I Was a Teenage Terrorist

By Crispin Sartwell

The classic molotov cocktail is an open wine bottle with a gas-soaked rag sticking out of the neck. But I figured only an idiot would hold something like that in his hand and light it. So I sealed the bottles, scrubbed them off, and tied rags around their midsections.

I stayed up until 3:30, dressed myself in black including a ski mask and gloves, and snuck out the back door. Maneuvering up the block, I emerged in the woods. Shaking in an adrenaline rush for the centuries, I lit the rag and lobbed the first cocktail onto the backhoe. A sheet of flame spread instantaneously over the area, singed me a bit. Then the backhoe exploded. I tossed the second cocktail on, just for the hell of it, and ran. I had been lying in bed for a few minutes when I heard the sirens.

My friends and I had played every day in the woods at Livingston Street and Broad Branch Avenue in D.C. In the late sixties, when we were ten or eleven, we played Chase. By 13 we'd moved on to Guerilla Warfare. I was pretty damned serious about it. I bought a copy of Che Guevara's classic book on the subject, memorized most of it, and used that as a guide. Under Che's guidance, I'd sneak up silently on William O'Brien and plug him before he knew what was happening.

One day when I was fifteen we went up to mess around in those woods. There was a backhoe parked up in there. A bunch of old trees had been removed and there was already a gash in the ground and a stack of cinder blocks. The game was over. I went to the auto parts store and bought a gas can, to the gas station and pumped a gallon. I fished out of the trash a couple of Ocean Spray cranberry juice bottles, selected for their thin walls and large capacity. In the bottles I mixed gasoline and Sterno.

25 years later, a week or two after the shootings at Columbine High School, I was on C-SPAN talking to Brian Lamb about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when it occurred to me that maybe I understood these kids better than I thought, certainly better than the people quoted everywhere proclaiming the boys' actions 'incomprehensible.' And then I heard myself confessing to the Backhoe immolation. People started calling in to berate me or to demand I make restitution to my victims. My life for a week or two was a shitstorm of controversy and of memory; I tried for the first time in many years to make sense out of my descent into violence and rage and of my fitful, incomplete recovery: the process by which I reached the point at which I was blowing stuff up and the process by which I became an irritation rather than a danger to myself and others.

My kids' school in rural Pennsylvania has implemented an anti-violence campaign called "Be Cool," which seems to consist entirely of posters hung here and there which say "act cool." Like most indoctrination aimed at children, the campaign is notable only for its emptiness. But the right way into this problem is empathy: you need to think about what it would be like to be Kip Kinkel, the Oregon kid who was convicted of killing his parents and two students at his high school while wounding 25 others. A solution won't come from the comfortable and self-congratulatory thought that Harris and Klebold and Kinkel are incomprehensible monsters.

Kinkel wrote in his journal: "I know everyone thinks this way sometimes, but I am so full of rage that I feel I could snap at any moment. I think about it every day. Blowing the school up or just taking the easy way out, and walk into a pep assembly with guns. In either case, people who are breathing will stop breathing." Alright. You're Kip and you're walking down the hall of your school and you can't stop thinking about guns and bombs and their effects. Now you run across a poster that says "act cool." Better now? In fact, seeing that poster just makes you a bit angrier; it's an institutional expression that isn't aimed at anyone in particular, and it's a demonstration of what you realized a long time ago: that these people are so out of touch with your life or indeed with reality in general that they seem barely human.

Or you're listening to a cop or that same assistant principal, and he's saying "violence never solved anything" (meanwhile in class you're reading about the American revolution), or maybe reciting slogans of this quality: "talk, not Glock." And you're snickering and deciding to show these twits what life and death are all about.

