School Killers

I can't think of any sensible thing to say when two students dressed in black trench coats bundle themselves up with explosive devices and guns and set out to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by killing as many of their classmates as they can. We think the world is a pressure-cooker out there in the Stock Exchange and the Bank Towers and the Emergency Wards-- it's a pressure-cooker out here too, in our vacuous suburbs, with our mall-rat status-rated designer running shoes and gilded suburban off-road super-trucks and Hollywood heroic bionic mega-metal men with laser guided killer stilettos whipping the forces of darkness without concept, idea, abstraction, or reflection, and our moral barometric Wall-Street pressure pages of translucent stock quotes: all on a race to achieve, obtain, impress and express, communicate and digitate in the soft blue glow of television on the sideboard at dinner with whatever molecules of your nuclear family are available tonight.

So a couple of boys in their color-drained coats mull over their failures and fantasies. Those girls with the curled blonde hair, up so early to remake their faces... those studs in the Tommy Hilfiger sweats reaping their squeals and nuzzling nipples with their slam-dunks and hail marys... those geeks in the turbo pascal class hacking their uncles pims and measuring their dicks for Harvardized condoms... those fay artistes craving exclusivity through obscurantism... those achievers with the part-time jobs and daddy's RAV on the weekends and drinking parties and future flatulent frat freaks... those fundies with their pre-school bible studies and samaritan smiles... the fat girls leaning with desperation... those skinny girls colluding behind their compressed lips... and you just can't get the grease off your face or the smell off your fingers or lose that dull inviscerating impression that your life is going to end in one long interminable trailer park whimper. And so you trade it all in for your 15 minutes of fame, and you're going to be bigger than fucking Charles Whitman or Richard Speck and you're going to know it, for who'd have thought a few hours--- hours and hours -- who'd have thought it'd take the police that long to find you in this gleaming chromium diaphragm of literate washfulness, here, here in the library, with the brains of your class-mates splattered around you, here among the books of which you never finished a one without thinking it was small or irrelevant, here below the sirens, and the helicopters, and the cameras, and CNN With A NEW SPECIAL LOGO AND MUSIC just for you, my sweet, now that your immortality has bled down the wires and who'd have thought it would take them four hours to find out your blood wasn't even hot enough to face down your own killers?

And I'm curious as hell about those last moments-- not even alone, like Whitman in his tower-- Charles, of course, not Walt-- not even alone, as if there was something you could say to each other, like Jesus, we really showed them, didn't we-- and you wouldn't probably even be quite so obvious as to say you have their attention now, would you? What were your last words to each other? Where have they gone? Where are they now? Where are the blondes and the geeks and the jocks and the brains and those oh-so-ephemeral have everything to die for most-popular and likely to succeed barbies and kens, who formerly, obliviously, oh so vacantly, surrounded us---- yes, they noticed.

April 20, 1999