Two Letters to a Virgo, on a Tragedy.
by Rewired,
5/19/02.
“Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.”
-- Havelock Ellis.
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“Regret is a wasted emotion.”
-- Rebecca Romijin Stamios.
Letter 1.
Two letters tonight. One, a story; the other, a commentary. Not that you should feel used or anything, but I need to get this shit out of my head and process it. You're tuned to details and simplification, and I could use a bit of your Virgo quality. I like Virgos. My ex-girlfriend; she was a Virgo, too. Maybe you can help me understand how a thing like this can happen.
On April 6, on my way up to a resteraunt to meet a good friend, I stopped at the BP gas station right across from Yoda’s Palace of Inconvienence. As soon as I walked inside the door I met with a pair of vivid blue, piercing reptile eyes. Those eyes – they were like an adult version of the ones that kid had. The one I’d seen in December. It was a tall, skinny and bald-headed guy leaning on the counter by the register. He was to the left, a girl was to the right. I instinctually felt myself go towards her register, but I decided to fight against my instinct, as I often do, and turn toward reptile eyes. It'd be dumb to walk away from his register just because he struck fear in me.
He held one of those looks that warns you not to do even the most remote thing to piss him off or else he might go ape shit on you and rip your throat out. Or stare harder. As for what was worse, I’d say it was a toss-up, if that gives you any idea of how threatening his stare was.
It took me a few minutes of looking at and looking away to realize it was Von from high school. I said his name, as
cliché-sounding as any high school classmate who’s bumped into a fellow ex-high school classmate nearly five years after graduation.
He confirmed it with a fake-sounding, “yeah,” in a poor attempt to sound polite, and then said my name to confirm that he knew who I was in poorly-acted enthusiasm. He seemed to suddenly lighten up when I shifted into customer mode and asked for a carton of Marlboro Reds, however. I really wanted to ask him about his girlfriend before exiting, and that was the plan. I opened my wallet to find no money, however, told him to wait just a second, went to the ATM and got money, and by the time I got back to the register a few feet away he had disappeared and the girl had taken his place. I paid for gas, got a carton of cigarettes and left.
I got to thinking on the road about how that kid had flipped out during high school - not in exactly the same way I did, but around
the same time. Previous to that point, he used to be a rather funny guy from what I remember. He was tall, skinny, had long light brown hair and long, boney face. He had the eyes of a reptile, but otherwise looked like a reject from a heavy metal band. He was a nice kid, though. He hung out with the group that had been slowly morphing into what was popularly known as `the druggies,’ but he didn’t seem to actually do any of the stuff.
Then one day it was just as if somebody flipped a switch: all of a sudden, he wasn’t a happy-go-lucky kid anymore. I thought someone told me what had suddenly made him crack -- I think it was a drug, perhaps acid, but I’m not sure. Whatever it was, though, it caused him to change drastically. He shaved off all his hair. He got tattoos. He talked to no one. He seemingly hated the whole of existence. He cold-shouldered the flock, flicked off the Shepard and sat motionless in the art room, arms crossed, staring with remarkable intensity off into oblivion.
He always had that “feel” about him that I couldn’t help but associate with the grays and their fellow goobs. I felt certain he was an abductee, though I had no real reason to. Just a feeling. I felt a certain bizarre rapport with him, though, and asked him to write me something for my e-zine. He did so.
My feeling that he was whatever I was were reinforced later on, however, after I learned through word of mouth that he was involved with a beautiful, dark girl by the name of JH.
JH was a slender girl with lively dark eyes and long brown hair. She, too, had that thing about her that made me associate her with the little gray guys. It was an unearthly feel about her that I got from people occasionally at varying intensities. Usually it tended to steer me away from them, with her there was the steering away plus the nervousness that came with my insatiable attraction to her. Though I’d stared at her quite often, that was about the extent of it -- I watched her from afar in nervous curiosity. I asked people about her, gathering all the information about her that I could. I came to officially meet JH for the first time in the school library some time after I’d gone nuts. I’d crept back into the very back of the library, where the Occult section was, and I noticed her quietly walking back there as well. She had what I can only describe as a loud presence - a “feel” about her that could not be ignored. It was like there was an aura that extended around her and set off an alarm when she was within a certain range, setting off this wave of mixed emotions in me. I found her looking at the books right around the Occult section.
