Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is to be preferred.
—Jean de la Fontaine
Jim Hogshire is living proof of why it's never a good idea to simultaneously shoot heroin and read the Koran.
Jim Hogshire is a devout Muslim.
He is also a hardcore doper with a particular fondness for opiates who, according to reliable sources, has recently fallen off the wagon so hard, he must have banged his head.
None of this would have been a problem for me if this peculiar mix of psychoactive drugs and Mohammedan spirituality had never entered my life during one of its bleakest phases.
Many of you lonely, malnourished, socially dislocated web freaks likely discovered jimgoad.net through a search of my name, so it's probable you've also seen the "Free Jim Goad!" web page with text by Mr. Hogshire. You're probably also aware that I'm currently in prison as a result of doling out some discipline to a sweet gal who didn't deserve a bit of it. While I was in county jail facing charges for this despicable, unforgivable crime, Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey told Jim Hogshire, erstwhile Feral House author, about my case.
Hogshire, with whom I'd had limited-though friendly contact prior to all this, jumped into the fray with surprising zeal.
He even offered to move to Portland and help work on my legal defense as I awaited trial.
I gladly accepted his offer, unaware that he would prove more interested in trying to give me a public-relations makeover than in doing anything substantial in the way of legal work. At the time, I was under high surveillance, embroiled in a situation where every phone call I made and every interaction with visitors bore the potential of being taped and used against me - and I'm not being paranoid about this, because jail officials and my lawyer told me as much.
With Hogshire, as with everyone else to whom I spoke at the time, I never said I was innocent - I said, "She's lying about what happened," which is not the same thing as saying I'm innocent, although I can see how the two might get confused.
(See interview with me from PANIK magazine for elaboration about her specific lies.)
If I had said the full truth - "Yeah, I beat the fuck out of her, but she hit me first," I would have been fried legally. I was facing twenty-five years in a box for something over which my brave victim suffered - maximum - a week.
In the event that you found yourself in such a situation (a recent book about the prison industry stated that roughly 70 percent of adult Americans have committed at least one imprisonable felony offense in their lives, although fewer than one percent of Americans are incarcerated), would you have felt it was the right thing to just say, "Yeah, I did it - just hang me"?
I doubt it.
Would it have been the manly thing for me to have asked for the maximum sentence as if years were penile inches? Anyone who continues to allege that I've ever denied hitting Anne R. on the morning in question is encouraged to present solid documented evidence of me making such a statement - whether in court transcripts, my writings, or taped phone conversations - rather than the hearsay which has been bandied around.
I possess such proof of Anne R. denying that she hit me that morning; I also can prove she's lying.
So if you can't PROVE your allegations like I can, you'd do well to shut the fuck up about it. I did not tell Hogshire anything about specifics of the incident, only that my accuser was lying about what happened.
It was only when evidence helpful to my case surfaced (such as the non-locking door locks and my blood being found in the car on and her clothes - again, see PANIK interview) did I share any hard facts with him. After a few weeks of vague promises and very little demonstrable legal work, Hogshire left a phone message for Sean Tejaratchi (publisher of Crap Hound and the person who above all others is responsible for saving my life during all of this) telling him, "Get ready... I'm about to start the 'Jim Goad is a Nice Guy' campaign!"
Those were his exact words - "The 'Jim Goad is a Nice Guy' campaign!"
Jim Hogshire is also busy doing PR work for Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddafi, and O.J. Simpson. He's also constructing a "Hitler was a Dog-Loving Vegetarian" website.
Nice guy? Anyone remotely familiar with my writing should have immediately sensed that this was not the sort of tone I'd ever willingly endorse. My writing career has been an extended effort to eradicate the pestilence of sanctimony and moralizing which afflicts far too many humans, regardless of their philosophical or political persuasion.
I want nothing more than to shatter all ideas of morality, every primitive fantasy of good vs. evil, yet many ill-advised (if well-intentioned) supporters of mine seem incapable of viewing life as anything more complex than a kindergarten morality play, and so they merely switch roles, making me into Jesus and my detractors into the Antichrist. So along comes Jim Hogshire to infuse my bunghole with a turkey baster's worth of distasteful piety. Shortly after making his ominous "Nice Guy" promise, and without ever clearing the contents of what he'd written with me, Sean T., or my lawyer, Hogshire went onto alt.zines and other 'net outlets with an extended post titled JIM GOAD PERSECUTION.
