wouldn't have to attend to the conversation and respond at the appropriate pauses and nod and smile and laugh where I was supposed to.  After six or seven minutes, I saw a middle-aged woman in a pink sweatshirt and matching sweatpants strolling along the sidewalk towards us.  She was walking a Pekingese, which is a type of dog.  I stepped out of the vehicle and shot her once, in the back of the head.  The dog didn't bolt or bark or attack or anything.  It simply stared up at me with an extraordinarily dopey expression etched upon its furry face.  Later, I did some research and discovered that this particular variety of dog is known for its perpetually dopey expressions.  I also learned that Chinese legend has it that the Pekingese came about from the mating of a lion and a monkey, but that strikes me as highly improbable, not to mention utterly repulsive if you step back and take a minute to form a mental picture.  Anyway, I got back in the car and The Professor joked that I didn't have to shoot a woman, I could have waited for a man to come by instead, and so I said that I'd just as soon have it over with earlier so I could go home and take a nap and eat some baked beans, and everybody laughed at that even though it wasn't meant to be a joke.  The Professor told me that I'd done a good job and they'd get me home as soon as possible and that they might have some specialized work for me coming down the pipeline.  That was a long time ago, though.  That was before I had an ideology.  A man without an ideology is a dangerous thing.

***

Sometimes I can close my eyes and see the march of history, arranged visually, like a path.  I think a lot of people see history as an uphill battle, like climbing a mountain.  It's difficult, they might think, but we're approaching a summit, so it's worth it.  We're going from a bad place to a good place.  These people think that down at the bottom of the mountain are the cave men and dinosaurs and everything, and about a quarter of the way up is the Age of Enlightenment and the American Revolution, and then the present is about halfway up, around by World War I and II and the major events of the Twentieth Century.  Then at the top is some idealized place of understanding and flying cars and all the basic amenities have been improved and nobody's suffering at all, or hardly anybody at least.  Well, I don't see it that way.  I see history on a downgrade.  The path is going down and down and down and the lower you get, the faster you go, and you trip and skin your knees and bump your head and claw at the path with your fingernails, but you keep going down, down, down, and pretty soon you're not even stumbling or crawling anymore, you're falling, and falling, falling, falling, and I don't know what's at the bottom, exactly, but I feel like it's got to be pretty damn bad.

***

The Professor lined up a few specialty jobs for me.  They all involved killing women.  The Professor fancied himself quite the 'grandfather,' and so he pulled me under his wing and tried to teach me the notable tricks of the trade.                  

"It's a difficult business, ending a woman," he said.
        
"I suppose it's about as difficult as anything else," I replied.
        
"A woman'll say anything to save herself.  She'll do anything to save herself... riiiight?"  The Professor laughed and winked and jabbed me in the ribs.  I tried to laugh, too, but I don't believe I was entirely successful.   The Professor didn't seem to notice.
        
"Cause you're gonna want to fuck her, riiiight?," said the Professor, and he winked again.  Winking excessively was a major component of The Professor's personality.  Often, to remain engaged in a conversation with The Professor, I would try to count how many times he winked.  He was a very talented winker.  Very natural.  I can't do it myself, at least not without contorting the open eye to such a degree that the wink becomes meaningless.  I can sleep like a log, though, and some people call sleeping 'catching forty winks,' so I guess I'm good at that. 
        
Anyway, I realized The Professor was waiting for me to say something in return, so I nodded and said, "Yes, I'm going to want to fuck her."
        
"Well, my boy," said The Professor, "I've got a secret trick, my men've been using for years.  Well, only my best men.  My best, best men.  I came up with it myself.  Now here's what you do..."
        
I nodded and said "Uh-huh" and molded my eyebrows into the pattern I use when I want someone to think I'm listening intently to them.
        
"Ya rub one out," said The Professor.  "Then another, then another.  You keep doin' it inside the span of an hour or so until you can't get it up any longer.  Then you keep whackin' till it chafes and hurts like hell.  It's gonna be out of action for about six hours at least.  You couldn't do anything if you wanted to.  Then there's no way the little lady can try to use her feminine wiles on ya, you know what I mean?"
        
"Yeah," I said. 
        
"I came up with that myself."
        
"That's really quite something," I said.
        
Later that week, I had to kill a woman for The Professor.  I stabbed her beneath the stairwell in the lobby of her apartment building.  It was quick, and I don't think she felt much pain.  She didn't have a doorman, but then again neither do I, nor do most of the people I know.  The Professor has a doorman.  Anyway, I returned to The Professor to get paid, and he greeted me gleefully, a shit-eating grin plastered upon his old man face.
        
"Ya try out the trick, my boy!?" he exclaimed.
        
"What trick?," I said.
        
"Ya knowwww," he said, crudely miming the act of masturbation with a half-curled fist.
        
"Oh, yes," I lied.  "I did."
        
"And did it work?"
        
"Yes, it did," I said.
        
"Hawww!," said The Professor.  "See?  I told you!"
        
"Yes, you did," I said.

***

If you want to cultivate a hatred for humanity, simply observe the vacant gusts of stupidity that accompany a scantily clad woman as she makes her way down a crowded subway platform.  She need not even be attractive to receive these thickheaded, syrupy, lascivious glances.  There is truly nothing more putrid or hateful than the glimpse of a feeble-minded man 'checking' a woman out.  It's maddening.  It makes me want to kill- to go up and down the platform, poking holes in all the men's heads and letting the gravy drain out.  That's what's really inside, not brains- it's just gravy sloshing and slapping against the smooth interiors of their skulls.  It has to be.  There's no way they could look so stupid otherwise.  But, of course, if I started killing every man on the subway platform, I'd be seen by a lot of witnesses.  Plus, there's about six surveillance cameras set up on each side of the platform, and there could be transit cops around, not to mention the 'hero' factor, which sometimes crops up in this line of work.  So it's not practical.  But when you stop to really think about it, it's strange that I've become known as a killer of women, when actually, well, probably, I'd like to kill all the men.  Most of them, anyway.  But maybe they don't know any better.  Maybe it's the women's fault, too.  I read in a magazine the other week that one in twenty women had fooled around with the family dog at least once when they were kids.  And by 'fool around,' I mean they put their hands or mouth on the family dog in a sexual way.  That strikes me as wrong on a number of levels.  So maybe lots of men and women deserve to die, in something approaching equal quantities. 

***