No Easy Answers (9 page)

In truth, there really wasn't. Many of Eric's levels were based on science fiction ideas. Here's the description of “UAC Labs” in the text file that went with the level:

After defeating the demons on Earth, you learn of a new terror. Phobos, where this hellish battle all began, has been taken over again! When you were fighting hell on Earth, the demon back-up crew decided to pay a visit to Phobos again. No problem, right? All the installations were already destroyed by you and the first attack right? Yeah, that parts [sic] right, but half the surviving humans from earth took refuge there! We just re-did the structures to fit our needs, and moved in again. Bad idea. Those gates were still active. Sooo aah, chalk up another kill for the demons. After the 2nd attack on Phobos, only 99% of the human population is left. Once you emerged from hell, you took the first ship you could to Phobos. Once again, there were no
survivors. Now it's PAYBACK TIME! Those goddamned alien bastards are gonna get one helluva BFG blast up their FREAKIN ASS! You land on the other side of Phobos. Where the humans landed for the 2nd time. Your mission is to destroy the 2 main gates, and destroy the platoon of demons at the main teleporter from Phobos to Earth. Use the maps, you'll need them to find all the hidden secrets and doors. Beware of the 2 gates, the[y] ARE still active, and more demons might come through any second. The platoon guarding the teleporterout is VERY large, so beware. Good luck marine, and don't forget, KILL ‘EM AAAAAL-LLL!!!!!

After the attack on Columbine, there were some
Doom
players who reviewed “UAC Labs” because of its notoriety. They criticized the hell out of the level—particularly the ending, where over a hundred different enemies come out of the walls simultaneously. “I'm not sure 5,000 rounds would be enough, let alone 500,” groused one reviewer as he gave a walk-through of the level. Another reviewer on the “Realm of Chaos”
Doom
site said Eric had “flagrantly exceeded” the “Thing Limit.”

What these reviewers failed to understand is that Eric didn't care about their rules. He made up his own.
Doom
was an escape for him into a world he understood; it was a reality far preferable to the miserable existence of school. Eric found himself truly at home there.

The bullying at Columbine continued, but during sophomore year, several of us got to know a group of “outcasts” at school who had found a way to fight back.

They were commonly known as the Trench Coat Mafia.

I cringe to use that term today, because it has such a stigma attached to it. In the initial days after the Columbine massacre, several TV news shows latched onto the idea of the “Trench Coat Mafia” like it was some sort of cult. Stories implied that the Trench Coat Mafia was a national organization, or that it had ties with the Neo-Nazi movement. To this day, references are made to the Trench Coat Mafia; I even heard the term used on the HBO show
Six Feet Under
not too long ago.

In reality, the Trench Coat Mafia was nothing more than a group of friends who hung out together, wore black trench coats, and prided themselves on being different from the “jocks.”

Even the trench coats were more of an accidental thing than any sort of “uniform.” The mother of one of its members, Tad Boles, bought a black coat for him as a present when she saw one on sale. Once he started wearing it, his friend followed suit because they liked the look.

While sitting at lunch one day, a few of the athletes were doing their usual routine, making fun of the kids they didn't like. They saw this group of kids sitting together, all wearing black trench coats, on a day when temperatures were in the eighty-degree range. One guy commented that with the trench coats, the group of “outcasts” looked like some sort of “mafia.”

“Yeah, like a trench coat mafia,” said another.

The term was supposed to be an insult. Instead, the group embraced it as a badge of pride. They were the outcasts, and, rather than be ashamed of it, they were proud of it. In fact, they wanted to fight back against their antagonists.

That was the flaw of the Trench Coat Mafia. They prided themselves on being the opposite of the jocks, but they weren't. All they did was spread even more hate. Just as the jocks would make fun of and belittle anyone who was different from them, so would the Trench Coat Mafia. They would just do it in the opposite direction. Jocks would beat the shit out of them and laugh, and then the Trench Coat Mafia would go beat the
shit out of some preps. They were filled with so much hate for the jocks and the bullies of Columbine that they allowed themselves to turn into the very thing they hated.

