RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Forty-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 as well as the guilty. – JG *

-Jason. Wake up.-

I sit up, still dreaming, my wife asleep at my side. They are arrayed at the foot of our bed, the women sitting, the men standing behind them. They are five in number, a little family – although I remember later that only three of them are actually related. The teenage Girl sits to the left of me, a strawberry blonde in a black t-shirt under a denim vest. She is scrawny and kind of trashy but she has a very pretty, vulnerable smile. She also has a deep gouge in her forehead and a thin red line dug into her throat where she was strangled. The older woman, the Mother, sits to my right, covered in blood from what appear to be innumerable stab wounds. Underneath the blood her dress is plain, her face even plainer. The older man, the Father, and a young teenage boy stand together behind her, the older man’s hand placed awkwardly on his Son’s shoulder. The boy, kind of punk-rock, kind of skater-ish, is also bleeding but less so than his Mother. Fewer stab wounds are visible. The Father appears nearly untouched but for the blood seeping forward into the front of his work shirt – all of his stab wounds were in his back. The last – that other teenage boy, the Suicide – is a little older than the Son but, admittedly, it is hard to determine his age because half of his face is gone and his jaw hangs awkwardly from the right side, the intact side. The shotgun took care of the rest. It appears that there may be another two or three figures standing behind him but the outlines are vague, ghostly.

-Jason. Wake up.-

-What. What is it now.-

Rand Myers speaks. –None of us is very happy about the way this has turned out so far.-

I laugh. –Oh. Oh really. Well, too fuckin’ bad. Get somebody else to write it up for you.- I shake my head, laugh again. –Assholes.-

Katie Hoehner touches my arm. –No, no, don’t get mad. It’s just there’s so many holes where there’s no information.-

-I know, believe me, I know. Tons of the stuff in this is total speculation. But what do you want me to do. How could I make it better, more what you want.-

John Janks says, -Well, what I’d like, I’d like it to be more consistent, more like a story from chapter to chapter. Not so much jumping around from idea to idea.-

-Okay.-

Katie Hoehner says, -There’s too many characters, and some of them just appear and then just disappear again, like Donna and Our Lady. It seems like they were just introduced to tell about the dream I was in.-

I smile. –They were.-

Katie shrugs. –But still.-

-Okay.-

Rand Myers says, -I wanna know what Snakeland really is, what it was. If it had all this impact on all of us, and everything, I wanna know exactly what was in there and how it did all this to us.-

-Okay.-

Mark Janks says, -I want some straight up good guys and bad guys. I’d like it to be clear if Mike Guerrasio was, like, an actual killer or just a dick. And if he was just a dick, I’d like to see him change, kind of come around and become cooler by the end of the story. Not all the Heads were dicks.-

-Most of them were.- I sigh. -Okay.-

Marge Janks clears her throat. –I want a happy ending. I know that maybe that’s not “cool”, the “cool” thing to do, but it’s what I want.-

Then I realize: -You guys are describing the, like, blockbuster Hollywood movie version of what happened.- And then I think about that for a second.

Suddenly, that doesn’t sound so bad.

RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Forty-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 as well as the guilty. – JG *

And what about the parents in this scenario? I don’t mean the Janks, or poor Mrs. Hoehner, or even the parents of Rand and Carolyn, or Tim and Chris. I mean everyone else, safe in their homes, kids asleep upstairs or pretending to be, watching the news, hearing the gossip, seeing that encroaching shadow from Snakeland reach down Mansfield Avenue toward all the others, towards them. Did they wonder, were they afraid, did they just ignore it and hope it went away? All gone now, all those memories – all the adults from that time period that I have spoken to claim to remember nothing of the suicides, and perhaps only a vague recollection of that poor Katie Hoehner or that awful Jeremy Janks. And Snakeland? Nothing. “Oh, the grain elevators? I was so happy when they tore that down. I’m surprised no one died in there.”

Someone did. Katie Hoehner was killed in Snakeland. Her body was moved to the railroad tracks.

