RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Third Fragment

* This is a fictionalized account of some shit that actually happened. All the names, locations, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent. – JG *

These are the actual facts of the matter:

This is an elegy, but if I’m being honest I didn’t really know any of the people who died. I attended Kenton North Senior High School from 1984 through 1988. At some point in my freshman year, another Freshman named Kenneth Coloiacovo (14 years old) killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. Over the summer of 1985 a Sophomore-to-be named Katie Hoehner (15 years old) was strangled to death and her body left on the railroad tracks behind a series of abandoned grain elevators in Kenton that had been nicknamed “Snakeland”. Katie Hoehner sat in front of me in Homeroom freshman year but if we ever said two words to each other it was a lot. Her killer was never brought to justice and the crime remains officially unsolved to this day.

Soon after the beginning of my sophomore year a Senior named Jeremy Janks (17 years old) murdered his younger brother, mother and father (in that order) by stabbing them to death. Jeremy then unsuccessfully attempted to kill himself by slashing his wrists and, in the confusion following blood loss, drove the family car into the back of a restored ’68 Camaro stopped at a traffic light in Kenton. The driver, Will Haynes (25 years old) was killed. Jeremy survived, and served 25 years in jail for the murders. I believe he has recently been released to a halfway house somewhere in Western New York.

I am fuzzier on the next series of dates as I have not been able to retrieve any records from the period but am relatively certain that the suicides of Gene Marsten (17 years old, pills), Carolyn Brewster (15 years old, hanged) and Hugh Corwin (16 years old, gun) all occurred in succession between the winter break of sophomore year and my graduation in May of 1988.

There was no uproar, no village meeting, no systematic investigation into any potential connection between the murders and the suicides. No experts were flown in to consult with Kenton North staff, no team of trauma specialists were dispatched to administer Crisis Counseling to the vulnerable student body. The only thing that was ever publicly discussed by the adults of Kenton is whether or not the name of the Kenton North football team, the Blue Devils, should be changed as it could be interpreted as a reference to Satanism.

All this shit actually happened.

RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Second Fragment

* This is a fictionalized account of some shit that actually happened. All the names, locations, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent. – JG *

I learned the meaning of the word “elegy” from the title of Issue #138 of The Uncanny X-Men, the comic book in which the funeral of Jean Grey, Phoenix, takes place. October, 1980: this is where the 1980s truly begin. “Elegy” was the first X-Men comic I ever bought – I missed Issue #137 (headed “Phoenix Must Die!” on the cover – I guess they meant it) by a matter of days. #137, the “Death of Phoenix” issue, went on to become worth hundreds of dollars, one of the most valuable modern-age comic books ever – Issue #138 did not. Story of my life. However, “Elegy” began the eternal autumn that haunted Kenton, NY and most especially Kenton North Senior High School, until the end, until the apocalypse that never came, until that one day when we all kept on breathing and shouldn’t have, couldn’t have.

So, “Elegy”: black leaves blowing across its splash page, Scott Summers’ black thoughts blowing across the other 31 – “This...is pain beyond pain. I never knew a body could hurt so much and still function. I’m not sure I want to call this ‘living’.” We were kids reading a superhero comic. Biff. Pow. Bam. It’s Clobberin’ Time. If X-Men #137 ripped something open in our lives and “Elegy” is what crawled in, X-Men #142, the conclusion of the “Days of Future Past” storyline, is that great beast matured and now slouching toward Babylon to be born. They didn’t even need to give us the actual comic book, the cover was sufficient: a huge mutant-killing Sentinel robot holds Storm in his right hand with a big spear in her back and uses his left hand to incinerate an airborne Wolverine. The tagline? “This Issue: Everybody Dies!”

“Everybody Dies!” Imagine that. That was the selling point. “C’mon, kids! Everybody Dies!” And it worked – Issue #142 sold like crazy. After #137 went through the roof none of us were going to miss out – I wasn’t going to miss out again. If somebody (Phoenix, Gwen Stacy, et. al.) dies and the comic book’s value goes through the roof, what happens when “Everybody Dies”? What is its worth then? How do you calculate that?

Except, if you read X-Men #142 (and I did, literally hundreds of times) you found out that really, nobody dies. Or they did, but it was in the future – 2013 to be exact. That totally super-futuristic time, the year 2013. Storm gets speared in silhouette, Colossus gets killed offstage, but Wolverine gets the flesh burned off his adamantium bones even more graphically than on the cover. That was pretty insane. That was February 1981.

C’mon kids. Everybody dies.