That's not to say that the Trench Coat Mafia was made up of bad guys. They were a pretty diverse lot, and that made for some interesting conversation. Some were Wiccans, some were Satanists, some didn't proclaim any faith whatsoever. I sat with them at lunch a few times, and they were very accepting of me. It was the jocks they hated.

The feeling was mutual. Jocks would call the girls who hung out with the Trench Coat Mafia “sluts” and “Nazi lesbians.” One day at lunch the jocks threw a bag full of ice water on a member of the group, which led to a fight outside. When security intervened, the Trench Coat Mafia kids wound up with three-day suspensions. The jocks who had started the fight were never even sent to the office.

Even so, the Trench Coat Mafia had chosen to take a stand against the bullying at Columbine. Most of them had already graduated and moved on by the time my senior year arrived. But their actions—and their acceptance—made an impression on Eric and Dylan. For the first time, they were seeing a group of outcasts who weren't taking the bullying lying down. For once they were seeing kids who dished it right back.

Neither of them would forget that lesson.

One member of the Trench Coat Mafia, Chris Morris, had taken a particular liking to Eric. Chris had a job working at Blackjack Pizza, a restaurant just a few blocks south of Columbine, near the Cooper 7 Theater. He urged Eric to apply there near the end of sophomore year; Dylan soon followed suit.

It was during their time at Blackjack Pizza that Eric and Dylan really started to become close. Before that, we had all been one big group of
friends. Now, though, Eric and Dylan were forming a bond that was much stronger than what they had with the rest of us.

Employees at Blackjack Pizza had a fun way to pass the slower hours at work: setting off dry ice bombs outside the store. They would get the dry ice from Baskin Robbins and make crude “bombs” by placing a construction-zone cone over the ice, letting pressure build up and seeing how high they could shoot the cone into the air.

However, Eric and Dylan were introduced to far more powerful explosives that summer. At some point, they discovered recipes on the Internet for building pipe bombs using ordinary PVC pipe and powder from leftover fireworks. In a police interview conducted after the Columbine massacre, the former owner of Blackjack Pizza recalled one of them bringing a pipe bomb to work one day and showing it off to other employees. The owner immediately told him to get rid of it.

For Eric, pipe bombs were a whole new adventure, a way of playing God that was far more exciting than the virtual reality of
Doom.
This wasn't just a game anymore. These explosives were the real thing.

Early in junior year, my little brother and I were playing around on the computer. Zach Heckler had come over, and the three of us were hunched over the monitor with a new program when we heard a knocking on the window glass.

I looked at my watch. It was nearly three o'clock in the morning. Yet there, crouching outside, were Eric and Dylan, dressed completely in black and carrying a backpack. I couldn't believe it. We let them in, and they sat down and told us how they had snuck out and were “carrying out missions” in the neighborhood.

By now, Eric and Dylan had clearly bonded much more strongly with each other than with the rest of us. Working together at Blackjack Pizza,
they had developed a lot of mutual interests that they hadn't shared before. Eric—who took German at Columbine and spoke it fairly well—had discovered Rammstein, a German metal band, and he and Dylan became fans. That fall, Eric had started wearing black, just like the Trench Coat Mafia. It wouldn't be long before Dylan adopted a similar attire.

Brooks's junior year was also Aaron Brown's freshman year. He hadn't seen Dylan around in some time, and it was a shock the first time he saw him in the halls of Columbine
.

“He looked like a totally different person,” Aaron said. “I was like, ‘Brooks, is that Dylan?’ I couldn't believe it. He was a lot taller than the last time I'd seen him. He was dressed in all black, looking down, kind of sad. He just had this attitude about him—you could tell that he was very unhappy. He wasn't being accepted at all.”

At first I didn't find Dylan's behavior that strange. It just seemed like he was finding a new side to himself. In fact, it was sort of interesting to see Dylan rebelling—like me, I thought. It seemed to be good for him; he was becoming more assertive. I didn't share his interest in Rammstein—I thought their music was pretty one-dimensional and lame—but it struck me that perhaps the changes in Eric and Dylan were positive.

I knew nothing of their pipe bomb building. They never told me about it. They did, however, tell me of some of the “Rebel Missions” they were starting to undertake in the neighborhood.

