Portrait by Harry Griffin

This article appears in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

There is an endless library of rock star memoirs out there about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Pick any of them up, and you can flip to a page about groupie fucking, hotel-room trashing, and white-line snorting. So when Laura Jane Grace and I started working on her book, TRANNY: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, about her life fronting the punk band Against Me!, we wanted it to be different, because while she has definitely engaged in plenty of bad behavior, there was so much more going on underneath it all.

While the band was chugging along, Laura was hiding a secret that she wouldn't reveal until she was almost 32: She was a transsexual. She would soon drop her birth name, Tom Gabel, and live as a woman. Throughout TRANNY, we took great care in describing her struggle with dysphoria and gender identity to the reader. We explored it in detail in the earliest pages, as she fought to understand it as a misbehaving teenager, but then we faded it into the background toward the middle of her story, when she became distracted by the lifestyle of her rock star adulthood.

The midpoint of the book captures this era of her life. Laura (still known as Tom then) had recently eloped with her second wife, Heather. Against Me! had just released its major label debut, New Wave (2007), which brought newfound fame but also a small army of pissed-off fans who felt they'd been shafted by the leap. The rising profile of Against Me! and the taxing schedule that came with it caused tensions and fights among its members. And on top of it all, Laura wasn't much caring for the face of the selfish, perpetually hungover prick she saw staring back at her in the mirror every day.

The selection below is from that part of the story, when Tom Gabel couldn't get out of the way of their own damned ego. So while much of TRANNY deals with the nuances of everyday life as a transgender person, this is the section where Laura and I said "fuck it" and indulged ourselves in some full-on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll writing. And yet, for all the proverbial dick-swinging of this scene, it's also a moment when her rock star persona begins to crumble and gives way to Laura Jane Grace. —DAN OZZI

The tour bus was waiting for me in the parking lot of the Leon County Jail at 4 AM after I was processed, charged with battery, bonded out, and released on $500 bail. Radar, our bus driver on that run, gave me a kind nod and smile as I jumped onboard with a sigh.

In my cell, I had been seated next to a bleary-eyed man dressed only in a pair of sweatpants and a white tank top who went by the name of Mills. "All the prisons gonna start farming out inmates' body parts for profit," he told me. He seemed like a seasoned veteran of the system, and I didn't question his wisdom. I nodded my head, listening to him talk, but mostly my mind wandered, lost in regret. I thought about what a stupid mistake I'd made and how much hell was in store for me.

Earlier that day, Heather and I walked to a coffee shop in Tallahassee that shared a parking lot with the Beta Bar, a venue Against Me! was scheduled to play that night, a place we had played regularly. We ordered tea, and I walked toward the back to use the restroom, where I saw a bulletin board on the wall with various flyers and notes tacked to it. One was a write-up for our show cut from a newspaper. Someone had taken a pen to it, crossing out all our eyes with "Xs" and scrawling the word "sellout" across my forehead. I tore it down, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash. When I turned around, there was a punk right in my face.

"What'd you do that for?" he snarled.

"This was insulting to me, so I threw it out," I told him.

"Who the fuck do you think you are? This is our space, not yours." He turned his back to me, walking to take his seat at the counter.

I chased after him. "I'm a fucking human being, and I don't know you. Why are you treating me like this?"

He sat in front of his coffee, ignoring me. "What's your problem?" I pressed.

"As far as I'm concerned, this conversation is over," he said, flashing me a smug look.

Laura Jane Grace (then known as Tom Gabel) practices in Florida with her first band, the Adversaries. Photo courtesy of Laura Jane Grace

As far as I was concerned, it wasn't. I snapped. At that moment, this guy was every person who'd ever called me a sellout, every punk in the crowd who'd given me the finger, every asshole who'd ever slandered my band's name in a fanzine.

He raised his cup to take a sip, but I knocked it out of his hand before it reached his lips, sending coffee splattering in all directions. I grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face down, pinning his cheek against the wet counter. I was completely blacked out. I don't know what I would have done at that moment if I hadn't been torn off of him by some people who started taking shots at me.

What I didn't realize was that later that night, this coffee shop was holding a protest show to counter the Against Me! show next door. Most of the people there knew who I was, and they tried to wrestle me to the ground. To me, they were just strangers throwing punches, but they knew my name. Every blow that landed on my body was a mark of revenge on behalf of the punk scene. It was a headbutt that brought me back to reality. It wasn't that it hurt; it was just that the idea of getting headbutted was so ridiculous that it snapped me to my senses.

"Just let me go," I told them.

"I'm going to release your arms," I heard someone behind me say. "If you hit me, I swear to God I'll fucking kill you."

Sure, bro, I thought. You're going to kill me. Right.

I had no idea what Heather was thinking as we left the scene. She said nothing. We walked in silence along the nearby railroad tracks until it was time to get back to the venue. There were two police cars waiting in the parking lot when we arrived.

I walked up to the first officer I saw, introduced myself, and asked if they were looking for me. He informed me they had to arrest me, but gave me a choice: I could go straight to jail or play the show first. I chose to play, setting myself up for a terrible performance. I was distracted throughout the whole set by an inner rage of defeat and the dread of what was waiting for me when it was over. I had been wrung through the legal system before and knew the long, arduous process I was in for.

After the show was over, I changed clothes on the bus, popped two Valiums, and met the officers waiting for me behind the venue. They handcuffed me, put me in a squad car, and started driving me down to the station.

We pulled out of the parking lot, alongside some fans exiting the venue. The cruiser circled by the coffee shop, and from the backseat, I looked up at its marquee, which had been changed— tallahassee punks: 1, against me: 0.

I woke up to find my mug shot plastered all over the front pages of music websites along with my arrest report for battery. "Hair: Brown. Identifying marks: Tattoos all over. Sex: M."

Grace, age 19. Photo courtesy of Laura Jane Grace

There were two messages waiting for me, one from my manager with a list of legal defense options and the other from the Boss, Springsteen himself. Bruce had praised our band in the press and come out to see us play, an always gracious, humble guest, and about as low-key as you can get if you're Bruce Springsteen.

Dear Tom, Hope all is well. In regards to some of the criticism you say you've been taking for your great album, some real smart guy once said "he who is not busy being born, is busy dying" (Dylan). I still hold that to be true. I can't count the amount of changes I've been through that have pissed off some fans. If you have a long career, not only will that happen over and over again, but it's supposed to. The Clash's second album, Give 'Em Enough Rope, was produced by Sandy Pearlman, high production values, hard guitars, and received some similar criticism from "the faithful." Who remembers that now besides old guys like me? Nobody. All they remember is the Clash went on to be one of the most important bands we'd ever seen. It just comes with the turf. If you're not reaching out beyond the audience you have to the greater audience you might have, you'll never find out what your band is truly capable of, what it's worth, and how much meaning you can bring into your fans' lives. If you act honorably, which means writing well, performing like it's the only thing that matters on a nightly basis, and giving the best of yourself to pull out the best in your audience, you've done your job. Then you let the chips fall where they may. Protect your heart, your art, your band, your friendships, then CHARGE ON, BROTHER, CHARGE ON! I'll be catching up with you along the way. Come out and see us any time.—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

I felt humiliated in front of Heather. I had let my band down. I had let Bruce down, too.

Afterward, my legal charges hung above me like a dark cloud that followed me to every city we went to. In an effort to strengthen my case, my attorney asked me to provide a portfolio of press clippings about the band to prove that I was famous. None of them were helpful, though, because they all mentioned my battery on an officer when I was a teenager. There was even one article from a few years prior where I told a journalist that I liked fighting. I have no idea what made me say that. I hated fighting. I'd never even won a fight and had a long history of getting my ass kicked. I pointed him to the issue of Maximum Rock n' roll that encouraged people to attack me so that the court would understand the aggression I was constantly faced with.

The stress drove me further and further down a hole of alcohol and cocaine. Binges turned into benders that lasted for months. It became impossible not to drink before shows, usually at least half a bottle of Jameson. If I wasn't drunk, all I could think about were the charges against me. The stakes were high, and I was blowing it.

Grace and her guitar at College Street Music Hall

Touring in support of New Wave felt like a fight to the death that we weren't winning. We were on the road all year, playing tours that were financially disastrous and destroying the band's relationship.

A strange dynamic had developed within the band that no one could really explain. When three of us were together, our relationship was fine. But with all four of us, we'd always end up at one another's throats. If our significant others were with us, it threw gas onto the fire. Andrew and I in particular had a difficult time communicating. Sometimes entire days would go by on tour without us talking. We wouldn't even make eye contact when we passed each other in the venues. My paranoia would lead me to run through dark scenarios in my head, imagining what he was thinking about me, and I'm sure he was doing the same.

It all came to a head one night in Rhode Island, on a stretch where Andrew and I hadn't spoken in more than three days. I couldn't remember ever feeling that unhappy on a tour. Two songs into our set at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, I walked over to his side of the stage and shouted in his ear over the feedback, "I like this deal we have worked out between us. You don't talk to me unless I talk to you first, and I won't talk to you unless you talk to me first. That way, we'll never have to talk again."

I wanted to provoke a reaction out of him, and I got it. He punched me square in the chest, sending me back a few feet. "Go fuck yourself, man!" he shouted. "I quit, how about that?" We rushed through the rest of our set, and I stormed offstage.

The crowd was chanting for an encore, but I pushed my way through everyone to the backstage exit. I headed to the bus and grabbed my bags. My plan was to split—stay at a hotel and work out a flight in the morning. Halfway to leaving, I stopped, turned around, and headed back into the venue, where I could still hear the crowd cheering for us.

"You got anything else you want to say?" Andrew asked when I came back in. He didn't wait for me to give an answer, not that I had one worth a damn. He laid into me, told me he was sick of my shit, that I manipulated everyone, and that he hated being in a band with me. "You can't quit," I pleaded.

"Why not?" he asked.

Grace and former Against Me! guitarist Andrew Seward do a midair high five. Photo courtesy of Bryan Wynacht

I stood in silence because I could think of no reason other than that the band was all I had. But I couldn't bring myself to say that. I couldn't reveal how lonely I truly was.

I asked Warren and James if they wanted to quit too. James said no. Warren, in his typical passive aggressive way, said, "It seems like that's what happening right now."

