“[Miss Moore] is dedicated to making sure this works,” Kyle’s counselor told him.
“And I trusted that counselor,” Kyle said. “She was the first person to actually reach me—the problem was, she didn’t reach me until I was fifteen. Still, she’s the only reason I am still functional.” Additionally, Miss Moore, Kyle said, “was a great woman. She fought for me. She loved me. She took me in and made me feel like I was one of the family right away.”
At home now after missing the bus for a second day, Kyle told Miss Moore: “Mom, it’s not your job to drive me to school.” This sort of thing was important to Kyle. Rules, regulations, and procedures—they meant something to him. Kyle adhered to and took to the idea of a structured life. He had lived most of his life under the rule of an institution or in foster care: schedules, routines, and planning. He took organization seriously. He was used to being told what to do, following the rules, and expected others to do the same.
“I am not going to have you drive a half hour out of your way because the bus company screwed up,” Kyle told Miss Moore as he felt his adrenaline rising. He was getting himself going. “Screw it ... I’ll go in on Monday.” It was a Friday. He was taking a long weekend.
To put this incident into perspective, Kyle had been involved with the revolving door of the institution for as far back as he could recall. “I had been in and out consistently,” he commented. He’d live with a foster family, do something bizarre, act out aggressively, or say something that scared the people in his life and around him, and he’d be committed. “By 1999, a few years before this bus incident, I was so tired of living with foster families. I’d get to like a family, get used to them ... feel comfortable . . . and they’d kick me out for some reason. And then I am left with that whole abandonment-issue thing.”
In this situation, wherein Kyle was such a volatile person, the relationships he had with his foster families were often forged and shattered on a series, or culmination, of incidents and words, not on one event in particular or one fight between Kyle and a foster family member.
Nonetheless, this lifestyle wore Kyle down, he said later.
So heading toward the end of the school year (2001), when he missed the bus one morning and it didn’t show up the following morning, Kyle had had enough. He was finished with adhering to the “law of the land.” He was making a decision on his own and sticking by it.
There was no way he was going to allow his foster mother to drive him to school. Yet, to put this event into even a more cogent perspective, Kyle had gone off his medication by the spring of 2001. He said in one breath that it wasn’t “a complete and deliberate choice”; yet, in another, he went on to explain he was in charge of taking his medications by then. So it was his decision to stop. Miss Moore would ask, keeping tabs on him, reminding Kyle, and he would always lie, answering, “Yes, sure, done deal. Did it.” Kyle wanted to take it, he claimed, but he would get “focused on something” and totally forget to take it and “miss a couple of doses.” And because of those missed doses, his “psychoses would begin to set in,” he explained. The demons, the dragons, the voices, the rage, and the sheer chaos going on inside his mind would come back and he would unwittingly, perhaps, enter into that inevitable Catch-22 we all hear about. When he was on his meds, he knew he needed them and he understood how good it was for him to take them; off his meds, he didn’t realize their value and thought he didn’t need them.
“I get into a manic phase and I just stop thinking about the missed doses anymore and then I stop altogether. My mind ends up in an entirely different place—and you can see, as I explain it to you, how this exacerbates itself.”
Kyle was extremely protective of Miss Moore. He did not like a lot of what was going on inside her house. There were other foster kids living there besides him, and some took advantage of Miss Moore, he said. This was why, when she offered to drive him to school, he was adamant: “No way.”
“You’re not going out of your way when it’s the bus company’s responsibility to get me to school,” Kyle said. “They get paid to do that.”
“Well, your guidance counselor is talking about truancy,” Miss Moore explained.
“Let me call them and explain what happened,” Kyle insisted.
Miss Moore seemed unsure. She thought about it. Love was about trust. Trust was about responsibility and honoring your word.
“Okay,” Miss Moore said. And she took off for work.
Kyle rode his bicycle over to a friend’s that morning after Miss Moore cleared out. While there, he called the school. He expressed his feelings and his predicament to the guidance counselor. Kyle was not one to hide how he felt. And there was a time in his life when he needed to be right. He liked to tell things the way he saw them. Good, bad, indifferent. Didn’t matter to Kyle. “This is how it is!”
“Well, you are not showing up for school, and that is truancy, and you are going to get into trouble,” the guidance counselor said.
It was one thing to clarify a situation for Kyle Hulbert; it was quite another to tell him what he didn’t want to hear. Here was an unpredictable, ready-to-explode young adult off his meds—meds that he needed desperately just to function, maybe not on an even keel, but somewhat normally. To begin with, the school Kyle attended was an alternative establishment. He wasn’t allowed to attend the local community high school because of his unpredictable and explosive behavior. His guidance counselor at the alternative school also worked for the foster care service—so the counselor was quite clear about whom he was dealing with on the telephone.
Kyle sat and listened to the guidance counselor “chewing” him “out,” he later claimed. According to Kyle’s version, the guy was saying, “Your behavior over the past few months has been becoming more and more erratic and degrading. You need to straighten your ass out. Now you get your ass into this school. . . .”
Seems unlikely a guidance counselor would speak to a foster child with issues in this manner, but Kyle swore by it.
