Whips-n-Chains
Chi
Excerpt from the ZeroZeroZero book regarding that monologue:
The police officer told me that the young man, his informer, had heard the only lesson worth learning—that’s what he called it—and had recorded it on the sly. Not to betray anyone, but to be able to listen to it again. A lesson on how to be in the world. And he let the officer hear the whole thing; they listened together, sharing the young man’s earbuds......
“Now you have to write about it. Let’s see if somebody gets pissed off . . . which would mean that the young man’s telling the truth. If you write about it and nobody does anything, then either it’s just a load of crap from some B-grade actor, and our Chicano friend is making fools of us . . . or nobody believes the bullshyt you write.” He laughed.
I nodded without promising anything; I was just trying to understand the situation. Supposedly it was an old Italian boss talking to a group of Latinos, Italians, Italian Americans, Albanians, and former Kaibiles, the notorious Guatemalan elite soldiers.
At least, that’s what the young man said. No facts, statistics, or details. Not something you learn against your will; you just enter the room one way and you come out changed.
You’re still wearing the same clothes, have the same haircut, your beard is still the same length. No signs of being initiated, no cuts over your eyebrows, no broken nose, and you haven’t been brainwashed with sermons either.
You go in, and when you come out, at first glance you look exactly the same as when you were pushed through the door. But only on the outside. Inside you’re completely different.
They didn’t reveal the ultimate truth to you, they merely put a few things in their proper place. Things you hadn’t known how to use before, that you’d never had the courage to take in.
The police officer read me the transcription he’d made. They’d met in a room not far from where we were, seated in no particular order, randomly, not in a horseshoe like they do at ritual initiations.
Seated like they do in a club in some small town in southern Italy, or on Arthur Avenue in New York City, to watch the soccer game on TV. But there was no soccer game on TV in that room, and this was no gathering of friends.
They were all members of criminal organizations, of all different ranks. The old Italian gets up. They knew he was a man of honor, that he’d come to the United States after living in Canada for a long time.
He begins talking without even introducing himself; he doesn’t need to. He speaks a b*stard Italian, some dialect thrown in, mixed with English and Spanish.
I wanted to know his name, so I asked the police officer, trying to sound casual, as if it were a passing curiosity. He didn’t bother answering me. There were only the boss’s words.
Them folks who think they can get by with justice, with laws that are equal for everybody, with hard work, dignity, clean streets, with women same as men, it’s only a world of fags who think it’s okay to make fools of themselves. And everyone around them.
All that crap about a better world, leave it to them idiots. To the rich idiots who can afford such luxuries. The luxury of believing in a happy world, a just world. Rich people with guilty consciences, or with something to hide. Whoever rules just does it, and that’s that. Sure, he can say he rules for the good, for justice and liberty and all. But that’s just sissy stuff; leave all that to the rich fools. Who rules, rules. Period.
The police officer buried his nose in his notebook and started reading again.....
" The rules of the organization are the rules of life. Government laws are the rules of one side that wants to fukk the other side.
And we ain’t gonna let ourselves get fukked by nobody. There’s people who make money without taking any risks, and they’re always gonna be afraid of those who make money by risking everything. If you risk it all, you have it all, capish?
But if you think you gotta save yourself, or that you can do it without jail time, without fleeing, without going into hiding, then let me make it clear right from the start: you are not a man.
And if you’re not a man, you can leave this room right now, and don’t even hope to ever become one, ’cause you will never ever be a man of honor.
Crees en el amor? Love ends. Crees en tu corazón? Your heart stops. No? No love and no heart?
So, do you believe in coño, in p*ssy? Well, even pussies dry up after a while.
You believe in your wife? Soon as your money runs out, she’ll tell you you’re neglecting her.
You believe in your children? As soon as you stop giving them money they’ll say you don’t love them.
You believe in your mama? If you don’t nurse her, she’ll say you’re an ungrateful child.
Listen to what I’m tellin’ you. You need to live, vivir. You got to live for yourselves. It’s for yourselves that you need to know how to be respected, and how to show respect. La famiglia.
Respect the people who are useful to you and despise the ones who aren’t. The people who can give you something get your respect, and the ones who are useless lose it.
Somebody who wants something from you, doesn’t he respect you? Somebody who’s afraid of you? So what happens when you got nothing to give? When you got nothing left? When you’re no longer useful? Then you’re basura, rubbish. If you have nothing to give, then you’re nothing, nada, nulla
“So,” the police officer said, “I understood right then and there that the boss, this Italiano, was somebody who counts, who knows what life’s about. Really knows.
