by Otto Penzler
Four years later, the chill still hadn’t gone away. It stayed with me exactly as the memories of torturing Timmy Titimski stayed with me, and I began doing some research into the case as a way of deciding if a boy like Jonathan could ever be forgiven. What I found at first didn’t surprise me: a website that portrays bullying as a gay rights issue—because of the abuse suffered by gay teens—portraying Josh Belluardo as the “non-gay victim” of gay bashing; people who still lived in the Port Victoria subdivision portraying Jonathan not only as a bully but as a threat to overall peace and security. In the afterlife of the tragedy, Joshua continued rising as an angel to the precise degree that Jonathan continued mutating into an all-purpose bogeyman, and when I talked to one Port Victoria resident about real estate on Shallow Cove, this is what she told me: “What happened to Josh changed a lot of lives, not just the lives of the Millers and the Belluardos. I think most of the houses in that cul-de-sac have turned over a couple of times. People just left, and you know why? I think it’s because they know that however long that boy goes to jail, one day he’s going to get out. They know he’s coming back, and they don’t want to be around.”
I was surprised, then, when I met Jonathan’s parents, Robin and Alan Miller, and they told me that at the time of the “accident,” Jonathan was two inches shorter and nearly twenty pounds lighter than Josh Belluardo. Of course, I was not surprised that the Millers tried their best to present Jonathan as a harmless innocent—hell, they were his parents and had a reputation for defending their son at any cost—but what they told me checked out, and the surprises kept coming. Josh, as it turned out, was not weak. He was not helpless. He was more athletic than Jonathan. He was more popular than Jonathan. He had the reputation as someone who could handle himself; indeed, in some quarters, he had the reputation as something of a bully himself. He was never terrorized by Jonathan because he never allowed himself to be terrorized, and so when I asked Jonathan’s friend James Nachtsheim what he expected to happen when Jonathan punched Josh, I was surprised when he said that he expected Josh to turn around and “kick Jonathan’s ass.” When I went to E. T. Booth Middle School and talked to Pat Patterson, the counselor who runs the school’s antibullying program and who knew both Josh and Jonathan, I was surprised to hear him say that the boys’ relationship “didn’t follow the classic guidelines” of bully and bullied, because “a bully usually recognizes a victim, and that wasn’t Josh. Josh was a stand-up kid, and he didn’t allow Jonathan to push him around.” When I had my interview with Bill Head, I was surprised when he said that after he was quoted calling Josh another victim of bullying, the Belluardos called and asked him to please stop using Josh’s name in his crusade. And when I went to the Belluardos’ lawyer and asked to speak to his clients, I was surprised by the explanation the lawyer offered for their refusal: They did not want to speak on the subject of bullying. They do not believe that Josh was bullied. They believe that he was viciously attacked. “And quite frankly,” the lawyer said, “they believe that if Jonathan had given Josh a fair fight, Josh would have kicked his ass.”
He was not a bully, then. Jonathan Miller, the bus-stop bully, was not a bully—or at least not a bully at the bus stop, and above all not a bully to the boy he was said to have killed as a result of bullying. But if he was not a bully, what was he, and why did people insist on making bullying the basis of his crime? If he was not a bully, how did he suffer the terrible cruelty of being judged a bully for life? And if he was not a bully, well, then was he still a terrible boy?
Here’s a story about Jonathan Miller and his parents—a story that Jonathan’s parents, Robin and Alan Miller, tell about their son and themselves. Jonathan was in high school at the time: Etowah. He had made it out of middle school. He had made it out of E. T. Booth despite the suspensions, despite the referrals, despite a principal who, according to the Millers, tried to crush his spirit. Here was a boy whose name was decided after his parents watched Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Here was a boy who, in Robin’s words, “always flew where he wasn’t supposed to go,” and all the administration at E. T. Booth wanted to do was put him on Ritalin. They convened what Robin calls “the Ritalin meeting” when Jonathan was in eighth grade. Robin stormed out, and after that it just got worse for Jonathan. “They suspended Jonathan three days for farting,” she says, “ ‘Serial farting,’ they called it. I mean, c’mon …” The Millers were lucky that Jonathan wanted to go to school at all after what he went through at E. T. Booth, but at Etowah the assistant principal was creative and amenable to Robin’s input. When she called Robin to say that Jonathan was about to be suspended for being continually late to science class, Robin remembers saying, “Don’t suspend him. It’s gotten so he likes suspensions. Give him something he really dislikes.” So one day, when Jonathan got out of the class before science class, she was waiting out in the hall for him. “In front of all his friends, I said, ‘If you can’t make it to class on your own, your mother is going to have to help you.’ He said, ‘Mom, I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you’re late for science class.’ And you know what? He was never late again.”