With that, Kyle felt threatened. He called it a “slip comment” later on when he retold this story. But in a day and age of guns and schools and violence and impulsive, on-edge students, no comment, however off-kilter, would be taken for granted.
“Coming to school right now is not a good idea,” Kyle said to his guidance counselor. “I am feeling very much too volatile and I don’t want to make a big hole in the ground.” Kyle later claimed he didn’t even know or realize what he was saying, only that he responded the way he thought he needed. He reacted to the counselor’s yelling. He was telling his counselor that going to school would not be a good idea—that he was not in a good state of mind.
Kyle hung up and went to the mall.
The guidance counselor called the police and explained that a student had threatened to blow up the school and was talking strangely, wanting to hurt himself and others.
On his way back from the mall, Kyle was riding his bicycle down the block when he saw a cop car. The officer driving slammed on the brakes and pulled up in front of him.
“Kyle Hulbert?” the cop asked.
“Uh, yeah . . . ,” Kyle said, surprised.
The cop had an emergency detention order, which generally was handed out along with a court-ordered isolation order for a person with a communicable disease, like tuberculosis or bubonic plague. But in Kyle’s case, it meant that he was headed back to an institution, a familiar-enough place to him by that point in his life.
CHAPTER 6
RENAISSANCE WAS ALL Kyle needed to hear. That era spanning a time period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, arguably born in Italy and spreading throughout Europe, gave Kyle a warm and fuzzy feeling, as if he’d been back to that society and reincarnated into the twenty-first century. Renaissance, much in line with Kyle and his philosophy of life, means “rebirth.” Historians say the Renaissance was about “classical learning and values.” It was a time of discovery, new thought, and artistic exploration. All of this was some
thing Kyle could relate to. As he walked through the weapons shop on the grounds of the festival on that crisp, cool, windy October afternoon, Kyle spotted several kids his age hanging around. There was a bounce to Kyle’s step on this day. He’d just met Brandy and had gotten her number. He was feeling empowered. He devoured the attention the cat costume had given him all day long. People were constantly stopping him and admiring the costume and complimenting him for it.
“Hey, hot girls want to come up and pet you behind the ears,” Kyle said later with a laugh. “I’m ready and willing to purr.”
Kyle had stepped away from those friends he had gone to the festival with and told them he’d meet up with them at the weapons shop. As he searched the weapons shop tent for his mates, something else caught Kyle’s eye.
One of the girls in the weapons shop had her back to him. He walked up stealthily. The guy behind the counter, who turned out to be the proprietor of the shop, grinned. He picked up on what Kyle (the cat) was doing, and he decided to play along with the gag. Kyle wanted to scare the girl. Not in a Jason from Friday the 13th way, but rather in a startling break-the-ice manner to introduce himself. The cat costume had been receiving positive comments for how real it was. He had become quite the attraction at the festival—or at least he felt he was—and now he was playing the role of the cat quite zealously.
The guy behind the counter kept the girl’s attention as Kyle walked up stealthily from behind.
“And by the way, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine,” the proprietor said to the girl as he gestured for her to turn around.
Kyle was right behind her. She turned at that moment and, with her eyes meeting Kyle’s chest (she was so short), she took one look at him and screamed.
“I was laughing and trying to apologize at the same time,” Kyle remarked later. It was one of those moments.
They introduced themselves. With the girl screaming, several of her friends came running to her side. They had been in another section of the shop, browsing around, and hadn’t seen what had happened. As they approached, everyone had a good laugh.
“I’m Mike,” one of the kids said to Kyle, introducing himself. “Great costume.”
“Katie,” said another girl, nodding. “And that is,” she added, pointing to the third wheel in the group, “Clara.”
Clara, Kyle thought. He liked the name. He’d seen her before, too.
But where?
It had been earlier that same day. Clara had approached Kyle. She introduced herself. She said how much she appreciated Kyle’s look, the black clothes, the mask, and especially the long sword strapped to his back as if he were a Ninja Turtle. She had looked him over that first time they met as if sizing him up for a role in a movie.
“Everybody, this is Kyle,” Clara said aloud as they stood inside the weapons tent. “He’s an assassin!”
Kyle liked that.
They were role-playing already.
Clara smiled at Kyle. There was an energy between them, a moment of pure poise. Not necessarily romantic, but as though they were connected spiritually.
Katie laughed. She stood there, thinking for a moment, recalling how Clara had, earlier that day, pointed Kyle out as Katie, Mike, and Clara walked around. “Check him out . . . ,” Clara had said. “You know, I think I may know that guy from the Underworld.”
Katie looked at Clara. She knew what Clara was talking about.
And now here they were, being formally introduced, hanging out together inside the weapons tent. The meeting seemed so random, yet Clara knew it was inevitable. She felt as though she and Kyle were destined to meet, and here they were, running into each other at last.
Kyle could tell immediately that Clara was different from the other kids. There was something about her. Clara was dressed in a long gray cloak, her everyday clothing underneath. She stood with a long wooden shaft in her hand, giving her that Gandalf look, like a leader from The Lord of the Rings. She had a magnetic quality about her, Kyle considered, however dark it was, and he could tell the others looked at Clara, to a certain extent, for guidance and direction.