That Mexican kid couldn’t have come up with that speech on his own. The s%$c dropped out of school at sixteen; they fished him out of a gambling den in Barcelona.
And the way this guy talks, his Calabrian dialect, how could some actor or braggart ever invent that? If it weren’t for my wife’s grandmother I never would have understood a word of it.”
I’d heard dozens of speeches on Mafia moral philosophy—in penitents’ confessions and wiretappings. But this was different; it was like training for the soul.
"I’m talkin’ to you; I even like some of you. Some of you, I’d like to smash your face. But even if I like you the best, if you got more p*ssy or more money than me, I want you dead.
If one of you becomes my brother, and I make him my equal in the organization, then one thing is clear: He’s gonna try to fukk me over.
Don’t think a friend will be forever a friend. I’ll be killed by somebody I shared my food with, my sleep, everything. I’ll be killed by somebody I ate with, somebody who gave me shelter.
I don’t know who it’ll be or I’d already have eliminated him. But it’ll happen. And if he doesn’t kill me, he’ll betray me.
Rules are rules.
And rules are not laws. Laws are for cowards.
Rules are for men.
That’s why we have rules of honor. Rules of honor don’t tell you you have to be good, just, upright.
Rules of honor tell you how to rule.
What you have to do to handle people, money, power. Rules of honor tell you how to behave if you want to rule, if you want to fukk the guy above you, if you don’t want to be fukked by the guy below you.
There’s no sense explaining them. Rules of honor exist, period. They evolved on their own, on and through the blood of every man of honor. How do you choose?
Was that question for me?
I searched for the right answer. How can you choose, in a few seconds, a few minutes, hours, what you should do?
If you choose wrong, you’ll pay for it for years, for that quick decision. The rules are always there, but you got to know how to recognize them, you got to understand when they really count.
And then there’s God’s laws. God’s laws are contained in the rules. God’s laws—the real ones, though, not the ones they use to make poor fools tremble with fear. But remember this:
You can have all the rules of honor you want, but still, only one thing’s for certain. You’re a man only if you know deep down what your destiny is.
Poor fools grovel, because it’s easier. Men of honor know that everything dies, everything passes away, nothing lasts forever.
Journalists start out wanting to change the world and end up wanting to be editor in chief.
( Keep this in mind when criticizing these authors)
It’s easier to condition them than to corrupt them. Each one matters only for himself and for the Honored Society.
And the Honored Society says you matter only if you rule. You can choose how, later. You can rule with an iron fist or you can buy consensus.
By spilling blood or giving it. The Honored Society knows that every man is weak, depraved, vain. It knows that people don’t change; that’s why rules are everything.
Bonds of friendship are nothing without rules. Every problem has a solution, from your wife who leaves you to your group that splits up. The solution merely depends on how much you offer. If things go poorly, you merely offered too little. Don’t go looking for other explanations. It seemed like a university seminar for aspiring bosses. What was this?
You have to know who you want to be. If you rob, shoot, rape, deal drugs, you’ll make money for a while, but then they’ll take you and crush you.
You can do it. Sure, you can do it. But not for long, ’cause you don’t know what might happen to you; people will fear you only if you stick a pistol in their mouth. But as soon as you turn your back, what happens?
As soon as a job goes wrong? If you belong to the organization, you know there’s a rule for everything.
If you want to make money, there’s ways to do it; if you want to kill, there are motives and methods; if you want to get ahead, you can, but you have to earn respect, trust, you have to make yourself indispensable.
There’s even rules for if you want to change the rules.
Whatever you do outside the rules, you never know how it might end.
But whatever you do that follows the rules of honor, you always know exactly what it’s going to get you. And you know exactly how the people around you will react.
So if you want to be an ordinary man, just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to become a man of honor, you got to have rules.
And the difference between an ordinary man and a man of honor is that the man of honor always knows what’s happening, while the ordinary man gets screwed by chance, bad luck, or stupidity. Things happen to him.
But the man of honor knows what’s gonna happen, and he knows when.
You know exactly what belongs to you and what doesn’t; you know exactly how far you can push yourself, even if you want to push past every rule.
Everybody wants three things: power, p*ssy, and money. Even the judge when he condemns bad people, even the politicians, they want dinero and p*ssy and power, but they want to get it by showing they’re indispensable, defenders of the law or the poor or who knows what.
Everybody wants money, even though they go around saying they want something else, or doing things for other people.
The rules of the Honored Society are rules for controlling everybody. The Honored Society knows you can have money, p*ssy, and power, but it also knows that the man who’s capable of giving up everything is the one who decides everybody else’s fate.
