Jeremy Spoke in Class Today

In the fall of 1989, my senior year, I bought a handgun in the lobby of my high school library. It was a cheap .25 caliber, small enough to fit in my front pocket. The guy who sold it to me, a fellow student, said it was unregistered. He said it was something I didn’t want to get caught with.

For several years, I kept the gun in the glove box of my truck. Each morning, before I drove to school, I would check to make sure it was there. Each afternoon, driving home, I would suddenly recall it, like a harbored secret. It mostly stayed in my truck. I took it out occasionally to aim it. As far as I can remember, I never fired it.

I’m still not sure why I bought it. A few months before, in August, I had joined the National Guard—as soon as I finished high school, I would ship off to basic training. I owned a shotgun at the time, and a deer rifle. Where I lived in rural Arkansas, lots of kids owned guns. They drove to school with deer rifles on the gun racks of their trucks. Others had shotguns or crossbows. A few kids occasionally brought their guns inside, and years later, after everything that has happened, I think of the guns we carried and wonder if we were scared and thought we needed protection. If we felt there was some undisclosed and ill-defined danger coming, some shootout we always needed to be prepared for, even at that age.

This was, of course, a time of war.

The Berlin Wall was coming down, ending a war older than we were, but already another one was coming. Sometime during basic training, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Our drill sergeants told us we were going to war.

Instead, I went home. I started college during the long buildup to the Gulf War. My roommate—also a National Guard member—and I watched CNN every night, usually while drinking heavily. By this time, the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions had been mobilized. The aircraft carriers Eisenhower and Independence had slipped through the Suez Canal on their way to the Persian Gulf. Every day more soldiers arrived in the Gulf. Every day more National Guard units were alerted.

One weekend a month, I went to Guard drill. On the rifle range, we fired our M16s at pop-up targets so far downrange that I could hardly see them. In October, we did field training exercises, radioing for fake air strikes while the enemy—the other half of our battalion—moved toward us. Always there was talk of the war, men with more rank than me wondering whether we would be called.

When we needed to forget about what was happening, my roommate and I read. He liked old pulp novels: The Punisher, The Executioner, The Destroyer. Bullets were always flying in these books. People dying and getting decapitated. Cops killed and innocent bystanders (sometimes) saved.

He also liked Stephen King, and during the fall of 1990, as the buildup of forces continued in the Gulf, I started a collection of King’s short stories titled Skeleton Crew. In the first story, some secret government project opens up another dimension, and horrifying creatures come through, hidden in a thick mist. Other stories had a spell-casting grandmother, a man stranded on a deserted island who eats parts of himself to stay alive, a toy monkey whose cymbals cause catastrophe every time they clash.

The story “Cain Rose Up” is set in a college dorm. The main character, Curt Garrish, has just finished a difficult final exam. He heads back to his room and, after talking to a few students, takes out his hunting rifle, which is hidden in his closet. He loads it, then stands at the window looking out.

I read this story in November, at the start of deer season in Arkansas. The days had grown short, and the streetlights came on in the afternoon. My stepfather’s National Guard unit had been mobilized, and I was afraid mine would be next. I was drunk a lot of the time and hungover when I wasn’t. I still had that handgun in the glove compartment of my truck. Some days, walking down the halls of the dorm, I could see other students cleaning their guns in preparation for a weekend hunt, the smell of solvent sharp in the hallway. We weren’t supposed to have guns there, but like Curt Garrish in the story, we simply smuggled them inside, late at night, while everyone was asleep.

As Garrish makes his way toward his dorm room and the rifle, the language of the story foreshadows death—Garrish says he has taken a “last” test. He thinks a fellow student might be better off dead. Reading his description of Rollins as “the asinine floor-counselor who had sent Jimmy Brody up to visit the Dean of Men for a drinking offense,” I laughed, since my asinine floor counselor had sent me to the dean of students for a drinking offense earlier in the semester. But after Rollins leaves, Garrish imagines him dead in a ditch.