Eric Harris, after a series of petty crimes, was sent to "anger management" class. This doesn't appear to have been particularly effective. Just before the Columbine shootings, Harris said "More rage. More rage. Keep building it on." Harris and Klebold were consumed by rage and they identified themselves with it. They brought it to the point where, in all seriousness, they wanted to kill everyone. But if you think that they cultivated rage because they found it pleasurable or amusing, consider that they also killed the rage inside themselves by committing suicide. They sought the state of mind that killed them and a dozen others. They committed themselves to the obsession that broke them. They committed themselves to it because it broke them. Most of the shooters, such as T. J. Solomon, the Conyers, Georgia teen who wounded six of his classmates, have been suicidal as well as homicidal. They wanted to kill the sources of rage outside themselves, but above all they wanted to kill the rage in their own head.

Perhaps that seems incomprehensible to you. But it needn't. Many people have such experiences. It's like an addiction, for example, where you are so absorbed by and identified with your compulsion that you learn to want it to kill you. Addiction is associated with self-loathing, and so is rage. As Kinkel wrote in his journal, "I don't want to see, hear, speak or feel evil, but I can't help it. I am evil. . . . If there was a God, he wouldn't let me feel the way I do. Love isn't real, only hate remains. Only hate."

If you're wondering what made me so mad, the answer is that I'm finally not sure. Any explanation I have assayed feels like a just-so story I manufactured for a therapist or a newspaper, and also a way to remove the cause from myself, to give someone else (my parents, say) the responsibility. I still want my rage, want to insist that it is mine. Sometimes it's been almost the only thing I had left.

Maybe you can be born enraged. Look at the babies crying in a hospital nursery. While some of them are expressing a discomfort that is for the moment almost tolerable, others seem wracked by a despair or a rage so deep that it and the child's body are identical. I imagine myself in DC General in 1958 crying that way, knowing without cognition that the world is wrong and that I wanted to die tearing it apart.

I imagine it that way because I don't have any memory earlier than the rage: I don't remember a rageless pleasure. And the most real and in some way satisfying moments I do remember from early childhood were moments of perfect expression of rage; my mother called them "tantrums." I probably didn't look much like I was having fun as I was screaming and tearing things apart, but those were the only moments when my body matched my mind. At all other times I was holding myself in, holding myself back, and even as a small child I was aware of this as dishonesty, as hypocrisy: as a hiding of my self in fear from the world. And much of my history from then until I was maybe twenty and started using my rage, rather than simply letting it use me, was the history of letting the rage drive, letting it take me where it wanted, showing it to people and using it to destroy things.

From the start, then, expressing rage outwardly was a moral imperative. I always thought, though I may have been deluded, that I could have kept my rage from leaking into external enactment, that I could have appeared to be just another friendly kid. But I always experienced that as a temptation, as the deepest cowardice and self-betrayal. I believed that what's good is what's true - I still in some sense believe that - and what was true for me was that I wanted to destroy authority. If I didn't enact that externally I was just another peon chump like everyone else.

So I demand responsibility for my own rage. But there's no doubt that the people around me shaped it.

My father was a writer and an alcoholic. He could be fun as hell but he was wildly inconsistent. One day he'd play with my brother and me for hours, the next he'd be so wrapped up in his own head that there was no reaching him, or so out-of-control angry that it was a punishment just to be near him.

I got angry back, or I was always already angry, like maybe he was too, and I'd fight him like hell all the way down the line until I simply physically could not fight any longer. We had intellectual arguments, we had screaming battles, we had physical contests, but whatever we were doing he always beat me and I never fucking gave up.

When I picture my baby brother Adam in the DC General nursery two years after me, I hear his cry as despair. With Dad, he backed off, buckled. From the time he was small, Adam was passive and sad and withdrawn. When he got high, he'd barely speak, and by the time he was fourteen, he was getting high all the time. He had a girlfriend named Martha, and after she left him he was hardly there at all; he liked to sit alone with a huge mug if neat gin and study chess books. By thirty he was dead of a heroin overdose. But even when I was little, I knew without thinking that whatever it was that kept me fighting was keeping me alive, and I always fought like my life was at stake.