The crowd was still out there, still chanting for that encore, so we agreed to put everything aside for a few minutes and give it to them. We marched back onstage, picked up our instruments, and as we started the intro to "We Laugh at Danger..." the entire place erupted. The long wait for our return built up an excitement in the crowd. Bodies went flying in a blur of fists and singing faces.

Sometimes being in a band is a lot like being in a sexual relationship. If you don't communicate properly, you're destined for explosive fights, but the makeup sex will be incredible. Despite our differences, I really loved Andrew. He and I caught eyes mid-song as a thousand people jumped up and down and sang along.

"This is why you can't quit!" I shouted to him. He smiled at me, and I smirked back.

Seward carries away a drunk and shirtless Grace. Photo courtesy of Laura Jane Grace

Journal Entries by Laura Jane Grace

November 2, 2007—Asbury Park, NJ
Tomorrow we're headlining the Saints and Sinners Festival. Ticket sales are low. The promoter overpaid for us and he's losing his ass. There's mythology surrounding the area here, the convention center is cool because it's forever tied to Springsteen but it sounds like shit playing there unless you're actually Springsteen. This is our schedule for the day:

8:00 AM—Bus Arrives at Venue
8:45 AM—Crew Lobby Call
9:00 AM—Load In
10:15 AM—Band Lobby call
10:30 AM—Sound Check
12:30 PM to 1:30 PM—Radio interview with WHTG
2:00 PM to 5:00 PM—Photo shoot for Magnet Magazine 6:30 PM—Interview with XM Radio
7:00 PM—Interview with WSOU
7:30 PM—Interview with the Cleveland Scene
10:30 PM—Set Time

We can't say no to anything. Every show and every interview, everything offered, we agree to.

I've passed the point of feeling tired. I have a headache. My eyes hurt. No real sleep on the plane. Nothing vegan on the hotel lobby restaurant menu that I can eat.

November 10, 2007—Orlando, FL
You can't help but feel a little ridiculous being in a punk band that's playing at the House Of Blues in Downtown Disney in Orlando, Florida. The stage is walking distance from Pleasure Island for fuck's sake. Outside of the venue, families amble along, pushing strollers carrying whiny brats wearing Mickey Mouse ears on their heads while high on sugar and cartoon fantasies. The location trivializes anything you have to say on stage. What a joke we are and the audience knows it.

You don't see all the people in the room who are singing along with their fists pumping in the air. You just see the people in the room who aren't singing along. You see the people leaving through the ones who stay.

Punks yell "fuck New Wave!" in between every song we play. They hate our new album. I'm a fool and I let it get to me. I can't focus and I play horribly. The set feels like it's never going to end. I'd like to think that wasn't me up on stage tonight but it was.

This is the first time I've ever really hated being on tour. I want to go back to the bus and crawl into my bunk and die. I want my heart to stop beating. The band and crew can find me blue-faced and cold to the touch in the morning.

The band, backstage, after finishing up a two-year tour in support of its album, 'New Wave.' Photo courtesy of Wes Orshowski

November 16, 2007
Andrew starts off the conversation apologizing. I apologize to Andrew in return. Warren tells me how much he doesn't like me. "I like you when you make an effort." Warren tells me this band isn't his whole life, it's just part of his life. He tells me that if the band broke up today he wouldn't die. I tell Warren that if the band were to break up today that I would feel like I was dying. Warren wants to tour less and spend more time with his "loved ones." He makes a point in emphasizing "loved ones" a couple times when talking. He is telling me that I am not one of his "loved ones." I get it.

I tell Warren that I'm just blown away that he's surprised by our hectic schedule right now and that if he didn't want to tour he shouldn't have signed a fucking million-dollar major label record deal. You don't get the money for free. You have to work for it. Warren tells me we aren't very inspiring right now. I make the argument that this is the most inspiring we've ever been. It may be ugly but who's to say ugliness isn't inspiring? We're absolutely pushed to our limits. We're climbing Everest. Frostbite has set in. This journey will surely cost limbs. We've run out of food and we're turning to cannibalism. No one gets to leave with their sanity intact. That wouldn't be fair. There's a whole big world full of sensible balanced people, what's so goddamn inspiring about any of them?

November 20, 2007—Cleveland, OH
The past two days have taken years off of my life. I've talked to a million people—friends I wish I could talk to more, journalists I feel stupid for talking to, and label suits I never want to talk to again. If the past couple of days were made into a cartoon flip book, it would be one of me progressively fading.

We have a rule about not playing shows on Monday nights but here we are playing a show on a Monday night. No one is paying attention to what we're agreeing to anymore. Interviews all day long today, radio station performance, meet and greet with contest winners, then finally after all that, we play a show.

I worry. I worry that I'm losing my hair. I worry that I'm getting fat. I worry that I'm going to have a cocaine-induced stroke and spend the rest of my life using my diminished brain capacity to think about how I had it all and then I threw it away. I worry that I'm going to get arrested and convicted of a crime and then sentenced to years in jail. I worry that it will be a sentence just long enough to leave me with some life left when I get out but forever damaged, emotionally dead. I worry that I am too self-centered and egotistical, arrogant and vain. I worry.

We all joked as we headed up on stage tonight that we should get matching shovel tattoos. We've been digging deep.

I've ignored a call from my father everyday since my birthday.

November 22, 2007—Chicago, IL
Just woke up from a dream. Andrew's wife and I are lying side by side on our backs on the floor of the otherwise empty tour bus. I have female genitalia, a detail which I am ecstatic about.

Verité slides her hand down into her pants and starts pleasuring herself. I do the same. She tells me how happy she is for me and how glad she is that we can relate to each other in this way. She turns and moves in to kiss me and her face freezes in time. She is suddenly grotesque and unbeautiful. The thought of my wife enters my head and I pull away. I rise to my feet and her face melts into a look of embarrassment and rejection.

In the dream, Andrew and the rest of the band and crew come crowding back into the bus. We act natural, like nothing was going on.

"I'm sorry," I silently mouth to Verité. Dream ends.

I've taken three shots of Scotch in an attempt to put myself back to sleep. It only makes me want another shot of Scotch. I don't even like Scotch.

Copyright 2016 by Total Treble, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

This article appears in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe. Come back on October 31 to read the full excerpt.

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

While we in Australia don't have a particularly extensive history of celebrating ghosts and candy, we all share some interest in horror. But when we got talking here at the VICE office about what we find captivating, most of us agreed that our notions of fear are tied in with our dreams. So, in honor of Halloween, an idea was hatched: We'd reach out to our illustrators and ask them to draw their nightmares.

Here are some of the responses we got, with a little description of what each dream was about.

Lee Lai

I was about nine when I first had this dream. I'm running through an outdoor mall and watching people explode into masses of weird, wormy noodles. I think the horror wasn't just in the gore, but watching these people trying to fight back the transformation from their loved ones. I can still see a woman in my head, trying to force the writhing tentacles back from her face. I think it's more or less permanently imprinted in my brain.

Michael Dockery

Around the age of nine, I used to get these night terrors, which are basically nightmares when you're not completely asleep. They felt very real, and came on with an extreme sensation of fear and anxiety—and something about the decay of time.

I dreamed that there was an unstoppable magnetic force attracting metal, growing bigger until it consisted of all the metal from our planet. I remember I could feel the pressure of this metal orb, and that every bend and crushing fold was hurting me. And it was deafeningly loud, screaming as it gained mass.

I tried to calm myself down by thinking of a nice beach whenever I felt the fear take hold. Sometimes this would work; sometimes it wouldn't. In the times that a beach wasn't enough to distract me, there was a particular feeling of dread I'll never forget. The dread was this: It's already done, and it's already too late. We are no match for it.

Ben Thomson

My image is from a dream I had when I was living in a really weird student apartment—one time I found two neo-Nazis lighting ping pong balls on fire in my lounge at 3 AM. Anyway, I still remember my dream to this day because it was so surreal. I dreamed I was being dragged across my lounge by two little gray aliens. I remember panicking and trying to gouge one of their eyes out, and they responded by zapping me with something that knocked me out cold. At that moment, I woke up conscious in my bed, completely freaked out.

Michael Hili

Sometimes I dream about accidentally unlocking secrets of the universe. Like if jumped of the bed while shouting out the word "bread" would I be able to fly? Probably.

Usually I dream about carnivores. It's pretty weird, but I have this dream I'm cracking the shells of buttery clams and drink the juice at the bottom of the bowl and this somehow unlocks a group of carnivorous beings beginning with the letter "V." So, for example, I'll get a whole lot of vultures being born out of Venus flytraps. Then for some reason, they're all singing Harry Nilsson's "Put the Lime in the Coconut" in perfect harmony.

I try to find the low part to the harmony to show them I've seen Reservoir Dogs as well, but I fuck it up. This angers them, and they start nipping at me with their buttery beaks.

Ashley Goodall

A few months ago, a close friend asked me to look after some of her grandmother's prized possessions while she traveled through Europe. One of them was an extremely valuable clay vase that her grandmother had made 40 years earlier—a family heirloom.

That night I had a dream that I tripped over and broke the vase into a thousand pieces. I remember trying to glue the pot back together, but every time I touched one of the pieces, it just ran through my fingers like sand. It was a total nightmare, and I woke in panic and sweat.

I immediately went into my lounge room to check the vase was all right. I wrapped it in bubble wrap and put it in the back of my storage cupboard to get it away from me.

Dimitrios Guerrero

Since the age of six or seven, I've had this ongoing nightmare that begins with a faceless man spinning in an empty room wearing a paisley suit. As the man spins, scissors start to appear and shoot toward me. I try ducking them, but the spinning man can control and move the scissors.

I start to feel really anxious and claustrophobic, and the pressure in the room starts to build. The more I try to avoid the scissors, the more the room breaks up and fragments, to the point where everything is completely blurred and distorted and all that's left is this terror. That's usually when I wake up.

Warning: Spoilers from episode five ahead.

We're halfway through the first season of Westworld, so it seems fair to ask: What is this show about? Sure, it's "about" a depraved amusement park set in some unknown future where rich people can pay to shoot and fuck robots. But what is the story that it's telling? Is Westworld the tale of a robot rebellion? A far-future A.I. experiment? A lesson on what might happen when maniacal genius comes undone? More specifically, will Dolores ever find freedom? How did Bernard first fall in love with his creation? Will the Man in Black unravel the whole mystery?