It’s a very short story. Simple, direct sentences, but King captures that end-of-semester feel. The fears and frustrations. The silence of a formerly loud dormitory, the sense of emptiness. There isn’t much interior dialogue, and what we do have is about dying. When Garrish begins to fire his rifle, he is thinking about eating the world before it eats him, a phrase he repeats throughout the story.

I read “Cain Rose Up” a dozen times through November and December. As the leaves left the trees and the weather turned cold. As the reports of rifles sounded in the blue hills ringing our small college town. As the dorms began to empty and the students went home for Christmas.

In those days, I did not know about Charles Whitman, the gunman who killed 17 people in Austin, Texas, in 1966. “Cain Rose Up” was first published in 1968, two years after the Austin shooting. For weeks beforehand, Whitman had been complaining about irrational thoughts. Overwhelming violent impulses. During his autopsy, doctors found a pecan-size tumor in his brain.

The scariest part of the Stephen King story is that there’s no stated reason for why Curt Garrish opens fire. We expect there to be a reason. A manifesto. Some sort of mental illness. Reading the story today, we cannot understand how a seemingly healthy young man does such a thing, despite the number of times we’ve seen it happen.

The war started in January, and we watched it from the beginning, just as we had followed the buildup. CNN’s 24-hour coverage showed oil fires burning, men in gas masks, Apache helicopters. Wolf Blitzer told us about the Iraqi Republican Guard. For days we watched as coalition aircraft carpet-bombed the desert. We would see crosshairs on the screen, and a moment later a factory would blow up, and let me tell you now, there’s only so much destruction you can handle before wanting to destroy something yourself. Usually yourself.

At the time, I was reading Rage, a novel by King in which Charlie Decker, shortly after being expelled for beating his chemistry teacher with a pipe wrench, walks into his high school and shoots his algebra teacher. He then takes the class hostage for four hours. While mornings were filled with gunfire in the hills and evenings with news from the Gulf, I read about how Charlie’s classmates slowly come over to his side. About how they begin—all but one—to understand how he could have become so lost. When Ted, the only student who doesn’t understand Charlie’s actions, tries to escape, the other students stop him. Rage ends with Charlie getting shot by the police chief. There is more to the story—Charlie becomes a sort of hero, and Ted, who has become the antagonist, ends up in an institution—but for me, it always ended in the classroom. The story is set in the classroom. All the hurt happens in the classroom. Charlie is broken and scared in the same way Curt from “Cain Rose Up” is broken and scared, both of them looking for some way to alleviate all the things inside them that made them want to hurt others, and themselves.

By March, the war was over, and so was my college career, at least for the time being. I spent the last two months of the academic year not going to class at all. I turned on CNN in the morning and got the latest news, then read through the afternoon, mostly Rage, because the fake world of the book was better than the real world of bombs and bullets.

At the end of the semester, when the dorm was almost empty, I read “Cain Rose Up” again. Soon I would have to drive home and tell my mother I had flunked out of college, not because I wasn’t smart enough but because there was something wrong with me.

It was evening. The parking lot was almost empty as well, and the long halls of the dorm were silent as the sound of socked feet on the tile floor. I stood in the window, looking out at the university. It was late, nearly everyone gone, but I could still see a few people crossing campus. I remember thinking that from so far away, you wouldn’t even be able to see their faces when the first shots were fired.

Imagine now the summer of 1991. There are parades everywhere in America, flags waving, people crying, soldiers who just want to get home forced to march in the midsummer heat. George H. W. Bush has never been more popular.

The most-played song on college radio stations is Jesus Jones’s “Right Here, Right Now,” a song that says we’re watching the world wake up from history, but history is always around us. The Cold War has been blown away and the Gulf War won. The Soviet Union, that big pink blob on all our high school maps, has been broken into 15 different-colored countries.

