To get inside John Martin’s basement, you need to push aside the branches of an overgrown shrub, then walk down a set of steps that sag in the middle. Tear off the seal left behind by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, cautiously open the door, and suck in the whiff of a dungeon: Cold air streams out, loaded with the stench of rotting food.
On the last day of June, John Martin walked into an Air Force recruiting office in San Leandro and fired three shots at a sergeant sitting at a computer. He missed. Then Martin put the gun to his own head. He nailed it.
Next to his bear-sized body, investigators found a note headlined “Want to know why?” To answer his own question, Martin had written the names of an Air Force captain and three boot camp drill sergeants whom he had failed to impress more than twenty years ago. Denigrating three of the officers with the epithets “spic,” “nigger,” and “cracker,” he then wrote: “What goes around comes around.” At the bottom of the page he decorated a swastika with the initials USAF. It was the final statement of a bitter man.
Officials believe he left no family. When the coroner’s office gave up its search for a living relative last week, Martin’s longtime landlord was left to pack up the contents of his tenant’s one-room apartment. Martin had lived in the cramped basement for nearly eighteen years.
The landlord says Martin came upstairs only to use the bathroom or heat up a bowl of ramen noodles. Even though he typically passed his tenant in the hallway at least once a day, where he managed to gather tiny threads of information, the landlord can’t recall them ever engaging in an in-depth conversation. Whenever attention would turn his way, Martin was shy to the point of hyperventilating, the landlord recalls. He never saw John Martin receive a piece of personal mail or send one out; never saw him with a friend, or even heard him speak of one. He never knew what Martin was doing down there.
Now, finally, he was about to find out.
Feeling around in the darkness for a light switch, visitors encounter a handful of stringy spiderwebs. Then the sole lightbulb shines from the far corner, revealing bare cement walls all around. Cobwebs hang from the corners of the low ceiling like tapestries, forcing visitors to duck. It’s the size of a toolshed in here, and the ground is just as cold and dirty.
Then you notice the stacks of paper. The piles are neatly divided into white paper, newsprint, and shiny magazine pages. They vary in size from ankle- to waist-high. To save floor space, Martin had elevated his mattress the way that college students do in their dorms. Beneath his bed, he’d crammed cardboard boxes filled with still more papers.
The white stacks are photocopies of thousands of US patents. Many detail the inner workings of inventions that rely on water and electricity to create energy — or so it appears. Notations and obsessive markings on the diagrams are incomprehensible to the engineering-challenged. One patent from the top of a pile is titled “Method and Device for Attenuating the Noise Radiated by Jets.” Aside from joining the Air Force, Martin’s only known ambition in life was to become a scientist.
The newspaper stacks are shorter. Martin kept select issues of the San Francisco Examiner throughout the 1990s. One front page, dated August 17, 1998, announces “Zero Hour for President,” a reference to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. The issue is turned to the jump page, as if Martin had followed the story to the inside of the paper, folded it in half, then quit reading. Also included are hundreds of clippings of women. Some are Reuters photos of South Asian women in traditional clothing and silky headdresses. Others are of All-American beauties: a long-haired blonde at Ocean Beach on the Fourth of July, a ponytailed soccer player dribbling for the net, a smiling brunette playing tug-o-war with her chocolate lab at Dolores Park.
The magazine pages have been pulled from men’s magazines, mostly Playboy. On page after page, tanned bodies pose beneath the glow of amber lighting. Dig a little deeper into the pile, and the content escalates to blow jobs, intercourse, orgies, and money shots. At the very bottom, the wilting centerfold of Playmate Roberta Vasquez, November 1984.
Martin told his landlord that both of his parents died in a car crash when he was young. He was raised by his grandmother while he attended San Leandro High School. On the top of his only bookshelf, Martin kept a worn paperback copy of The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z and two hardcovers, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Chemistry of Powder and Explosives. Two live bullets — each large enough for an assault weapon — were neatly balanced on top of the explosives book.
The middle shelf displayed Martin’s few other fascinations: The Armenian-English Dictionary, a bag of Scottish clan badges, a bumper sticker that reads “Have You Hugged a Scot Today?,” and a ticket stub from the 1992 Scottish Games in Santa Rosa. On the bottom shelf, he kept a mound of old Playmate calendars, pamphlets on the Alameda County Fair, science periodicals, and a copy of his 1978 yearbook.
Martin was a sophomore that year. In his school photo, he was a pair of spectacles and a large smile with a sixteen-year-old pencil neck. To the right of him, the photo of a male classmate is blacked out in permanent marker. More than twenty other boys suffer the same fate. By contrast, the names of two dozen females are underlined in pencil. The underlined girls are the archetypes of high school beauty: trim, gleeful, and usually blonde.
Inside the covers, the signings are made out to “John” or “Johnny,” and they offer praise for another school year completed (!) and share excitement for the coming summer break (!!). One student congratulates Martin on earning his pilot’s license. Another comments on his badminton skills in gym class — “You should join the team!” Still another encourages Martin to continue his stint with the drama club, and playfully warns him not to spend all his time reading Shakespeare.
