“I Thought He was Going to Eat my Lips” [The Best of Online Writing I]

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Not all political stories come flagged and armoured with a capital ‘P’. Here’s an indulgence: “Kiss of the Scorpion Woman”, without doubt one of our favourite features in years.

Oral sex. Paint by numbers. Prison marriage. Sex changes. Cooking. Castration. Crack. Cotton Panties. New York Poster Esther Haynes wrote a stunning story about the love affair between copycat Zodiac Killer Eddie Seda and pre-op transsexual/former gang member Synthia-China in Attica (gaol). Esther was meant to be interviewing another slashie, club kid/killer Michael Alig, but her nose got the better of her.

Grotesquely illuminating, this story is a dream come true. The best features often have tabloid content, silently spraying out their sweet-smelling political poison.

Download, Print, Duplicate, and then Staple it into the paper-corpses of New Weekly, People, and Who magazine, scattered about at your local Hairdresser or Dental Clinic. Let people know that there’s some quality, illuminating, trash available.

 Take the intro:

Heriberto “Eddie” Seda waited 35 years to have his first romantic kiss. It happened last spring, when Eddie pressed his mouth through the three-inch-wide space between the prison bars and found fellow Attica inmate Synthia-China Blast, a preop male-to-female transsexual, No. 97A0308.

It was weird, I thought he was going to eat my lips,” Synthia recalls. “I’d read a lot of books about serial killers, and I didn’t trust him, like he might bite my face off or something.” But instead, Eddie Seda, known as New York’s copycat Zodiac Killer, started shaking. “I felt like I was 11 and having my first kiss with a bowl of Jell-O, because he didn’t know how to kiss for nothing. He was a virgin,” adds Synthia, 29. Then she laughs. “Let’s just say he’s a pro now.

Hooked. Completely sucked in by off-the-charts tabloid dialogue. And facts galore too.

Esther even gets all meta-media, and bothers to pick up the lingo:

When Eddie Seda walks over to my assigned spot, I’m surprised at how handsome he is, with short black hair, innocent-looking eyes, and a shy smile that never leaves his face. He was voted “most fuckable perp” by a group of female journalists who covered his arrest in 1996.

Character establishment is deft:

Bad boys turned on Synthia, who was known as a “biker bitch” with countless tattoos, including a scorpion covering the right side of her face.

And hooks and surprises left, right and center:

[Synthia] claims that before she met Eddie, she’d had sex with some of the most notorious rapists and killers in the New York prison system. “It seems that my only attractions are to society’s sickest and most twisted lowlifes,” she wrote in a letter to me. “I’m actually hoping to be incarcerated with the Son of Sam so I can sleep with him while awaiting my sex-change outcome in the courts.” And that fetish suits Eddie just fine: “I liked that she was excited by my murders. It was a little plus for us. She used to put the zodiac sign all over her cell as a tribute to me. I’d see one and say, ‘Is that a new one?’ And she’d say yes. It flattered me.

Kudos Esther Haynes: you’ve given us all hope.

Want more features like this? You could harass Fairfax but it would probably lead to naught. And The Monthly is way too busy publishing “important features”, like “Donald Bradman at 100″,to waste their time on brilliantly written, intelligent fluff like this.

A painting-by-numbers Eddie Seda, signed for Synthia (Photo: Synthia-China Blast. Courtesy The New York Post)

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Tags: Donald Bradman, Esther Haynes, New Weekly, The Age, The Monthly, The New York Post, Transsexual, Zodiac Killer