The other male, Mike Pfohl, had an unkempt look about him. He wore a scraggly mustache, not fully grown in, and a bit of a goatee. Mike sported thick, dark, bushy eyebrows and long, stringy hippie hair. He had a 1970s rock-and-roll look, like a member of Grand Funk Railroad or Led Zeppelin.
Quiet, Kyle thought while sizing up Mike. Though he would soon learn that Mike’s silence wasn’t a shyness necessarily, but it stemmed more from curiosity. Kyle considered that he had fallen in with his kind of people.
Mike was also checking out Kyle in his own way. Kyle came across as boisterous and loud, and he talked speedily. He had a full-on personality. Kyle wanted people to like him and notice him—right away.
“Mike was generally fascinated by the people around him,” Kyle said later.
Kyle didn’t know it yet, but Mike had a dark past. He wasn’t all right, or quiet for quiet’s sake. Back in December 2000, Mike cut himself badly. Not by accident, but with a razor blade, an X-Acto knife. He’d self-inflicted several wounds: arms, chest, and stomach. A friend had caught him in time and Mike was taken in and saved. Four weeks after that, one report claimed, Mike tried swallowing a bottle of pills, but his mother stopped him before he could complete the job. He wound up in a mental hospital. Since getting out, he was sleeping in the basement of his parents’ house.
The way Kyle acted, as they all stood around that tent talking and introducing themselves, Mike latched onto his personality. Mike liked the idea, Kyle later observed, of this new kid being assertive and loud and talkative. Kyle was original and unlike anyone this group knew. He had a leadership quality about him, but not to the degree of being bossy or brassy. Although Clara might have come across as the group’s architect, she was far from it. Kyle was now with a group of followers. Kyle was unlike anyone within Mike’s world whom the kid had been accustomed to meeting.
Mike was “very reserved,” Kyle said. He kept to himself. The greasy hair, long and flowing over his shoulders, the round silver-dollar-size thick glasses, were all features that personified who Mike was. Mike looked a lot older than his age. He had reticence to his gate, as though he would just about go along with whatever anyone in the group wanted to do, and would not ask too many questions. Mike, who had been working at Walmart, had one shining testament to his life (beyond Katie, whom he adored). It was his black Honda Civic, a car he had purchased with money his grandmother had lent him. The car was all his. It allowed him the opportunity to come and go as he pleased. He wasn’t cemented to the basement of his parents’ house, living in a dungeon without much light. The car gave him mobility, freedom. He could pop in a head-crunching CD of metal and bang his head while driving.
“Mike was very prone to black moods,” Kyle explained, “but he loved that car. Man, did he love his car.”
The entire group, Kyle soon realized, was like this: dark, gloomy, and sad. Listening to Mike talk, after they hit it off and started walking around the festival, Kyle thought: His life is boring in a lot of ways. The guy was existing, Kyle felt. Just going about life, not knowing what he was going to do next, where he was headed. Mike also stayed at a rental property with Katie and several other friends at times. His prize possession in life was his shitty car. Mike did not have much.
“He was used to dealing with a bunch of people,” Kyle said, “who weren’t caring a whole lot in their lives about achieving things.”
Mike wanted success; his only hang-up was that he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He yearned to “achieve something great out of his life,” Kyle added. “He just didn’t know what that was.”
As he got to know Mike, Kyle believed Mike saw him as a larger-than-life figure who did not belong, as Kyle put it, in “the right and ordered world” that all of them—Mike, Katie, Clara, and some others—existed in at the time. Kyle had no reservations about showing people who he was, telling people how he felt, and he did
not care what people thought about him. Kyle was over being bullied and picked on and talked about, which had become a perpetual part of his life as a child.
“There’s that crazy kid . . . ,” Kyle would hear as he walked down the hallways of his school. “He’s on meds!” He was used to being “that kid,” the one everyone else talked about and steered clear of. Making his way through school, Kyle’s life had become such a litany of paranoid delusions that he kept a knife on him at all times—and carried the weapon with pride, knowing he would use it if he needed. He sometimes even traveled with that sword, a weapon so sharp and powerful that one swipe could sever the head off a human being in an instant. Kyle believed there were people out in the world after him. He was constantly running, constantly looking over his shoulder, waiting for the day he would have to do battle with someone. Yet, he didn’t know who, where, or when that was going to happen.
“Back then,” Kyle explained, “I was constantly under the belief that ‘someone was after me.’ The paranoia fluctuated from day to day. Sometimes I believed demons were hunting me. Other times it was rival vampires.”
A lot of the time, there was no “specific ‘them,’” Kyle added. “Just the sure knowledge that some ... ‘other’ was out to get me to do me harm.”
As he walked around the festival, getting to know Mike, Clara, and Katie, Kyle thought maybe he wouldn’t share with them just yet the voices ringing in his head and the fact that, he said later, “often this paranoia I experienced dovetailed with my desire to be protective of those I called my friends.” Kyle felt this already about these three and he’d just met them. He could sense a bond immediately. For Kyle, this meant something. Because “if ‘the other’ was out to hurt me, then it would hurt my friends to get to me. . . .”
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