Westworld is still captivating from scene to scene thanks to its brilliant cast, gorgeous vistas, and stacks of dead bodies. But as a whole, the show still has more fan theories than focus. Most prestige dramas tell one or two central stories with a couple of main characters. Breaking Bad tells the story of one man's descent from "Mr. Chips to Scarface"; each season of The Wire tells the story of how a group of police do or don't bring in a case against drug dealers, and so on. Westworld has set up a lot of intriguing subplots, characters, and themes that don't really cohere into a single story, and no one has yet emerged as a definite protagonist. If a story is about a dozen things, does it risk being about nothing?

Still, there are five more episodes to pull all the strands together, and quite a few storylines advanced in intriguing ways this week.

Teddy's No Good, Very Bad Day

The fifth episode is titled "Contrapasso," a reference to Dante's Inferno and hopefully not an indication that "they were all in hell!" will be the answer to the question of what the show is about.

But Teddy (James Marsden) might as well be in hell, as he and Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) are dragged around by the Man in Black (Ed Harris) as he searches for the maze. They run into the British robot boy—who is almost certainly modeled on either Ford (Anthony Hopkins) or the mysterious Arnold as a child—allowing the Man in Black to remind us he's still a monster. "Too small," he says, deciding against any child murder today.

But Teddy, grievously wounded last episode by Wyatt's gang, is fading. To save him, the Man in Black facilitates an impromptu blood transfusion. He slices Lawrence's throat and strings him upside down in a tree, letting him bleed out into a leather bag. After an offscreen transfusion, Teddy is doing alright. Why, you ask, do robots need human blood to live? The Man in Black tells Teddy that back in the day he sliced open a robot, and they "used to be beautiful... a million perfect pieces." Then, somewhere along the way, the bean counters realized that "humanity is cost-effective," meaning it was easier to make them out of flesh and bone.

Into the Wild

Nice guy William (Jimmi Simpson), jerk-store employee of the month Logan (Ben Barnes), and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) head south of the border in search of local criminal kingpin El Lazo. While the Western clichés we've seen previously take place in the section of the park that "feels like it was designed by committee" (as Logan says), they are heading into the "raw" section. Down here is less Tombstone and more El Topo.

Dancing skeletons, gold-painted prostitutes, and drunken Confederates stagger around the town, and the sequences here are filmed with a dreamy Lynchian quality. The show is finally opening up its style and tonal palate, even if the picture isn't filled in yet.

Their guide Slim sets them up with El Lazo a.k.a. Lawrence a.k.a. the dead carcass in the middle of nowhere. In my episode three review, I mentioned the theory that William might be the Man in Black in a previous timeline. The fact that Lawrence appears again, seemingly uninterrupted as the criminal boss across the border, is certainly a point in his favor. (Another possibility, albeit less likely, is that there are multiple versions of each host, their brains connected through something like the cloud. This would explain how Bernard and Ford are able to talk to various robots seemingly in the middle of their adventures.)

Dolores gets to whip out a bandana and six-shooter, and the gang robs a stage coach carrying nitroglycerin in a plot between El Lazo and the drunken Confederate soldiers that all goes to shit—especially for Logan—but leaves William, Dolores, and Lawrence all heading to the front lines where the greatest thrill the park has to offer can be found: war.

Elsie on the Case

By far the most interesting story lines so far have taken place inside the park, but the drama at headquarters finally gets interesting this episode as Elsie (Shannon Woodward) does some detective work. She convinces one of the "creepy necro-perv" repairmen in the basement to let her look at the robot who smashed his head in before it got incinerated. She finds a "laser-based satellite uplink" buried in his arm that someone has been using to smuggle data out of the park.

Next week, be on the lookout for the WikiLeaks Westworld email dump.

The Two Stooges

This week's comedy relief comes in the form of the two basement repairmen who were around when Maeve woke up. One of them (Leonardo Nam) dreams of something bigger, and is trying to learn to program a robot bird, so he can get a promotion. The other (Ptolemy Slocum) apparently has his "aggro-bro" levels set to max and flips out at him between sessions with a redhead in his "VR tank." But the real point of these scenes is to let us know that Maeve has broken out of her programming and can wake herself up from sleep mode.

Everybody Loves Arnold

The through line of this episode is the ghost—or robotic consciousness?—of Arnold, Ford's co-creator who mysteriously died 30 years ago, and who disagreed with Ford on matters of robot self-actualization. A voice, seemingly Arnold's, instructs Dolores, "Find me." Logan tells William that the family lawyers looked into Arnold and couldn't find a single thing on him. Meanwhile, Ford is also searching for him, especially in Dolores's mind. "Somewhere under all those updates, he's still there," he tells her, making me think that Arnold transformed himself into code that lives in the minds of all the robots.

After Ford's interrogation, Dolores tells an unseen figure that "he doesn't know. I didn't tell him anything."

But the most thrilling scene this week takes place when Ford interrupts the Man in Black's drinking. They speak like old frenemies, with the Man in Black saying that the park was always "missing a real villain," hence his murder spree while Ford acts amused at his quest. "If you're looking for the moral of the story, simply ask," Ford says. The Man in Black, getting testy, makes it clear that he doesn't think Ford knows the moral. It was Arnold who was the real genius of the park. Teddy—seemingly controlled by Ford via telekinesis—stops the Man in Black from skinning an answer out of Ford, and we're left knowing that answers may be out there but we won't find them yet.

Follow Lincoln Michel on Twitter.

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Photo by Lalitree Darnielle

John Darnielle

John Darnielle is "America's best non-hip-hop lyricist"—at least according to those fusty crabs over at the New Yorker. To us, he's that dude who sings songs and started the Mountain Goats, and who also happens to write incredible fiction. His magic pen—and the success of his first novel, Wolf in White Van, which was a New York Times best seller and National Book Award nominee—has led fans to petition the White House to appoint him poet laureate. This issue features an excerpt of his new novel, Universal Harvester, forthcoming in 2017.

READ UNIVERSAL HARVESTER

Laura Jane Grace

Laura Jane Grace is the lead singer of Against Me!, a punk band responsible for those iconic albums you love and a few you hated enough to write to her and let her know that she is sellout scum. She also writes a column called Mandatory Happiness for Noisey. Recently, Grace penned her memoir, TRANNY: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, with the column's editor, Dan Ozzi, who is definitely, totally not writing this bio about her right now but is very talented and handsome. This issue features a killer excerpt from the book.

READ TRANNY

Meryl Meisler

Meryl Meisler is an O.G. Brooklyn photographer. In the 1970s, she worked as an art teacher in Bushwick, and she would take photographs of her students in the streets, roller-skating and goofing around. At night, she'd cross the Williamsburg Bridge and photograph the alternate universe of Manhattan, where the disco scene was exploding at clubs like Studio 54. Two years ago, she published a book of her pictures from this era, A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick, and the photos in this issue are some shots that never made it into the book.

SEE A TALE OF TWO CITIES: DISCO ERA BUSHWICK

Noisey

Noisey is VICE's music channel. In five fine years of existence, it's made the prestigious move from calling itself a "blog" to a "website," and now it's also a "television show." With offices all over the world, Noisey prides itself on using music as a way through which to explore the highs and lows of global youth culture, while still figuring out the best way to make fun of Drake's latest haircut. This issue features work from Noisey editors Dan Ozzi, Kim Kelly, Kyle Kramer, and Eric Sundermann, who are all special in their own way.

THUMP

THUMP is VICE's electronic-music and nightlife site. She likes fog machines, healing crystals, and using club culture as a lens for writing about what it means to be a young person in 2016. For this issue, she asked her adoptive mother—editor-in-chief Emilie Friedlander—to write about a teenager-focused video-sharing app that's revolutionizing the way that music marketing works. She also collaborated with VICE on a reported feature about the alleged-sexual-abuse scandal surrounding pioneering hip-hop DJ and Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa.

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Photo via Flickr user Sarah_Ackerman

Last Saturday in the midst of Halloween craziness, one of the ubiquitous Times Square Cookie Monsters was stabbed in the back when he tried to break up a fight between a guy dressed up as a Tuskegee Airman and another man dressed as a Native American, the New York Post reports.

The trio reportedly collided on West 50th around 6 PM on Saturday night after the man in the pilot costume confronted the man wearing the Native American costume, deeming it offensive, and a fight between the two men broke out. When Christopher Ramos, the man in the Cookie Monster suit, stepped in to try and diffuse the brawl, the aviator allegedly pulled a knife from his shoe and plunged it through the Cookie Monster costume and into Ramos's back.

Ramos then went straight to the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital after the tussle, but none of his injuries were life-threatening, according to an NYPD representative who spoke with Gothamist.

The NYPD—who are no strangers to witnessing meltdowns at the city's tourist hotspot—are still looking for the short-tempered costumed pilot and the man dressed as a Native American.

Read: Redface Is Just as Offensive as Blackface

Eric Garner's body lies in a coffin for viewing before his funeral at a church in Brooklyn. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The internal machinations of federal law enforcement have been the biggest news story in America since Friday, when FBI director James Comey told Congress agents are looking into a new cache of emails possibly relevant to their investigation of Hillary Clinton. Since then, the Wall Street Journal reported officials at the Justice Department and FBI have been squabbling over how and whether to press ahead with the probe. But there's another weird Department of Justice/FBI dispute that has been hovering in the background of American life for a while now, and this one isn't about classified documents, insecure emails, or the future of a prominent politician.

Instead, this fight is about a man's life and why he lost it.

Last week, the New York Times reported the feds have swapped out the New York investigators and lawyers on the Eric Garner case, signaling NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo might still face charges for violating the black man's civil rights by placing him in a lethal chokehold in 2014. To back up a bit, after a local grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on charges of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide that December—igniting protests across the city and country—the feds in Washington announced they were opening their own civil rights probe. "Our prosecutors will conduct an independent, thorough, fair and expeditious investigation," then-US attorney general Eric Holder promised.

Expeditious probably wasn't the right word, because despite video of Garner begging 11 times—"I can't breathe!"—for air after being wrestled to the sidewalk, Holder's vow came nearly two years ago. Meanwhile, Pantaleo remains with the force (albeit on modified duty) and has even seen his pay go up.

