Psycho Killer - Pt. I

I don't dedicate.
Nonetheless...
For C.

The New Jersey public school system, Stolichnaya, C-SPAN, the Unabomber, my abnormal psych professor, Sub Pop Records and ENIAC are all partially to blame.

But it's mainly on me. Or rather, the sixteen year-old version of me.

Now, maybe the sixteen year-old you was a delightful, upstanding young adult, starring in drama club productions, dishing up meals at the soup kitchen and never letting your boyfriend's hands bypass the orcas swimming across your Sierra Club t-shirt.

Sixteen Year-Old Jul, however, was a monstrous little bastard. I was poorly-informed, endlessly-opinionated, incredibly foul-mouthed (well, some things never change). I was chubby, shy and ensnared in an H.R. Giger painting's worth of orthodontia. I was also deep in the throes of Teenage Ebola: low self-esteem and enormous ego, battling for control within a single body, leaving the host in piss-poor shape for the duration.

I didn't have a boyfriend... but that was because teenage boys were malodorous, slack-jawed cretins. My teachers were liars, charlatans and entirely too fond of poly-blend separates. My parents were cruel oppressors with archaic views of freedom, personal responsibility and the difference between "clean dishes" and "dishes still encrusted with recognizable chunks of Stroganoff, so re-wash them again NOW, young lady".

I kept a 4" pocket knife tucked in one Doc Marten at all times, presumably as proof of my Junior Bad-Ass League membership. I'd practice flicking it open with one hand while alone in my bedroom, periodically losing my grip and spearing my Kermit the Frog pillow.

I should not have been left in charge of a goldfish bowl, let alone my own path to adulthood.

All of this elaborates, but doesn't explain. And it most definitely doesn't excuse.

---

Shortly after I turned seventeen, I made the biggest mistake of my life. In a somewhat off-kilter tribute to the Talking Heads, I'm going to call him David.

We met online in September.

By Halloween, we were deliriously in love.

By Thanksgiving, I'd made plans to leave college and move to Georgia to be with him.

Around the time of the first snowfall, I packed up my stuffed animals and broad collection of misanthropic literature, hopped in my father's dung-colored K-car and sputtered off towards my destiny.

Thing is, around Election Day, we'd had the following instant-message exchange.

David: You know, I've killed before.
Jul: Um... seriously?
David: I've never told anyone, obviously, but I know I can trust you. And I'm absolutely not joking.
Jul: Hmmmmn. Tell me more...

Not incredulity, not horror, not shock... "tell me more".

Psycho killer / qu'est-ce que c'est?

That's stuck with me, more than anything else which happened during that tumultuous, heartbreaking, life-shaping year. "Tell me more".

Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa...

I've forgiven David. You already know where his story is headed (nowhere, fast, bottle of Depakote rattling alongside).

Someday, I may forgive myself.

---

The day of my sixteenth birthday, I woke up, chugged a diet Mountain Dew and dropped out of high school. Tired of being an awkward, geeky outcast, I planned to both reinvent myself and achieve my true potential at Scrub Pine Community College. The latter goal got off to a ripping start; my first semester GPA was a Rod Carew-like 4.0. However, I was still horrifically geeky.... and now, I was paying for the privilege of being ignored by my classmates. I sat alone in the dining hall each day, nibbling a homogeneous chicken patty and shooting daggers at my sheep-like inferiors. My romantic life was limited to a few clumsy liaisons with an aloof Lothario who disappeared for weeks on end and returned my breathy, "I'm so in love with you!", with a measured, "Well, I care for you as well, BUT...".

Things clearly hadn't gone the way I'd imagined. This chapped my pompous little ass to no end. How DARE life deviate from my meticulously-crafted plan? Had I been older and less insufferable, I could have reevaluated my options. Had I been humbler, I could've saved years of strife and reevaluated myself. I could've said hello to the early-education majors, rather than attempting to ignite their scrunchies with the force of my glare.

I was sixteen. It doesn't excuse, but it'll have to explain.

While watching a filmstrip in Abnormal Psychology class one afternoon, I decided that the explanation for my social difficulties was blindingly simple: I was afflicted with antisocial personality disorder... in other words, a sociopath.

I'll repeat: sixteen.

I'd received a copy of the DSM-IV as a birthday present several months earlier. Soon, the section devoted to ASPD had been burnished to a soft gleam by my eager little fingers. "This is SO ACCURATE!" I marveled, copying choice diagnostic criteria onto pastel index cards, "I DO fail to conform to social norms!" I carried this small stack of symptomology with me at all times, periodically pausing in 7-11 or the campus bookstore to leaf through them and murmur, "I HAVE rationalized having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another! Why, just yesterday I punched Junket because she stole my Dr Pepper-flavored lip gloss! If that doesn't indicate a lack of conscience, I don't know WHAT does!"