In July, the remains of 11 men and boys are found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment, and the world gets scarier, the way it did in the ’70s when we first learned about serial killers. In Russia, there’s a coup attempt. In October, the deadliest mass shooting in American history takes place when George Hennard shoots 23 people in a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, before killing himself. In November, postal worker Thomas McIlvane goes on a shooting rampage in Royal Oak, Michigan, and we get the lovely new phrase going postal. After each shooting, we go out to our cars to see if our handguns are still there. Some nights, we bring them inside, “just in case,” we tell ourselves, but don’t say what it is in case of.

In November, we elect a new president, but just days after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, a shooting at CIA headquarters in Langley causes the country to ask whether anywhere is safe from gun violence.

Add to all this a tanking economy, high unemployment, and a record deficit. The flag-waving after the war has tailed off, and some of us are beginning to understand how empty everything is. At the end of all the rhetoric, we have spent billions of dollars and killed thousands of people. We have left a country in ruins. We’ve left many veterans in ruins.

That the Gulf War followed the Cold War so closely made it seem like we’d always be at war, and the number of shootings on the nightly news told us there’d always be guns.

It was into this atmosphere that the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy” came into our lives. Eddie Vedder based the lyrics on the story of Jeremy Delle, a 15-year-old sophomore who killed himself in front of his high school English class in Richardson, Texas, on January 8, 1991. Vedder could relate to the Jeremy Delle story because a kid he knew in junior high “kind of freaked out and brought a gun into class one day” and shot a fish tank at the school.

In the song, which came out in August 1992, the eponymous Jeremy is picked on at school. The lyrics recount Jeremy’s difficult home life, that “the boy was something Mommy wouldn’t wear,” and it is because of being picked on and this difficult home life that he walks into his classroom and kills himself in front of the other students. The chorus, in Vedder’s deep voice, repeats again and again that Jeremy spoke in class today, even though we, the audience, know that Jeremy actually went silent. The video, which begins by setting the scene—“3:30 in the afternoon,” “64 degrees and cloudy”—depicts Jeremy at home, drawing pictures, and ends with still shots: the class recoiled in horror. Bright spots of blood on their white clothing.

For context, you have to remember what was happening in America when “Jeremy” came out. The particular feeling of angst and anxiety. The creeping commitment to guns. The fact that people were now walking into restaurants and opening fire. Going postal. That school shootings were appearing elsewhere in our pop culture. That already some of us were beginning to cart guns around in an attempt to alleviate some unknown, unnamed fear.

The economy was slowly starting to pick back up, and our new president was a young dude who blew the saxophone and didn’t sound like a cranky old man yelling at traffic. In the wake of the war, America embraced optimism. A new wind and all that. The end of the old Soviet Union and now this little hiccup in the Middle East had been handled and everyone in America was ready to go back to being exceptional.

Except me, and people like me. And there were a lot of us back then. We came from small towns but wanted to go somewhere big. We felt stifled and confined and wanted to walk in the larger world, but seeing the larger world—the wars and the shootings and how all anyone could talk about was the economy—made us think that the wider world wasn’t worth it. That, like the narrator in “Jeremy,” we might spend our lives trying to forget this, trying to erase this.

In the video, Jeremy is the only moving thing. Everything else is a still shot, from his parents sitting at the dinner table while Jeremy rages around them, to the descriptions of Jeremy that appear as words written on a chalkboard: problem, peer, harmless, bored. Alongside the words are biblical allusions: “the serpent was subtil,” from Genesis 3:1; “the unclean spirit entered,” from Mark 5:13; and Genesis 3:6, referencing the concept of original sin.

As the video progresses, Jeremy becomes more agitated. Isolated. Alone. He raises his arms in a V, but he’s standing before a wall of flames. Strobe lighting gives him a dark, surreal look, as if we can’t possibly imagine what he is going through, or what he is about to do. Some nights, watching MTV at three or four in the morning after drinking all night, I would see the “Jeremy” video superimposing itself over the day’s events, as if it embodied everything the early ’90s were about.