But word of a staffing change has injected new life into the case, even as it raises fresh questions about the federal government's role in probing some of the most outrageous police-brutality cases in America. For a sense of how to read the tea leaves—and what, exactly, it takes to charge a cop with violating someone's civil rights in this country—we spoke with Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Before taking that gig, Smith completed 18 investigations as the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division's Special Litigation Section, including, most notably, the case centering on the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.

VICE: Before we go into the latest developments in the Garner case, can you break down how the feds get involved in these types of cases generally?
Jonathan Smith: So the federal government has one criminal civil rights statute, the 18 U.S.C. 242, which permits the US to prosecute people for willful violations of someone's civil rights. It's a fairly high standard, and different than most state standards, where you may have various different crimes that a police officer can commit, including negligence or recklessness. Willfulness is the same standard as you'd have to prove someone engaged in deliberate murder, or first-degree murder, essentially for the purpose of depriving a person of their civil rights. It's a very difficult standard to meet, and so that's why, just as a general matter, you see many more state prosecutions of police officers than you see federal prosecutions.

Nevertheless, during the Obama administration, the feds have brought about 600 successful "color of law" prosecutions—they are called "color of law" because it's violation of someone's civil rights under the "color of law." A lot of them changes that dynamic.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Photo via flickr/Popwerks

Montreal police, investigating the possibility of crooked cops on the force, obtained warrants to surveil a journalist's iPhone, and even obtained permission to use his GPS chip to track his whereabouts at all time.

But the federal minister of public safety, Ralph Goodale, stopped short of discouraging police forces from going to the courts to obtain judicial orders against journalists.

Asked directly by NDP Member of Parliament Matthew Dubé on Monday about whether he'll issue a directive to create more formal rules around how police deal with journalists, Goodale would only say that "we take the freedom of the press in this country very, very seriously."

Dubé raised the question after on Monday after Montreal newspaper La Presse published details on surveillances warrants, at least 24 in total, obtained to surveil journalist Patrick Lagacé. The MP also referenced another case, where federal police are working to obtain chat records from a VICE journalist's cell phone, as evidence that action needs to be taken.

Lagacé, who works at La Presse, had been in contact with Faycal Djelidi, a Montreal police officer under investigation for a number of crimes, including perjury and obstruction of justice. When Lagacé's number popped up on Djelidi's phone, the Montreal police obtained the initial surveillance warrants for the journalist's device.

The Montreal police contend that, while their judicial authorization allowed them to access the GPS chip in Lagacé's phone, they used that power "never," or "nearly never," according to La Presse. The surveillance order would allow police to see the numbers for his incoming and outgoing calls and texts.

Costa Labos, head of internal affairs for the police service, confirmed that he green lit the practise, but defended the investigation.

"I understand that certain people could have been offended or disturbed by the fact that their telephone was , but we have to do our work," he told the newspaper.

Labos was, himself, subject to an internal affairs investigation after he was accused of lying to a judge to obtain a search warrant. Djieldi, for his part, is still facing trial on nine charges.

The case, just one of many instances of Canadian cops investigating journalists in recent years, shows how willing police are to compromise journalist's protection of their sources, La Presse said in a statement.

"In Canada, police bodies just seem to ignore the fundamental rules," said Éric Trottier, a vice president at the media company. "We have to put an end to what seems like a total witch hunt against journalistic sources."

Aside from the investigation into Lagacé, national and local police have been criticized repeatedly in recent years for expanding their investigations to include journalists.

VICE Canada is currently appealing a 2015 production order, upheld by an Ontario court, that would force national security reporter Ben Makuch to hand over transcripts of his conversation with suspected Islamic State fighter Farah Shirdon to the RCMP.

READ MORE: 'A Detrimental Chilling Effect': VICE Pushes Back in Legal Fight With Canadian Police

More recently, it emerged that Joel-Denis Bellavance and Gilles Toupin, also at La Presse, were followed by RCMP officers operating under their own authority, as the investigators tried to find the source of an intelligence whistleblower. In another case, from September, a Montreal court order authorized police to seize the computer of Journal de Montreal reporter Michael Nguyen, after he published surveillance video of a judge behaving erratically.

Canada has laws that protect journalists' relationship with their sources, like many American states have.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Photo by Taj Bourgeois

Today, thousands of Donald Trumps will take to the streets, shouting "pussy" jokes and demanding treats from strangers. Hundreds of Hillary Clintons will follow close, trying to remember a catchphrase. Ken Bones will be there, too, wondering where they can use the bathroom. Harambe the dead ape will rise from the grave, as will David Bowie. You may catch Prince and Willy Wonka making out, or puking, or crying. I'm tempted to stay in.

Like most reasonable people, I do not love Halloween, but I'm not such a spoilsport as to hate it, either. I think that Halloween is fine. It's obviously better than St. Patrick's Day and Valentine's Day (if you're single), but not nearly as nice as Christmas (if you like family) or New Year's (if you use "party" as a verb). It is the median fun holiday.

The main problem with Halloween is that it lacks a central purpose. There are costumes, yes, but unless you're a child young enough to trick-or-treat, the holiday is missing a culminating event. It lacks the mission provided by Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas presents, or the shouts of "Happy New Year!" The most exciting part of Halloween is seeing what people are wearing; if you go to a Halloween party, this happens at the very beginning of the night (if it's not spoiled ahead of time on Instagram). The rest of the party is anticlimactic.

Halloween doesn't really have food, or even a special drink. (Candy is great, but you're an adult and can already buy all the candy you could eat for like $6.) To make matters worse, costumes turn everyone into a slightly or even seriously more awful version of themselves, either emboldened and obnoxious or self-conscious and uncomfortable. Plus the entire night they're all thinking about going to another party they heard about, or maybe a bar. Meanwhile, cabs are scarce, Ubers are surging, and there are dudes dressed like the Jared Leto Joker on the subway.

This is what happens when a day for children to pretend is repurposed into a night for adults to binge drink. It's an awkward transition. Halloween is fun for kids because they get to dress and eat the way they wish they could every day; adults don't actually want to look like superheroes or eat only candy. Halloween forces grown-ups to pay lip service to their inner-child, leaving everyone feeling (and acting) like morons.

Photo by Flickr user Ed Yourdon

Halloween can suck, but it doesn't have to. What our spookiest holiday has going for it is that it's an occasion when people try to do something with friends. The importance of gatherings shouldn't be discounted. Actually planning to hang out with people can be an arduous task. Large gatherings can be tedious, but when they do work out, they're way more memorable than staying in or seeing a movie or whatever you do on most nights. On Halloween, people at a minimum aspire to have fun. Compare this to the group of holidays collectively known as "the Mondays." These days—when banks are closed and you might not have to go to work—seem like they'd be good for a barbecue or a trip upstate, but they're usually treated like surrogate Sundays. Halloween might be full of annoyances, but at least it's not just another day for errands.

To make the most out of Halloween, try less. Don't spend too much of your night trying to find the best possible thing to do. Halloween is when "good enough" truly is, so just pick a party and stick with it. How many people's costumes can you remember from last year? No one cares what you wore, either. Unless you were in theater or a sorority, your best bet is to just wear something simple. Elaborate costumes are expensive and time consuming; if you don't get some personal satisfaction from dressing like a woman giving birth to herself, don't bother. Don't try to for anything political; avoid memes and topical gags—they're not original, and you'll feel embarrassed and sick of the joke before the night even gets started. Unless you want to end up in a cautionary listicle, be careful about anything that may be construed as racially insensitive. Dress up as something obvious that people will recognize, like a mime, or buy a thrift store overcoat and be the guy from Twin Peaks. It doesn't matter if it's not clever. Your costume can be as sexy as you'd like, but Halloween is usually the first truly cold night of the year, so try to bring along a scarf or sweater if you're going to be outside much.

When Celtic pagans or early Christians (the holiday's origins are fiercely debated) held feasts to celebrate the autumn harvest, they couldn't have imagined that one day a man dressed as an Italian plumber created by a Japanese corporation would commemorate the night by peeing on my stoop. Halloween, then, is evidence that our culture is a living, breathing dialogue across centuries and continents. Isn't that reason enough to celebrate? It might not be the coolest or the most fulfilling of our holy days, but that's fine. After all, something has to be in the middle.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

Graphic by Ralph Damman

Travis Vader was originally convicted on two counts of second-degree murder. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Amber Bracken

The Edmonton judge in a much-discussed murder trial has switched the murder conviction of the accused to the lesser crime of manslaughter, admitting he made a mistake.

Justice Denny Thomas told a courtroom on Monday he was wrong to use Section 230 of the Criminal Code to convict Travis Vader on two counts of second-degree murder as the Supreme Court of Canada declared that section unconstitutional in 1990—meaning it no longer carries any weight, although it remains on the books.

"I accept that it was an error," the judge said in court, according to the Canadian Press.

The section said the judge could convict the accused of second-degree murder if he had killed the victims, an elderly couple, while in the middle of robbing them.

In switching his verdict, the judge denied Vader's lawyers' request to declare a mistrial, even though his lawyers argued that he made a "colossal" error and a new trial was the only way to fix the mistake.

"This court cannot proceed to impose a life sentence upon Mr. Vader for an offence that does not exist," his lawyers wrote in a brief.

The case is strange for several reasons. The elderly victims in the case, Marie and Lyle McCann, went missing in July 2010 while on a camping trip in British Columbia. Their burned camper was found, but their bodies were never discovered.

At trial, Justice Thomas agreed the evidence presented at trial proved that Vader robbed and shot the couple, but he didn't find that Vader intended to murder them.

The judge also denied an application from a group of media outlets to livestream Monday's decision, although he previously allowed cameras into the courtroom for his initial verdict.

The Vader case was the first criminal trial in Alberta that saw cameras allowed inside a courtroom.

Vader will be sentenced in December.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Fred Dunn

The number of Indigenous people now represent more than a quarter of all inmates held in Canada's federal prisons, according to the new annual report from Canada's prison watchdog.

And within the last decade, the number of female Indigenous inmates has doubled, while the population of male Indigenous inmates has increased by more than 50 percent. During that time, the federal inmate population increased by only 10 percent.

"It's a shameful milestone in Canadian history," correctional investigator Howard Sapers told a press conference on Monday.

