No Easy Answers (5 page)

Finding friends within the CHIPS program was virtually impossible. In complete contrast to the friendly atmosphere we'd had at Normandy, classmates in CHIPS weren't friends; they were competitors, and it was a battle to make sure that nobody got too far ahead of anybody else. There's a theory about “crabs in a barrel”: when a lot of crabs are trapped together in a barrel, every now and then one of them manages to climb over the others and make it to the top. When it does this, the other crabs grab onto it and pull it back down. Classes in the CHIPS program worked in much the same way.

Looking to the other kids at Governor's Ranch for friendship didn't work, either. Every day at recess, the other kids knew who the CHIPS kids were. “Oh, there's the smart kids,” they'd sneer. They hated our guts. Dylan and I got our first taste of bullying on the playgrounds of Governor's Ranch. It wouldn't be our last.

We had been put into a class that we'd thought would consist of intelligent kids and teachers who cared about us. What we got was the opposite, and we felt disappointed and hurt.

I could feel the experience making me meaner. In first and second grade, I never got into fistfights; now they were almost commonplace. I would even fight with my little brother, Aaron, who was two grades below me. I was spending every day defending myself from bullies on the playground and saboteurs in the classroom, and my aggression was boiling over.

Dylan was showing signs of it, too. One day, he and I got into a fight on the playground. He said something that made me mad, so I pushed him. Just like that, he jumped on me and started punching; we rolled around, locked together, until the teachers peeled us apart and sent us to the principal's office.

That fight was the first time I ever saw Dylan's temper. Because Dylan internalized things so much, he would let his anger build up within him until one little thing finally set it off. When that happened, it was like an explosion.

The funny thing was, we weren't even that mad at each other; we were still close friends, still sleeping over at each other's houses. Yet the day-to-day experience of school had us both on edge, to the point that we were as ready to lash out at each other as our tormenters were.

I didn't trust authority anymore. I didn't trust my classmates. I was having trouble even trusting my own friends. My anger spilled over into everything at Governor's Ranch, until finally I had to face an ugly truth:
I hated school, and everything about it, and I didn't want to be there anymore.

I had been a straight-A student in first and second grade. Now, as my grades started to slip, my parents could see that something was wrong. When they asked me what it was, I told them everything that had been happening.

At first, they thought I was just having trouble adjusting, but they soon realized that the problem ran deeper. They began looking into alternatives.

As it turned out, Byron Klebold was attending a nearby school called John L. Shaffer Elementary. The Klebolds recommended the school to my parents, noting that it had one of the top ratings in the state and that Byron was very happy there.

When my parents pulled me from Governor's Ranch at the end of the year, I was thrilled. I was the lone dropout from the third-grade CHIPS program, and proud of it; I was off to a new start at a new school.

Dylan, however, stayed behind. I wonder sometimes why he never wanted to come along, considering that his brother was there and he was so unhappy with CHIPS. Chances are, he knew how much it meant to his parents to see him in the advanced placement program.

He wouldn't have wanted to let them down.

IT WAS THURSDAY AFTERNOON, AFTER ANOTHER LONG DAY IN SIXTH grade. Dylan, my little brother Aaron, and I were taking our usual thirty minutes of video game play in front of the TV.

This had become a tradition for the three of us, now that I was at Shaffer Elementary. Dylan's mom was still at work for the first few hours after school, so my mom would pick Dylan up and bring him over to my house. When Mrs. Klebold got off work, she came over and joined us.

Today, though, we were treating our video games far more seriously than usual. After all, we had just acquired a new title:
Mortal Kombat
.

The concept behind
Mortal Kombat
is simple. It's a martial arts fighting game. The player chooses from eight different warriors, all of who have come to the “Shaolin Tournament” for different reasons. Scorpion, the undead ninja, is seeking revenge on his opponent, Sub-Zero; Johnny Cage is the martial-arts movie star; Sonja, the American fighter, is chasing after arch-criminal Kano; Liu Kang is seeking honor for his family, and so on.

