No Easy Answers (10 page)

I heard through my other friends that Eric was talking shit about me. For the most part, I shrugged it off. However, it did concern me when I heard that Eric wanted to mess with my car.

I told my parents what was going on. It didn't surprise my mom that much. She had already developed a distrust of Eric Harris.

“Eric held grudges and he never let them go,” Judy Brown said. “It was not normal behavior for boys. Boys usually speak up, say what they have to say, and that's that.”

Initially, Randy and Judy Brown liked Eric, because he seemed like the most clean-cut of Brooks's friends. Most of them dressed and acted like typical members of the punk or alternative scene. Eric, by contrast, looked almost preppy.

“My main impression of Eric was driving down Elmhurst and seeing him in the window of his study every night, every time we drove by, on the computer,” said Randy Brown. “The Harris's study is in the front of the house, and every time I went by, he was there. It was uncanny.

“You have to remember, too, that we were much more naïve then than we are now,” Randy continued. “The things that would now be considered red flags . . . at the time we just excused as ‘teenage behavior.’”

The first time Judy Brown suspected something amiss was when Brooks came home and told her that Eric was refusing to speak to her son Aaron. Aaron had made a comment to Eric along the lines of “Hey, man, get a life; you're on the computer too much.” It was meant as gentle ribbing, but Eric didn't take it that way.

“Brooks said that Eric now hated Aaron,” Judy recalls. “I said, ‘You've got to be kidding. Can't you smooth it over?’ And Brooks said, ‘No way, Mom. There's no smoothing it over. He won't change his mind.”

The next time Judy became concerned about Eric Harris was after Brooks and Eric had quarreled over rides to school. Brooks came home and said he'd heard that Eric was looking to damage his car in some way, for revenge.

“I remembered how Eric had held a grudge toward Aaron before,” Judy said. “I knew he wasn't going to let this one go either.”

Shortly after Eric and I had our falling-out, Eric figured out a way to get two of his enemies with one shot. He and Dylan plotted a new “Rebel Mission” against Nick Baumgart.

Eric had decided he didn't like the way Nick laughed. It was ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than choosing to hate my brother for telling him to get off the computer, or hating me because I didn't want to drive him to school anymore. The same “clownish” traits that had made us laugh so hard at Nick's antics in the library during freshman year now had Eric hating him with a passion. Go figure.

Dylan and Nick had never been great friends, not even in grade school, and I imagine it wasn't hard for Eric to convince him to help with the plan.

Dressed in their usual black “mission clothes,” Eric and Dylan crept over to Nick's house late one night. They put superglue in all of his door locks, then tried to set fire to all of the plants and bushes outside.

Then, the next day, Eric went up to Nick and said, “Man, I'm sorry about your house. I was talking to some people and I heard that Brooks did it.”

Nick went home and told his mom, and she went off the wall about it. So my mom called her to explain that I couldn't have been involved.

For the first time, my parents' strict demands on me regarding school were about to pay off. Because I hadn't been doing a lot of my school-work, my teachers had begun sending a card home with me every week that indicated whether or not I had done my assignments.

That week, I'd missed some assignments, so I didn't have the card. My parents and I had a big fight, and I wound up grounded. I lost car privileges and had to stay at home every night. As it turned out, one of those nights was the night that Nick's house was hit.

“I can guarantee you that Brooks didn't do it,” my mom told Mrs. Baumgart.

“Why?”

“Because he was here at home, grounded.” Based on that, it was pretty easy to figure out who the true culprit was. If Eric had been angry with me before, now he was furious.

A few weeks after Eric and I stopped talking to each other, Trevor and I happened to be driving home from school in separate cars. Trevor was driving his car ahead of me when we pulled up to the stop sign near my house.

The spot was right next to the bus stop. Eric, who was riding the bus again, was throwing snowballs with other kids from school.

When Eric saw Trevor, he picked up a chunk of ice from where it forms over the gutter. He threw it as hard as he could at Trevor's car, denting the trunk. Then, without missing a beat, he picked up another chunk of ice and threw it at my car.

The ice smashed into my windshield; I heard it crack. It wasn't a large chip, but enough to make one of those little spider webs around it.