It was a weird time. While Blind Melon was urging us to keep our cheeks dry today, Ugly Kid Joe was telling us how much he hated everything about us. REM was reminding us that everybody hurts sometimes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were shooting up under the bridge. Guns N’ Roses sang of walking in the cold November rain while Alice in Chains fell down in a hole and Nirvana told us to nevermind, that with the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Kurt Loder and Kennedy told us the news of the day and then switched to videos, and we saw “Jeremy” again and again. Soundgarden was singing about Spoonman, and Snoop Dogg was drinking gin and juice, anything to forget for a few hours. Tool was trying to stay sober. Metallica told us nothing else matters.

The world was down in a hole. My National Guard unit was never deployed, but on many nights, I imagined it had been. I imagined the war. The constant shooting. How I would feel coming home. I had gone back to college but spent most of my time watching MTV. We were hearing inklings about email and the internet, but where I lived, no one owned a computer. War broke out in Bosnia as Socialist Yugoslavia fell, further breaking up our classroom maps. In November 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Act, mandating federal background checks on those purchasing firearms; barely a week later, six people were murdered and 19 injured when a man named Colin Ferguson opened fire on a Long Island Railroad train. Interspersed as it was between music videos, the news seemed part of the same surreal world the videos came from.

MTV played the “Jeremy” video constantly. Every time it came on, I listened for clues in the lyrics to why Jeremy kills himself. Why so many other people were killing themselves as well, including veterans who had served in the Gulf War. When people were walking into schools to shoot themselves or other people or both, the media asked, “What if this feeling wasn’t here before and was instead started by the music?” instead of realizing that the opposite is true, and it always has been.

On MTV at 11 p.m., Beavis and Butt-Head came on. It was a show about two kids who do little except watch music videos, the same thing I was doing. They have no drive except to listen to music and “score” with “chicks,” which was something else I was doing. On the weekends, my roommate and I invited our friends over and got drunk and listened to loud music, and it occurs to me now how often we need some noise to shut out the silence of our own hearts. I’ve often wondered why my younger self was so uninterested in the world, but more likely I was learning, at that tender age, how to dissociate from it when it becomes overwhelming. Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

We liked the depravity of alternative music. The mainstream music of the ’80s had been as big and loud as the hair bands that played it, celebrating the world of sex and drugs, but alternative music of the new decade was about private suffering—Jeremy’s Daddy not giving attention to the fact that Mommy didn’t care. Or how, with the lights out, we can be anonymous, moving through college parties, drinking and listening to loud music.

Because it’s so easy to sit and watch. Let the world slip by. See the images on the screen and scream along with the words, nevermind what they mean. We were already afraid. A few years before, we had watched the Satanic Panic sweep the nation, along with a fear of Dungeons & Dragons and serial killers, but it seemed we had not yet learned anything about fear and how it gets inside us. How the 24-hour cycle gives us no respite from the news. Turn to any channel any time of day for breaking news, and now with the internet and social media, we have instant access to stories from around the world, all the killings and kidnappings, all the bullets and bombs.

After “Jeremy,” Pearl Jam stepped away from making music videos. “Ten years from now,” bassist Jeff Ament said, “I don’t want people to remember our songs as videos.”

Ament was saying he wanted people to remember the music. But he might have been saying something else—that he didn’t want the video to be remembered because of what it was.

But many people get the video wrong. There is a widespread belief, because of the way the last scene is edited, that Jeremy has killed his classmates, that the blood covering them in the last still is theirs. Maybe this interpretation gained ground in America because that’s what we have come to expect—that we will, someday, be killed by a gun.

Charlie, the main character in Stephen King’s Rage, comes from a broken home, just as Jeremy does. His father is violent and abusive. One night, Charlie hears him talk about cutting Charlie’s mother’s nose off. In another scene, Charlie’s classmates discuss how difficult school is. How much pressure is on them. The class slowly comes around to Charlie’s side, realizing the world outside the windows is as banged up and broken as it is in here. How no one out there understands.