Do you see? After Josh’s death, angry mobs gathered on Atlanta’s talk-radio shows and called Robin an unfit mother. Does an unfit mother escort her son to science class? Alan could not help himself: As he drove to his lawyer’s office, he used to turn on the radio and listen to complete strangers call for his castration. Does a father who takes his two sons camping and volunteers for the Boy Scouts deserve to be castrated? They were both involved in the life of their son Jonathan. They both made sure they were always home for their son Jonathan. The only thing they wouldn’t do for their son Jonathan was give up on him. They couldn’t give up on him. He was a kid. He was a knucklehead. He was mouthy and reckless. But he wasn’t violent, he wasn’t mean—he was never a lost cause. Do you know what he did after he found out that he had killed Josh? He screamed for a half hour. He pounded his head against the concrete floor of the jail. He had to be put on suicide watch.
But it’s no use, is it? No matter what they say about Jonathan—that he wasn’t, that he isn’t—he was and he is. They were and they are. They are marked. Their son killed Joshua Belluardo, and they have nothing left but his cause. Alan Miller is eminently reasonable in his son’s cause, almost businesslike; he is a bespectacled man with a pinkish face and longish silver hair and the softness of Tennessee in his voice. Robin Miller is passionately volatile in her son’s cause; she’s from upstate New York, with her mass of corkscrewed hair tied tightly back, a slight space between her front teeth, a small white scar jabbing her upper lip, and her broad forehead creased with care. They are speaking from the living room of their house, where they are surrounded by pictures of their nieces and nephews, and of their son Jeremy, and of their son Jonathan, which are all at least four years old. Their house is an hour and a half outside of Atlanta. It is a hardscrabble little house in a hardscrabble little neighborhood of the kind that used to ring the mill in hardscrabble Southern towns. They left Shallow Cove not long before the Belluardos did. The Belluardos sued them and are now in the process of suing Cherokee County School District for allowing Jonathan on the bus in the first place. The Millers’ insurance company paid the claim, but the suit—and the fees of their lawyers—has bankrupted them. They have lost everything and are fully aware that their cause is sabotaged by the awful fact that they haven’t lost enough. Their loss is consummate. The Belluardos’ loss is infinite. It’s permanent and irrevocable, and now when Robin says, “I’d just love to feel Jonathan’s face again,” she quickly adds, “I feel guilty saying that. Because Mrs. Belluardo would love to feel Josh’s face again. I wrote her a note once, but how can you tell someone, ‘I’m sorry my son killed your son?”
And so they’ve stopped trying to match loss for loss. They’ve stopped trying to convince anyone that the scales will ever be equal. In the terrible zero-sum game of life and death, they are the winners: Their son is
alive. And now they want him back. They understand that he committed a crime. They agree that he should do time in jail. They do not believe that he was a bully or that the crime he committed was murder. “We still have hope that Jonathan can make something of himself,” Alan Miller says. “The Belluardos will never be satisfied with Jonathan’s punishment until they get their son back. That’s not going to happen. But we can get our son back and give him another chance.”
It’s a reasonable request and a reasonable position to take. But it’s not all they want. It can’t be. Like the Belluardos, they want what they cannot have; they want to revoke the irrevocable. They want their boy not to be considered terrible, and now, at the end of the interview, Robin stands up and makes the plea she is consigned to make until Jonathan comes home and the Millers are able to disappear. “I just want people to know we’re not bad people,” Robin says. “That Jonathan is not a bad person. I used to be really proud of him—his kind heart. But now it’s like I’m always saying, We really are good people, we really are good people ….”
The terrible boy does not look so terrible behind the glass. He looks tired. He always looks tired behind the glass because he always is tired. No, to be more specific, sleepy; he is always sleepy behind the glass. The glass is the glass that separates prisoners from visitors. Behind it sits Jonathan Miller, talking by means of a black phone. He is 18 years old. Since November 2, 1998, he has grown five inches and put on nearly sixty pounds. He has spent nearly a quarter of his life in jail, among terrible boys and terrible men. He has grown up behind the glass—he has, in his mother’s words, been raised by the state—and he has not only spent the last four years without touching a tree or stepping on grass, he has spent the last four years forgetting what trees and grass feel like.
