STEEL OF THE SOUTH: More Scary Virginia Stories to Blog in the Dark...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Recently, while stuck on bed rest, I had the opportunity to get some pleasure reading done. At one point, I unearthed my old high school yearbooks.

Flipping through the vulgar comments and past pictures of people I've long forgotten actually brought back some interesting memories.

I found a photograph stuck between a few pages, a photograph of this frightening brute of a kid. He had a sneer on his face that could kill weaker men, eyes full of all sorts of illicit substances, hair parted straight down the middle, bandages covering gashes over his eye and across his nose.

Man, I'd almost forgotten what a hoodlum I was when I was 17. Scared the shit out of me.

And some people wonder why I consider myself fortunate to have survived high school. But I think I turned out just fine. Wouldn't change a thing.

- Jason

* * * *

The machete was brand new, fresh from the Rose's five-and-dime, plastic shrink wrap dangling from the handle.

I heard one of the school's vice-principals shout into his two-way radio as he chased after “Muhammad,” ordering the school's receptionist tell the sheriff's deputies that the “suspect” was armed and dangerous.

Muhammad was normally a peaceful kid, a Black Muslim whose parents had sent him down to Farmville to live with his grandmother. Muhammad had spent his early childhood being instructed in the ways of the Five Percent Nation.

Though a man of peace, who had many friends of many races, he readily admitted to distrusting white people, to being convinced that the FBI had killed Brother Malcolm and Dr. King, to believing that the federal government was pushing crack in housing projects across America.

Muhammad had been suspended from school for fighting with a white kid earlier that day. The white kid had received a lighter sentence. So Muhammad was sent home, and the white kid was sent to In-School Suspension.

Muhammad had obviously gone shopping for some very mean-looking hardware, purchasing a tool to extract his pound of cracker flesh for what he apparently viewed as a racist conspiracy. As he ran past me, after the white kid who'd passed me only a few seconds earlier, I noticed his eyes were aflame with that lust, that murderous thousand-yard stare of a man consumed by his own hatred.

I learned a long time ago that one does not step in the way of a man wielding a machete, even a normally peaceful man. Machetes do not leave pretty wounds and often sever limbs.

Mr. S., a chisel-faced man in his late fifties, was the senior disciplinary administrator of the school district. He'd survived the 'Nam; he once claimed that maintaining discipline in a rural Virginia high school was nothing compared to dealing with Charlie. But despite his reputation as a harsh man, he was also known to be fair and once, according to legend, had even laughed.

Mr. S. plowed through the throngs of 13-18 year-old kids who clogged the sidewalk as they waited for their afternoon buses. He pushed students to the ground as he ran, hollering ahead for students to get out of his way or risk being run down. Some moved out of the vice-principal's path; most did not.

“Muhammad” apparently did catch up with the white kid, who'd run to the school office for shelter. The principal convinced the Five Percenter, the normally peaceful kid with many friends of many races, to put down his weapon before he ended up doing something he'd later regret.

By the time the county mounties arrived, the incident had been resolved. And "Muhammad" went to jail, never to return as a student.

Later that week, the school yearbooks were distributed to those who'd paid for them. I remember wishing that Muhammad had waited to go crazy, wishing that he'd waited until after the school year ended, so I could've gotten him to sign my freshman yearbook.

After all, he was a peaceful man, most of the time, with many friends of many different races.

* * * *

I don't know what inspired me that night.

Maybe I'd seen too many gang-related films - movies about South Central Los Angeles, Miami drug lords and New York crime kingpins were all the rage in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it was the gangsta rap or the aggressive punk music, the stuff I started to listen to the moment I hit puberty.

For whatever reason, I was inspired, after helping a "Max" jump a guy behind the Food Lion, to piss in a kid's face as he lay on the ground.

We used to call this sort of juvenile code enforcement schoolin' a motherfucker. And, as my friend put it so eloquently that night, if this motherfucker wants to steal shit, he needs to be taken to motherfuckin' school.

Nobody else wanted to help this friend of mine out. None of our mutual friends, who all talked a good game, stepped up to get his back. They were all conveniently busy, had baseball practice or dates. So “Max” and I sat alone in his beat-up yellow tank of a car for two hours, drinking forty after forty of Colt 45 and waiting for this stupid kid to leave a shopping center cineplex.

The poor bastard didn't even see it coming. Walked right out towards his car as if he owned the world.

“Max” did most of the work. It was his stolen property, his lost income. The only thing I did was hit the kid from the back while Max informed him of the charges against him, of why this milder sentence of the Court of Street Justice was better than the alternative.

As the kid lay on the ground, squirming and begging, the 160 ounces of malt liquor filling my bladder suddenly demanded a prompt exit.

It was nothing personal, really. I just had to take a leak.

As Max reminded me afterwards, when I felt guilty about it, that kid probably would've done the same to me if he'd had the chance. And if it'd been other guys jumping him, less civil individuals from Church Hill or Hampton Roads or D.C., then he probably would've endured much, much worse.