Cocaine. That’s what cocaine is. All you can see, you can have it. Without cocaine, you’re nothing. With cocaine, you can be whoever you want. If you sniff cocaine, you screw yourself all on your own.
The organization gives you rules for moving up in the world. It gives you rules for killing and for how you’re gonna be killed.
You want to lead a normal life? You want to be worth nothing? Fine.
All you need to do is not see, not hear.
But remember this: In Mexico where you can do whatever you want, get high, fukk little girls, drive as fast as you like, the only ones who really rule are the ones who have rules.
If you do stupid stuff, you got no honor, and if you got no honor, you got no power. You’re just like everybody else.
The police officer pointed his finger at a particularly worn page of his notebook. “Look, look at this . . . he wanted to explain absolutely everything. How to live, not just how to be a mafioso. How to live.”
You work, a lot. You have some money, algo dinero. Maybe some beautiful women. But then they leave you, for somebody more handsome, with more dinero than you.
You might have a decent life—pretty unlikely—or a shytty life, like everybody else. But when you end up in jail, the ones on the outside, who think they’re clean, will insult you, but you will have ruled.
They’ll hate you, but you’ll have bought yourself everything good in life, everything you wanted. You’ll have the organization behind you. It might happen that you suffer some, and maybe they’ll even kill you.
The organization backs whoever’s strongest, obviously. You can climb mountains with rules of flesh, blood, and money.
But if you become weak, if you make a mistake, you’re fukked.
If you do good, you’ll be rewarded. If you make a bad alliance, you’re fukked; if you make a mistake in war, you’re fukked;
if you don’t know how to hold on to power, you’re fukked. But these wars are permitted, they’re allowed. They’re our wars.
You might win and you might lose. But on only one condition will you always lose, and in the most painful way possible: if you betray the organization.
Whoever tries to go against the Honored Society has no hope of surviving. You can run from the law but not from the organization.
You can even run from God, ’cause God can wait forever for the fugitive. But you can’t escape the organization.
If you betray it and run, if they screw you and you run, if you don’t respect the rules and you run, somebody’s gonna pay. They’ll come looking for you. They’ll go to your family, to your allies. Your name will be on the list forever. And nothing can ever erase it. Not time, not money. You’re fukked for all eternity, you and your descendants.
The police officer closed his notebook. “The kid, it was like he came out of a trance.”
“Now you have to write about it. Let’s see if somebody gets pissed off . . . which would mean that the young man’s telling the truth. If you write about it and nobody does anything, then either it’s just a load of crap from some B-grade actor, and our Chicano friend is making fools of us . . . or nobody believes the bullshyt you write.” He laughed.
I nodded without promising anything; I was just trying to understand the situation. Supposedly it was an old Italian boss talking to a group of Latinos, Italians, Italian Americans, Albanians, and former Kaibiles, the notorious Guatemalan elite soldiers.
At least, that’s what the young man said. No facts, statistics, or details. Not something you learn against your will; you just enter the room one way and you come out changed.
You’re still wearing the same clothes, have the same haircut, your beard is still the same length. No signs of being initiated, no cuts over your eyebrows, no broken nose, and you haven’t been brainwashed with sermons either.
You go in, and when you come out, at first glance you look exactly the same as when you were pushed through the door. But only on the outside. Inside you’re completely different.
They didn’t reveal the ultimate truth to you, they merely put a few things in their proper place. Things you hadn’t known how to use before, that you’d never had the courage to take in.
The police officer read me the transcription he’d made. They’d met in a room not far from where we were, seated in no particular order, randomly, not in a horseshoe like they do at ritual initiations.
Seated like they do in a club in some small town in southern Italy, or on Arthur Avenue in New York City, to watch the soccer game on TV. But there was no soccer game on TV in that room, and this was no gathering of friends.
They were all members of criminal organizations, of all different ranks. The old Italian gets up. They knew he was a man of honor, that he’d come to the United States after living in Canada for a long time.
He begins talking without even introducing himself; he doesn’t need to. He speaks a b*stard Italian, some dialect thrown in, mixed with English and Spanish.
I wanted to know his name, so I asked the police officer, trying to sound casual, as if it were a passing curiosity. He didn’t bother answering me. There were only the boss’s words.
Them folks who think they can get by with justice, with laws that are equal for everybody, with hard work, dignity, clean streets, with women same as men, it’s only a world of fags who think it’s okay to make fools of themselves. And everyone around them.