(As far as I can tell, the "Free Jim Goad!" website has reprinted this rant virtually untouched.) Much of what he said in that post is true.
To wit:
* I was repeatedly reluctant to press charges against Anne R. because I figured everyone had suffered enough;
* Using my writings against me was a flimsy excuse for the state to deny me bail;
* It seemed malicious of the prosecutor to re-indict me and TRIPLE my charges three months into the proceedings, while Anne R. was never charged with anything, despite often substantial evidence against her;
* That most journalists ignored all the evidence of crimes perpetrated by Anne R. because, well, she's a woman, right?;
* That my body bears permanent scars from her attacks.
But there were several things about Hogshire's post which ultimately did me more harm than good. Hogshire called my prosecutor a "pervert" while also posting the man's phone number, and this apparently inspired some nudniks to leave death threats on the D.A.'s phone machine, which certainly didn't help my case or nudge the prosecutor toward lenience. And when you look at his descriptions of the D.A.:
"[He's] a mentally ill and vicious man... Nazi-like-tactics...- menace to society... an evil person... the tyrant..."
...you'd think it was one of Debbie Goad or Anne R.'s public recriminations against me!
This is what I meant about people who merely switch roles in the morality play. The worst thing about Hogshire's post was that it gave the impression he was only regurgitating information that I'd fed him, which wasn't the case. Hogshire wrote that during the incident for which I faced charges, I "drove... through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights, and not doing anything reckless."
Stopping at red lights?
Driving in populated areas?
We were on a mountain road for almost the entire ride! Only the fire-breathing, desert-baked, nonbeliever-scorching Allah who lives inside Hogshire's head knows where he got such ideas, but they didn't come from me. Even more disturbing was Hogshire's whole Jim Goad-as-honky-Mumia Abu-Jamal depiction of me as a Christlike victim of the Evil State: "[He is] a persecuted man... he is INNOCENT...Pray for Jim Goad!"
When a friend read me the contents of Hogshire's post over the phone, I called Sean Tejaratchi and asked him to tell Hogshire to yank it immediately and to not post anything else unless explicitly instructed to do so. Sean left a message for Hogshire to that effect.
Jim soon responded with a rambling, accusatory, fifteen-minute phone message claiming to be the only person who was truly helping me and that he seriously doubted that Mr. Jim Goad had instructed Sean to make the call. By this point, Jim's campaign had taken on a life of its own, a life which bore little relation to MY life, which was in serious jeopardy.
Jim had become a Fabulous Furry Freak Brother on a delusional Jihad against the Infidel.
In a twisted way, Jim seemed to enjoy vicariously living through my legal troubles.
He once mentioned to a mutual friend that his efforts at redeeming me helped take his mind off his own problems, problems which apparently merited serious attention. Hogshire, whose long blond hair makes him look vaguely like aging folk rocker Steven Stills, visited me behind glass and over two-way phones while I was in county jail. For the entire visit, he was shaking uncontrollably from what must have been the heavy ingestion of some illicit stimulant. At one point, he tore off a small square of paper from a notepad and held it up to the glass.
On the paper were scrawled two words which had absolutely no meaning for me, cryptic or otherwise, something like "table" and "food."
After pressing the paper against the glass for a few seconds, he said, "OK? Got it?" I nervously muttered, "Uh, yeah, OK." Then he crumpled the paper into a ball and ATE it. He then lifted his shirt and, using a fingernail, scratched the word CODE into his chest.
I thought, "My life has never been lower than this."
I recalled Nick Broomfield's documentary about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and how at the lowest point in her life she was besieged by bumbling, creepy, parasitic "supporters." Over Hogshire's desperate objections, I eventually accepted a plea bargain.
My deal was that I was handed a three-year sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to attempted kidnapping, attempted assault in the second degree, and fourth-degree assault, all for the same incident. The word "kidnapping" has connotations a bit more juicily extreme than what the term means under Oregon law.