Somehow - I don’t remember how - I ended up talking with her. She’d been a fixation of mine for awhile by that time, and I was both amazed and exhilarated to finally have the opportunity to communicate with her. She was all I’d hoped she’d be; dark and
damned interesting. She told me she loved reading these books about serial killers; books that were located a few shelves down from my section on the paranormal. Somehow that made me all the more curious about her on multiple levels, not least of which was the level where I wanted to corner her in a dark room, pin her yup against a wall and fuck the living hell out of her.
Eventually, I managed to bring up my relatively-recently acquired obsession with the paranormal and asked her is she’d ever seen a ghost or anything of that nature.
Then -- and she said it, dead serious -- “I’ve seen aliens.”
My mouth dropped. Marry me, I thought.
On a more serious level, I was a bit frightened by that comment. This was the first time I’d ever met anyone else who claimed to have experiences with them. I certainly believed there were a few around the school that had seen them, but no one had ever openly admitted it to me until her. I’m kicking myself in the ass for not remembering the details of the story she told me, but she told me it throwing it under the category of a “dream,” even though she maintained that she had actually seen them.
Over time, my obsession with her grew. Not only was she dark, mysterious and beautiful, but she'd seen "them." I remember once I found myself alone with her in a dark art room, and I so wanted her, I so wanted to make a move, but I was scared of her - and not only because of her maddening beauty. I had somehow come to associate her with a strange mixture of sexual intensity and soul-shattering fear.
I couldn’t cough up the courage to talk to her again, though, let alone so far as to make a move on her.
As the years went by, I’d occasionally receive updates on her whereabouts and well-being. It just so happened that my mother worked with her mother for a time. Mom explained the lady, as JH had explained her, as so incredibly Christian that it bordered on the psychotic. JH and Von had apparently run off to Pennsylvania together for a time, but eventually returned and, the
last I heard, had broken up.
Seeing his hating eyes in the gas station brought back that curiosity I had regarding what had happened to him. I wondered how she was, and wished I would've asked him about her.
--------------------------------------------------
I wrote the above on April 6 of this year (with some personal things deleted), after seeing Von in the BP gas station where he worked. Yesterday morning, I got the news.
I woke up late and was in the process of pouring myself a cup of coffee when the phone rang. My dad went to reach for it.
"Tell them I know," I told him, figuring it was work calling.
I wasn't late for work, but it's rigid routine for me to go their four hours early every day and sit around, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and write. I’m kind of weird that way. When I'm not there at least three hours early, they usually call and wake me up. They're kind of weird that way.
Dad handed me the phone. It wasn't work. It was Melinda, a friend from middle school who I'd drifted from during high school, and who had spent the last several years desperately trying to rekindle a friendship with me. I'd accepted that we had changed. I'd flipped out during high school and began seeing little aliens and having out-of-body experiences -- I knew I'd be too weird for her now, and I was significantly different than how I'd been when she knew me. I didn't want to live in the past and try to be who I was, and she seemed to expect that of me, so I had kept my distance. She called me periodically out of the blue, but it had been awhile.
"What's up?" I asked.
"Did you hear about Von and JH?"
"No," I said, suddenly interested. "What?"
"They're dead."
"What?"
It was the way she said it -- with not a hint of apparent sorrow. She almost seemed happy to tell me the news. She said it in the same tone she used to use when she called those frigid winters during high school to announce to me we had a snow day.
My dad threw the front page of the newspaper in front of me just after she said those two words, `they’re dead’, so perfect it could’ve been a scene out of a movie. I saw the two familiar faces of Von and JH on the front page and caught the words `murder-suicide’. The pictures. They were pulled out the yearbook, for shit's sake.
They both graduated in 1998 from my high school, a year after I did. Some time ago I heard they both ran away to Pennsylvania, but they eventually came back to our Ohio town. They broke up and, after he became obsessive, irrational and abusive, often stalking her, she moved back to PA to distance herself from him.