All that crap about a better world, leave it to them idiots. To the rich idiots who can afford such luxuries. The luxury of believing in a happy world, a just world. Rich people with guilty consciences, or with something to hide. Whoever rules just does it, and that’s that. Sure, he can say he rules for the good, for justice and liberty and all. But that’s just sissy stuff; leave all that to the rich fools. Who rules, rules. Period.
The police officer buried his nose in his notebook and started reading again.....
" The rules of the organization are the rules of life. Government laws are the rules of one side that wants to fukk the other side.
And we ain’t gonna let ourselves get fukked by nobody. There’s people who make money without taking any risks, and they’re always gonna be afraid of those who make money by risking everything. If you risk it all, you have it all, capish?
But if you think you gotta save yourself, or that you can do it without jail time, without fleeing, without going into hiding, then let me make it clear right from the start: you are not a man.
And if you’re not a man, you can leave this room right now, and don’t even hope to ever become one, ’cause you will never ever be a man of honor.
Crees en el amor? Love ends. Crees en tu corazón? Your heart stops. No? No love and no heart?
So, do you believe in coño, in p*ssy? Well, even pussies dry up after a while.
You believe in your wife? Soon as your money runs out, she’ll tell you you’re neglecting her.
You believe in your children? As soon as you stop giving them money they’ll say you don’t love them.
You believe in your mama? If you don’t nurse her, she’ll say you’re an ungrateful child.
Listen to what I’m tellin’ you. You need to live, vivir. You got to live for yourselves. It’s for yourselves that you need to know how to be respected, and how to show respect. La famiglia.
Respect the people who are useful to you and despise the ones who aren’t. The people who can give you something get your respect, and the ones who are useless lose it.
Somebody who wants something from you, doesn’t he respect you? Somebody who’s afraid of you? So what happens when you got nothing to give? When you got nothing left? When you’re no longer useful? Then you’re basura, rubbish. If you have nothing to give, then you’re nothing, nada, nulla
“So,” the police officer said, “I understood right then and there that the boss, this Italiano, was somebody who counts, who knows what life’s about. Really knows.
That Mexican kid couldn’t have come up with that speech on his own. The s%$c dropped out of school at sixteen; they fished him out of a gambling den in Barcelona.
And the way this guy talks, his Calabrian dialect, how could some actor or braggart ever invent that? If it weren’t for my wife’s grandmother I never would have understood a word of it.”
I’d heard dozens of speeches on Mafia moral philosophy—in penitents’ confessions and wiretappings. But this was different; it was like training for the soul.
"I’m talkin’ to you; I even like some of you. Some of you, I’d like to smash your face. But even if I like you the best, if you got more p*ssy or more money than me, I want you dead.
If one of you becomes my brother, and I make him my equal in the organization, then one thing is clear: He’s gonna try to fukk me over.
Don’t think a friend will be forever a friend. I’ll be killed by somebody I shared my food with, my sleep, everything. I’ll be killed by somebody I ate with, somebody who gave me shelter.
I don’t know who it’ll be or I’d already have eliminated him. But it’ll happen. And if he doesn’t kill me, he’ll betray me.
Rules are rules.
And rules are not laws. Laws are for cowards.
Rules are for men.
That’s why we have rules of honor. Rules of honor don’t tell you you have to be good, just, upright.
Rules of honor tell you how to rule.
What you have to do to handle people, money, power. Rules of honor tell you how to behave if you want to rule, if you want to fukk the guy above you, if you don’t want to be fukked by the guy below you.
There’s no sense explaining them. Rules of honor exist, period. They evolved on their own, on and through the blood of every man of honor. How do you choose?
Was that question for me?
I searched for the right answer. How can you choose, in a few seconds, a few minutes, hours, what you should do?
If you choose wrong, you’ll pay for it for years, for that quick decision. The rules are always there, but you got to know how to recognize them, you got to understand when they really count.
And then there’s God’s laws. God’s laws are contained in the rules. God’s laws—the real ones, though, not the ones they use to make poor fools tremble with fear. But remember this:
You can have all the rules of honor you want, but still, only one thing’s for certain. You’re a man only if you know deep down what your destiny is.
Poor fools grovel, because it’s easier. Men of honor know that everything dies, everything passes away, nothing lasts forever.
Journalists start out wanting to change the world and end up wanting to be editor in chief.
( Keep this in mind when criticizing these authors)
It’s easier to condition them than to corrupt them. Each one matters only for himself and for the Honored Society.
And the Honored Society says you matter only if you rule. You can choose how, later. You can rule with an iron fist or you can buy consensus.