I applied a zestful, can-do spirit towards nurturing my newfound sociopathy. I spent hours analyzing the seminal hate-zine "ANSWER Me!" as though it were a misanthropic Dead Sea scroll. I located and downloaded the most graphic, disturbing images I could find (crime-scene snapshots, an infamous Steve Albini album cover) in an attempt to "desensitize" myself to them. I stared at my bright, bratty little sisters and exhausted but doting parents and tried (in vain, thankfully) to convince myself that I felt no emotion towards them whatsoever. It was an unsustainably strange way to live; had things gone differently, I'm sure I would have retired the close-range shotgun-blast photos and unsmiling facade within a few months.

Then I met David.

---

My first-ever website was a slow-loading monstrosity known as "Craven Chicky's Wicked Lair" (my screen name having been inspired by Craven Walker, inventor of the Lava Lamp). In addition to a 50MB WAV file of my sister belching punk rock lyrics, it also featured some half-decent (if painfully immature) writing. One day, I received an e-mail from "VitriolLad88", complimenting me on my angry teenage wordsmithery and asking if I'd be interested in chatting on instant messenger. Attention- and affection-starved, I installed ICQ and sent him a message less than five minutes later ("So, what's a nice boy like you doing on a worldwide interconnected computer network like this?").

Later that day, he and I exchanged ten minutes' worth of witty banter.

The next day, we chatted for several hours.

The day after that, the drug really took hold. We stayed up all night, exchanging flirtatious bon mots, deep-rooted secrets and shared hatred of the civilized world. At nine AM, I staggered off to school, exhausted but grinning. In between classes, I scurried to the computer lab to see if a particularly vitriolic lad had fired off any new correspondence.

Of course he'd sent a gorgeous e-mail. Of course it was five pages long.

---

David, you see, was manic-depressive, unmedicated by choice. Falling in love with a person in the grips of an active mania is sort of like riding a malfunctioning roller coaster. The experience is so fantastically exhilarating that it takes you a little too long to notice that something's wrong. By then, you're strapped in place, going ninety miles an hour and helpless to do anything but close your eyes and pray.

Youth is idiocy, enthusiasm is contagious and mistakes are inevitable. Within weeks, I was gone... catastrophically in love and deep under David's spell. Even when young and idealistic, I hadn't been terribly young or idealistic... no bacon-thwarted attempts at veganism, no circulating hand-scrawled petitions at the mall. My bond with this mysterious stranger living eight hundred miles away was the first thing I was absolutely, positively sure of. We spent every spare moment online, chatting, conspiring, marvelling that we'd found the one other soul in the world which perfectly matched our own. "The words 'I love you' don't even come close," wrote David one night, "I AM you... pure and simple." I was enraptured, a believer at last. Never before (and, to be brutally honest, never since) have I felt so adored and adoring, so inextricably tethered to a lover's heart. "I want to gather all the false love I've bestowed upon other women, stack it like cordwood and set it alight," he wrote, "I want to make a massive, towering pyre in honor of everyone and everything which made me who I am, which made me capable of loving you."

Oh, he was good.

David's top-secret sinister "revelation" was delivered at 3 AM, roughly a month after we'd met. It had much the same effect on our nascent bond as tempering does on steel. My love was a killer... because he could, because he was bigger, greater, more powerful than any of society's rules. And I? I was the one woman in the world who knew him, through and through. I was him. I wouldn't blanch at his actions, I would celebrate them. My convictions were now exponentially stronger and more solid than they'd been before. My high-school acquaintances were buying prom dresses and beaten-up cars. I was buying a mythology. I was a feverish, twisted mess, intoxicated by love and potential, enraged by everything else. One night, in response to my escalating verbal abuse, my mother pleaded, "Jul, your family can't TAKE this anymore! You never, ever stop hurting us. I just don't think you can continue to live in this house."

"I don't think so, either," I replied icily (even though my teeth were clenched and my nails gouging divots in my palms), "I'm moving to Georgia... and I'm getting married."

Several days earlier, in a move which had made my already-inflamed heart practically rupture, David had been referring to me as his "wife".

It was the brass ring. It was my whole world, my destiny.

It was, as it turned out, nothing as I'd imagined. But I'd find that out soon enough.

"WHAT?", exclaimed my mother, "With... with the guy you've been talking to on the computer? Are you insane?"

"You have no idea", I replied.

To Be Continued...