Rage

by Jerry Langton

  Kevin: No.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Truth About Goths: Why Kids Want To Be Vampires

  About a week after Johnathon’s death, Ashley received an alarming e-mail. She was very surprised to see that it was from Tim. The subject line was—as was usual for Tim—typed in all caps and with little regard for spelling or grammar, it read: IM IN JAIL.

  Tim was being held at the Syl Apps Youth and Secure Treatment Centre. Kevin and Pierre were at other facilities. The Syl Apps Centre is in Oakville, Ontario, about an hour’s drive southwest of 90 Dawes. Named after the late star forward for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Olympic pole-vaulter who later became a Conservative Member of Parliament, the Syl Apps is a detention, custody and treatment facility for mentally ill youth.

  Normally it is an efficiently run facility that has little interaction with the neighborhood around it, and it has been the source of few news-making incidents. But on December 1, 2003, Tim was left unsupervised on an Internet-equipped computer long enough to log onto his MSN e-mail account and compose a message for Ashley. The message was time-stamped at around midnight, but my sources tell me that the kids at Syl Apps frequently change times and dates on the computers there just for fun, and it was most likely sent in the early afternoon. At least, that’s when Ashley received it.

  “This is the story,” was his opener, and he went on to claim that none of what happened was his fault. He explained to her that when he arrived at Kevin’s, he and Pierre were already talking about killing Kevin’s family. Since they were laughing and having a good time, he was sure they were joking and so he went along with the joke. As he understood it, Kevin was planning to run away from home that day because of problems with his stepfather, and all the talk of killing his family was just his fantasizing out loud.

  But as Kevin began to get more destructive in the house, Tim claimed he became more and more frightened of him—frightened even for his own life. He became even more scared when Johnathon came home. According to the note, Kevin and Pierre were determined to beat Johnathon up, but Tim intervened, suggesting that they merely threaten the boy instead.

  But after Kevin threw his little brother down the stairs, Tim wrote, he was so scared he couldn’t even move. And when Kevin told Tim to go get him a butcher knife from the kitchen, he said he complied without thinking.

  Tim then made it clear that it was Kevin alone, and not him, who hacked Johnathon to death. Tim closed his message with a rather beseeching: “Please, I wouldn’t do that you have to believe me.”

  It was a far cry from the young man who was almost blasé while bragging about murdering strangers and drinking their blood.

  As soon as she finished reading the message, Ashley called detective Glenn Gray.

  Dahlia (not her real name) is meeting with me to tell me about Tim. She wouldn’t come to meet me alone. Something about seeing a much older man she met over the Internet spooks her, so she arrives at the coffee shop with a phalanx of four friends. After introductions—I give her a copy of Fallen Angel, my first book, to establish a little credibility—we sit at a booth in the back and the rest of her crew sits at a table about ten feet away. I’d rather they were farther away because if she knows they can hear her, it may prejudice her answers, but they won’t budge.

  From first impressions, she doesn’t appear to have much in common with Ashley. She’s short and small-featured and looks much younger than her 18 years. She’s more cute than pretty and does not project a great deal of self-confidence. She has an appearance of vulnerability Ashley doesn’t share. Dahlia’s hair is not quite shoulder length and blonde. It’s an unnatural color that suits neither her eyes nor her complexion.

  She tells me it’s not what she looked like when she dated Tim. Back then, it was dyed black (her long-abandoned natural color is, she says, “mouse brown” and she absolutely hates it). And back then she wore white foundation with heavy black mascara and eyeliner, rather than the subtle, girl-next-door look she goes with now.

  When I ask her about Tim, she says she wants to make it very clear she was never really into him. “Well, not exactly ‘dated’ dated,” she corrects herself. “We went a few places and talked—it’s not like we were boyfriend and girlfriend.” In fact, that’s why they broke up. I ask for details.

  “It’s a long story,” she tells me. “I wore black, he wore black, so people naturally thought we should be together.” According to Dahlia, when Tim came to her high school, nobody knew him, but her friends noticed him right away and were excited that there was a guy in school who looked and acted so much like her. Before long, they were pressuring her to get to know him; one friend of hers actually called them “a match made in hell.”

  So Dahlia did her best to get noticed by Tim and, before long, he built up enough courage to talk to her and eventually to ask her out. They didn’t do much. He never seemed to have any money; so most of their dates consisted of just walking and talking. They spoke even more often electronically. Besides hanging around at school, they also communicated through e-mail and by MSN Instant Messenger at night.

  She tells me that it wouldn’t have bothered her that they didn’t go anywhere—she likes talking—but he didn’t really have anything to talk about. He was boring. He was always around, always talking, but never seemed to have anything to say. Once they discussed what their favorite bands were, there wasn’t all that much left to talk about. And it bothered her that she called her his girlfriend. “I mean,” she tells me. “All we did was walk around together.”

  And it bothered her that he was so immature. He would frequently affect accents or talk in the voices of his favorite cartoon characters. It was annoying, but not as annoying as the smug grin he had on his face whenever he said or did something he thought was funny. “Which was constantly,” she said.