My father died in 1980. But we were and we are the same: his drinking is my drinking and his his self-destruction is my self-destruction and his destruction of his own authority and everyone else's was my destruction of his, yours, and now my own. And I guess he gave me a picture of what authority is: arbitrary, irrational, worse than useless, something that must be destroyed. And he also taught me to destroy it and to claim it precisely in and as the act of destroying it.

My mother, on the other hand, was steady as a rock. Fundamentally a moralist, she expected something like moral perfection from herself and from my father and from us. Her rules were enforced not just by punishments, though of course by that too, but above all by her ethical disappointment, her judgment. Somehow she taught me not to compromise, even with her, and it was her authority and her morality that I was, finally, dedicated both to destroying and to enacting. I thought of her the way I came to think of institutions: implacable but wrong. I came to be even more morally implacable than she was. And I was implacable first with her; to me the small child it seemed heroic not to give in to her rationality: I wanted her authority destroyed.

But she also taught me to hold the world and the people in it to a standard. And I did, and trained my rage on it and them when they didn't live up to it. And I learned to turn my rage on myself too at any moment when I was out of control, or false to myself. The true moralist is motivated by rage, and the true moralist had better start with himself. My inner life, in exactly the same way as my outer life, was marred and adorned by my violence.

When I was 11 and 12, my parents split and my mother remarried. My stepfather shared my mother's moral intensity, but he was a gentle man in a wheelchair who had been a conscientious objector in World War II. And he brought with him my two stepbrothers: Jim, who was five years older than I was, and Bob, two years younger than he. Jim had hardly moved in with us before he was busted for armed robbery and stuck in the Maryland State Pen. But Bob settled right on in. He was a party boy extraordinaire: it was wall-to-wall drugs and girls.

I idolized the guy and hated him. When I brought Beth home after a date, she ended up in his room. Bob had the car, the pot, the cachet. He looked something like a rougher and readier Brad Pitt, with a wicked grin and an insatiable set of appetites. I wanted to be Bob in a pretty bad way, wanted to be a man the way he was.

Bob and I had a secret: he spent years trying to make me have sex with him. One of the first things he said when he moved in was did I know what a blowjob was and did I want to try it? I didn't and I didn't. But for all the years of my adolescence, he badgered me: followed me around trying to catch me masturbating, tried to blackmail me into having sex by every possible means. Once he found a couple of copies of Penthouse under my bed, and said he'd tell the parents I had them unless I jerked him off.

I never gave in to these advances (though I've always wondered what happened to my brother Adam, and now will never know), but I did let them infest my head. And one thing I wondered about was whether I was gay. I was extraordinarily anxious about masculinity, especially since Bob wasn't the only problem. By the time I was fourteen, I was continually being chicken-hawked. A man on the bus would sit next to me and put his hand on my crotch. I'd be hitch-hiking and the guy who picked me up would start with "so, have a girlfriend?" To which the only answer has to be "I'll get out right here."

I never actually had sex with any of these men, but I learned to hate the whole idea of homosexuality and I figured I must have been exuding something that was making all these men do this, though my own fantasy life was about girls. To myself, I seemed effeminate: small and pretty. But I wanted to be a man and I wanted to kill Bob and all those sick clowns who messed with me. As it turned out, I didn't have to kill Bob.

In 1983, when he was 28 and I was 25, a guy he knew shot him when they were both smoking PCP, a quarter-mile from the driveway of my parents' house. I was there, heard the shot, ran out onto the road. Bob was crumpled up on the shoulder on his knees, like he was kissing the ground. I could see he was dead because his body was perfectly relaxed. I lifted him up and saw the blood coming out of his mouth. His chest was collapsed inward, a red mess.