Problems continued. He kept coming back to her, trying to get her to take him back, but she refused. Apparently she'd begun dating someone else; a kid from high school. She was talking to people at the store where she worked about getting a restraining order against Von.
Then on May 16, around 8 AM, there was a disturbance reported at JH's apartment in PA Local police arrived, knocked on the door, and received no answer. They left by 8:16. According to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, a neighbor across the hall then saw who was undoubtedly Von leaving the apartment. He was covered in blood.
According to word-of-mouth, he saw her, lifted a finger to his lips, and went "shhh." Then he left.
When detectives arrived at her apartment the second time, at 8:24 AM, they found her purse outside her door. When they got no response from within the apartment, they located a superintendent of the building who opened the door for them.
Inside, they found a trail of blood leading from the living room to the bedroom and bathroom. They found JH's body, beaten to death with a pair of brass knuckles they found nearby and stabbed from the chards of a broken mirror. They had enough evidence to arrest Von and put out an all-points bulletin to track him down and bring him in for questioning. At 5:45 that very evening, a hiker spotted him down at a park not a block from my house. His body was found in a secluded area by a trail. He'd put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Letter 2.
Thirteen years ago, right after we had moved to our new house in the sticks, my mother was in the living room sorting through some old video tapes. We were having a little verbal battle -- not at all that unusual -- because I wanted to go over to play with my friend, Joe, who's backyard was separated by ours by this dirt trail that ran at an angle through our woods. As we were arguing, we began hearing what sounded like someone screaming. It got louder. We looked out the window, and that's when we both saw Joe's oldest sister, Sara, running towards my mom and I. She was screaming frantically, as if she had gone insane. It was so surreal. So frightening. Her face was red and smeared with tears. My mom tried to calm her so she could understand just what the fuck was wrong.
To me, it sounded as if she was saying, "Jill's gone crazy. Jill's killing people."
Jill was their pet black lab. My mom commanded me to stay put on the back porch and then ran with Sara back down the trail. I stood there, uncertain what to think. I was worried about what was happening, and lack of knowledge of such an obviously alarming situation only fuels fear and feeds the feeling of insecurity. Had Jill gotten rabies and gone around biting people, killing them? I thought of Stephen King’s Cujo. I hadn't a fucking clue.
I stood there for a long while. I don't remember moving. I can hardly remember breathing. I saw a large group of people through the trees, running to the part of the woods to the side of their house and right behind ours. I heard talking in the distance. Echoes of voices. I heard screaming. I couldn't make out the words for the life of me, especially when I heard the sirens howling. Like knives to my ears, cutting through my confused thoughts.
Mom came back that day looking worn in more ways than one. It was the last day of school. It wasn't Jill that had gone crazy and had gone around killing people, it was Jed -- Joe's oldest brother. It was Jed who'd "gone crazy," and it was Jed who'd "killed himself."
Jed was to go to his senior prom today. He had a date awaiting his arrival. Imagine having a mother see her son like that -- and a father, brothers, a sister. Imagine them, in turn, having to call up his date to the prom that would be starting in a few hours and having to explain to her how her date couldn't exactly make it. How her date had hung himself in the woods right behind our house.
I never really knew Jed. Damned if I can remember what he looked like. I saw him, I think, only once or twice, and I never talked with him. Stories I heard about him played down the unprecedented tragedy it was made up to be in the very beginning. Such stories told how he had asked for it. How death, to him, was the biggest high; the greatest drug. The stories told of how he was obsessed with death and reveled in pushing his pain thresholds. One story involved him and a friend ramming their wrists onto a rusty bob wire fence; the game was to see who could take more pain before blacking out or calling mercy. The stories, the pain his family felt, his suicide right in the back woods -- all these things were fucked up, no doubt, but I never knew the guy. I heard about him second hand, I saw him through pictures, I felt the loss through other people I knew who knew him. But I didn't know him like I knew Von and JH.
