Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia enthusiast, is a man of little appetite or need. He lives alone, disavows God and subsists on less than 500 calories a day.
Reducing his footprint further still, Dr. Death has gone green, having recently purchased an electric car.
It's not that he wants to save the human race, since he has little regard for the human race. Rather, Kevorkian says he doesn't need a gas guzzler since he doesn't stray far from his rundown apartment complex.
"I don't enjoy flashy cars. I live in a dump. I don't eat much," he says. "Discipline. Americans don't have discipline."
In that vein, Jack Kevorkian is running for Michigan's Ninth Congressional District seat as an independent. Polls show Kevorkian is running a distant third, but could impact the Nov. 4 election between Republican incumbent Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Bloomfield Township, and challenger Gary Peters.
Kevorkian's mantra is that the government has become a tyranny, people have become blind to their enslavement and the Ninth Amendment has been all but strangled. It reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
He takes this to mean that government has no right to stop smoking, mandate helmets or seat belts, ban abortions, homosexual marriage, drugs or helping someone kill themselves.
"Without these rights, life isn't worth living," he says.
Kevorkian insists his is a serious run. The doctor even has a health care plan: kill the system and make government pay insurance premiums. And for that, Kevorkian needs a car.
The electric car is a far cry from the vehicles he used to own before being sent to prison for 8 ½ years after lethally injecting Thomas Youk, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease. Before he was sent to prison, Kevorkian drove a Cadillac and the notorious VW van -- dubbed the "Death Mobile" -- as he helped more than one person die in its rear bed and claims to have assisted more than 130 people cross into the hear-after.
The car, a General Electric Motorcar, cost $11,414 and was paid for from the $67,000 speaking fee he received from the University of Florida this year. It gets 30 miles per charge and takes six hours to restore the empty battery.
"I gambled and I lost, but I succeeded in verifying the Dark Age is still with us," Kevorkian says of his time in prison. "Compassion is the chief ingredient of civilization and we are not civilized," he says. "I feel like the whole thing was a waste."
The cantankerous Kevorkian, who was paroled a year ago and has been living in relative obscurity since, has found something new to be cantankerous about. His driver's license expired while in prison, and to renew it, he will have to take a driving test in a gasoline powered car.
"I'm not going to drive a damned gas powered car!" Kevorkian screams from his Barcalounger, purchased at the Salvation Army and covered in a towel purchased from the Salvation Army. Everything, in fact, seems to be purchased from the Salvation Army: his furniture, his clothes, his cutlery.
"Stupid laws," he smolders. "Why don't we fight them? One dumb law leads to another and in the end you are a slave!"
"Pretty soon you lose it all," agrees his lawyer and friend, Mayer Morganroth.
The two elderly men make an odd couple, the dapper Morganroth playing something of the Felix Unger to Kevorkian's Oscar Madison. Morganroth says he admires the substance if not the style of Kevorkian, whose notoriety has waned since being released from prison. It was Morganroth who arranged the purchase of the new car.
"Right message," Morganroth says of Kevorkian. "Wrong messenger."
Kevorkian says he's out of the euthanasia business for good. Besides, the electric car -- tall, white and egg-shaped -- isn't large enough to hold a Thanatron -- or death machine. Still, two-seater is more than enough machine for Kevorkian, a notorious aesthetic. Breakfast consists of 1/3 cup of cereal and 1/3 of a banana. Lunch is a slice of processed turkey in ¼ of a tortilla and folded into a neat triangle along with one small potato and 1/3 of an ear of corn. Dinner is one fried egg with 2/3 of the yolk removed, ¼ tortilla, 1/3 ear of corn, one small baked potato, plain. Snacks are usually two radishes and 1/3 of a cucumber or a piece of fruit. He keeps a jug of sweet wine, but rarely partakes.
"I like to be soused" he says. "When you're drunk, really drunk, you have no problems."
His Spartan apartment has shelves filled with books from Sartre and Kafka to Gray's Anatomy. His shoes are arranged in meticulous order: laces, loafers, slippers. Kevorkian suffers from Hepatitis C, refuses to give the high-five handshake because of germs and recently tripped at the public library striking his lateral super orbital ridge. He wears a Band Aid to cover the black eye -- giving him the severe, skeletal appearance of a backwoods moonshiner.
Kevorkian doesn't take the car out on the road just yet, having succumbed to fear of the Man and his licensure rules, but he does tool around the parking lot of his apartment complex, occasionally crossing the street -- without insurance or plates-- careening around the parking lot of the 44th district court.
While idling -- and refusing to wear a seatbelt -- Kevorkian revealed this: "Life isn't that great."
Jack Kevorkian says he has never loved, never married, never had children.
He paraphrases the existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: "Sleep is wonderful but death is better still. Not to have been born is the miracle."
"I would rather have not been born," he says. "Who needed this god-danged going to jail and all this trouble. You know, what good did it do? It doesn't do any good any way."
And with that he crept into traffic in his electric ovum.