  She was thinking about breaking it off with him when he made her mind up for her. On one of their nighttime walks, he stopped, turned to face her, held both of her hands and told her he loved her. That’s when she knew she was done with him. She told him so. He started yelling and screaming and even punched a wall. He cried. She relented and told him she’d see him the next day, but that she wasn’t really interested in being his girlfriend.

  The next time they got together, Tim got her alone and told her that he’d been acting funny because he had a secret, a secret he could tell only her.

  It was, she tells me in the coffee shop, a difficult moment for her. Although she was annoyed at Tim and not at all interested in dating him anymore, she certainly didn’t dislike him and if he had a real problem, she didn’t want to abandon him. A few things ran through her mind. She knew he wasn’t gay. It could be drugs—maybe someone was out to get him for money he owed. She stopped walking, eager to listen, perhaps to help.

  Tim turned around to face her, grabbed both her hands as he did earlier when he told her he loved her, looked her straight in the eyes and told her that he was a vampire and that he drank human blood.

  At the coffee shop, she gives me a look that clearly says, “Can you believe it?”

  I nod, roll my eyes and ask her what she did next.

  Shocked that he would say something so ridiculous, so stupid, she jerked her hands back and told him she never wanted to see him again. And then she walked away. At home, she blocked his instant messages and refused to open his e-mails.

  “I should’ve slapped him,” she tells me. “He had me worried for a minute there.”

  I ask her what happened after that.

  “Well,” she says, “he eventually kind of got the message and stopped bothering me.” After a while she started saying “hi” to him again (after she heard he was seeing someone else) when they saw each other in school, but that was about it.

  I ask her why the vampire thing bothered her so much; was it just that she expected something else? “Well, mostly,” she tells me. “But I also felt like I was being played.” She confesses that she was, at the time, a Goth. Goths, she explains, are kid
s who dress up in black and lots of makeup and try to look spooky. They listen to darkly themed music and tend to like things related to horror movies and other scary things like bats, spiders and ravens. But because she was a Goth, she believes Tim assumed that she was interested in vampires and drinking blood for real.

  “That stuff ’s disgusting,” she says. “Just because I wore all black doesn’t mean I want to kill people and drink their blood.”

  It’s actually a lot of fun, she assures me, to be a Goth, to look different than everyone else. She was a Goth, she says, simply because she likes dressing up and because she thought the music was cool.

  “So why aren’t you a Goth anymore?” I ask.

  “Because there are so many jerks out there who take it too seriously,” she says. “Tim’s not the only one, you meet them on the Net all the time—they all think they’re real live vampires—it’s just not fun anymore.”

  “Are vampires real?”

  I was putting my seven-year-old son to bed when he asked that. He must have heard me talking about the book.

  “No, vampires are an old legend from a faraway place a long time ago,” I told him. He looked at me as though he expected more, so I oblige. “People like to make up scary stories like that because it gets them all excited and then, when they realize everything’s okay and there’s nothing to be scared about, it makes them feel all better.” He decided my explanation sounded plausible enough and went off to sleep.

  I wasn’t exactly telling the truth. While it’s true that the original legend—that of the dead awakening, hungering for the blood of the living to keep them from a permanent grave—is nothing more than a twisted fairy tale that parents used hundreds of years ago to terrify their children into obedience, there actually are vampires out there.

  To be more precise, there are people—lots of them—who call themselves vampires. And some of them actually do drink blood. They show up every once in a while on Jerry Springer-style shows. Tim must have thought they were kind of cool, because he repeatedly told people he was one of them.

  It’s a bizarre take on history, actually. People grow up with the idea that vampires are cool, erotic and dangerous. And for various reasons—psychologists note a lack of guidance from parents, a contextual skew caused by an early exposure to media intended for adults, and a lack of social structure—some teens acquire an indistinct or totally misdirected opinion about what’s real and what isn’t. They become vampires, at least in the sense that they drink blood and say they are vampires, because they want very badly to be vampires.

  This doesn’t surprise the experts. Lynn Schofield Clark—psychologist and author of From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural—makes the following points about teens in our culture:

  • [North] American culture is so steeped in Judeo-Christian heritage; teens must make options that fit the mold of that tradition. Vampires, as a long-standing European myth, are part of that background.

  • While teens are media-savvy, their ability to make distinctions between entertainment, culture, fact and religion is easily blurred, leading to an “openness to possibility” philosophy, which allows them to accept things they see portrayed in media as truth, if they are presented realistically. Without a larger frame of reference to draw upon, teens may be unable to separate metaphor from fact. Clark notes cross-genre TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and Touched by an Angel that may cause spiritual confusion.

  • Teens may adopt a form of spiritual belief other than that of their parents or peers to affect rebellion, or may simply be dissatisfied with the dominant spiritual beliefs (or lack of them) around them and look for something else.

  That Tim Ferriman told people he was a vampire may surprise some, but it’s not actually that uncommon. In fact, there are many thousands of people his age all over the world who dress up like vampires, and a few who drink blood.