His annual report, which also says Indigenous women represent 35 percent of inmates in federal prisons, serves to highlight his concerns about federal correctional facilities, which house offenders who have been sentenced to more than two years in prison.

Sapers has previously pointed out that just 30 years ago, Indigenous people comprised 10 percent of the federal inmate population. And they represent just four percent of Canada's general population.

READ MORE: Why Indigenous Women Are Canada's Fastest Growing Prison Population

The report notes that Indigenous prisoners are more likely to be held in solitary confinement and in maximum security facilities than non-Aboriginal inmates.

Last week, there was an uproar after it was revealed that Adam Capay, a 24-year-old Indigenous man, was being held in solitary confinement in a Thunder Bay, Ontario jail for more than four years without trial. Sapers was asked about the case but said he couldn't comment because it's under provincial jurisdiction.

He did describe Capay's situation as "very troubling" and that his office has never heard of a case like his in federal prisons.

"Segregation should be rare, it should be a last resort," said Sapers. "Until we have a legislated cap, I am concerned that segregation could go on indefinitely is still possible."

For years, Sapers has called on the federal corrections department to appoint a deputy commissioner dedicated entirely to improving the system for Indigenous offenders, and has said that efforts to curb the disproportionate number of Indigenous offenders aren't working.

In addition to decrying the increase in Indigenous offenders, his report also sounds the alarm over a dramatic increase in guards using "inflammatory agents" such as pepper spray against inmates. The number of incidents involving the use of pepper spray against inmates has more than tripled since 2011, and more than one-third of those incidents involved inmates suffering from mental illnesses.

A trick-or-treater in the 1970s, for illustrative purposes and not related to this case. Photo: Don Scarborough, via

On a rainy Halloween night in 1974, the children of Deer Park, Texas were out knocking on doors. Ronald Clark O'Bryan, an optician, was out too, watching over his kids—eight-year-old Timothy and five-year-old Elizabeth—as they trick-or-treated in a suburban neighborhood near their home. Joining them was the O'Bryan's neighbor, Jim Bates, and his young son.

One of the houses the group approached had all its lights switched off, but the kids banged on the door anyway; the vague promise of candy was too enticing.

But there was no answer: either the occupants were hiding or no one was home. Growing impatient, the kids ran off to find another house and Jim followed. Ronald was left alone.

Catching up with the others a short while later, Ronald had good news. He produced a handful of 21-inch Pixy Stix, tubes of powdered sour candy. Turned out someone had been in at the dark house all along. The sweets were handed out—one to each of the children there, one for Jim's other child and another to a ten-year-old boy Ronald had recognized from church as the group walked home.

Before bed, Timothy O'Bryan was allowed one treat from the evening's haul, and picked his Pixy Stix tube—but the powdered sugar was stuck in the straw, and it wasn't until his dad helped him to dislodge it that he could take his first mouthful. It tasted bitter, he complained, so Ronald grabbed him a glass of Kool-Aid to wash the taste away. Less than an hour later, Timothy was dead.

"It was just a coincidence that I was working the police intake that night," says former Harris County prosecutor Mike Hinton, decades later, on the phone from Houston. "I got a call from the Pasadena police department—they told me an eight-year-old boy had died. He was rushed to hospital, but he'd already passed."

Dr. Joseph A Jachimczyk

Wanting to get his investigation underway, Hinton called Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk, chief medical examiner of nearby Harris County. "I told him the situation and he asked what the young man's breath smelled like," says Hinton now. A call to the morgue revealed there was a scent of almonds coming from the boy's mouth. "It's cyanide," said Dr. Jachimczyk.

An autopsy proved the medical examiner's hunch: a pathologist said Timothy had consumed enough cyanide to kill two people. Tests later found that the top two inches of the Pixy Stix had been packed with the poison.

Police officers managed to recover the remaining sweets from the other children before any of them had a chance to dig in, and noted that whoever was responsible had used staples to seal the Pixy Stix after tampering with them. "That's what saved another boy's life that night," Hinton recalls. "They found him in bed with the sweet in his hand, but he wasn't strong enough to undo the staples."

The police took Ronald back to the neighborhood the group had been trick-or-treating in so he could direct them to the house where he'd picked up the Pixy Stix. But he was stumped—he just couldn't find the house, and said he'd never seen the face of the person responsible; that had just emerged from a doorway and handed him the candy. Investigators started to become suspicious.

"A few days went by, and it was incredibly frustrating," says Hinton, "so they took O'Bryan out again and were pretty firm with him."

The tactic worked: Ronald's memory was jogged. He pointed towards the house.

The man who lived there wasn't home, so officers went to his place of work—Houston's William Hobby P. Airport—and arrested him in front of his colleagues. The mystery was over; cased closed.

Only, the man had an alibi. "It turned out he was working that night," says Hinton in his long Texan drawl. "His wife and daughter were home and had turned out the lights early as they'd run out of candy." Colleagues and time sheets confirmed the man's story. "This only magnified my suspicions," says Hinton. "I'd also heard O'Bryan was angry at his relatives for not staying up the night of Timothy's funeral, which was odd."

Ronald, it transpires, had written a song about Jesus, and Timothy joining the Lord in heaven, and had grown agitated when his grieving family wouldn't stay up late to watch a recording of the performance being broadcast on television. "Something strange was going on," says Hinton.

Soon after, while he was teaching a class at the Pasadena police academy, detectives arrived at Hinton's door. They had discovered that Ronald had recently taken out life insurance policies on both of his children—$10,000 per child in January of that year, and then a further $20,000 on each a month before Halloween. Investigators already knew Ronald owed debts of over $100,000, so when they found out he'd called his insurers to ask about the payout at 9 AM the morning after Timothy's death, it was clear the case against him was beginning to come together.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan's mugshot. Background photo by Flickr user lobo235, via

Granted a warrant, a search of the O'Bryan house offered up a pair of scissors with plastic residue attached, which was similar to that found on the cyanide-laced sweets. O'Bryan was arrested and taken in for questioning.

As the investigation continued, says Hinton, the evidence started to stack up against Ronald. "It turned out O'Bryan was going to community college and in class would ask his professor questions like, 'What is more lethal: cyanide or another type of poison?'" says Hinton. "Why would someone ask that?"

Another witness, who worked for a chemical company in Houston, told police a man had come in to buy some cyanide, but left after being told the smallest amount he could buy was 5 lbs. "The man from the store said he couldn't identify O'Bryan, but he remembered that his customer was wearing a beige or blue smock, like a doctor," says Hinton. "O'Bryan was an optician—that was exactly the uniform he wore to work."

Still, this was years before DNA testing and contactless debit cards, and police couldn't put the Pixy Stix in Ronald's hands or prove he'd bought any cyanide. So the 30-year-old optician maintained his innocence.

Hinton remembers the case vividly; in the decades that have passed, his memories have remained sharp. "O'Bryan adored the attention," he says. "I think he even loved it during his trial."

Ronald entered a not guilty plea, with his defense blaming the tainted candy on some untraceable boogieman—a sick individual using the cover of Halloween to poison unsuspecting children. But friends, family, and co-workers all testified against the man the press was now calling the "Candy Man," and on June 3, 1975 it took just 46 minutes for a jury to return a guilty verdict for one charge of capital murder and four counts of attempted murder. An hour later, it was decided that Ronald would be executed by electric chair.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan, right, is escorted from the courtroom by a bailiff after hearing the guilty verdict on June 3, 1975. AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Othell O. Owensby Jr.

Before and since the Deer Park poisoning, rumors of dodgy sweets being handed out have always surfaced around Halloween. But whether the fear is that the candies contain broken glass and razor blades, or that they're actually ecstasy pills, there's not much evidence to suggest parents actually have anything to worry about.

In 2000, a man in Minneapolis was charged with putting needles in the Snickers bars he'd handed out to trick-or-treaters—but the only victim he claimed was a teenager who got a slight prick from the hidden sharp object. Since Timothy O'Bryan, there hasn't been a single case where a child has actually died after consuming contaminated Halloween treats.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan's appeal avenues were explored and turned down for nearly a decade after his guilty verdict, so it wasn't until March 31, 1984, when all routes to survival had been exhausted, that he was finally put to death for his crime. By this point, the US Supreme Court had ruled the electric chair a cruel and unusual punishment, so his life was ended with a lethal injection.

Outside the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, a crowd of around 300 people gathered to hear if the man the Halloween poisoner had met his end, shouting "Trick or treat" and throwing candy at anti-death penalty protesters.

At 12:48 AM, when Ronald was pronounced dead, Hinton was in his childhood home in Amarillo, an eight-hour drive from Huntsville. That evening, he'd gone to his favorite lake, fishing rod in hand, and drunk a beer in celebration as he drifted out into the darkness.

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Call the cops if you see this guy around. Screenshot via YouTube

The man who was filmed yelling "white power" and calling a South Asian lawyer a "fucking Paki" and a "shit skin" in an Abbotsford, BC parking lot has been charged with assault.

Abbotsford police have charged Karry Corbett, 47, of Hope, BC, with two counts of assault, one count of uttering threats and one count of causing a disturbance.

According to a police press release, "warrants have been issued and police have been actively seeking to locate and arrest (Corbett)."

Corbett was recorded making a racist rant by Abbotsford lawyer Ravi Duhra on October 21.

Duhra reportedly started filming when he saw Corbett verbally assaulting an elderly parking attendant who had issued him a fine. At that point, Corbett focused his wrath on Duhra, saying, "Is there a problem? You fucking Paki, go back to fucking India." He called Duhra a number of other racist slurs, including a "camel-riding motherfucker" though he was careful to repeat "it's not a threat!"

The video went viral, receiving condemnation from the cops and local politicians. Versions of it were taken off YouTube for violating the company's hate speech policy.

Though Corbett was blatantly racist, Abbotsford police have not charged him with a hate crime, which the criminal code defines as acts in which someone advocates or promotes genocide or incites hatred against groups based on colour, race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Abbotsford police spokesman Ian MacDonald told The Abbotsford News he didn't feel Corbett was convincing enough to actually incite hatred.

"I think that it's pretty difficult to say that anybody (witnessing the interaction) would be swayed by his comments."