An eye for an eye, a piss for a piss.

* * * *

That motherfucker had a .22...

When he first pulled it from the front of his boxers and started waving it around, screaming about how “hard” he was, most people just laughed. And when he fired into the air, bobbing his head up and down, one hand holding up those baggy jeans and the other holding a weapon, people just stood there and stared.

Here is this 16-year-old, skinny-ass white dude, who everybody knew was crazy, save for the court-appointed dumbass who'd let him off probation early. Here's this Crazy-Ass Peckerwood, waving a gun around in a parking lot at two in the morning.

And the only thing anyone could do was laugh, then stare in amazement.

If this kid's parents hadn't been wealthy socialites, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have been set loose by the correctional system. If he'd been poor, or a minority, or poor and a minority, he would've been rotting in a juvenile prison somewhere.

But because he came from a good family, one where the poor little thing's psychosis was easily blamed on a desire to fit in and his parents' divorce, he was set free to go all apeshit in the middle of the night without so much as an ankle bracelet.

When Mr. Crazy-Ass Peckerwood started beating that tiny handgun upon his tiny chest, screaming about how he was going to bus' a cap on someone if he did'n get respec', people finally began to back away from the scene.

The cops, surely, had been called, and nobody wanted to be around an armed nutcase when the cops showed up. As I ducked down to climb into the driver's seat of the Maroon Doom, my prize Dodge Shadow, the idiot started firing again. But this time, he wasn't firing into the air.

I remember being shoved from behind, with a friendly hand on the back of my neck. My chin caught the shifter and my shin caught the door frame as my body fell into the car. My first reaction was to start laughing. Earlier that night I'd watched a documentary on the Reagan assassination attempt - the idea that my friends would choose to play Secret Service agents to a would-be Hillbilly Hinckley was too absurd not to laugh.

I rolled over and sat up in the driver's seat, still laughing. A hand reached up from the backseat and smacked me upside my skull, with voices screaming for me to drive, motherfucker, drive.

As I started the engine and shifted down into second gear, I looked over at the crazy motherfucker. He was pointing that little pop-gun .22 towards the Maroon Doom, firing away. From the back seat, people were arguing about someone needing to see a doctor, about me needing to drive to the emergency room.

As I drove, the person who'd been grazed climbed into the passenger seat next to me, showed me what looked like a long cigarette burn, and said that, no, he didn't need to go to a doctor – our other friends were just being pussies.

He'd been shot before, so I took his word for it. He smiled and pointed out that getting grazed was a much better alternative than having me get shot in the face.

I laughed at first. And then it hit me like a cinderblock to the chin.

I spent the next few days barely sober and rarely narcotic-free, afraid to face the nature of my own mortality, the fact that, yes, a .22 pistol is a small gun that can still, if someone's shooting at you, end your life if its rounds hit you just right.

... And he just tried to fucking kill me.

- # # # -

AN EDUCATION COVERED IN BLOOD: Answering Questions That Shouldn't Need To Be Asked...

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," 1917

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) - It was an Amtrak operator who first discovered the girl's body, limp alongside the bed of the train tracks early Saturday morning.

The girl, according to what little is known, had been drunk and abandoned by friends to the unseasonably cold Ohio night. No one will ever know why, exactly, the 19-year-old was wandering the streets alone, why she was wandering the streets alone at night, about a mile from her campus dorm room.

Her blood alcohol level, according to local authorities, hovered somewhere near twice the legal limit, somewhere above 0.229 percent. Under Ohio law, 0.08 percent is considered legally impaired.

Her hands were covered in black exes and other bar markings, indicating that she was a minor. Though it's now known that she'd been drinking at a house party prior to hitting the Uptown district, it's highly unlikely that she didn't find some way of obtaining booze while at the bars.

The driver of the southbound CSX train didn't even realize that he'd hit anything when he was notified in nearby Hamilton. His locomotive had passed through Oxford 90 minutes prior to the Amtrak train.

Sometime in the next week, the family of a 19-year-old Speech Pathology major will bury their daughter in Strongsville, a suburban Cleveland city of almost 44,000 residents.

Beth was in her first year at the Local U. She'd transferred earlier in the year. Her Facebook profile picture was one of a smiling, happy girl, embracing some other smiling, happy girl.

I teared up up looking at the face of yet another dead college student.

* * * *

I've seen many dead college students over the course of my short life.

I've seen the gleeful face of a murdered Wyoming student plastered across the television screen, a young man executed for simply being open about his sexuality. At Cal Poly, as an undergrad and as a reporter, I covered the kidnappings, torture and deaths of two classmates.

And I still don't talk much about the shooting at Northern Colorado during my first ol' college try, the one where my friends and I sat in a dining hall and watched the CNN footage of a madman shooting from the windows until he was finally brought down by a police sniper.

Many people throw out completely jingoistic garbage about the College Experience.