I was livid. I slammed on the brakes and leaned out of the car, yelling, “Fuck you! Fuck you, Eric! You're gonna pay to fix this!”

Eric laughed at me. “Kiss my ass, Brooks! I ain't paying for shit!”

I floored the gas down the remaining few blocks to my parents' house, went in and told my mom exactly what had happened. Then—seeing red—I went straight to Eric's place to talk to his parents.

I hammered on their front door, still furious. All I could think of was getting back at Eric. Mrs. Harris answered, and I glared at her. “I've got something to tell you about your son,” I said.

She looked back at me, a little confused. “Okay . . .” She asked me to come in.

We sat down in her living room, and I told her everything Eric had been doing in the past few months. “Your son's been sneaking out at night,” I said. “He's going around vandalizing things. He's threatened people. And just now he broke my windshield.”

She didn't seem to believe me. She kept asking me to calm down. That only made me angrier.

“He's got liquor in his room,” I said. “Search it. He's got spray paint cans in his room. Search it. Eric's fucked up, and you need to know about it. I'm getting out of here before he gets back, because I'm not gonna deal with him right now.”

Mrs. Harris wanted me to stay, to sit down and talk with Eric about this, as if we were in the school counselor's office or something. I shook my head. “I'm gone,” I said as I got back in the car to go home.

As it turned out, Trevor had gone on his own mission of sorts. When I went to the Harrises' house, he drove back to the bus stop, where Eric and his friends had all left their backpacks while they continued their snowball fight. Trevor pulled up, grabbed Eric's bag, threw it in his car, and took off back to my house.

My mom decided that we were going to confront Eric. Once I got home, the three of us got in her car; my mom was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and Trevor sat in the back.

We drove back down the street to the bus stop. As we pulled up, my mom rolled down her window and called for Eric to come over.

“I said to the kids, ‘Lock the doors. I'm just going to unroll the window a crack,’ Judy Brown recalled. “And they did, and I said, ‘Eric, I've got your backpack and I'm taking it over to your mom's. Meet us over there.”

Eric's response shocked all three of them. His face turned bright red, and suddenly he began shrieking and pounding on the car, pulling as hard as he could on the door handle. He screamed at them to let him in.

No one, not even Brooks, had seen Eric act like this before.

“He just went crazy,” Judy Brown said. “I started to pull away slowly, and he wouldn't let go. I said, ‘Back away from the car. We'll meet you at your mom's.’ He didn't listen. He just kept screaming, ‘Give me my backpack!’ Trevor moved over to the other side of the car, away from him. We were all scared.”

Judy drove to Eric's house; Kathy Harris was standing in the driveway. Judy got out of the car and gave the backpack to her, explaining what had happened to Brooks's windshield.

“Normally a kid throwing a snowball at a car wouldn't upset me that much,” Judy said. “I understand that kids can get carried away. But because we had heard he was going to do something to vandalize Brooks's car, it made me think this was on purpose.”

Kathy Harris's eyes began to well up with tears. Judy immediately became sympathetic. She remembers Kathy Harris as being “very sweet, a very nice lady.”

At the time, Judy didn't think much of Eric's bag; she had no idea that Eric was already building pipe bombs at that time, or that his journal contained entries about how much he hated school.

“To this day, I wonder what might have been in that bag,” she says.

Later that evening, Kathy Harris called Judy at home to discuss the matter further. According to Judy, Kathy wanted to listen, but her husband, Wayne, kept saying that Eric didn't mean it.

“He said, ‘This is just kids’ stuff. The truth is, Eric's afraid of you.’ I said, ‘Look, your son isn't afraid of me—he came after me at my car.’ And he said, ‘My son said that he is afraid of you.’ He didn't want to hear that his son had done anything wrong.”

My mom told us about her phone call with the Harrises, and we sat around talking about it in our living room. By now my dad was home from work, so we brought him up to speed on the situation. I told my parents about the other things Eric had been doing, and Aaron backed me up, because he knew about it as well.

I was still seething. It helped a little to know that my parents were on my side, and that Eric's parents were dealing with him at the same moment. Nonetheless, I felt so much anger that night. I was used to getting shit from the bullies. I didn't expect it from people I used to call my friends.