In what will come as a surprise to no one, this isn't Corbett's first brush with the law. He was slated to stand trial for uttering threats and assault with a weapon in November and has previously been convicted of assault with intent to resist arrest, assaulting a peace officer, uttering threats, theft, mischief, breaking and entering, and breaching conditions, according to The Abbotsford News.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

When I was in high school in the late 90s and early 2000s—also known as the Y2K era—horror movies weren't what you would call "scary."

Somehow at the turn of the millennium, the tech-paranoia of Canadian horror master David Cronenberg, and the testosterone-fueled action of Aliens, gave rise to what I call nu-horror: a mix of monster horror with sci-fi action, enhanced with computer animation. The movies were plot heavy, often adapted from video games, filmed in bright colors, and they were full of un-spooky subject matter like space travel and the internet. It was an exciting new high-tech millennium, and these were apparently our high-tech new fears.

Movies that set the stage for nu-horror included The Faculty, Event Horizon, and Blade. Examples of the subgenre at its height include Thir13en Ghosts, Resident Evil, Jason X, The House of the Dead, Dracula 2000, Ghosts of Mars, and How to Make a Monster.

In the Y2K days, horror's sister musical genre, metal, was going through a similar rough patch. Bands like Korn, Mudvayne, P.O.D., and Linkin Park were stretching the term "metal" to its breaking point by making what we now derisively call "nu-metal"—the term I'm obviously co-opting here.

NME called nu-metal "the worst genre of all time." The nu-horror era in movies is not fondly remembered either.

According to film scholar Steffen Hantke, horror fans in the Y2K days were in a panic about their precious genre coming apart at the seams. In Hantke's 2010 book American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium Hantke wrote that "from a pessimist's point of view, the last ten years have seen American horror film at its worst." He also noted that the movie blog Bloody-Disgusting.com hosted a discussion in 2005 called, "'Do you think horror movies are done for?'"

A lot of this geek anger was in opposition to teen slasher movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a glut of American horror movies that were just inferior remakes of Japanese movies. Still, much of the blame also lands at the feet of the cheesy, sci-fi-tinged horror I'm labeling nu-horror.

Here's a very brief history:

In the late 90s, Robert Rodriguez's aliens-ate-my-teachers movie The Faculty, and the blue-tinted gorefest in space Event Horizon, helped set nu-horror in motion.

The Faculty starts out as a garden-variety Invasion of the Body Snatchers–style paranoia thriller, but set in a high school so it can be marketed to teens. But then at the end, the monster is revealed as sort of a mix between the alien from Alien and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, and computer animation takes over. Event Horizon is sorta the opposite, starting as a space opera on a grand scale, and then making a left turn into horror movie territory, with demons, torture, and glimpses of hell.

In the ensuing few years, things like space travel, computer read-outs, and shootouts with aliens became commonplace in ostensibly scary movies. Also, in 1999, The Matrix came along, and as a cultural juggernaut, its influence can definitely be felt in the horror movies of the time. For instance, Uwe Bol's 2003 House of the Dead includes several shots that mimic "bullet time," The Matrix's time-stopping camera technique (link is NSFW).

The Matrix is no more or less scary than one of the high water marks of the nu-horror subgenre: 2001's Jason X, in which Jason Voorhees wakes up on a space ship, having been frozen for 445 years, and starts killing the sexy astronauts he encounters. The sexy astronauts fight back with killer robots and super guns. It is not a scary movie, but it is an immensely entertaining movie.

The year 2001 was the biggest for nu-horror. Thir13en Ghosts (which I think is pronounced "Thir-one-three-en Ghosts") is the most useful all-around snapshot of the subgenre I can find. It offers the viewer the kind of bright, colorful sets and lighting design they might typically expect from a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical, costumes reminiscent of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, the visuals of a Slipknot video, and a Ghostbusters-style mix of science fiction and horror.

There's also a needlessly convoluted story, in which (deep breath) a giant steampunk house is murdering people, but ghosts also live in the house, and a cursed document written by the devil is all over the walls, which can be used to trap the ghosts, and the characters who are still alive can only see the ghosts if they wear hi-tech glasses that work like the glasses from They Live , and in addition to the house being able to kill people, the ghosts can also kill people.

The plot doesn't stay with you, and neither do the attempted scares. Instead, after watching Thir13en Ghosts, like so much Y2K-era culture, you just remember a kind of strobing, screaming, technicolor mess.

Because of their low budgets, horror movies will always be laboratories for cheap special effects that look dated a few weeks after the movies leave theaters. And because they're for teens, horror movies will always try to riff on the cultural fads of the moment, and the results will be ridiculous. So nu-horror may not be some uniquely crappy era in movies, but just possess a unique lack of aesthetic limits, as if the filmmakers were hitting you with every sight, color, and noise they possibly could.

The time period itself had its high points as well, with non-nu-horror horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and Gore Verbinski's Ring remake. In that vein, over the next few years, non-Hollywood horror movies like High Tension, Wolf Creek, and The Descent came along and injected some new ideas—restraint mostly—into Hollywood's horror vocabulary. Say what you will about the flash-in-the-pan that was torture porn, movies like Saw and Hostel helped usher in a new era of gritty, pared-down movies.

These days, instead of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the audience and hoping some of it scares them, filmmakers are working on a relatively microscopic scale, making horror movies like The Witch and Green Room, and audiences seem to dig them.

But then again, another Resident Evil movie will hit theaters next January. So maybe nu-horror isn't dead.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

If it's true that, as Christopher Booker wrote, there are only seven plots reiterated throughout fiction, it should come as no surprise that every year's literary crop brings a fresh spate of retold myths, folktales, and classics. From Wide Sargasso Sea to West Side Story to Clueless, great retellings have become beloved in their own right, filtering timeless themes through contemporary sensibilities. (There are, of course, occasional missteps on this path—the less said about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the better.) Revisiting a story gives us an opportunity to explore universal experiences from the perspective of those who weren't represented in the original, and nowhere is this more apparent than in today's generation of young writers and artists bringing overt queerness into the literary canon.

I've always loved anything that puts an original twist on a well-known story. As an adolescent, I devoured the feminist, sometimes queer, fairy tales of Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch and wished there were more books like it. In the last few years, interest in queering the classics seems to be gathering momentum with books like Malinda Lo's Ash, in which a Cinderella-esque character chooses a huntress over a prince; former VICE contributor Sara Benincasa's Great, an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, where both Gatsby and the object of her affection are girls; and Sassafras Lowrey's Lost Boi, a Peter Pan story about queer and trans street kids.

Queer retellings aren't limited to the written word, either. In June, Lifetime remade its own original movie Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, this time featuring lesbian vampires. Even more recently, the band It Was Romance debuted the video for "Hooking Up with Girls," which visually echoes every shot in Fiona Apple's iconic "Criminal" video. At this point, it's safe to say that queer retellings are mainstream, and more will certainly be forthcoming. (Next month, Manifold Press will release A Certain Persuasion: Modern LGBTQ+ Fiction Inspired by Jane Austen's Novels.) Any story about forbidden love is especially easy to queer, but just about any plot can be reworked to suit LGBTQ characters and audiences.

Of course, queer retellings are only a small facet of a larger movement toward LGBTQ representation and visibility in every corner of art and culture, but they're a crucial one. We'll never stop telling new stories and exploring underrepresented aspects of the human experience, but retelling old stories from a queer point of view adds something unique: the recognition that the stories that connect us across cultures and generations belong to all of us, LGBTQ people included. Lane Moore, the singer/songwriter behind It Was Romance and director of their video paying homage to "Criminal," says her goal was to "normalize queer culture because to me, it's all the same. I just love the idea of people all starting to see that we're more alike than we think, because that helps people become more compassionate with each other, and oftentimes feel less alone." By elaborating on the canon in this way, LGBTQ writers carve out a space for themselves—and for queer readers.

We'll never stop telling new stories and exploring underrepresented aspects of the human experience, but retelling old stories from a queer point of view adds something unique.

Robin Talley's novel As I Descended, released in September, tells an all-too-familiar story of potential outmatched by destructive ambition. It's recognizable as Macbeth, but the antihero this time is a bisexual teenager named Maria, nudged along the path toward success and then disaster by her closeted girlfriend Lily. Just as her Scottish predecessor struggles to navigate between his goals and his morals, Maria is torn between her desperation for a coveted scholarship and what she knows is right. Lily has her own agenda, which is intimately connected to her fear of the consequences should anyone find out that she's gay.

The plot of As I Descended both hinges on the characters' queerness and transcends it—there's nothing about the book that would be inaccessible to a straight reader, but same-sex romance is an inextricable part of its plot. In a literary environment where LGBTQ representation is still catching up from centuries of erasure, it's refreshing to see a queer protagonist like Maria, not a stereotype nor a trope but a deeply flawed, complicated person battling conflicting desires. When Maria gives in to her worst impulses, it's not a validation of homophobic stereotypes but an illustration of what could happen to any desperate person in a moment of weakness. Worth noting, too, is the fact that the Macduff stand-in who threatens to foil Maria's plans is also gay; no single character in As I Descended must bear the burden of representing all LGBTQ people.

Talley says that writing classics from a queer perspective shows readers "that there's nothing inherently 'straight' (and for that matter, nothing inherently male, white, or Christian, etc.) about the stories that we think of as defining our culture." While straight, white, and male is overwhelmingly the profile of literary characters typically deemed "universal," As I Descended proves that a bisexual Latina student makes an equally compelling and relatable lead.

For Sara Benincasa, author of Great, turning Jay Gatsby into a teenage girl with a borderline obsessive crush on her childhood best friend was not just a question of offering a relatable character to queer readers, but of making the story more real. She says, "For stories to be authentic, they must include LGBTQ folks, because we're everywhere. We're in every town, every school, every gym, every grocery store, every club... So why shouldn't we be in stories?"

As a queer writer and reader, and as someone endlessly fascinated by the ways stories evolve across time and distance, the growing popularity of queer retellings inspires and delights me. Writers and artists like Talley, Moore, and Benincasa help readers to understand that not only are LGBTQ people part of the story now, but that in fact, we always have been.

Follow Lindsay King-Miller on Twitter.

These reviews appear in the upcoming November issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

ROLLING BLACKOUTS
Sarah Glidden
Drawn & Quarterly

This masterful new book of graphic nonfiction—equal parts reportage, personal narrative, and history lesson—follows Sarah Glidden's two months reporting on the ongoing refugee crisis in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. With her are journalist friends Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville, as well as the latter's childhood friend Dan O'Brien, an ex-Marine whose presence, though rooted in an attempt to better understand the people and the countries they visit, creates a persistent tension with the journalists' subjects and even with the journalists themselves.