Imagining them both dead right now is a lot more difficult than the whole Jed episode was thirteen years ago. I wasn't best of friends with Von and knew him mostly by association, but this is a kid you see everyday, a kid you often wonder about. I had a crush on JH, and Von wrote for my goddamned paper. I just wrote all that shit about Von and JH last month. A kid at work who goes to my old school says that Von came in just a few weeks ago to visit the art teacher, who we all adored. A girl I knew from high school came in and said that the night that it happened, he stopped at the bar where she works and he bought a beer from her -- a bar I pass by every fucking day on my way to Chardon to go to work. What had changed him? What drove him over his edge in high school? What drove him to do what he did on May 16?
Von fell victim to his own violent, sadistic, masochistic insanity. That part of it -- the bullet in his fucking skull -- that's fine. Argue if you will, but if one has a right to live, one has a right to die. What isn't fair is that he dragged a girl, beautiful from skin to eyes to soul, right down with him. What isn't fair is that he made her a victim of his insanity as well. That's the part that I don't get. The lack of justice or meaning in it all. It seems so fake, but you've got to keep reminding yourself it's not. But it really does seem so fake. This shit is for Stephen King novels. Gory movies. Bad dreams. Tales by the campfire that scare the shit out of you until you realize it's just a story. Or until you wake up from the dream. Or until the movie ends. Then you close the book and flee into the safety and boredom of the real world. This isn't shit for the local goddamn news. This isn't the stuff you like to think about happening in reality. But reality suddenly hits: the world has gone hopelessly insane. It's a fact, and yeah, I know it's not a new one, but it's a fact that strikes a hard blow in times like these. You hear the words "murder-suicide" and realize that it's not within the frames of a TV, or even a mile away, but a horror story that ended half a block from your driveway. This is the kind of silent so-called fucking "sanity" you find in this small country town in Ohio, the back door of America. Welcome to our fine country. Welcome to our wonderful world. This is a preview of the human species. I'm your fucking host, and welcome to my generation of de-generation.
Since I read what happened, I've had these questions that won't seem to go away. Some of them are sick, some stupid, but I think it's natural to think them -- just not ask them aloud, or on paper. Well, I’ve never been natural, so why stop now? It's just an attempt to try and understand, maybe rationalize the whole situation so it makes sense to me.
Why did he do it -- what was going through his sick fucking mind as he beat her to death and cut her with her own mirror? Deep below all his psychological mess, what was the base motivation for this horrid episode -- was it out of fear? Jealousy? Hate? As hard as it is for me to conceive, was it, in some twisted, fucked up way only the raging mad and hopelessly sadistic/masochistic can understand, out of love? Did he want to commit suicide, and simply wanted to drag her down with him? Did he kill her, know he'd get caught, and would rather choose dying by his own hand than get caught, thrown in jail facing life imprisonment if not death row? Or did he kill her in a fit of rage, an episode of insanity, and then realize what he'd done and, unable to live with the guilt, decided to terminate himself out of punishment? In other words, in those last few hours, or moments, did a glimmer of what one would like to think of "humanity" glimmer through, and he realized just how fucked up and sick all this was? In the end, only he knows, I guess. One on the outside is lost trying to conceive of the motivations behind an act such as this. I'm entirely at a loss to understand.
JH I admired deeply. She was one of those people I always hoped, and secretly figured, I'd bump into again one day in the future. It sort of seems selfish and trivial now, but I'd always hoped maybe I'd get a chance to be with her for awhile. Maybe she'd be single and by that time I'd gotten over my anxiety and would ask her out. Maybe I'd just get to know her better, and we could maybe talk about her views on the world, on her personal beliefs, and even about the strange experiences I believed we both shared. She always seemed so interesting.
I've often thought about her since high school, always curious what she was doing, always asking if she had broken up with Von yet. I became especially curious as to how she was doing after seeing Von in BP last month. Selfish regrets flooded through me yesterday, and still to today. I was always too scared to talk to her. How senseless fear can be, and what limitless opportunities I could have had -- and continue to have -- if I weren't to let it have the wheel, the throne of my being and dominate me so often and to such a high degree.
