Chapter 6
Finally, the Fall
The screen flickered, casting a sickly blue light across the detritus-strewn room. Another image, another face robbed of innocence, another click. I cannot go on like this. The words echoed in my head, a hollow mantra recited for years, each repetition weaker than the last. Worcester. Back to Worcester. “Luxury apartment,” the owners of The Sole Proprietor had called it. More like a gilded cage built on a foundation of shame. In comparison, Cape Cod was cleaner, brighter, but the darkness followed me, clung to me like a second skin.

Each week, another name, another arrest. The headlines screamed from my laptop screen, the front pages of the local dailies, the Worcester Sun, Worcester Telegram – worcester.ma, the digital home of the Worcester Sun, a startup news organization dedicated to providing the best journalism in Worcester (also the worst panic attacks) – faces blurred, crimes detailed in sterile legalese. Worcester Police cracking down. “Operation Clipped Wings”: A Task Force specially assembled, using undercover agents, intelligence agents, operatives, and what have you.

Was I next? No, I was already gone, broken long ago. The anticipation was a strange cocktail of terror and relief. Like a prisoner awaiting execution, I both dreaded and yearned for the finality.

“Revenge Porn”

“Mr. Jacobucci, you are under arrest for the illegal possession, selling…”

“I didn’t sell…”

“Did anyone read this pervert his Miranda?”

They read me the Miranda. “… You have the right to remain silent…”

Then one of the officers, the same one, started to talk again: “For distributing any material depicting a child under eighteen in a sexual manner, you could face serious federal charges of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. Section 2252. Also, for transporting child porn using interstate commerce, by computer or mail, and visual depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”

“What in Jesus’s name?” My infantile mind protested, grumbled, despite reality opening that day like those portals in films today. I don’t watch much or any TV anymore, but whenever I do, it has a goddamed portal taking people to their former or later selves.

I wish I could travel in time and stop before I started that fateful day at the drive-in.

Christ, this room. A monument to my decay. Mountains of pizza boxes, overflowing ashtrays, clothes festering in the corner like forgotten corpses. A biohazard zone. Fitting, really. My mind was just as toxic, a swirling vortex of filth and despair. How could anyone live like this? How could I live like this? But here I was, steeped in squalor, the architect of my own personal, customized hell, full of grown-up kids with smoldering iron rods in their hands… I think I have an idea where those pokers were meant to go.

Sleep was a distant memory. The guilt gnawed; the images burned behind my eyelids. Flashes of innocence corrupted, stolen. I was a consumer, a participant in this vile trade. And I couldn’t stop. The shame was a constant companion, whispering accusations in the dead of night. Odium. Opprobrium. These weren’t just words; they were the nails in my coffin.

Then came December. Recklessness, born of despair. ‘Winnie’s Poop’. A stupid, childish handle on a chat room steeped in the darkest depravity. I shared the unspeakable, the visuals that made my stomach churn even as they fueled my addiction. A faceless exchange in the dead of cyberspace. Only it wasn’t faceless, was it? It was watched, recorded, cataloged, and surveilled with the Hubble; it seems.

‘Winnie’s Poop’. God, the irony. An undercover cop. Part of “Operation Clipped Wings”. A savior, or a destroyer? Maybe both.

Relief. That’s what I felt. A perverse sense of liberation. Finally, it was out of my hands. No more internal battles, no more desperate promises broken before they were even uttered. Let the authorities take over. Let them punish me. Let them…fix me?

The water was boiling; I was in the pot. The kettle shook like a man with Parkinson’s.

The stool wobbled. I adjusted the noose, the rope rough against my skin. This was it. The end. A final, desperate act of self-flagellation. I couldn’t cleanse the filth within, but maybe I could erase the vessel that contained it.

“I cannot go on like this.” The words were barely a whisper, lost in the dissonant clamor of my racing heart. A montage of faces flashed before my eyes – my mother, her disappointed gaze, my father, his silent disapproval (amenity for even more), the innocent children whose images haunted my waking hours.

