Another Goddamn Shooting

When I was a kid, I was bullied pretty much constantly at school. I didn't have friends to pressure other kids into leaving me alone, and the teachers never really paid much attention to what was going on.

The harassment ranged from the extreme to the mundane depending on factors I never could identify, but it never outright stopped. It wasn't uncommon to have groups of girls in nice clothing follow me down a hallway, taking turns asking me questions about my hygiene, whether I owned a TV, whether I worshipped the devil.

Sometimes they'd surround me with a single person leading the charge, but usually they stayed together and tried to remain behind me, where I wouldn't be able to tell who said what. Once in the bathroom, people started climbing the other stalls or crawling underneath to look at me. Another favorite pastime was thinking up nicknames.

I wore a lot of black back then, and I wasn't aware that I was lacking social skills. When people tell you you're weird, you just assume that explains everything and move on. I wrote poems about sadistic murder and suicide and turned them in. Teachers didn't really like that, but they also didn't ask any questions most of the time. I thought that was great; now I wish they'd been willing to invest the time. Things might be different today if even one of them had bothered.

Meanwhile people were still throwing spare change at me, stuffing shampoo samples in my locker, and singing "Pretty Woman" as a group whenever I got nearby.

The boys weren't as bad as the girls, possibly because they were too busy eating their own weaklings, but there were enough of them to cause me a headache. The bullying tactics of a boy harassing a low-caste female were usually more straightforward than you'd expect from a girl.

One would get behind me and pantomime whatever I was doing, so that I only knew what was going on when I turned to see what was causing the laughter. A lot of times, they'd try to ask me out on dates or embarrass each other with the old "My friend over there, he likes you" ploy.

Back then I was completely face blind. I'd been coming to class for years with these kids and I couldn't have picked one of them out of a lineup or called them by name. I tried, but somehow I never learned how to do it.

Because of this, I never knew who my tormenters were, or how many of them there were. I thought it was everyone, though it might have been as few as twenty kids for all I know.

What I do know is that from the minute I left the house until I came home afterwards, I had to be on my guard and ready for anything. I never relaxed. I was terribly paranoid and went to great lengths to avoid being near others, a habit which continues to this day even though I've learned to ape a lot of normal human social cues since then.

I fantasized about destroying the school. Would I set it on fire, shoot everyone, blow it up? What kind of bombs would I need? Where would I put them? How would I make sure I didn't kill any of the good ones along with the assholes, when I didn't know who was who? And so on and so forth. I didn't want to kill anyone but myself, but there was a wonderful escapism in planning out all these violent revenge scenarios.

Some asshole could be sitting two desks away whispering to her friends, and here was me debating the best way to get her head off her body. There was a deep satisfaction in it. No one could try to tell me that these soul-crushing drones were actually very nice and wonderful people deep down--I killed them in effigy, and that was enough. It didn't stop the bullying, but I didn't snap, so maybe it worked after all.

With all that said, let me confess that I had a major hero-worship thing going on with the famous school shooters of my era. Columbine came after I finally dropped out of high school for good, which is fortunate. Suddenly my old school not only noticed its bullied oddballs for the first time, it also had on-campus cops arrest them for being potential psychopaths (that is, wearing trenchcoats or looking Goth).

Still, if it had happened sooner, I would have been fantasizing it was my classmates eating lead. That's how it was with the Kip Kinkel shooting. That one happened at the school I was supposed to be attending, and the senior class was made up of people from my year. I spent a lot of time hoping that maybe he got some of the kids whose harassment in middle school made me quit going. I imagined he only killed people who tortured him and made him twisted in the first place.

Such thinking never holds up under scrutiny, but I was really angry and such evil thoughts were nicely shocking and dark. They expressed a need for ultimate closure, which I couldn't get on my own, and so I ran with it. I never would have been one of the kids taking a gun to school, but I understood.

School shootings can serve as potent wish fulfilment when your life is in chaos and your fellow students are doing their best to make you wish you were dead, until you're trampled so flat that Columbine makes you say "Good job, guys." The key is to pretend the enigmatic shooter was in the exact same boat you're in, and the people he killed--every single one--were analogous to the ones currently tormenting you.

There's this vibe of darkness and mystery that surrounds the American school shooter. It's almost coyly romantic. Think of a shooter and you get this vague impression of a trenchcoat-clad loner who nobody relates to because he's so quiet and weird, and then one day the guy (or girl) just snaps. "I've taken all I can stand from you people!" he roars, and the body count starts to rise.

Too often, the school shooter dies in the firefight, suicide by either the cops or their own hand. They get to go out in a blaze of glory, taking the truth about their motivations to the grave. Usually we never know what set them off, but within about 24 hours I can count on watching a Jesus freak make fun of my favorite video game or band on national TV.

Mr. Cho, our most recent addition to the club, has helpfully contributed to our understanding of the school shooter conundrum by way of a multimedia manifesto, mailed to NBC just before the slaughter began.

The contents of this manifesto are so absolutely moronic and petty, so loaded with self-pitying psychobabble, that all the glamour and mystique has been permanently stripped away from his image. Now, instead of going down in history as a silent martyr with dead aim and inscrutable goals, this dum-dum will forever be remembered as a whiny fuckwit who stalked women and had to gun down a fucking Holocaust survivor to feel like he even rated an obituary.

How does that bit go? The one about how it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt? Anyway.

Rest assured that we did not lose a potential cancer cure in Mr. Cho. The shame is that he knew this and decided to drag down a bunch of the bright ones with him because, hey, misery and mediocrity loves company.

Just about the only mystery left here is the fact that he made it all the way to college with as slow a mind as he apparently had. I guess God works in mysterious ways.

I hope weird kids today look at this guy's work and see it for the cowardly act of a total chode instead of the grand gesture it was clearly intended to be. It might be too much to ask for, but if even one would-be killer could be discouraged from idolizing school shooters as martyrs, that would be nice.

The moral of the story: School shootings used to mean something, man, but they've totally pussied out since their last album.