In Oregon, you've "kidnapped" someone if you've moved them more than THREE FEET against their will. It figures that in the year we were together, there were dozens of times that Anne R. refused to leave my car when I asked her, but the only time she wants to leave, I go to prison for it. When I was arrested, I didn't realize the degree to which Anne's vagina was a "Get Out of Jail Free" card, and I naively believed that the justice system would weigh my state of mind at the time and be willing to place my actions in context. There's a difference between committing an act and feeling guilty for it - which is a separate act in itself - yet many people seem too dumb to grasp this simple principle.
Yes, I beat her up.
Viciously.
Joyously.
Remorselessly.
And within my subjective system of ethics, I did the right thing.
If I hadn't done it, she probably would have killed me. I can draw two conclusions from my experience with her:
1. Don't get involved with crazy broads;
2. The term "crazy broads" is a redundancy.
Even after I accepted the plea, Jim seemed incapable of acknowledging that I was culpable of anything, preferring to believe that I'd been so thoroughly demoralized by my time in jail that I couldn't make rational decisions. He blindly jousted with alt.zines gerbils who were secretly furious that they'd never been able to muster any publicity for themselves and had been waiting for a chance to strike at me.
That's OK, zine weenies. Even with me in prison, I'm still the king, and you're all still peasants. Your attempted guillotining of me has only made me stronger. Never doubt that I will live to make you all uncomfortably mindful of your perpetually subordinate role relative to me in the literary food chain.
Ironically - but not surprisingly, given her track record - the person who helped my legal defense the most was my accuser, Lady R., whose quantifiable lies about what happened on the morning in question, as well as her psychopathic phone calls to me and Sean Tejaratchi (see archives) frightened the D.A. into offering a plea agreement.
More than anyone else, Anne R. was able to shave years off my sentence. In Jim Hogshire's defense, he provided me with constant support, however loopy, during one of my life's darkest episodes. Oh, I forgot - I'm an evil woman-beater, which means I'm not human, which means I don't have feelings, which means that I couldn't possibly have suffered emotionally during all this.
And I can't say anything bad about whatever webmeisters at anti-social.com posted Jim's rant on their site and maintained it there - by including my address, they put me in contact with a lot of old friends and many new ones.
I also need to state that however drug-besotten and Islamically curvaceous his mind might be, Jim Hogshire is mostly a decent fellow. He's one of those rare sorts who seems absolutely incapable of malice. Well, maybe a little passive-aggressiveness here and there, but largely his heart is in the right place, even if his brain is somewhat askew. Saying mean things about him after he expended dozens of hours trying to help me bears the appearance of kicking a puppy dog. Truly, I hadn't intended to say anything unsavory about him... until he took monetary contributions intended for me and kept them for himself.
About a year ago, I wrote Jim Hogshire a letter inquiring about the money which people had sent him while I was in county jail, money they'd innocently intended to be passed along to me.
I had never asked Jim to solicit this money - it was his idea. What he managed to collect wasn't a lot by street standards - barely enough for a day or two's worth of fixes for the dedicated smack-shooter - but in here, it would have kept me afloat in the canteen-purchased toiletries and sundries which make incarceration that much more bearable. While I was in county jail, Jim had initially promised to send the money.
Then he made some excuse to a mutual friend that he'd spent it to buy legal books for me, books which I never requested nor received. Jim never answered my letter, nor have I had any contact with him since taking my plea bargain. If he had merely been straight-up enough to fork over the dough which people had sent him with the intention of it being given to me, I would have let things rest. But, you know, heroin's expensive.
And U-100 needles aren't cheap, either. So there, Jim.
You can keep the money you owe me and buy a few clean rigs or a nice fat hunk of black tar.
I've made a few cheap jokes at your expense, so we can call it even. I have no idea where Jim Hogshire stands on all this, whether he feels I deceived him in some way, whether he feels foolish for jumping the gun, or whether he's found a new avenue whereby to sate his apparently insatiable need for feeling persecuted. Hey, maybe I'm filling that need for him now.
A Salaam Alaykum, my brother.
{originally posted Summer 2000}