Got his gun...
When I was in high school, I knew a girl named Luna. She was sweet. Really smart, fairly dorky, most people didn’t find her that interesting or in any way attractive, and in part because of the sort of social awkwardness and genuine desire to connect that comes with that status, she and I kind of clicked. She was younger than I was, which made it kind of sketchy to everyone else when I flirted with her (naturally, one of the popular athletes in my class dated someone two years younger than him who everyone considered the hot girl in the school, and everyone sort of patted him on the back about it), and some people I knew tended to joke at my and our expense about our match made in heaven. Even so, for about a month there, if either of us had had the balls to make the first move, it’s possible we might have ended up dating.
I knew her brother, too, though less well. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we were friendly. And I identified with him quite a bit too, the sort of person I thought that if we had had half a chance, we might have been really good friends. But in high school, we didn’t have a chance. I was so averse to the way the school worked, to the ridiculous pressure that teachers and parents and administrators so obliviously put on us, to the amount of time and energy that class, homework, projects and above all sports demanded, and to the society of rich white incredibly bourgeois teenagers who tried to create the same hierarchy of in and out that they had seen on tv shows set in public schools, that I didn’t take the few opportunities that were available to me. Especially to be friends with people four years younger than me.
But Alan was still interesting to me: he not only had the same type of unfulfilled longing to form relationships and enjoy his life that the character possessed, but he actually looked like the supporting character from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you know, the one who’s actually sick but Ferris takes out for one last hurrah. In his father’s Ferrari. The few times we met, I was struck by how genuine, how sincere he seemed. We played paintball together once, in a tournament that I didn’t really even tell my parents about until I brought home a DVD player-the prize each member of our team got for winning. Or maybe it was the time the guys showed up with colored bandanas under baseball caps, strutting the thug walk and talking shit. These guys who certainly seemed, certainly acted like gang members (and hit every target with incredible marksmanship when they were practicing), were the ones who when the shit started flying, cowered in a bunker the entire fight-as they were completely enveloped on both sides, under increasingly constant fire, as a final flanker crept up the gully behind them, and all the while I was in the bunker with them, waiting for the “medic” before I could move or shoot again. And a few weeks, maybe a few months later, he mentioned it to me between classes. It was one of those rare experiences that we actually shared.
But I went off to college the next year and never saw him again. He was just another person from the high school I hated, who I wasn’t enthusiastic about maintaining any contact with at all. Frankly, I wanted a clean break. Every once in a while, I might think about Luna or Alan, I might wonder what I could have done differently, what ways I could have been less dorky, or sketchy, or less anything when I flirted with Luna, or I might marvel at this quiet, really interesting kid I never really got to be friends with. And my third year of college, sitting in my Lo-Rise apartment, having gone through all the shit that was my first two years, making friends that weren’t friends, breaking my leg, USAPA and PSA, my sister called me to tell me that Alan Serensky had murdered his parents with a shotgun.
I taught a lesson today about gun control and school shootings. It was a difficult thing to talk about. So I talked about how central guns and gun ownership is to an American identity based so completely on individualism-fending for, providing for, and defending oneself, without and occasionally against the government. About how the battles of Lexington and Concord that started the American Revolution basically happened when the British Army tried to take the colonists’ guns. About my next door neighbor in Durham who owns a dozen hunting rifles and his son who so proudly showed off his first to me before he left for Marine boot camp.
And then I talked about what I really wanted to talk about: about being in high school right after Columbine, about the conversations I had with my friends about how terrified parents and administrators were of precisely us: social outcasts with emotional problems who listened to Nirvana and Metallica and liked playing Goldeneye and Doom. About how everyone was scrambling to “understand” why it had happened-the videos I had seen of people demonstrating how easy it was to hide a shotgun under an overcoat and Amanda telling me later that she could never wear her black trenchcoat in Colorado again; the discussions of access to guns, absent parents, and social ostracism; the movie Elephant and all the rumors people had said about the killers that were represented in the film; the time I came into a classroom where there had just been a discussion about this very thing and in the middle of the list of causes was “Normal teen angst gone awry,” and how upset I had been.
Because I remember that in terms of the two categories, horrifying as it now seems in the distance I have from that time in my life, my friends and I tended to identify with the shooters much more than the victims. And the idea that the “teen angst” that murderers of their classmates felt could in any way be dismissed as normal probably angered and upset me more than anything else in the ongoing dialog about school shootings. If anything, didn’t at least this scream to everyone that something is seriously not right here? That something has to change in the way high schools work? Sure, these were exceptional cases, but the people who died could not possibly be considered “acceptable losses” for the system, could they? I recall so clearly how desperate I was the whole time, how the strain of my experience was not unique to me, but was like an anthem to an entire generation of whom, in the words of Evan Wright (Generation Kill) “not a whole lot was expected […] other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without any more mass shootings in the style of Columbine."