  But those few generally don’t actually attack people in the night and bite their necks, the self-described vampires I met told me. Instead, they usually depend on friends and each other to supply them with blood.

  I asked a psychologist friend of mine who deals with teenagers on a regular basis why some of them dressed up like vampires, rather than, say, cowboys or pirates. “That’s an easy one,” he told me. “Cowboys and pirates were real and can be judged in historical context; since no real vampires ever existed, they can’t be judged—as a result, these kids are free to make up their mythology as they go along.”

  He’s right.

  “Besides,” he adds, “cowboys and pirates are just people, with all the frailties that implies. Vampires are magical beings, which some kids who are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the larger group find extra appealing.”

  He thinks about it a bit longer and says, “who knows, it could have been cowboys or pirates if some kids started dressing that way—but it was vampires.”

  He’s talking about the Goth movement that came out of England in the early 1980s. If you aren’t aware of Goths, you’re in a distinct minority. For almost 30 years, legions of kids have been dyeing their hair black, wearing black often anachronistic clothes, putting on heavy makeup and listening to doom-and-gloom music.

  Although most sources tell me there aren’t as many of them as there once were, it’s hard to find a high school in Europe, North America, or Australia that doesn’t have at least a few.

  Canada, and Toronto in particular, seems to have a disproportionate number. It started, I’m told by a number of sources (including Goths themselves, music journalists, police, mental health professionals and others), with a group of kids who hung out on Toronto’s Queen Street West in the middle 1980s. Trends tend to hit Canada later than they do in Europe and the United States, and aficionados of what was then called “new music”—punk, new wave, new romantic and just about anything other than what’s now called “classic rock”—were few in number, not very popular in the mainstream community, and they tended to seek each other out. Before long, they began meeting informally on Queen Street—primarily between University and Spadina. The location offered lots of foot traffic for panhandling (some of them were homeless and many more jobless) and many bars with live music and cheap draft beer. Because passersby often referred to them as “freaks,” the Queen Street kids took the name as a badge of honor.

  As more and more teens became fans of alternative music—thanks in a large part to Queen Street’s own live music venues and the MuchMusic music TV network, whose storefront headquarters had been located at Queen and John since 1984—the Freaks grew in number and splintered into various sets. By 1987, the Goths, with their vampire-like fashions, were frequenting their own hangouts and eventually had their own bars and nightclubs.

  The movement peaked after a dance club called Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar opened in September 1992. Fashionably, it was located on Queen Street across from a Centre for Addiction and Mental Health facility. The club imposed a strict “Goth dress only” entry requirement. It was consistently very popular and drew many from the Toronto Goth scene, including those too young to get into clubs farther east on Queen, on the other side of Bathurst. Demand for a place to “be” became so strong among teenagers that the club also opened for underage Goths twice a week. The money lost on liquor sales was more than recouped by gate receipts, once a cover charge was installed.

  But the Goth scene began to decline in numbers in the mid-1990s. Some cite unfavorable media coverage, while others say that Goth culture was co-opted by more mainstream acts like Marilyn Manson. Still others say that these days, Goths spend more time on the Internet than they do at nightclubs. As other bars in the Queen West area began offering “Goth nights,” Sanctuary closed its doors.

  In a move that infuriated the area’s Goths, Sanctuary’s owners sold out to the giant Starbucks coffee shop chain in 2000. When the coffee bar opened a few months later, the owners held an opening night gala in which they invited customers to “come d
ressed in your best Goth attire” to try some free coffee drinks.

  But a significant vestige of the Goth district remains around Queen and Bathurst. It now consists of three dedicated dance clubs (ironically, two of them—Savage Garden and Velvet Underground—share names with decidedly non-Goth bands), some boutiques and a few dozen kids dressed in black hanging around outside them all.

  In an effort to better understand Goth, vampires and the forces that molded Tim Ferriman and people like him, I visited them all, interviewed people on the street and online and even opened up a few history books.

  The original Goths were a tribe of people who emerged from the east to attack the Roman Empire circa 263 A.D. What they did before that and where they came from are a matter of mystery and conjecture. After meeting up with, and raiding the edges of, the weakening Roman Empire, the Goths set up a nation-state of sorts in Dacia (modern-day Romania), which the Romans had abandoned as unprofitable a few years earlier.

  They developed a more-or-less friendly trading relationship with the nearby Byzantines. After Byzantium was conquered by the Romans, becoming Nova Roma (New Rome), and then Constantinople (known today as Istanbul, Turkey), the Goths became increasingly Romanized. Most of them spoke at least a little Latin, they adopted the rudiments of Roman-style government and dress and their state religion, Christianity.

  The Goths divided themselves into two distinct groups—the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Although the Romans thought the names meant “eastern Goths” and “western Goths,” both “ostro” and “visi” basically meant “good” in the Gothic language, so a modern translation would be more like “excellent Goths” and “awesome Goths.”

  Under severe pressure from another proto-European tribe, the Huns, the Ostrogoths asked the Romans for permission to cross the Danube and settle in the Empire under Roman protection. In exchange for land and grain, the Ostrogoths were expected to act as a buffer zone between the Romans and the Huns.