“John,” reads one farewell from “Mary” in bubbly cursive, “I’m glad I got to know you. You’re really cute. Stay sweet.”
Martin told his landlord years ago that he planned to use the GI Bill to finance his college education. But in May 1984, he was discharged from boot camp for being “unable to perform physically,” according to the Air Force. He told his landlord that he suffered from bad knees. After he was rejected by the military, Martin returned to San Leandro; his grandmother died sometime thereafter. His hopes of college dashed, he took a clerk’s job at the Veterans Administration Office and rented his underground room in 1986.
The home is located at the end of a dead-end street in a neighborhood with all the charm of a wrecking yard. One neighbor says she saw Martin walk by nearly every day, on his way to the BART station. “I’d smile at him and say, ‘Hi,'” she recalls. “He didn’t say ‘Hi’ back at first. … But I stayed persistent. He started waving back.”
Martin’s landlord says his tenant visited the library every weekend, returning with a stack of photocopies and a plastic bag full of tattered science-fiction paperbacks. The landlord says that on holidays Martin ignored the home’s festivities, and retreated to his room as usual. He recalls only one instance, about ten years ago, when Martin accepted a social invitation and accompanied him on a jaunt to a downtown watering hole. He witnessed Martin drink two beers, the first time he’d seen his tenant consume any drugs or alcohol. “I couldn’t believe it,” the landlord says. “John almost looked like he enjoyed himself that night.” Even with a couple drinks under his belt, Martin revealed little.
In the far corner of his basement, beyond his mini-skyline of paper, Martin’s broken red-velvet chair sits on the floor like an abandoned car seat. An old television set rests half a foot away. On top of the cable box: a July 2002 issue of TV Guide with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. Inside his VCR: a tape of the sadistic 1979 epic Caligula, stopped midway through. In the final scene that Martin must have viewed, Malcolm McDowell, as the Roman emperor, rams his fist into a man’s anus while proclaiming, “I, Caligulus Caesar, command in the name of the Senate and the people of Rome!”
To the right of the television, a cardboard box filled with videocassettes, the majority of them porn. Many are tame, Playboy-produced centerfold specials, but others lean toward the aggressive: The Story of O and The Fruits of Passion: The Story of O Continued. Two infomercial videos stand out: The Art of the Bullwhip and David Reed’s Attracting Today’s Women.
Next to his chair, Martin used a short stack of US patents as a nightstand. On top are two remote controls, a Texas Instruments calculator, a live rifle bullet, the July 2004 issue of Playboy, and an advertisement for a Czech-made automatic rifle. He left a bottle of Korbel brandy squeezed between the chair and nightstand. Only a few gulps are missing, but its label has been peeled away. Next to the booze, a small jar of Best Foods mayonnaise and a Heinz ketchup container.
Martin had highlighted the television shows he wanted to watch on June 29, the day before he killed himself. In that day’s Chronicle, he used a pale-blue highlighter to mark his choices.
6:30 p.m. would be spent with Friends: “The One with the Stripper; Rachel’s Father Confronts Ross.” Each of the evening’s six Law & Order episodes earned a marking. Two and a half hours’ worth of CBS programming also gets marked, including an episode of Navy NCIS: “A decomposed body is found in a tub of acid at a Naval base.” At 9 p.m., Sports Illustrated’s Fortieth Anniversary Swimsuit Special.
10 p.m. was particularly busy: Judging Amy, NYPD 24/7, Law & Order, The System, Myth Busters, and Finds are all marked.
The night ends with the Discovery Channel’s The FBI Files: A Hunter’s Game.
Many things stand out in Martin’s room because they are missing. No window to the world outside. No radio, stereo, or any sign of music beyond a dusty box of warped records from the 1970s. No pictures of people he knew, or of himself. No Christmas cards or postcards from friends on the road. No journals or diaries.
Nor is there any hint of the racist tendencies he’d displayed in his final note. Instead, much of what’s left behind are the belongings of an angry and troubled man, one who’d been devoured by his grudges.
To the left of his chair, Martin left a mound of trash, the main source of the room’s odor. At the bottom of the pile are deflated camping mattresses wadded up in knots and caked with mildew. On top are crumpled papers: A US Bank statement from June 14 that says he’s overdrawn by $621.04; a letter from the Ayn Rand Studies Foundation; a bus map for AC Transit lines 83 and 57; a pamphlet for a Greek Orthodox church.
Resting on top, a plastic bottle of Diet Coke, empty; a bag of moldy wheat bread; an opened can of Libby’s Roast Beef with Gravy Sauce, now overrun by ants.
On June 30, Martin headed out of his room and aimed himself toward the recruiting office. In his pocket he carried a .357 Magnum and 45 bullets.
Amid the trash heap, he left behind a copy of a 2004 calendar. Each day of the month until June 28 is crossed out in highlighter. On the last line of the calendar Martin wrote, “THE END (WAT A MOTH R FUKR).”