None of us do. Not what makes a kid walk into a school and kill himself, not what makes him walk into a school and kill others. Not what he is thinking. Not his hopes or dreams, though we do have some idea of the forces that made him this way. In Rage, Charlie doesn’t know why he is doing what he is doing, although he knows he will regret his actions later. But he cannot stop them, any more than the rest of us can stop the world from sliding toward constant violence.

Or at least we don’t seem able to. Since Rage was published in 1977, several copycat incidents have occurred.

In 1988, Jeffrey Lyne Cox held 60 classmates at gunpoint at San Gabriel High School in California before being disarmed by other students. He had read Rage multiple times.

In 1989, 17-year-old Dustin Pierce took a classroom of 10 students and a teacher hostage at gunpoint in Jackson County High School in McKee, Kentucky, while reportedly trying to re-create the plot of Rage.

On September 11, 1991, Ryan R. Harris walked into a math class at Stevens High School in Rapid City, South Dakota. He pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and ordered the teacher to leave. The teacher complied, and Harris held the rest of the class hostage for the next four hours. Harris had been inspired by Rage.

On January 18, 1993, Scott Pennington, a student at East Carter High School in Grayson, Kentucky, used a .38-caliber revolver to fatally shoot his English teacher, Deanna McDavid, in the head. He then shot and killed the school’s head custodian, Marvin Hicks, and held his classmates hostage for 20 minutes before releasing them. Just before the shooting, he had written an essay on Rage.

On December 1, 1997, at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, 14-year-old Michael Carneal brought five guns to school and opened fire on a group of students standing in a prayer circle. Three were killed and five injured. Police would later discover a copy of Rage in Carneal’s locker.

Because of these copycat killings, Stephen King allowed Rage to go out of print. Shortly after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, King published a 25-page essay titled “Guns,” in which he explained his reasoning for pulling the novel:

It took more than one slim novel to cause [the shooters] to do what they did. These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse. … My book did not break [them] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.

Before Jeffrey Lyne Cox was born, his parents’ marriage had come apart. His father demanded he be perfect; his mother lashed out in anger. In 1987, he spent two weeks in a Los Angeles psychiatric ward after displaying suicidal tendencies. Five months later, he took his high school classmates hostage.

Dustin Pierce took his teacher and classmates hostage in Kentucky because he wanted to see his estranged father, whom he hadn’t seen since he was four.

Scott Pennington was upset at his teacher for giving him a C. Pennington was also upset that his family had recently moved. His father was disabled and out of work—the family lived in poverty. Pennington said he wanted to kill two people, any two people, to become eligible for the death penalty.

Michael Carneal told reporters that he could not explain his crimes, but he did say that contributing factors included a mistaken belief that his parents did not love him, taunting from classmates, and false assertions that he was gay.

In 1996, at Frontier Junior High School in Moses Lake, Washington, Barry Dale Loukaitis opened fire, killing two classmates and a teacher. A copy of Stephen King’s Rage was found on his nightstand. He also came from a troubled home. In the year prior to the shooting, his parents separated, after his mother discovered that her husband was having an affair. She filed for divorce in January 1996. After the divorce, she became increasingly distant and began speaking of suicide. She would frequently imply that her son would have to kill himself as well.

Psychologists hired by the defense believed that Loukaitis had either depression or bipolar disorder when he committed his crime. But prosecutors Donna Wise and John Knodell argued that Loukaitis had carefully planned the shooting, getting ideas from the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy,” mistakenly believing, because of the way the video was edited, that Jeremy had killed his classmates, not himself. Wise and Knodell also contended that he had gotten ideas from Rage.

I wonder if all of those young men thought the world would always be this way. If they thought there was no way out.

After killing three people and wounding five others, Michael Carneal dropped his rifle. He placed his pistol on the ground and surrendered to the school principal, saying, “Kill me, please. I can’t believe I did that.”

Ryan Harris told his classmates he wasn’t going to kill them.

Dustin Pierce just wanted to see his father.