But even that wasn’t what I really tried to say.
I had been consuming soda steadily for most of the morning up to that point in order to keep me awake (it was my earliest day so far), as a consequence of which, by the time I got to the class, I had the jitters that I so often had during exam week when I would write the bulk of my 15 page papers over the course of a few dozen hours. And I came into class, and I talked about stereotypes of America, and I talked about guns, about my experiences, and I came to the story and I almost cried. I have never cried about it. It’s not the sort of thing that makes me cry. It’s not the thought of Luna coming home from college to bury her parents and possibly testify against her brother that sticks with me the most (though it bothers me to consider); it’s not the depression of awful loss, it is horror. Plain, creeping moral horror. Not terror. Not fear. Even at the time, it was not the sort of thing I might scream after hearing. It’s the sort of thing about which I might just say, “Oh,” but an awareness would take me that I had identified on not merely an intellectual but also a truly personal level with a killer. The circumstances of the crime are even now unclear to me, but from what I understand, it seems that he finally snapped under the strain of an abusive father, and was so enraged that he killed everyone in the house.
But I look back into my yearbook at their pictures and I don’t see it. Because what I am looking at is not a murderer, it is that same genuine, almost plaintive boy I knew in high school. But I still could not explain it. I taught my lesson and everyone was completely silent at the end. Some people, I think, might not have understood me because I kept the punchline pristine, un-alluded to, and did not repeat it, and perhaps I spoke too fast. And afterwards, one of the students walked up to me and said she was grateful to hear about what happened and that it was such a sad story. And I didn’t say it, but I thought it. She wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a sad story, it was a horror story.
All I could think of, to represent that sudden shift, like the third line of a haiku, that gradual overwhelming catharsis, so much more powerful and lasting that mere shock, was the end of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem about the graceful, idol-like, fictitious robber baron:
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night
Went home, and put a bullet through his head.
And sitting in the teacher’s lounge afterward, waiting for another teacher to drive me back to Weiz, the same person I had such an interesting but halting conversation about the American empire (German has multiple words for empire, and I had to ask for clarification), and also about the American school system, the idea of failing schools versus, say, Durham Academy, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The details I went into, the spirit of high-school after Columbine, even my high school, and the absolute silence that had followed--confusion, perhaps, that I had talked about something so extreme?
But if I could ever get the story right, how this boy at once me and a movie character pulled out a shotgun and clicked the trigger at his father and then at his mother, how in that moment he changed for me from a lost opportunity to have a genuine friend to the one time in my life I actually felt I had touched Evil, then I could convey that subduing horror that I felt slowly grow as my sister and I hung up our phones. Then I could explain how awful the thought is of Luna, an orphan, her parents gone, visiting her brother in prison and, even if she does not actually say it, asking the entire time, “How could you? You killed our parents.” Then they could understand that this ‘extreme’ is also incredibly mundane, frighteningly so. And even now, as I sit here, typing my rambling, confused memoir with its clever little allusions, trying to figure out if I picked the right names to change my friends’ to, I still cannot feel I have conveyed, or recorded, or myself understood.
Because I talk about touching Evil, the concept, the entity, the thing, almost in a true religious sense. I don’t mean that the man was evil. He wasn’t: that’s the entire point. It’s that there was even there, even within that spirit that was so typical of people I knew--confused, conflicted, and because of that eager to connect, readily sociable--there was something that could commit the most awful act a teenager generally has the capability to do. When I assess it, that Evil is almost a disease, and for whatever combination of reasons--deprivation, stress, exposure, a parallel immuno-compromising disorder, pure chance--his system failed to suppress it. It did not possess him, nor force him. But it suddenly became a very real part of him.
What I actually ended up explaining to the students, and to a teacher who asked me afterwards, was how the discussion of violence had always been an intellectual exercise to me, and how that was changed, and maybe that is a part of it. But what really happened when I heard what had happened was deeply personal for me, and not because the issue of violence became personal, but because it horrified me to have confirmed what I thought very possible: that that capacity to do something terrible and unconscionable lay in the people I identified with, perhaps even moreso than in those I did not. And that identification, that sense that I was one of the people whose insides were constantly swirling around, it was almost a point of pride.