But regrets are pointless as well, I realize -- as senseless as the fears that forever fuel them.
by Rewired,
5/19/02.
“Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.”
-- Havelock Ellis.
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“Regret is a wasted emotion.”
-- Rebecca Romijin Stamios.
Letter 1.
Two letters tonight. One, a story; the other, a commentary. Not that you should feel used or anything, but I need to get this shit out of my head and process it. You're tuned to details and simplification, and I could use a bit of your Virgo quality. I like Virgos. My ex-girlfriend; she was a Virgo, too. Maybe you can help me understand how a thing like this can happen.
On April 6, on my way up to a resteraunt to meet a good friend, I stopped at the BP gas station right across from Yoda’s Palace of Inconvienence. As soon as I walked inside the door I met with a pair of vivid blue, piercing reptile eyes. Those eyes – they were like an adult version of the ones that kid had. The one I’d seen in December. It was a tall, skinny and bald-headed guy leaning on the counter by the register. He was to the left, a girl was to the right. I instinctually felt myself go towards her register, but I decided to fight against my instinct, as I often do, and turn toward reptile eyes. It'd be dumb to walk away from his register just because he struck fear in me.
He held one of those looks that warns you not to do even the most remote thing to piss him off or else he might go ape shit on you and rip your throat out. Or stare harder. As for what was worse, I’d say it was a toss-up, if that gives you any idea of how threatening his stare was.
It took me a few minutes of looking at and looking away to realize it was Von from high school. I said his name, as
cliché-sounding as any high school classmate who’s bumped into a fellow ex-high school classmate nearly five years after graduation.
He confirmed it with a fake-sounding, “yeah,” in a poor attempt to sound polite, and then said my name to confirm that he knew who I was in poorly-acted enthusiasm. He seemed to suddenly lighten up when I shifted into customer mode and asked for a carton of Marlboro Reds, however. I really wanted to ask him about his girlfriend before exiting, and that was the plan. I opened my wallet to find no money, however, told him to wait just a second, went to the ATM and got money, and by the time I got back to the register a few feet away he had disappeared and the girl had taken his place. I paid for gas, got a carton of cigarettes and left.
I got to thinking on the road about how that kid had flipped out during high school - not in exactly the same way I did, but around
the same time. Previous to that point, he used to be a rather funny guy from what I remember. He was tall, skinny, had long light brown hair and long, boney face. He had the eyes of a reptile, but otherwise looked like a reject from a heavy metal band. He was a nice kid, though. He hung out with the group that had been slowly morphing into what was popularly known as `the druggies,’ but he didn’t seem to actually do any of the stuff.
Then one day it was just as if somebody flipped a switch: all of a sudden, he wasn’t a happy-go-lucky kid anymore. I thought someone told me what had suddenly made him crack -- I think it was a drug, perhaps acid, but I’m not sure. Whatever it was, though, it caused him to change drastically. He shaved off all his hair. He got tattoos. He talked to no one. He seemingly hated the whole of existence. He cold-shouldered the flock, flicked off the Shepard and sat motionless in the art room, arms crossed, staring with remarkable intensity off into oblivion.
He always had that “feel” about him that I couldn’t help but associate with the grays and their fellow goobs. I felt certain he was an abductee, though I had no real reason to. Just a feeling. I felt a certain bizarre rapport with him, though, and asked him to write me something for my e-zine. He did so.
My feeling that he was whatever I was were reinforced later on, however, after I learned through word of mouth that he was involved with a beautiful, dark girl by the name of JH.
JH was a slender girl with lively dark eyes and long brown hair. She, too, had that thing about her that made me associate her with the little gray guys. It was an unearthly feel about her that I got from people occasionally at varying intensities. Usually it tended to steer me away from them, with her there was the steering away plus the nervousness that came with my insatiable attraction to her. Though I’d stared at her quite often, that was about the extent of it -- I watched her from afar in nervous curiosity. I asked people about her, gathering all the information about her that I could. I came to officially meet JH for the first time in the school library some time after I’d gone nuts. I’d crept back into the very back of the library, where the Occult section was, and I noticed her quietly walking back there as well. She had what I can only describe as a loud presence - a “feel” about her that could not be ignored. It was like there was an aura that extended around her and set off an alarm when she was within a certain range, setting off this wave of mixed emotions in me. I found her looking at the books right around the Occult section.