Masculinity, rage, and violence are so closely connected as to seem synonymous. To "assert one's masculinity" is to kick ass. And I deeply admired and still deeply admire masculinity in this sense. Indeed, it is deeply admirable: rather than trembling in the corner feeling his little feelings, a man turns all feelings into rage and violently transforms the conditions that oppress him. That is one of the most admirable human impulses and a condition for any great creation. That's the way I thought of it at the time: that's who I wanted to be. I wanted to show the world I was a man and Lord knows I could find the rage inside to do it.

So I had the rage and I had the target. I wanted to fight against power in all its forms. I wanted violence as a rite of passage to manhood. I was an anarchist, and at the tail-end of the sixties I was an eleven-year-old leftist revolutionary motherfucker. Revolution was the perfect place for me to put my shit. My first target was my school.

For an extreme anti-authoritarian, a large public school is a hard place to be but a beautiful target. The institution is essentially carceral: it's a crime not to attend. And my school in the early seventies, Alice Deal Junior High in upper northwest DC, was a particularly extreme case. No one was doing much teaching or learning. The administration had reduced its goals to keeping people in the building. All the doors were locked, and the admin hired bouncers ("community aides" at 250-300 pounds a pop) who prowled the halls with two-by-fours. I remember my English class gathering at windows to watch a kid running away from the school with an "aide" at his heels. The bruiser tackled him and then started wailing away with the board. And I remember a student who was so severely beaten by a French teacher that he disappeared for a couple of weeks and came back in casts.

But it wasn't even primarily the violence against students that hooked on to my rage; it was the lack of connection between the administration and the reality of adolescent life. I regarded the administrators as idiots who were completely out of touch. At every assembly, the principal, A. Lyman Warner, would get up and mutter the same empty catch phrases and cliches, telling us to pull together and say no to drugs and violence without having the vaguest notion of where the violence was coming from or why we needed the drugs. It was almost as bad as watching Al Gore run for president: someone had replaced his brain with a collage of idiotic cliches. What I felt most vividly is that these fools with their groupthink and empty theories wanted control over my body. They wanted it to move from place to place according to the bells, wanted to control what I ingested, what I said, what I read, what I thought, and who I was. I simply refused to be treated that way.

My holy text was a book called The Student as Nigger, by Jerry Farber, which described the oppression of students by analogy to the oppression of African-Americans. This seemed doubly appropriate to me because the school was mostly black, and because DC was one of the most racially polarized cities in the world; it seemed to consist exclusively of rich powerful white folks and dispossessed black folks.

The Student as Nigger is out of print, but I found it on the net. Here's a bit: "You may only study geometry for a semester--or French for two years. But doing what you're told, whether or not it makes sense, is a lesson you get every blessed school day for twelve years or more. You know how malleable we humans are. And you know what good learners we are--how little time it takes us to learn to drive a car or a plane or to play passable guitar. So imagine what the effect must be upon our apt and impressionable minds of a twelve-year course in servility. Think about it."

I thought about it. And I decided that servility was effeminate and the people who tried to reduce you to it deserved destruction. So I dedicated myself to that.

I read Steal This Book and The Anarchist Cookbook. I seized the mike at numerous assemblies to deliver anti-administration screeds, ran for class president on the "no more bullshit" platform as the assistant principal ripped down my signs, started the "Alice Deal Free Press" for which I was twice suspended, led a student walk-out and strike.

Finally, my friends and I were cutting letters out of the newspaper and threatening the principal "and his school" with destruction if he did not capitulate to our demands to end compulsory attendance and grading. My friends and I broke into the school and spread a stink solution all over the administrative office. Five years later, the place still stank. I organized a group to do the same thing to the US Capitol. We scouted the building and made a floor plan, but somehow it never happened. I tried to bomb some construction trailers at Livingston and Connecticut Ave., but the explosives fizzled. And so on.

And then I took that stroll up Livingston and saw what was happening to the woods. I figured I'd strike a blow for the environment against the depredations of man. I poured sugar into the gas tank of the first backhoe; with some difficulty, they towed it away. I used sand in the second. The third arrived with a locking gas cap. So I blew it the fuck up.

