Just wrote it.
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I’m crazy, you know. Completely, to the point I can’t work. I’m on disability and a pension and still under the care of a doctor, even now, years after I lost it. Paranoid-schizophrenic’s what they call it as they nod their heads, oh-so-sagely. Me? I say it’s just being in tune with reality, but hey -- who am I to argue with a guy who’d got a diploma that cost him a hundred-k to put on his wall? Or the cops and lawyers who agree that I’m totally crapped in the brain? Or family members who sigh and shake their heads and click their tongues in sad agreement? What’d one guy I met in the nuthouse say? Insanity’s not a state of mind, it’s a consensus by people who are too crazy to know they’re just as nuts as you are.
Now I’m not in a nut house. Never was, really. Well, except for a few months after I lost it and shot a cop in the middle of police headquarters. Didn’t know about that, did you? Well, it helped that I was a cop, too, and was in the middle of the latest in a series of nasty little scandals concerning corruption in the NYPD, so everybody wanted to keep it all nice and quiet. It also helped that I had connections to a couple of made guys in the mob. Even counted them as friends. But then -- what kind of sane man would be a cop yet openly invite Mafia scumbags to his wedding? On top of all this is that I was also known as an easy-skater kind of guy, the type who’s worked with all the ins and outs of making his life easy, even on the beat. But you want to know what made everybody absolutely, positively sure I was a freak job? Get ready for it. I could type 135 words per minute; 160 when I was flying. Without errors.
Yeah, typing skills are proof of insanity. It’s not considered human, if you’re a guy.
But I am human. And I did make plenty of mistakes in my life. Including being dumb enough to dig into why drugs were disappearing from the evidence locker. Pissed off people on all sides of the aisle with that one. But that’s for later in this story of how I wound up fucked up for life at the ripe old age of twenty-five, 'cause that's not when it started; that's only how it ended.
Yeah, that’s how old I was when my life went down in flames -- just 25 fucking years old. And even today, forty years later, there’s still argument as to what caused it and why it happened, and even whether or not I’m faking the whole fucking thing. Like I’d let myself get institutionalized and worked over by all sorts of drug cocktails till they figured out which one I could ingest without keeling over from a heart attack or dead liver, or I'd go up against cops with 20 years experience in dealing with anything and everything under their belts, or I'd believe the DA's office would give a fuck about what cops were doing.
So let me start this by saying up front -- my name is Vicenzo Lombardini, Vinnie to my buddies. Remember that name, because everybody wants you to forget it. Everybody wants you to think this Lombardini guy never existed. But he did exist. I do. And still do, despite everything they did. And now it’s time to tell my story, before life slips away and I’m lost forever.
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I’m crazy, you know. Completely, to the point I can’t work. I’m on disability and a pension and still under the care of a doctor, even now, years after I lost it. Paranoid-schizophrenic’s what they call it as they nod their heads, oh-so-sagely. Me? I say it’s just being in tune with reality, but hey -- who am I to argue with a guy who’d got a diploma that cost him a hundred-k to put on his wall? Or the cops and lawyers who agree that I’m totally crapped in the brain? Or family members who sigh and shake their heads and click their tongues in sad agreement? What’d one guy I met in the nuthouse say? Insanity’s not a state of mind, it’s a consensus by people who are too crazy to know they’re just as nuts as you are.
Now I’m not in a nut house. Never was, really. Well, except for a few months after I lost it and shot a cop in the middle of police headquarters. Didn’t know about that, did you? Well, it helped that I was a cop, too, and was in the middle of the latest in a series of nasty little scandals concerning corruption in the NYPD, so everybody wanted to keep it all nice and quiet. It also helped that I had connections to a couple of made guys in the mob. Even counted them as friends. But then -- what kind of sane man would be a cop yet openly invite Mafia scumbags to his wedding? On top of all this is that I was also known as an easy-skater kind of guy, the type who’s worked with all the ins and outs of making his life easy, even on the beat. But you want to know what made everybody absolutely, positively sure I was a freak job? Get ready for it. I could type 135 words per minute; 160 when I was flying. Without errors.
Yeah, typing skills are proof of insanity. It’s not considered human, if you’re a guy.
But I am human. And I did make plenty of mistakes in my life. Including being dumb enough to dig into why drugs were disappearing from the evidence locker. Pissed off people on all sides of the aisle with that one. But that’s for later in this story of how I wound up fucked up for life at the ripe old age of twenty-five, 'cause that's not when it started; that's only how it ended.
Yeah, that’s how old I was when my life went down in flames -- just 25 fucking years old. And even today, forty years later, there’s still argument as to what caused it and why it happened, and even whether or not I’m faking the whole fucking thing. Like I’d let myself get institutionalized and worked over by all sorts of drug cocktails till they figured out which one I could ingest without keeling over from a heart attack or dead liver, or I'd go up against cops with 20 years experience in dealing with anything and everything under their belts, or I'd believe the DA's office would give a fuck about what cops were doing.
So let me start this by saying up front -- my name is Vicenzo Lombardini, Vinnie to my buddies. Remember that name, because everybody wants you to forget it. Everybody wants you to think this Lombardini guy never existed. But he did exist. I do. And still do, despite everything they did. And now it’s time to tell my story, before life slips away and I’m lost forever.
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