Going to college is the only way to succeed in America, going to the right school can get you that dream job, or a college education will improve your life, help you make friends, help you grow into a responsible adult.

Those people, in their over-zealousness, often forget to explain the darker side. Maybe they don't know or maybe they just don't care.

Going to college, in the United States, can get you killed.

* * * *

In Blacksburg, they're mourning the loss of their fallen comrades, too. But it's not merely a young girl who wandered in front of a trail on a cold night, not merely an accident.

Thirty-three dead. Students and faculty, noted scholars and budding, bright young minds.

According to official accounts, there was only one gunman, one very angry, disturbed young man - he, too, is one of the dead students who will never see another graduation day.

Virginia Tech now joins a solemn club within higher education. Like Kent State and the University of Texas, like Jackson State and Cal State Fullerton, another university will bury its butchered scholars - its aspiring musicians, its writers, its poets and scientists.

No championship football season, no amount of Nobel Prizes or Rhodes Scholarships, will replace what that university lost on that cold Monday in April. None of those things have ever, after all, resurrected the dead.

A phantom stain will forever haunt its campus, the imaginary smell of blood hovering above its classrooms and dormitories. And no amount of scrubbing, no amount of vigils, memorials, or university committees will ever remove that, no amount of administrative or political whitewashing will ever erase that from the collective memory of those who survived.

* * * *

Already, the finger-pointing and politicization has begun about what happened in that quiet Appalachian town this week, the analysts and pundits spouting off about every scapegoat imaginable:

It's the guns. No wait! It's the meds the kid was taking, the failure of the psychologists. I've got it! It's another dangerous foreigner. No, no, no - listen to me! My causes are next! It's the lack of God in this country! We need prayer!

We need better campus police! It's the NeoCons, the Liberals, the President! The War in Iraq caused this! Let us protest...yes, a protest will save us!

Absalom, Absalom! Let us find answers quickly, my Countrymen! The pain is too much! Our children are dead, and we must assign blame...

And they will offer every theory imaginable, to sell their books, to move their causes forward, to maybe, possibly, legitimately do some good. But they will never provide any answers. And we'll all chose sides, divvy up our opinions like vultures along a roadside, picking and choosing theories based on how secure and comfortable they leave each of us feeling.

No one will ever know, truly, what went through a lonely South Korean kid's mind before he put a bullet through it, ending his rampage through Blacksburg.

And no one, here, in Oxford, will ever really know why that 19-year-old girl ended up in front of that CSX freight train, either.

Of course, her death won't make the national or international headlines. Death, in the press, is measured in terms of spent ammunition and body counts.

Ask the analysts.

* * * *

No one should even try to fool themselves into thinking that America's college campuses are the literal ivory towers they sometimes appear to be. There is no sanctuary from the cold reality of our world, not in Blacksburg and not in Oxford.

Senseless death is just as much a part of the college experience, for way too many campuses, as overpriced textbooks and cheap-tasting dining hall food. Estimates place alcohol-related campus fatalities at roughly 1,500 per year. According to the Centers for Disease Control, as many as 24,000 attempt suicide each year - the equivalent, roughly, of the entire campus population of the Local U., including faculty and staff - and another 1,100 succeed where the 24,000 thankfully failed.

We are, and will probably continue, to be a violent culture, societally schizophrenic in how we choose to look at how we live, and why we make the choices we do, and why certain things happen to good and bad people alike.

In America, on its pristine college campuses and in its libraries, through our literature and film, we fight a war as old as humanity itself, a war within ourselves, a war to both love and despise thy neighbor, a war to understand life and death from mortal coil.

Most importantly, we fight our own battles, daily, to simply find comfort in the answer to the Question Why?.

Our war, our wretched internal cultural war full of moral relativity and World Superpower pragmatism and self-pandering, never reaches its zenith and never will.

One cannot win any war against a mirror reflection, an inverse version of one's self, revealing all of the flaws one refuses, through ignorance or denial, to even acknowledge. There must first be acceptance of what answers lie beneath the glass, the things we fear or are afraid to admit to ourselves.

Why? questions are never answered simply by declaration. The why? questions must be thought about first, and then asked.

Why? questions, in Blacksburg and here, offer no easy answers. But the more we think about them, the more we ponder holistically, asking before answering, the more solutions to problems we may be able to unearth.

There are no experts of human nature better at answering these types of questions than ourselves, and that responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us. It is our duty, as the living, to ask questions for the dead, to find education beyond Finals Weeks, nostalgic alumni memories, beyond everything and anything that could possibly be taught in a classroom.

That is what college students are supposed to learn in college - the ability to think, to ask, and to answer. They shouldn't have to learn, in a civilized world, how to lay wreaths on the headstones of peers, to look for shelter at the sound of gunshots.

Maybe, one day, we can live in a world, or can at least be able to send children to college, without worrying about that.

* * * *

What candles may be held to speed them all?

There aren't enough candles in all the world.

- # # # -