Whisky Van Gogh Go

Skip this one if you’re not in the mood for being depressed.

This is 11-year-old Jaheem Herrera. About a week ago, he hung himself from his belt.

The short explanation is: bullying. The details are mostly irrelevant.

I have a bullying/suicide story, this ones strikes even me as a little weird. I had a classmate in Montana by the name of Brad Gates. Age nine, I swear he had muscles like an extra from Fight Club.

I don’t remember anything special or unique about his particular brand of bullying, except that the look on his face wasn’t the usual disgust or contempt that I was used to from bullies. He looked like he was participating in a game, like he thought it was supposed to be fun. And sometimes he looked like he was having fun. Other times, I’m not so sure. But I never detected hate from him.

I loathed him, of course. If he ever tried to talk to me (can’t recall, but it feels like it might have happened), I certainly would have ignored him.

I left Montana when we were about twelve, never looked back. A decade later I heard that, around the age of 16, he swallowed a shotgun. Apparently he was lonely and friendless, and may have suffered at the hands of his parents.

I used to wonder why adults let this happen. I came to the conclusion that they simply looked at their childhoods through rose-tinted glasses and forgot about the whole Lord of the Flies going on in the playground. I was a little too self-centered to realize that not everybody knows, not everyone goes through this. Some of us get the worst of it, others are oblivious, and others still enjoy the game.

More thoughts — and one possible “solution” — tomorrow.