Mind you, these plot details don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. All that matters is that you beat the crap out of the other guy before he beats the crap out of you. The player who takes two rounds out of three is the winner of the fight.

Aaron and I had saved up our money for weeks to buy
Mortal Kombat
. We'd even found the “blood code” for the game in one of our gaming magazines. If you entered the right button combination at
Mortal Kombat's
title screen, it would enable blood to fly from your opponent every time you connected a punch, making the game seem far more “adult,” like an R-rated movie.

Now it was finally ours. We had the manual sitting there in front of us, stating the button configurations for each move the characters did. From Johnny Cage's Splits to Liu Kang's Fireball, we had the moves memorized before we even started playing. I chose to play as Scorpion. Aaron chose Sub-Zero. Dylan chose Kano. We were ready.

By now, Mrs. Klebold had arrived at the house. My mom started the timer for our thirty minutes, and then she and Mrs. Klebold left us to it.

Only two can fight at a time, so the three of us constantly rotated: the winner of a round took on the person who had sat out the last round. Unfortunately, this meant that my brother stayed in the game while Dylan and I keep trading off. Aaron was two years younger than us, and it drove me crazy to get beaten so regularly by my little brother. But we still played relentlessly. After all, we wanted to see something never seen before in a video game: a fatality.

The fatality was a new concept, introduced in
Mortal Kombat
. After one player won two rounds out of three, the screen went dark. In a deep, sinister voice, the game instructed the player to “finish him.” The player would have about two seconds to hit the right button combination; if he hit it in time, then the winner would do a special “trick” to finish off the other character.

We didn't know what the trick would be, of course; we were only ten and twelve years of age. The instructions didn't tell us.

My brother was the first to pull it off. After beating Dylan, Aaron quickly nailed the combination. We watched as Sub-Zero reached over,
grabbed Kano's head, and ripped it from his body, complete with the gruesome sound of tearing flesh. Sub-Zero then held the dripping head aloft in triumph—the spine dangling from the now-severed skull—as bonus points piled up under Aaron's score.

We burst out laughing.

Not far away, my mother and Mrs. Klebold were having a conversation about the new violent video game that their sons were playing.

Mrs. Klebold—the same mom who wouldn't let Dylan play with toy guns—had reservations about
Mortal Kombat
. She was scared that this violence might affect us in a negative way. She thought maybe she should take the game away.

My mom was concerned as well. Aaron and I had been brought up in a very nonviolent home. When we were younger, my parents watched movies before we could, then noted where the violent scenes were so they could fast-forward through them whenever we were there. In fact, one time my dad fell asleep in front of the TV during the movie
Beetlejuice
, so my brother Aaron wound up seeing the scenes that my mom had deemed “too scary.” My mom really let my dad have it over that.

Now, though, we were older, and my mom was learning to loosen the reins a little. She suggested that she and Mrs. Klebold listen to us while we played. They would decide what to do about the game based on our reaction.

We were laughing.

There was blood dripping from Kano's spine, and skin flaps hanging from his severed head. A pool of blood was forming on the ground.

We weren't traumatized. We weren't crying. We were laughing—and we didn't feel bad, not one bit.

Why? Why did three boys laugh at such a disturbing death? Why were young boys all over the nation laughing? Was this, as some would have you believe, really the beginning of the fall of Dylan Klebold?

Mortal Kombat
represented the beginning of violence as a selling point in video games. After the success of that game, publishers went crazy with blood and gore. From
Doom
to
Postal
to
State of Emergency
, all violent-themed games owe something to
Mortal Kombat
.

Today, thanks to what happened at Columbine, many of these games are under fire from the pro-control, anti-thought politicians. They believe that since Eric and Dylan played
Doom
and then went on to kill people,
Doom
was in some way responsible for their actions.