Though Rolling Blackouts takes place in 2010, the events documented are depressingly current. The book, which takes its name from the power shortages that Glidden notices while in Iraq, effortlessly and poignantly tells the under-heard stories of the displaced and traumatized—many of whom have been betrayed by the American government in one way or another—while also depicting the logistical maneuvering and ethical gray areas underlying any journalistic endeavor.

One memorable story is that of Sam Malkandi, a middle-aged Iraqi Kurd, who deserts during the Iran-Iraq War, spending the next 20 years as a refugee in Iran, Pakistan, and Texas. He finally makes a home with his wife and two children in Seattle, only to find himself named in the 9/11 Commission Report for giving his mailing address to a man he meets at the local mall. Eventually, he's questioned by the authorities, detained for five years, and deported to a Kurdish city in Iraq without ever being convicted of a crime. Malkandi's story flummoxes the crew, who, through patient interviews and court documents, try to piece together the real story of how this affable suburban dad came to be an unwitting accomplice, two degrees removed from a high-level al Qaeda operative and bin Laden associate.

"I've reported a lot of stories on deportation," the journalist Sarah says to the group as they discuss Malkandi's plight. "Every one of them would break your heart. And the hardest part is how there's nothing you can do except tell the story and hope that one day the tides turn."—JAMES YEH

VALIANT GENTLEMEN
Sabina Murray
Grove Atlantic

Early in Valiant Gentlemen, Sabina Murray's latest novel, a man named Casement draws a picture of a man named Ward. Ward quibbles with the image. "That's the problem with you, Casement," he says. "You're a romantic, always making things up." "One of many, I'm sure," says Casement.

It's a nice scene, elegantly composed, and one that gestures—perhaps too cutely—at the novel's premise: to lean on history, but to shape it with a romantic hand.

We know very little about Ward and Casement. We know Casement is 22. We know Ward is good with languages, and that he is tall. We also know they're friends. On the whole it is just the two of them, Casement and Ward, in a place called Matadi, in September 1886.

In real life, Ward was Herbert Ward: sculptor, writer, and eventual British officer. Casement was Roger Casement: poet, diplomat, and eventual Irish revolutionary martyr. Though friends in their early years, the two men would end up on opposite sides in the Great War: Ward hauling casualties with the British Ambulance Committee, Casement finagling German support for an Irish revolution. For the full Casement treatment, readers can go elsewhere—his pioneering human rights work, his role in the Easter Uprising, and his legacy as a gay touchstone have been covered in countless biographies, and in Mario Vargas Llosa's unexpectedly exhaustive The Dream of the Celt (2012). What Murray's novel does very well is re-create the surprise and fascination of these men's lives without really needing all the information. Most particularly, it re-creates their friendship. And in doing so it provides the most successful account of famous men on fictionalized adventures since Measuring the World, Daniel Kehlmann's wry, brilliant account of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt's bisecting careers.

"Casement and Ward," Murray tells us, "are company men," once employed by the Belgian International Association of the Congo, now part of the English Sanford Expedition. Their work involves, primarily, contracting and orchestrating native porters to carry supplies. In this respect, the early chapters of Valiant Gentlemen probably constitute the world's most high-stakes novel of logistics. Take the example of the Florida paddle steamer, which Ward and Casement will need to break into pieces and convey up "the waterfalls and cataracts and currents" of the Congo.

Although Valiant Gentlemen is a novel of friendship, its principal characters are not, after the first chapter, often in the same place. The men carry on with their logistics, but for very different causes. H.M. Stanley, of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" fame, recruits Ward for a doomed expedition to rescue the governor of Equatoria. Meanwhile, Casement is hired out by Baptist missionaries. "The missionaries want to create God's kingdom on Earth and seem to have decided that God's kingdom is in Suffolk—or some such place—and so the Congo will be Suffolked, one skirt-wearing woman at a time."

The great tension of the novel is that Casement is part of an exploited people (Irish) helping his exploiters (British) to corral more exploitees (various African tribes). While Murray's work—including Tales of the New World and A Carnivore's Inquiry—is often described with the weak catchall "historical fiction," it is more nearly about the tensions of colonization. Casement knows what it means to be Suffolked because he has been Suffolked himself. Ward, the proper English son, will never really know, and it is the beginning of the distance between them.

What does it mean to be an English gentleman? Ward, we are told, "is not a gentleman, never wanted to be." He left England hoping to be a sailor, an artist; for some time, he was a wire walker in an Australian circus—toeing the line, in more ways than one, between gentility and freedom. Casement, for his part, feels divided into at least two selves, the valiant and the gentleman. "One Casement hunts elephants through the jungle. One Casement watches osprey circle," a civilized man back in County Antrim. The third Casement loves Ward deeply and will never say it.

After their separation, Casement and Ward grow increasingly apart. Casement, perpetual bachelor, carries on porting; Ward, delivering talks on cannibalism and illustrating adventure stories for Boy's Own Paper, becomes a parody of his African self. En route to an American lecture tour, Ward meets heiress Sarita Sanford. Marriage follows, and a string of little Wards. "Herbert and I," Sarita laments, a few years into the marriage, "have become so..." "Wealthy?" Casement suggests. "Boring." Casement becomes a diplomat, files reports on human rights atrocities in the Orange Free State, is knighted. Ward goes bald.

There are more than 30 years to cover, and the novel dashes through them, pausing only for quick reaction shots from our friends: "I don't think women voting is such a bad thing," Sarita says, as the issue arises, "but we're all so busy that we don't have time to read the papers." And there are hasty cameos by late Victorian notables: Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Titanic.

By May 1914, Casement's engaged in another kind of porter's work, an old logistical challenge come back to bite him: acquiring weapons, German-made, for the Irish Volunteers. "How can Casement reconcile his life of seeking peaceful means with organizing the purchase of weapons?" It's true that Casement has had 30 years' experience, by now, in reconciling his various Casements. But in this particular case, it won't end well—not for Casement, and not for his and Ward's friendship.

A gentleman, it turns out, is the kind of man who can stand ringside during a boxing match, or cheer on (with similar hoots) the First World War. And in this respect, Casement's refusal to condone exploitation of any kind makes for an instructive difference. It's not because he's a gentleman. It's because he's valiant. —JAMIE FISHER

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL
Luis Buñuel
Criterion

In Luis Buñuel's absurdist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel, upper-class dinner guests find themselves mysteriously stuck in a sitting room in their host's mansion. Days, and possibly weeks, go by, and still the guests can't leave the room. Abandoned by the servants, desperate for food, they become increasingly selfish and combative. Viewers are bound to ask: "What's the reason for the guests' imprisonment?" The only plausible answer is, "Everything." As the film, originally released in 1962 and now available on Blu-ray, goes on, we realize that the characters' previously cushy lives were built on cruelty, vanity, and greed. Their rigid class distinctions, false religious piety, sexual aggression, oppression of children, spouses, and siblings—all reveal themselves to derive from the most primitive and idiotic impulses. The actress Silvia Pinal, who plays one of the guests, suggested that Buñuel invented reality television when he made The Exterminating Angel, and it's hard not to see the film, with its savage and gleeful presentation of human pettiness, as a precursor to early reality shows like Real World and Big Brother. Watching the movie, one wonders, Why do I enjoy this so much? And then, I'm as bad as them, aren't I? —ANDREW KATZENSTEIN

CRASHING THE PARTY
Scott Savitt
Soft Skull Press

Crashing the Party, a new memoir by Scott Savitt, the in-house Chinese translator of the New York Times, describes the time he spent as one of the first American exchange students in China during the turbulent 1980s. After graduating, Savitt lived there for nearly two decades, first working as a reporter, and later founding an underground newspaper that ultimately led to his imprisonment and brutalization by the Chinese government. A rock 'n' roll subplot lightens the mood a bit, showing what can happen when a rebellious Western subculture meets a repressive post-Mao society—the birth of a colorful underground music scene complete with Beatles cover bands stalked by government censors. Savitt provides a frontline view of student protests, government crackdowns, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, which he navigates on motorbike, documenting the wall of tanks and splintered bodies in stark, bloody terms. And though he variously frets about the state of his love life and enjoys career successes, his own emotions generally take a backseat to the turmoil around him, even as we see him wracked with guilt over the disappearance and alleged suicide of a colleague turned lover or struggling with the loss of a high school girlfriend. —KIM KELLY

HUBRIS
Oren Ambarchi
Editions Mego

The first time I saw the Australian avant-garde composer Oren Ambarchi perform live, I thought my chest might cave in. Sitting in a dark theater in North Carolina, he wrung wrenching noise out a guitar and a smattering of electronics, the louder moments of which caused both the chair I was on and the flesh and bones surrounding my sternum to vibrate uncontrollably—an experience as unsettling as it was moving. On Hubris, his latest album for the hallowed Austrian experimental label Editions Mego, he seems to have mellowed out a bit, aiming for a less precarious sort of body-shaking—the constant lurch of the dance floor. The album's three pieces—one of which stretches over 20 minutes, another over 16—are composed of locomotive guitars, mechanistically programmed electronics (in part provided by techno mad scientist Ricardo Villalobos), and jittery live percussion work, so at least in its component parts, it can seem something like club music. But like most of Ambarchi's work, the longer you listen, the more you get caught up in the constant momentum of the whole thing—the fragmented precariousness that can feel like being in the backseat of a car that's moving just a little too fast for you to get comfortable. Some dance music aims to evoke the ecstasy of a sweaty nightclub, but Hubris aims for the paranoid underbelly: the anxiety that comes from spending so much time in dark, cramped spaces. —COLIN JOYCE

CERTAIN WOMEN
Kelly Reichardt
filmscience

In her first five movies, all but one of which took place in Oregon, the American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt focused on small groups of characters: a band of environmental activists (Night Moves), a 19th-century wagon party (Meek's Cutoff), or a drifter and her dog (Wendy and Lucy). Her new film, which she adapted from several short stories by Maile Meloy, is a departure: three tangentially linked stories, set in small-town Montana, about four beleaguered women. Laura (Laura Dern) is a Livingston-based lawyer drawn into the orbit of a disgruntled male client. Gina (Michelle Williams) drifts away from her husband—who is also Laura's occasional lover—as they contrive to build a house. And Beth (Kristen Stewart), who works at a second law firm in Livingston, becomes the object of an unspoken but profoundly intense crush on the part of a lonely female ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) when she starts teaching night classes in a tiny town hours away. The first two stories are sensitive and subtle, but it's the quiet, spacious moments that fill the third episode—a series of late-night diner rendezvous, a nocturnal horseback ride by the side of a highway—that show off one of Reichardt's great powers as a director: her unerring feeling for the climate and mood of American places the movies tend to neglect. —MAX NELSON

Remember when no one could shut up about the music world's two biggest "it" couples, Rihanna and Drake, and Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston? Alas love is fickle, and so are pop culture consumers, which is probably why people are obsessed with the possibility that Taylor and Drake are having a cozy winter rebound romance.