Somehow - I don’t remember how - I ended up talking with her. She’d been a fixation of mine for awhile by that time, and I was both amazed and exhilarated to finally have the opportunity to communicate with her. She was all I’d hoped she’d be; dark and
damned interesting. She told me she loved reading these books about serial killers; books that were located a few shelves down from my section on the paranormal. Somehow that made me all the more curious about her on multiple levels, not least of which was the level where I wanted to corner her in a dark room, pin her yup against a wall and fuck the living hell out of her.
Eventually, I managed to bring up my relatively-recently acquired obsession with the paranormal and asked her is she’d ever seen a ghost or anything of that nature.
Then -- and she said it, dead serious -- “I’ve seen aliens.”
My mouth dropped. Marry me, I thought.
On a more serious level, I was a bit frightened by that comment. This was the first time I’d ever met anyone else who claimed to have experiences with them. I certainly believed there were a few around the school that had seen them, but no one had ever openly admitted it to me until her. I’m kicking myself in the ass for not remembering the details of the story she told me, but she told me it throwing it under the category of a “dream,” even though she maintained that she had actually seen them.
Over time, my obsession with her grew. Not only was she dark, mysterious and beautiful, but she'd seen "them." I remember once I found myself alone with her in a dark art room, and I so wanted her, I so wanted to make a move, but I was scared of her - and not only because of her maddening beauty. I had somehow come to associate her with a strange mixture of sexual intensity and soul-shattering fear.
I couldn’t cough up the courage to talk to her again, though, let alone so far as to make a move on her.
As the years went by, I’d occasionally receive updates on her whereabouts and well-being. It just so happened that my mother worked with her mother for a time. Mom explained the lady, as JH had explained her, as so incredibly Christian that it bordered on the psychotic. JH and Von had apparently run off to Pennsylvania together for a time, but eventually returned and, the
last I heard, had broken up.
Seeing his hating eyes in the gas station brought back that curiosity I had regarding what had happened to him. I wondered how she was, and wished I would've asked him about her.
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I wrote the above on April 6 of this year (with some personal things deleted), after seeing Von in the BP gas station where he worked. Yesterday morning, I got the news.
I woke up late and was in the process of pouring myself a cup of coffee when the phone rang. My dad went to reach for it.
"Tell them I know," I told him, figuring it was work calling.
I wasn't late for work, but it's rigid routine for me to go their four hours early every day and sit around, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and write. I’m kind of weird that way. When I'm not there at least three hours early, they usually call and wake me up. They're kind of weird that way.
Dad handed me the phone. It wasn't work. It was Melinda, a friend from middle school who I'd drifted from during high school, and who had spent the last several years desperately trying to rekindle a friendship with me. I'd accepted that we had changed. I'd flipped out during high school and began seeing little aliens and having out-of-body experiences -- I knew I'd be too weird for her now, and I was significantly different than how I'd been when she knew me. I didn't want to live in the past and try to be who I was, and she seemed to expect that of me, so I had kept my distance. She called me periodically out of the blue, but it had been awhile.
"What's up?" I asked.
"Did you hear about Von and JH?"
"No," I said, suddenly interested. "What?"
"They're dead."
"What?"
It was the way she said it -- with not a hint of apparent sorrow. She almost seemed happy to tell me the news. She said it in the same tone she used to use when she called those frigid winters during high school to announce to me we had a snow day.
My dad threw the front page of the newspaper in front of me just after she said those two words, `they’re dead’, so perfect it could’ve been a scene out of a movie. I saw the two familiar faces of Von and JH on the front page and caught the words `murder-suicide’. The pictures. They were pulled out the yearbook, for shit's sake.
They both graduated in 1998 from my high school, a year after I did. Some time ago I heard they both ran away to Pennsylvania, but they eventually came back to our Ohio town. They broke up and, after he became obsessive, irrational and abusive, often stalking her, she moved back to PA to distance herself from him.