The moment when I sent that backhoe to heavy-equipment heaven was one of the most ecstatic moments of my life, because I was released from my rage utterly. Violence is both an expression of and, more importantly, a treatment for rage. At the point where your violent fantasies become real, you don't need those fantasies anymore. That's why a kid who is obsessed by violent thoughts may act on them knowing full well the cost he may pay: because the action is a release from the obsession that devours him. That release can easily be more important to you than your life, especially when, like most of the school shooters and like me, you are consumed also by self-loathing.

As late as my early twenties I was capable of getting pissed off enough to try to destroy things. But I also started to learn how to express my rage without destroying myself. For one thing, I medicated it: it's possible to stay high on pot all the time and still be violently angry, but you are unlikely to do much about it. And I learned to write instead of mixing molotovs: I was a freelance rock critic, and I took it out on the Police rather than on the police. I wrote some very nasty reviews.

I still despise authority. I'm still full of rage. So I've been asking myself, hard, why I and the people I've despised over the decades are still alive. First and of most immediate practical impact, was that I managed to get out of authoritarian institutions. My expulsion from the DC public school system was a very good thing. I wound up at a storefront "free" school in Adams-Morgan, where the only ongoing academic program was group therapy, but where the first priority was respecting the autonomy of the students. (The school ended at the end of my senior year, when the entire staff was busted for "contributing to the delinquency of a minor.") College seemed pretty voluntary to me, and though the bureaucracies in which I've worked have deeply irritated me, I haven't so far in my adult life had the sort of profound experience of powerlessness I had in public school.

My rage is still under there, and it still screws up my jobs and my relationships. I am capable of being so angry at people I love that I find a way to get them out of my life just to stop the anger in my head. I often thank God that people in positions of power over me can't read my mind, and I often wish that I could simply stop thinking altogether so I could stop thinking the way I do.

But I want to tell you something. I would not, even now, like to be rid of my anger or my condescension toward authority. Someone who is impressed by authority will never do anything very interesting or original; they're going to be happy to make themselves over into whatever the institutional structure demands. In a certain sense their existence is redundant. People who hate authority, including the school shooters, have done a lot of evil in this world. But by far the greatest evils have been perpetrated by authority's slavish minions: under the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese Communist Party. The thing most to be feared in this world is that people will cease to resist power that is exercised over them.

You can't make something new without wanting to destroy something old: a new creation needs room, and this room must be cleared.

Of course I do not have a solution to the problem of school violence. But I do know what I would say to Dylan Klebold if I had the chance:

I have some idea of what's happening in your head, because I've been there. The goal is for you and the people around you to survive your rage; it really does not have to kill you. Bad as it sucks, your rage is interesting and useful. And the fact that you're not like everyone else at Columbine High School is nothing but excellent. Try to laugh at those people. Go ahead and ridicule their slavishness, their conformism, their nasty little enforcement of mindless cultural norms. Ridicule them, but they aren't really worth killing; they're not worth your life. And then realize that this violent, destructive impulse that you have is actually an artistic impulse; that you can destroy by creating. Learn to survive the impulse and then learn to use it; we need all the iconoclasts we can get. Get out there and do something with what you've got, and praise God that you're no peon.

That's what I'd say. I wouldn't necessarily throw drugs or anger management at their rage, wouldn't, finally, try to cure them of their rage at all, because I think that's basically impossible in most cases. Rather, I'd try to make them see that the rage that is consuming them is an opportunity as well as a terrible burden, that it separates them from the people they despise and is potentially a source of art and celebration and liberation. If there's a possibility of transforming ourselves into more human people, it's the kids who hate authority who will show us the way to do it.

I still identify myself with rebelliousness, though I have learned to survive in institutional contexts, or to try to subvert them rather than hurling obscenities at them. But I associate that rebelliousness with whatever creativity I may have: I write my rage; I try to create, rather than destroy, explosively.