The Edgelord at 35

The following sad, meandering autobiographical piece began as an attempt to write an essay to introduce Misery Tourism’s first monthly content theme: school shootings. I was hoping to illuminate the role that school shootings have played in defining my generation, those of us who are too young to be Gen Xers but a little too old and and quite a bit too jaded and nihilistic to be millenials, and who are rapidly (and pointlessly) approaching middle age. Instead, I birthed a bunch of navel-gazing, self-loathing trash. It has no literary, diversionary, or moral merit. It probably shouldn’t be published at all, but since schadenfreude is our stock in trade, hey, here you fucking go.

Cho Seung-Hui died like Jesus Christ, but I’ve outlived both of them now. Cho by more than a decade; Jesus by nearly two years. I’m too old to be a martyr, even in my own eyes.

I wonder how James Holmes would put it. You either die a spree killer or live long enough to see yourself become … What? Not a victim. Statistically that’s unlikely. Not even a victim. An adult, maybe, but I’m not even recognizable as that. I still look like one of them: the skinny, liminal frame―not quite the body of an adolescent, not fully that of a grownup―the round, undifferentiated, hairless face, an obvious product of testosterone deprivation, the aversion to eye contact, and the high school hallway slouch (the posture of an animal in a constant state of passive surrender). No, not an adult. So what then? What do you become when you’ve grown out of violence without growing into anything else? A faggot, I guess.

That’s the word we would have used, isn’t it? Are you old enough to remember South Park‘s defense of “fag”? Did you laugh along? How many verses of The Marshall Mathers LP can you recite from memory? If you’re older or younger or more well-adjusted than me, you probably think I’m a homophobe. I am a homophobe. I am a homo. The duality of life.

That’s it then: “You either die a spree killer or live long enough to see yourself become a faggot.”

But James Holmes didn’t die. He’s sitting in a maximum security prison cell today, too crazy for lethal injection, too real for Arkham. I wonder if one day, maybe not long from now―Wikipedia tells me he turns 32 in December―while perched on the rim of his state-issued toilet, with his jumpsuit around his knees, the Aurora Joker will catch his reflection in the stainless steel mirror (his hair, now its natural color, perhaps thinner than it was a year ago) and think, “Christ, what a faggot.”

******

Let me tell you about my teen fantasy. I would lie on the couch in the living room, under a knit comforter saturated in dog and cat and human hair, with my eyes closed, and―if my concentration was stronger than the voices of the Southern Baptist preachers coming from the radio that was never off and certainly never on another station―I would imagine myself walking the halls of my Catholic middle school, with a gun, of course.

The gun was always some nondescript long-barrelled rifle. I knew nothing about guns then, know nothing about guns now. I declined all my father’s offers to hunt with him. What a missed opportunity.

I would imagine myself menacing my classmates and teachers with that rifle. I hated them, as I have hated and still hate many people, but I don’t want to get into why. I thought I might. I thought it might be cathartic to dedicate a paragraph or two to talking about how I was bullied or how my own unique otherness (as you fresh-faced identitarian children call it) made me a natural target or how, actually, I was a pretty shit student. But it won’t be. It’ll just be obnoxious. It will breed more pity than empathy. And, frankly, I owe you nothing. Writing is painful enough, a poor enough fit, a cramped crawlspace that I’m trying cautiously (and desperately) to back out of before panic sets in. Insert your own pubescent embarrassment here.

The point is, I hated them, and thus the gun. I would point the gun at them. I would slide the barrel down their throats after backing them into the corner of a classroom. They could never run in my imagination, just cower and crouch. The school had no exits, and every hallway had a dead end. Maybe they would beg. I honestly don’t remember. Some details are lost to time, and our fantasies are often more shorthand than lurid prose, even when we’re young and angry.

After I had tortured them, I would imagine what it would be like not to shoot. I would make myself lower the barrel, talk myself into walking away. This was an exercise in Christian forgiveness, you see. I thought I was teaching myself how to turn the other cheek, how to let go of my bitterness and transcend my rage.

What a little faggot I was.

******

Cho murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech the same day that I was accepted to graduate school. It was an english phd program at a nominal state school that I will not name. I spent most of the day reading the news online, and then my parents took me out to dinner. They were, I think, legitimately, unambiguously proud of me, possibly for the first and the last time.

Afterward, they dropped me off at Rudy‘s house. (I couldn’t drive. Still can’t.) I found him in his room (not yet thoroughly trashed, his windows unbroken at that time; he hadn’t yet written “uppity nigger” on the wall in Ninja Turtle green acrylic paint) watching a nature documentary.

“Update the Guiness Book,” I said. “We have a new fucking world record.” (Maybe I didn’t say this. I said something about a new record. Probably more artless. All remembered conversations are embellished.)

He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

“Oh fuck,” I said. “You haven’t heard the news?”

“No, I’ve been watching The Discovery Channel all day. What happened?”

I told him.