Problems continued. He kept coming back to her, trying to get her to take him back, but she refused. Apparently she'd begun dating someone else; a kid from high school. She was talking to people at the store where she worked about getting a restraining order against Von.
Then on May 16, around 8 AM, there was a disturbance reported at JH's apartment in PA Local police arrived, knocked on the door, and received no answer. They left by 8:16. According to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, a neighbor across the hall then saw who was undoubtedly Von leaving the apartment. He was covered in blood.
According to word-of-mouth, he saw her, lifted a finger to his lips, and went "shhh." Then he left.
When detectives arrived at her apartment the second time, at 8:24 AM, they found her purse outside her door. When they got no response from within the apartment, they located a superintendent of the building who opened the door for them.
Inside, they found a trail of blood leading from the living room to the bedroom and bathroom. They found JH's body, beaten to death with a pair of brass knuckles they found nearby and stabbed from the chards of a broken mirror. They had enough evidence to arrest Von and put out an all-points bulletin to track him down and bring him in for questioning. At 5:45 that very evening, a hiker spotted him down at a park not a block from my house. His body was found in a secluded area by a trail. He'd put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Letter 2.
Thirteen years ago, right after we had moved to our new house in the sticks, my mother was in the living room sorting through some old video tapes. We were having a little verbal battle -- not at all that unusual -- because I wanted to go over to play with my friend, Joe, who's backyard was separated by ours by this dirt trail that ran at an angle through our woods. As we were arguing, we began hearing what sounded like someone screaming. It got louder. We looked out the window, and that's when we both saw Joe's oldest sister, Sara, running towards my mom and I. She was screaming frantically, as if she had gone insane. It was so surreal. So frightening. Her face was red and smeared with tears. My mom tried to calm her so she could understand just what the fuck was wrong.
To me, it sounded as if she was saying, "Jill's gone crazy. Jill's killing people."
Jill was their pet black lab. My mom commanded me to stay put on the back porch and then ran with Sara back down the trail. I stood there, uncertain what to think. I was worried about what was happening, and lack of knowledge of such an obviously alarming situation only fuels fear and feeds the feeling of insecurity. Had Jill gotten rabies and gone around biting people, killing them? I thought of Stephen King’s Cujo. I hadn't a fucking clue.
I stood there for a long while. I don't remember moving. I can hardly remember breathing. I saw a large group of people through the trees, running to the part of the woods to the side of their house and right behind ours. I heard talking in the distance. Echoes of voices. I heard screaming. I couldn't make out the words for the life of me, especially when I heard the sirens howling. Like knives to my ears, cutting through my confused thoughts.
Mom came back that day looking worn in more ways than one. It was the last day of school. It wasn't Jill that had gone crazy and had gone around killing people, it was Jed -- Joe's oldest brother. It was Jed who'd "gone crazy," and it was Jed who'd "killed himself."
Jed was to go to his senior prom today. He had a date awaiting his arrival. Imagine having a mother see her son like that -- and a father, brothers, a sister. Imagine them, in turn, having to call up his date to the prom that would be starting in a few hours and having to explain to her how her date couldn't exactly make it. How her date had hung himself in the woods right behind our house.
I never really knew Jed. Damned if I can remember what he looked like. I saw him, I think, only once or twice, and I never talked with him. Stories I heard about him played down the unprecedented tragedy it was made up to be in the very beginning. Such stories told how he had asked for it. How death, to him, was the biggest high; the greatest drug. The stories told of how he was obsessed with death and reveled in pushing his pain thresholds. One story involved him and a friend ramming their wrists onto a rusty bob wire fence; the game was to see who could take more pain before blacking out or calling mercy. The stories, the pain his family felt, his suicide right in the back woods -- all these things were fucked up, no doubt, but I never knew the guy. I heard about him second hand, I saw him through pictures, I felt the loss through other people I knew who knew him. But I didn't know him like I knew Von and JH.