During the latest episode of VICELAND's Desus & Mero, the hosts discussed the #Trake (#Draylor?) dating rumors. Drake apparently took Swift to meet his mom, and that's totally a sign of true love, right?

But even if these rumors are true, both of them are likely already writing fire tracks about their breakup before their so-called relationship actually begins, since this is Taylor Swift and Drake we're talking about.

Watch tonight's episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

This post originally appeared on the Trace.

Justin Duckett works on the front lines of Memphis's gun violence epidemic. He is a firefighter and a paramedic in Orange Mound, one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city.

Increasingly, when he responds to a medical call, it is to treat a gunshot wound victim. There have been 189 homicides in Memphis so far this year, an uptick of 17 percent over the same period last year. The Memphis Fire Department has responded to more than 480 gunshot calls.

In his nine years on the job, the 31-year-old Memphis native estimates he's attended to hundreds of shooting victims.

Duckett practices a kind of battlefield medicine: After racing to the scene, either in a fire truck or ambulance, his priority is to keep gunshot patients from bleeding to death until he can get them to a hospital. The work is high-stress, fast-paced, and disturbing. He sees things that he can't forget. Some days, he gets home and finds specks of blood from victims still on his wristwatch, or on a pen he'd been writing with earlier.

Duckett spoke with the The Trace about trying to save people struck by gunfire, and how he copes with the emotional strain of his job.

Describe what happens when you get a call for a shooting.
Justin Duckett: The first thing we think about with any call is our own safety. We ask dispatch, "Hey, are police there?" If we pull up and one of us gets shot, now you have two patients and still nobody to help. We use judgment, though. If a six-year-old kid just got shot, and I feel like I can get that kid outta there, I'm going to.

Once I get to the patient, my first question is always, "What happened?" Just from the first few words I can get a good idea of their breathing and mental state. While I'm getting their story, I'm getting their clothes off, I'm looking to see where the holes are. I'm also looking for bleeding. If the patient is losing blood at a high rate, I need to jump straight to controlling this blood loss. As a paramedic, I can always intubate you and breathe for you. But I can't give you blood.

If the bullet hit an extremity, we'll apply pressure. We might have to apply a tourniquet, or an iTClamp, which looks like something out of a horror movie. It's like a hair-clip with the teeth, except it's all needles. If a gunshot has blown open a hole in your leg, now you are missing tissue and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's bleeding. The iTClamp will pull all that tissue together. At that point, we're down to a last-ditch effort.

Trauma calls, or gunshot calls, are the quickest kinds of medical calls. Gunshots are really just the most barbaric form of pre-hospital medicine that we do.

Where is the deadliest place on the body to be shot?
With gunshots, a little bitty hole the size of a dime can create the damage the size of a cantaloupe on the inside. You can't even begin to understand what's bleeding—or what's seconds away from bleeding. A person may have been lying there long enough that they obstructed something that was bleeding, and as soon as you start moving them around, boom, that little nicked artery opens up.

The number one thing there's no coming back from is getting shot in the center of the chest, especially in the heart. And if you're hit in the lungs and they can't hold air, you suffocate to death. Or if they fill up with blood, you drown to death. The head's tricky because the body is so resilient, it'll still try to force you to breathe and try to keep the heart pumping.

Is there a kind of shooting you dread responding to?
A child. Before we even get out of that station, you can tell everybody's thinking, I hope when we pull up, it's not what they said it is.

Most of our training is based off an adult. With a child, everything you do is magnified. A child only has so much blood circulating compared to a full-sized adult. The difference between that child bleeding to death and possibly having a chance to live is seconds.

Whereas a doctor can say, "This person weighs 55 kilos, we estimate he's lost this much blood," we're on the street. I don't get the luxury of knowing exactly how much a person weighs or how much fluid they need to replace the volume of blood loss, because the heart needs something to pump. I get one quick guesstimation.

Is there a particular call that sticks with you?
Every fireman has a couple they never forget. One of mine came four or five years ago, on my first day at Station 16. There were three children, and the oldest called their grandmother and told her, "My parents are lying here in the living room and they're not talking. They won't wake up." Then grandma called 9-1-1.

When we walked in, the back door was kicked in. There were bullet holes everywhere. Blood everywhere. The shooting happened at some point during the night, and nothing more could be done for the parents. But you got three little ones that don't understand what's going on—a seven-year-old and a four-year-old and a two-year-old asking when their mommy's going to wake up.

The Trace has reported on how mistrust between law enforcement and residents can perpetuate the cycle of violence. Do you notice this dynamic in your work, and does it ever affect your ability to reach gunshot victims in time to save them?
As a fireman or paramedic, you're generally accepted better than police. When somebody sees the big fire truck, or the ambulance with all the lights, they automatically associate it with help.

But if the ambulance comes, the police are going to come as well. And so people will avoid calling if they can. They don't want to tell you who did this to them, because they're scared that they might do it to them again or might do it to their family.

The one that completely messes your night up is when you've been running all night on the unit, you finally get back to the station, and you think, Whew, I'm going to sit down for a second. Then you hear Boom-boom-boom on the door. You look outside, you see a car pulling off, and a body lying right there in front of your station.

As a paramedic, you see a lot of horrific things on a regular basis. How do you cope with the stress and sadness of the work?
After any bad call we go through a mandatory debriefing, where we talk about what happened and get it off our chests. But very rarely will a fireman just come to you and say, "Hey man, that last call really bothered me." It ain't gonna happen. You're better off looking for the tooth fairy. It's that alpha-male, we're the strongest, best, baddest-in-the-land mentality.

Paramedics are said to have higher rates of divorce, suicide, and alcohol abuse. Is it the stuff that we see? Or is it because we all share the same personality, we all share the same faults?

Honestly though, the thing that truly makes you move on, is the other guys. We wake up together, eat together, go to calls together. We're around each other so much that we can tell, "Hey man, something's not right." Like, I love sweet tea. If we come off a jacked-up call, my lieutenant might go in and put on a pot of tea. That's what I feel helps better than any formal program.

What's the one thing from your years as a paramedic you wish you could forget?
I wish I could erase the smell of iron. That weird metallic-y smell. You can almost taste it.

Sometimes I'll be working on my bikes, or bite down on one of those old forks, and it automatically triggers: Bad. It's the smell you get when you walk into a room covered in blood.

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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Devin Morningstar made a number of disturbing allegations in a police interrogation video. Photo via Facebook.

Marissa Shephard made headlines in the early part of 2016 by evading police for a practically unheard-of 10 weeks during a nationwide manhunt as one suspect in what police called an "extremely violent" murder of a Moncton teenager.

She was eventually arrested on March 1 outside a motel in the city and charged, alongside Devin Morningstar and Tyler Noel—both arrested earlier—with first degree murder in the death of Baylee Wylie.

According to police interrogation videos played at the murder trial of Devin Morningstar on Monday, Shephard was in the basement of a Moncton triplex in mid-December, with the three guys, all of whom were under 20. Morningstar said the four were smoking crack and having a disagreement about who slept with who.

Morningstar told Codiac RCMP he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, the CBC reported. Morningstar recalled sleeping with Shephard, and then finding out the next day that Noel and Wylie also hooked up.

Marissa Shephard evaded police for 10 weeks. Photo via Facebook.

The claim that Wylie had also hooked up with Morningstar apparently escalated into a dispute, and Wylie threatened to call the cops. Both Noel and Morningstar were dealing drugs at the time, said Morningstar, and Noel also had a gun hidden under a couch.

By Morningstar's account to police, Noel and Shephard pitched a plan to frame Wylie for drug possession. This allegedly involved Shephard knocking Wylie over the head with a glass bong, Noel beating him bloody, and the two covering his face and body in Saran wrap. Morningstar claimed he heard Noel say "this is what happens to rats."

Morningstar said they then briefly freed Wylie from the Saran wrap, until Noel pulled Morningstar aside to say "this kid can't leave this house." In tears, Morningstar described the other two stabbing Wylie simultaneously. Morningstar said he also stabbed Wylie three times, to prove he was "solid" to Noel.

All told, Morningstar said it took an hour and a half for Wylie to die. He said he then poured bleach on the body and claimed Noel and Shephard set fire to the building.

The trial has heard that Wylie had about 200 wounds to his body.

Morningstar's trial resumes today. Noel and Shephard will face first-degree murder charges in 2017 at the earliest.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Brazilian military police escorting protesters holding signs comparing Hillary Clinton to Brazil's former president Dilma Roussef. All photos by Jardiel Carvalho/ R.U.A. Foto Coletivo

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

Last Saturday, about 20 supporters of Donald Trump took to the streets of São Paulo to show their support for the Republican presidential nominee. These were Brazilians who presumably couldn't vote for Trump, but they were American patriots nonetheless—when they gathered in Paulista Avenue, they kicked the day off with a rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner." Some demonstrators held Trump signs and placards accusing Hillary Clinton of being the North American version of Dilma Roussef (the former Brazilian president who was impeached last August); others wore shirts printed with the face of Brazilian far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro.

These Trumpistas were outnumbered by journalists, and the made-for-the-cameras action continued peacefully until about 3 PM, when an anti-fascist group arrived. The two opposing demonstrations started yelling at each other, and that was the prelude to some physical confrontations. After things got heated, police officers arrested four anti-Trump protesters, who were released right after being taken to the station.

See more photos of the rally below.