Here are some things I think about: Why Ryan Harris didn’t kill anyone. Why Barry Loukaitis did. Why they walked into those classrooms in the first place. What combination of abuse and alchemy caused them to be the way they were.

Here are some other things I think about:

In 1980, my parents divorced.

Through all of the ’80s, I saw my father only a handful of times.

In 1989, I bought a handgun.

In 1990, I read “Cain Rose Up.” In 1991, I read Rage.

In 1991, we watched the war like it was a movie. The bombs and bullets. The missiles and machine guns. The praising of our military might, as if all it takes to be better than someone is to possess more firepower.

Starting in 1992, I watched the “Jeremy” video at least 30,000 times. Or some number almost astronomical in meaning, like the number of people who die from gun violence every year, or the number of times our politicians have offered thoughts and prayers in response.

Here are even more things I think about: standing in the window of my dorm and looking down. Feeling small and afraid. Of the war. Of the world. Of how to make my way in it.

I think of the student in my writing class who wrote an essay about his school getting shot up. How he knew the kid who did it. How they all walked around afterward as if some fundamental thread of being had come unraveled.

I think of the grad school friend who survived the shooting at a San Antonio parade in 1979 when a gunman opened fire from an RV. She hid behind a dumpster. She was seven.

I think of the 1981 bomb threat at my elementary school, how the teachers tried to keep us occupied while policemen searched the buildings.

I think of how some men turn to books for an escape when the world outside the windows gets to be too much.

How some men turn to music.

How some men turn to guns.

How many people struggle with their mental health.

How most discussions of guns in America focus solely on men, even though more than 6,500 women in this country die each year from gun violence.

How many men harbor secrets so dark, they must seem like the end of the world.

How there is so much ugliness in the world that it ruins us, breaks us, hardens us to the point where we have to make the world even uglier.

I wonder if it’s really less dangerous with the lights out. Maybe Kurt Cobain meant that in the dark of a concert, in the throes of music we share—through videos, CDs, the pop-culture pantheon of the time—we were one, heads banging in unison at all the unfairness in the world. A lot of us were angry. Sad. Suicidal. Looking to music to show us some way in the world. But the music reflected everything we already felt. Already the bright future we foresaw had been tarnished by war. By the weaponry of man and the madness of men. Already we had seen the future and found it forlorn, lacking in both empathy and understanding. Where we’d work too many hours for too little pay. How we’d come home unhappy and take it out on those around us because the world makes us miserable pricks who project our fears onto others, so worried about keeping our families safe that we fail them, again and again.

Or maybe Cobain just meant that we can’t be targeted in the dark. That with the lights out, it’s harder to shoot us all. The truth is, we’re all scared. We’re all scarred and broken, and it isn’t from the stories we’ve read or music we’ve heard, but from what we see on the nightly news. Art imitates life, which makes me wonder what kind of lives we lead, and why anyone would want to imitate them.

I lost the handgun long ago. I don’t even remember where, or why.

When I still had the gun, however, I would bring it in the house every so often to clean it. To imagine myself firing it. Some days, I took it to school with me. But then I would go into the military and learn so much about guns, I would want to abandon them forever. I would read Rage and wonder why, with so much beauty in the world, men choose to do such ugly things. I would watch the “Jeremy” video and wonder, again, what makes the world this way. I see the way Jeremy smiles at the end, as he tosses his teacher an apple. As he turns to face the classroom.

I no longer see only the video, however. Instead, I see a kid like Charlie Decker. Like Barry Loukaitis. Michael Carneal. The Columbine shooters, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter. I see my ex-wife’s kindergarten classroom, I see the classrooms my daughters attended over the years, I see the college classrooms I’ve spent two decades in, I see the hundreds and hundreds of students who’ve sat before me. None of us can move, trapped as we are in our national nightmare. We have turned toward the door, where a small boy stands isolated and alone, hurting in a hundred different ways. He raises his right hand. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Sixty-four degrees and cloudy. Our faces frozen in horror, as if we’ll relive this moment, again and again and again.