The next day at school, I heard through my friends that Eric was still angry. My friends didn't tell me specifics, but they said Eric was threatening me. I went home and told my mom, who called the police. An officer came to our house, and we talked to him at length about what was going on.

My mom described the windshield incident. “He thinks he got away with it,” she told the officer. “Please, just go over there and let him know
that he didn't.” The officer was sympathetic to the situation. He told us he understood how upsetting a bully could be. He said he would pay a visit to the Harris home, only a few blocks away, and have a chat with them in an effort to rattle Eric a little.

I'm guessing that he must have done just that, because later that night, we got another phone call from the Harrises. This time, it was Mr. Harris, letting us know that he was bringing Eric over to our house to apologize.

My mom took Aaron and me aside. “I want both of you in the back bedroom, and don't come out,” she said. We went, and we listened at the door as Eric came in.

“Eric came over and stood in our doorway, and he just had this fake tone to his voice,” Judy said.” ‘Mrs. Brown, I didn't mean any harm, and you know I would never do anything to hurt Brooks I let him finish, but I could see right through the act. And then I said, ‘You know, Eric, you can pull the wool over your dad's eyes, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes.’

“That seemed to surprise him. He said, ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ I remember that specifically. And I said, ‘Yes, I am. And if you ever come up our street, or if you ever do anything to Brooks again—if I ever even see you on our street again—I'm calling the police.’”

Eric was shocked by Judy's words. He didn't say anything further; he just turned and stormed out to his father, who was waiting in the car
.

“I don't think anyone had ever confronted him like that before,” Judy said. “I think he was amazed that I didn't just go, ‘It's okay, Eric. Yes.’ Maybe he had gotten away with it for so long, manipulating people that way, that he was stunned when it didn't work.”

Eric hadn't counted on my mother's attitude. He couldn't believe what she'd said to him.

At least, that's what I heard from people around school, since Eric and I weren't speaking anymore.

Dylan tried to make peace between us, but he always failed. Eric wanted nothing to do with me, and after what had happened to my windshield, I felt the same way toward him. Dylan and I would still go out to have cigarettes together, and Eric would refuse to go along because I was there. Sometimes I would go visit Dylan while he was working at Blackjack Pizza, and then Eric would show up and I would have to leave. I wished I could do something to improve the situation. But if that meant talking to Eric again, I refused. I was too angry.

However, I had no idea that, in the privacy of his study, Eric was quietly plotting his revenge.

IN MARCH OF 1998, I WAS WALKING TO CLASS WHEN DYLAN approached me with a small piece of paper. On it was written the address for a Web site.

“I think you should take a look at this tonight,” Dylan said.

I shrugged. “Okay. Anything special?” I figured at the time that it was the address for some new program Dylan had uncovered.

“It's Eric's Web site,” he said. “You need to see it. And you can't tell Eric I gave it to you.”

I nodded. “All right.”

That night I logged on for the first time. Sure enough, it was Eric's page; I recognized the more familiar features, like the “Jo Momma” joke section; all of us would sit around and tell those. “Jo Momma” jokes are a takeoff of the traditional momma joke, only they're made to be deliberately bad. The humor came from seeing just how lame you could make them. We'd say things like, “Jo Momma is so poor she lives in a two-story Dorito bag.” “Jo Momma is so fat she uses a Greyhound bus for roller blades.” “Jo Momma is so dumb that she has seven extra fingers and two extra toes and she still can't count to 29.”

However, Eric had several pages that clearly were not meant as a joke. They were brutal, savage attacks on everything he hated about the world. One of them had to do with me. Eric had written:

My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law, if you don't like it, you die. If I don't like you or I don't like what you want me to do, you die. If I do something incorrect, oh fucking well, you die. Dead people can't do many things like argue, whine, bitch, complain, narc, rat out, criticize, or even fucking talk. So that's the only way to solve arguments with all you fuck-heads out there, I just kill! God I can't wait till I can kill you people. I'll just go to some downtown area in some big-ass city and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame. Ich sage FICT TU! I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will after I mow down a whole fucking area full of you snotty ass rich mother fucking high strung godlike attitude having worthless piece of shit whores. I don't care if I live or die in the shootout, all I want to do is to kill and injure as many of you pricks as I can, especially a few people. Like Brooks Brown
.