In the halls of Columbine, Eric and Dylan set out pipe bombs in specific spots, in close proximity. Their goal was to have one blow up and start a chain reaction through the east side of the school. How do I know that? Because that's how you kill your opponent in
Duke Nukem
.

They walked in with their TEC-9 and Hi-Point assault rifle, shooting wildly. They thought this would work because it works in
Duke Nukem
.

I won't dispute the idea that some of the elements of their plan were derived from video games. What I disagree with is the notion that video games
caused
the shootings—as well as most of the rest of the violence that takes place in America.

There are two basic types of video game players: those in touch with reality and those outside reality. Those who are in touch with reality represent the vast majority of players. We are the ones who, after work, go home for a few rounds of our favorite game, or who sit for hours and try to figure out parts of a new level. We're even the kind you see sitting on sidewalks in front of stores at midnight, waiting to purchase the latest system the moment it's released. We just prefer the hands-on nature of video games to the mindless nature of television.

However, there's that small segment of society that loses touch with the line between fantasy and reality. They are the ones who get into these
games to such an extent that they believe there is some element of reality in them. You've seen these guys, dressed in capes with wands, wearing Klingon masks, and speaking of the characters as if they were real people.

Eric and Dylan both fall into this category. Their delusions went beyond capes and spells, and spilled into more serious things.

However, that doesn't make their actions the fault of the video games they played. Video games may have given them a place to direct their rage—but something else caused their rage in the first place. Something caused them to cross the line of fantasy and embrace imaginary worlds like
Doom
and
Duke Nukem
as an alternate reality.

When Eric and Dylan got into the world of video games, they loved it, because it was a world with definite rules. Those rules were preset, and they could not be broken. For a young man in a world like ours, it was a godsend. In the real world, the rules change constantly—and you could be in trouble at a moment's notice. But video games are different.

In a video game you only get what you know; nothing changes. So video games are a sort of haven, an escape to a logical, exciting world where two things are certain: justice is done, and you get what is due you based on your actions. Everything happens through your own doing, your own mistakes, and your own achievements.

Eric and Dylan got sucked into this appealing fantasy because it was an escape from the troubles of everyday life. When you have a place to go—whether it be home, school, a bar, a drug den, or a video game—where things seem perfect, then you go to that place as much as you can. It's a type of drug—a fantasy—where happiness exists because things make sense.

In real life, things didn't make sense. We saw our classmates being beaten by their parents, who were supposed to love them and nurture them. We heard our friends talking about how much their mommies
hated their daddies—kids turned into bargaining chips in custody battles they couldn't even begin to comprehend. We saw racism, sexism, and cultural oppression—not just on TV or on the Internet, but in our own daily lives. These came from the adults we looked up to. These came from the world that we'd become a part of someday.

Kids are lied to by the people in power on a regular basis, whether it's in school or in politics. Our generation has come to know injustice as a way of life. Kids every day drop out and move on because they've come to believe that there are no fixed standards, and no reason for hope.

We can laugh at a virtual bloody skull, complete with severed spinal cord, on our video game screens. We know it isn't real. We know it's a work of imagination.

It isn't so easy to laugh at the horrors of the real world.

Shaffer Elementary proved to be a big improvement over where I'd been. In some ways, though, it was still tough; it's never easy to attend three schools in three years, and by the time I arrived at Shaffer, most kids had already formed their groups of friends and didn't pay too much attention to me. It wasn't the constant bullying and cruelty that Governor's Ranch had been, but it was lonely.

My grades didn't improve. My previous experiences had soured me on school, and I had started to tune it out. It wasn't that I couldn't handle the work; I was still getting A's on the assignments I turned in. The thing was, I'd only turn in half my assignments. If you get three A's and two incompletes, your average score drops down to a D real quick.

My parents and I began fighting about my grades. It didn't help when I took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills—a multiple-choice standardized quiz that kids all over the country take every year—and scored in the 99th percentile.
My parents would look at that, then look at the C's and D's on my report card, and demand to know why I wasn't “working to my potential.”