“Of course it’s an Asian.” Rudy was talking from the bed, eyes on the ceiling, while I spun around in his computer chair, gleefully trying to induce nausea. “Fucking model minorities, man. They get all the high scores. He probably didn’t even have to use aim assist. “

We spent most of the night joking, bullshitting, and watching the news. We savored every detail. The Holocaust survivor’s heroic sacrifice. Nikki Giovanni’s self-serving rationalizations. (Rudy: “God, why couldn’t he have shot her?” Me: “You’re just another self-loathing black man. No respect for the voices of your generation.”) Richard McBeef. The girlfriend who was and wasn’t. What a goddamn story.

I don’t remember the weather, but I choose to imagine a beautiful spring evening: grass edging towards life, cartoon songbirds, that smiling moonman from the McDonald’s commercials, the works.

Jonesboro. Columbine. Red Lake. Virginia Tech. They all happened in the spring. Eliot―not Rodger, though he was another victim of the mating season―was on to something.

I dropped out of grad school after a year. My life is full of missed opportunities. After the violence of spring, sometimes the summer we anticipated turns out to be nothing but a humid drag. It’s easy to envy the fertilizer.

******

I’ve only attended one party in the last decade, and it was a costume party. Theme: high school cliques. (Or was it clichés?) My roommate was turning 25. Another big milestone that seems quaint in retrospect. We had been friends for long enough that I could not decline. He suggested that I could go in my normal style of dress―black khakis, round glasses, polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top―and just say I was a nerd. Hell, I could bring one of my Dungeons & Dragons manuals if I needed a prop. I had a different idea.

I found the black trench coat (too large, but that only made it more appealing) and camo pants at the first thrift store I visited, and the Korn t-shirt (also too big) at the second. My roommate let me borrow a pair of fingerless gloves and a baseball cap. The sports team insignia on the hat wasn’t ideal, but it was going to be worn backwards anyway, so it was no major loss. The gun was trickier. I thought about buying a cheap water pistol, but today they all come in warped, impressionistic shapes and garish neon colors, more dildo than firearm, reassuring to parents and trigger-happy but liability-averse cops, but not at all what I was looking for. My miracle came when the roommate discovered that his sister had a wonderfully realistic-looking BB gun, all black, an entirely believably reproduction of a Glock 9.

My roommate’s girlfriend―studying to become a music education teacher, the first member of her family to attend college, a working class success story―was horrified. “I don’t want you to dress like that,” she said. “It upsets me.” Roommate laughed and told her I wasn’t going to listen to her. I didn’t.

(I spoke to that roommate again a few months ago. He visited for my 34th birthday. He took me to the house he just bought, and I met his new wife. They both dropped out of college a few years ago. He’s a postal worker and she works at a factory. What’s the appropriate cliché? “They seemed happy and very much in love.” I asked about his old girlfriend. He told me she had a mental breakdown, like her father. Schizophrenia ran in the family. She never graduated. One day she called her brother from Colorado and begged him to drive out east and bring her home with him. Someone had tried to hurt her. She was scared. They had an argument over her reckless driving and she left him by the side of the highway in Nebraska. Last he heard she had spent a few days in jail after skipping out on a restaurant bill and was living in her car in a Walmart parking lot. A working class success story.)

The party was depressing. Flamboyant gay men in sports jerseys. Morbidly obese girls in cheerleader uniforms. My roommate wore a rastafari hat and drunkenly manipulated an acoustic guitar. Everyone was living their best lie. Contrary to the advice given by Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Bowling for Columbine, life does not necessarily get better after high school.  

I lingered at the periphery. I would like to say that I was maintaining character, but the truth is that no change of outfit would have made me any less a wallflower. Plus, I don’t drink, so that didn’t make things easier. If this were not a true story, now would be when I awkwardly embarrass myself and, perhaps, have a moment of clarity about how my self-absorption and childish pretensions have isolated me from other humans, but, honestly, I had had and shrugged off that realization years before, so I just passed the time in annoyed discomfort. My gun was fake, but the outcome would have been no different if it were real.

I still have the costume. Someday, when senility sets in―My great-grandfather had Alzheimer’s. The genetic potential is there. Why should I expect to be spared?―maybe I will put it on and wander outside, not aimlessly, but with a profound and anachronistic sense of purpose, a meaning that outlives the mind. They won’t let me have a gun, of course, but I will imagine one, and it’ll be real enough for a nutty old piece old shit. Rudy will be dead by then, I’m sure, but if pop culture has educated me well about dementia, I’ll still hear his voice.  A role reversal: this time it will be him goading me on. He’ll be the one who won’t shut up, and I’ll be mute but not lost, a magic bullet loaded in my ethereal clip for everyone I see who looks younger than me, two if they haven’t lived in vain.

Hopefully by then generations will have come and gone and the eternal cycle of teenage rebellion will have passed from propriety to im, from inclusion to ex, and some kid, high on whatever’s fashionable, low on self-esteem, will gawk at me as I pass and say, with that tone of repulsed admiration that only a bitter juvenile delinquent can pull off, “Jesus, look at that old faggot.”