“Oh. Well then, I’m surprised it was only one person.”

Another question wafts in on the autumn wind: why did it all stop? By the time Chris Coloiacovo killed himself, early in 1986, a little more than halfway through our sophomore year, it was all over. There were no more deaths at Kenton North, and certainly none related to Snakeland. What changed? By the beginning of junior year, September 1986, I don’t have any further memories of Mike Guerrasio either. Did he graduate? Drop out? I don’t know. I don’t even remember the Heads as a real presence after that either – maybe their musical allegiances were already beginning to fragment, in the same manner as ours. Mostly what I remember is that something in the air had changed, that electric friction had diminished somehow, had started in on the normalization process that would eventually lead us all into adulthood and the requisite disappointments, small triumphs and more subtle and consistent pleasures that came with it.

One thought though: if somebody actually did something, if someone killed the Snake in Snakeland, or dug some displaced soul a grave, or one of those other things that people do in horror movies to send the Bad Spirits away, let me know, okay? Credit should go where credit is due. Thanks must be given for ending the murders and suicides, with just a little held back for dispersing that extraordinary friction, so brief, so rare.

RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Forty-First Fragment

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

These are the actual facts of the matter:

At some point late in my freshman year, another Freshman named Rand Myers (14 years old) killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. At some point after Katie Hoehner, Will Haynes and the Janks family were all murdered at the beginning of my sophomore year two juniors named Tim Danvers (17 years old) and Carolyn Brewster (17 years old) committed suicide prior to the Christmas break at the end of 1985, Tim with an overdose of pills and Carolyn also with a gun. Sometime after the beginning of 1986 and springtime of that year another sophomore named Chris Coloiacovo (16 years old) hung himself. Essentially the end of our sophomore year was also the end of the series of deaths that haunted Kenton during the mid-1980s.

As there is no official record of the suicides, I have had to assign them random reasons in my mind out of the usual ones – was it Rand who was an unmedicated major depressive or was it Chris? Was Tim the one who killed himself because he was gay, or was it Carolyn? Was Chris bullied to death, or was he one of those autoerotic accidents that happen by the thousands every year? Did Rand shoot himself because he couldn’t get it up for Janey Larson? Did Tim? There is always so much secrecy around suicides, especially young ones – I always think that the reasons we speculatively assign end up being much, much worse than whatever the truth might be. Sincerely, how much worse can it get than a teenage suicide?

Except, of course, for a teenage suicide birthed in Snakeland.

RETURN TO SNAKELAND - Fortieth Fragment

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

Although long after the rash of deaths at Kenton North, it wasn’t until 1992 that I was shown very plainly that you do not fuck with a suicide. That year, right before I was to graduate from Simmons College, one of my classmates - thin, shy, Indian – hung himself in his dorm room. Although the high-strung hippies that flocked to Simmons were pretty freaked out, this was old news to me and even if it wasn’t I was going through an especially self-absorbed period and probably wouldn’t have cared much either way.

However, when this young man killed himself he left a note for Leon Bernstein, the dean of Simmons, challenging the dean to make sense, or something approximating sense, out of his suicide. Although this challenge would’ve been refused by most of us, at least in the name of good taste, Bernstein was not one to forego a challenge. And boy did we pay for it. Bernstein directly confronted the young man’s death and the self-absorbed reasons behind it as a large part of his Commencement Address that year and it spread a dark shroud far and wide over the proceedings. Bernstein made the classic error of confronting the suicide head-on, and a suicide’s silence is deafening. The dead boy’s passive-aggression turned Bernstein into a bully before our very eyes. He could not pull it all back around into something positive, something life-affirming by the end, and by the time he realized he was out of his depth it was just too late. The Address stumbled to a close and even the presence on the dais of Martin Scorcese and Sonny Rollins could not dispel the huge cloud of shit-mist he had sprayed in every direction. Our graduation was, at least temporarily, ruined.

Never forget: suicide is an act of aggression. Do not fuck with a suicide.