By spilling blood or giving it. The Honored Society knows that every man is weak, depraved, vain. It knows that people don’t change; that’s why rules are everything.
Bonds of friendship are nothing without rules. Every problem has a solution, from your wife who leaves you to your group that splits up. The solution merely depends on how much you offer. If things go poorly, you merely offered too little. Don’t go looking for other explanations. It seemed like a university seminar for aspiring bosses. What was this?
You have to know who you want to be. If you rob, shoot, rape, deal drugs, you’ll make money for a while, but then they’ll take you and crush you.
You can do it. Sure, you can do it. But not for long, ’cause you don’t know what might happen to you; people will fear you only if you stick a pistol in their mouth. But as soon as you turn your back, what happens?
As soon as a job goes wrong? If you belong to the organization, you know there’s a rule for everything.
If you want to make money, there’s ways to do it; if you want to kill, there are motives and methods; if you want to get ahead, you can, but you have to earn respect, trust, you have to make yourself indispensable.
There’s even rules for if you want to change the rules.
Whatever you do outside the rules, you never know how it might end.
But whatever you do that follows the rules of honor, you always know exactly what it’s going to get you. And you know exactly how the people around you will react.
So if you want to be an ordinary man, just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to become a man of honor, you got to have rules.
And the difference between an ordinary man and a man of honor is that the man of honor always knows what’s happening, while the ordinary man gets screwed by chance, bad luck, or stupidity. Things happen to him.
But the man of honor knows what’s gonna happen, and he knows when.
You know exactly what belongs to you and what doesn’t; you know exactly how far you can push yourself, even if you want to push past every rule.
Everybody wants three things: power, p*ssy, and money. Even the judge when he condemns bad people, even the politicians, they want dinero and p*ssy and power, but they want to get it by showing they’re indispensable, defenders of the law or the poor or who knows what.
Everybody wants money, even though they go around saying they want something else, or doing things for other people.
The rules of the Honored Society are rules for controlling everybody. The Honored Society knows you can have money, p*ssy, and power, but it also knows that the man who’s capable of giving up everything is the one who decides everybody else’s fate.
Cocaine. That’s what cocaine is. All you can see, you can have it. Without cocaine, you’re nothing. With cocaine, you can be whoever you want. If you sniff cocaine, you screw yourself all on your own.
The organization gives you rules for moving up in the world. It gives you rules for killing and for how you’re gonna be killed.
You want to lead a normal life? You want to be worth nothing? Fine.
All you need to do is not see, not hear.
But remember this: In Mexico where you can do whatever you want, get high, fukk little girls, drive as fast as you like, the only ones who really rule are the ones who have rules.
If you do stupid stuff, you got no honor, and if you got no honor, you got no power. You’re just like everybody else.
The police officer pointed his finger at a particularly worn page of his notebook. “Look, look at this . . . he wanted to explain absolutely everything. How to live, not just how to be a mafioso. How to live.”
You work, a lot. You have some money, algo dinero. Maybe some beautiful women. But then they leave you, for somebody more handsome, with more dinero than you.
You might have a decent life—pretty unlikely—or a shytty life, like everybody else. But when you end up in jail, the ones on the outside, who think they’re clean, will insult you, but you will have ruled.
They’ll hate you, but you’ll have bought yourself everything good in life, everything you wanted. You’ll have the organization behind you. It might happen that you suffer some, and maybe they’ll even kill you.
The organization backs whoever’s strongest, obviously. You can climb mountains with rules of flesh, blood, and money.
But if you become weak, if you make a mistake, you’re fukked.
If you do good, you’ll be rewarded. If you make a bad alliance, you’re fukked; if you make a mistake in war, you’re fukked;
if you don’t know how to hold on to power, you’re fukked. But these wars are permitted, they’re allowed. They’re our wars.
You might win and you might lose. But on only one condition will you always lose, and in the most painful way possible: if you betray the organization.
Whoever tries to go against the Honored Society has no hope of surviving. You can run from the law but not from the organization.
You can even run from God, ’cause God can wait forever for the fugitive. But you can’t escape the organization.
If you betray it and run, if they screw you and you run, if you don’t respect the rules and you run, somebody’s gonna pay. They’ll come looking for you. They’ll go to your family, to your allies. Your name will be on the list forever. And nothing can ever erase it. Not time, not money. You’re fukked for all eternity, you and your descendants.
The police officer closed his notebook. “The kid, it was like he came out of a trance.”
I'm just glad nothing demonic happened to her
This show right here is all the above and then some
I like crime thrillers and catch killer type stuff but I'll watch whatever 