“The Rebels” is the name of the Columbine sports teams. Eric had adopted the name to describe not only himself—he now went by the
nickname “REB” both online and at work—but also the acts of “revenge” that he and Dylan had begun to perform.

Eric had spray paint cans and superglue, and he told us how he and Dylan would sneak over to people's houses and vandalize them, because the person had said or done something at school that had pissed them off. Perhaps Eric and Dylan would glue someone's doors shut, or write words on their front lawn. They did these acts not as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but as REB and VoDkA, the Rebels.

I think the story that got me the most was the one they told about Halloween of junior year. That night, the two of them went up on the roof with a BB gun and took shots at little kids who were trick-or-treating. They said the kids would look around, all confused at what had hit them, but because Eric and Dylan were concealed in the darkness of the roof, they never knew. They told us about this over lunch, laughing like it was the funniest joke in the world.

The first few times I heard stories like that, I laughed, too—out of shock, not pleasure. After a while, I couldn't even laugh anymore. The Halloween story really bugged me. Even if someone could see the humor in pulling missions of revenge on the houses of people who acted like jerks at school, taking pot-shots at little kids on Halloween is just plain sick.

But Eric and Dylan didn't feel the need to explain their behavior. They were angry with the world, and that anger was beginning to show.

IT DIDN'T TAKE MUCH ANYMORE TO SET ERIC OFF. BY THE WINTER OF junior year, I would learn that lesson firsthand.

It wasn't some massive fight that drove Eric and me apart, or a prank that got out of hand. Eric decided that he hated me because I didn't give him a ride to school.

When Eric was a freshman, he got rides from his older brother whenever he could. Now that Kevin had graduated and gone off to college, Eric was back to riding the bus all the time, because he still didn't have his driver's license. So he had started riding along with me instead.

I had become friends with a guy named Trevor Dolac through the Columbine debate program. He and I would alternate driving to school. One week, I would drive on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday while Trevor took Tuesday and Thursday. The next week, we would switch. Eric simply rode along.

However, as anyone who knows me will attest, I'm not exactly punctual. Since I didn't care that much about school, I'd oversleep or dawdle around in the mornings, which meant that I was almost always running ten minutes behind. Trevor never got too annoyed about it, but it drove Eric crazy. Every morning, for the entire drive to Columbine, all I'd hear was Eric complaining about how I needed to get my shit together.

One morning, I overslept again. Trevor called me, wondering where I was.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “I'll be right over.”

As I got dressed, the phone rang again. This time it was Eric. I knew what he was going to say before I even picked up.

I didn't need this, I thought. After all, I wasn't asking Eric to pitch in gas money. I was late all the time and by now, Eric knew it. He still chose to ask for rides from me anyway, right? So he knew what he was getting. I told him I was running late. I suggested that he find another ride.

Unfortunately for Eric, the bus had already left. He was pretty pissed off about it, and he started yelling at me over the phone about what a dick I was. I let him yell for a little while, then hung up.

A few minutes later I was at Trevor's house. “Eric's being a little bitch,” I said as Trevor got in the car. “We're not picking him up today. We're just going straight to school.”

We headed out of our neighborhood toward Pierce Street. A familiar truck pulled out right in front of us. Eric had enlisted his dad to give him a ride.

When Mr. Harris saw our car, he pulled over and we followed suit. Eric got out of his dad's truck and climbed into my backseat.

“You asshole!” he said. “I'm ten fucking minutes late already! My dad's pissed off at me. I can't rely on you for anything!”

I'd had enough. I turned around in my seat and stared hard at him. “Dude, that's it. I don't need this shit every morning. I'm not giving you rides to school anymore.”

We arrived at school and went our separate ways. Usually, if I drove everyone to school in the morning, I provided a ride home as well. But that afternoon, Trevor and I took off from school without Eric. We never gave him another ride after that.

The next time Eric saw me at school, he refused to acknowledge me; I'd pass him in the hallways and say, “Hey, Eric,” and he'd just glare. Once I realized that he was going to make an issue of what had happened, I became so annoyed that I stopped talking to him, too.