Imagining them both dead right now is a lot more difficult than the whole Jed episode was thirteen years ago. I wasn't best of friends with Von and knew him mostly by association, but this is a kid you see everyday, a kid you often wonder about. I had a crush on JH, and Von wrote for my goddamned paper. I just wrote all that shit about Von and JH last month. A kid at work who goes to my old school says that Von came in just a few weeks ago to visit the art teacher, who we all adored. A girl I knew from high school came in and said that the night that it happened, he stopped at the bar where she works and he bought a beer from her -- a bar I pass by every fucking day on my way to Chardon to go to work. What had changed him? What drove him over his edge in high school? What drove him to do what he did on May 16?
Von fell victim to his own violent, sadistic, masochistic insanity. That part of it -- the bullet in his fucking skull -- that's fine. Argue if you will, but if one has a right to live, one has a right to die. What isn't fair is that he dragged a girl, beautiful from skin to eyes to soul, right down with him. What isn't fair is that he made her a victim of his insanity as well. That's the part that I don't get. The lack of justice or meaning in it all. It seems so fake, but you've got to keep reminding yourself it's not. But it really does seem so fake. This shit is for Stephen King novels. Gory movies. Bad dreams. Tales by the campfire that scare the shit out of you until you realize it's just a story. Or until you wake up from the dream. Or until the movie ends. Then you close the book and flee into the safety and boredom of the real world. This isn't shit for the local goddamn news. This isn't the stuff you like to think about happening in reality. But reality suddenly hits: the world has gone hopelessly insane. It's a fact, and yeah, I know it's not a new one, but it's a fact that strikes a hard blow in times like these. You hear the words "murder-suicide" and realize that it's not within the frames of a TV, or even a mile away, but a horror story that ended half a block from your driveway. This is the kind of silent so-called fucking "sanity" you find in this small country town in Ohio, the back door of America. Welcome to our fine country. Welcome to our wonderful world. This is a preview of the human species. I'm your fucking host, and welcome to my generation of de-generation.
Since I read what happened, I've had these questions that won't seem to go away. Some of them are sick, some stupid, but I think it's natural to think them -- just not ask them aloud, or on paper. Well, I’ve never been natural, so why stop now? It's just an attempt to try and understand, maybe rationalize the whole situation so it makes sense to me.
Why did he do it -- what was going through his sick fucking mind as he beat her to death and cut her with her own mirror? Deep below all his psychological mess, what was the base motivation for this horrid episode -- was it out of fear? Jealousy? Hate? As hard as it is for me to conceive, was it, in some twisted, fucked up way only the raging mad and hopelessly sadistic/masochistic can understand, out of love? Did he want to commit suicide, and simply wanted to drag her down with him? Did he kill her, know he'd get caught, and would rather choose dying by his own hand than get caught, thrown in jail facing life imprisonment if not death row? Or did he kill her in a fit of rage, an episode of insanity, and then realize what he'd done and, unable to live with the guilt, decided to terminate himself out of punishment? In other words, in those last few hours, or moments, did a glimmer of what one would like to think of "humanity" glimmer through, and he realized just how fucked up and sick all this was? In the end, only he knows, I guess. One on the outside is lost trying to conceive of the motivations behind an act such as this. I'm entirely at a loss to understand.
JH I admired deeply. She was one of those people I always hoped, and secretly figured, I'd bump into again one day in the future. It sort of seems selfish and trivial now, but I'd always hoped maybe I'd get a chance to be with her for awhile. Maybe she'd be single and by that time I'd gotten over my anxiety and would ask her out. Maybe I'd just get to know her better, and we could maybe talk about her views on the world, on her personal beliefs, and even about the strange experiences I believed we both shared. She always seemed so interesting.
I've often thought about her since high school, always curious what she was doing, always asking if she had broken up with Von yet. I became especially curious as to how she was doing after seeing Von in BP last month. Selfish regrets flooded through me yesterday, and still to today. I was always too scared to talk to her. How senseless fear can be, and what limitless opportunities I could have had -- and continue to have -- if I weren't to let it have the wheel, the throne of my being and dominate me so often and to such a high degree.
But regrets are pointless as well, I realize -- as senseless as the fears that forever fuel them.
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