Then, a sound. A knock.

Not a gentle rap, but a forceful, insistent pounding. Like a battering ram against the gates of my personal firewall-hell. My heart leaped into my throat. They were here.

“Worcester Police! Open up!”

My feet hit the floor. The stool clattered to the side. The noose swung gently, a macabre pendulum marking the passage of my final moments of freedom.

It has precedents in my life. I always knew that it would come one day. I have always prepared myself for a day like this. A day to answer for the choices and decisions in my life.

On my feet, instinct battling reason. Run? Hide? Where could I go? The walls were closing in, the room shrinking, suffocating. There was nowhere to escape.

There was a heavy thud as the door splintered under the force of their entry.

I froze.

“Look at that, just when I finally managed to balance on the stool with a noose around my neck, the Worcester Police Squad, Special Task Force “Operation Clipped Wings” was right there, in my face and all over me.”

The room was flooded with uniforms, faces grim, eyes scanning. A whirlwind of shouting, orders barked with military precision. I was pulled from the wreckage of my suicide attempt, hauled into the harsh light of reality.

“Oh, first of all. They just leave you there, right?”

Three years’ probation. Mandatory treatment. Rehabilitation. They seemed to work. Ten years clean. A decade. By 2017, it would be a full ten years.

Nine days before Christmas. Nine days before, I was supposed to become an occupant at the cold storage at either Mercadante Funeral Home & Chapel or Rice Funeral Home, if they were kind. Else, I’d be thrown into a shallow, unmarked (only by a random number) grave, HMP Long Lartin’s own graveyard, where a dead inmate is placed.

They say it never happens. That people like me are just fantasizing, exaggerating. Or that we’re sick, masochistic, deserving of whatever comes our way. That we’re being manipulated, led astray by some twisted swaggerer. Or worse, that we bring it on ourselves, revel in the attention.

Just a little kitty party

But they don’t understand. They can’t understand the relentless pull, the insatiable hunger, the crippling despair. The slow, agonizing death of the soul.

There are levels and layers of denial. Several people would say that if you ever tried telling this ‘Somebody’s’ story, a lot, and I mean a lot of people say that kinda thing “never happens.” But this is straight from a deviant horse’s mouth.

It was just natural for people to completely disbelieve it then. Now, I guess, the deep state, Hollywood grooming, and the rise in CSAM activities have opened many people’s eyes to something so preposterous and outrageous. During interrogation, they say you’re deluded. Or that you like masochism and sadism, it’s very common. They accuse you of fantasizing, exaggerating. Or they accuse you of being manipulative. And being like, “What is it that you really want from all this? What is this all about? Are you sick?”

Well, they also do not understand how the law of attraction works, or does not work, in your sick head.

“I cannot go on like this.” before clicking a button with a thumbnail of an underage boy with what looks like condensed milk on his innocent face…

The incident that happened on the Internet had a curve; three weeks before, I planned on offing myself on Christmas Day (Merry Christmas – I guess no one wants to sit in my lap anymore when I dress up as fucking Santa Claus and sit at the atrium of a popular mall here in Worcester). It took the Police Task Force a week to get to me after that clickbait private room exchange.

And then, forgetting. Moving on. That’s what they want. That’s what everyone tells you to do.

Fuck that.

Every time I passed a mirror, a window, or a reflective surface, I saw the face of a monster.

The floorboards creaked under the weight of the officers as they approached. I stared at the bare wall, its peeling paint a testament to my neglect. This was it. The culmination of years of self-destruction. The moment of reckoning.

A wave of nausea washed over me. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for the inevitable.

They knew I was here. They’d been watching me. Waiting for me to slip up.

Then, the knock. Louder this time, more insistent. Impatient.

As I closed my eyes, I thought of Christmas, nine days away. And the police. The police kept knocking on my apartment door.

The End