He is shy, slow-moving, slightly gawky. His face is long, his hair short and combed forward. He has fledgling sideburns and pinkish skin stained with jailhouse acne. He’s wearing eyeglasses with a stylish horizontal inclination—the kind of eyeglasses kids his age wear out in the world. His hands are soft and white, uncontaminated by effort. He has a soft, sleepy voice accented not by affect but by occasional complaint—a burbling institutional monotone, cued to react rather than make pronouncements. Although he no longer tries to speak over people—although he’s finally learned to keep his big mouth shut, or, at the very least, to speak under people, at prison volume—he still likes to talk, and as he does, his right eye starts opening like a flower whose bloom is prodded by trick photography. He’s struggling to rouse himself and as he does, the partition between the boy raised by Alan and Robin Miller and the man raised by the state of Georgia becomes more and more apparent. He does not look like a terrible boy, but in his prison jumpsuit—whose horizontal white-and-orange stripes are, in this jail, the designation of a murderer—he has been outfitted with the trappings of a terrible man.
He is still in a county jail. Pending his appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, he is not yet in the state prison system, but jail is jail, and behind him the turquoise pod of steel and stone looms like a cathedral. Over the last four years, he has moved from one jail to another; he is happy with this one because it allows him to keep a radio in his cell. “What kind of music do you listen to, Jonathan?”
“Well, I like to tell all my macho friends that I listen to rap, but really I like to listen to love songs. Whitney Houston is my favorite.”
“Who did you hang around with at Etowah?”
“I didn’t really belong to a group. I had a lot of friends, but they were mostly older. In school, I was sort of a loner, going from group to group—two days with these guys, three days with these girls.”
“What about Josh?”
“Josh and I were friends at first. Then he turned against me. I guess he thought I was the weakest link or something.” “Were you guys enemies?”
“Well, it wasn’t all me. They make him out to be an angel. They make him out to be all good and me all bad. Okay, if they say I’m bad, I must be bad, but I’m good, too. I didn’t even want to fight that day. All he had to say was, ‘I don’t want to fight you,’ and none of this would have happened. But he gave me this look and said, Tight me at my house,’ and I said, ‘I’m tired of this.’”
“Why did you hit him in the back of the head? Were you scared?”
“I ain’t been afraid of nobody my whole life. I’ve never been afraid of getting beat up. Maybe I did it because I knew he’d never face me—like, Hey, I’m here. It was no big deal; the whole thing lasted ten seconds. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to go camping.”
“Did you hit him with your right hand or your left?”
“Right.”
“Did you hit him with a roundhouse punch or a straight one?”
“It wasn’t no roundhouse. It was a boxing punch. I didn’t think I hit him that hard because I didn’t break my knuckles or nothing, but I guess I hit him harder than I thought I did, because I was sort of going downhill.”
“What was your reaction when you started becoming known as a bully?”
“I got scared. I was like, What? Because people were talking about me in the newspapers, and I didn’t even know who they were. I was like, Everybody says I’m bad, so I must be bad, but I’m not all bad. Like in jail, they call me Killer Miller. I told them to stop—I’m no killer—but then I thought, The Belluardos say I’m a killer, the DA says I’m a killer, the judge says I’m a killer, the jury says I’m a killer, why should I get in a fight when people in jail call me a killer? Now I just tell them, When I win my appeal, you can’t call me killer no more. Because I know I’m not a killer. I know I didn’t mean to kill that boy. But I don’t care what anyone thinks of me except the judges who are hearing my case and the Belluardo family. They’re the only ones I care about.”
It is early afternoon. His right eye is open now, in full bloom, but at five o’clock when they come around and give him his pills, it will start closing again. As a murderer, decked in white-and-orange stripes—as Killer Miller—he’s locked down in his cell twenty-one hours a day. As a murderer, he shares his cell with no one, and to make the time pass, the jail affords him what it affords everyone else he’s met in the turquoise cathedral: pharmacological intervention. Zoloft, Prozac, Placidyl, Elavil: In the interest of tractability, he’s taken them all at one time or another, but now he’s just on Elavil, and he sleeps sixteen hours a day. The time passes. By the time his eyes open, they’re ready to close again, and in that way, in blank, dreamless sleep, the terrible boy grows up behind the glass.
He remembers. Timmy Titimski remembers the bully—his bully, the one designed especially for him, like a bullet with his name on it. I remember him, too, of course. How can I forget? He was crucial. He helped form me, as I suppose I helped form him. He exists as a signal event in my conscience. Hell, he is my conscience. There was nothing else to stop me back then except its slow drip. Today, if I lived in Cherokee County, Georgia, or in any of the other counties across the nation that have adopted three-strikes laws or zero tolerance policies in response to bullying, I would not have had to stop myself. I would have been stopped. I would have been suspended, expelled, possibly sent for a spell to a juvenile detention center. Instead, I grew up. I had the freedom to develop a sense of regret—the great sustaining mercy of guilt. I even had the luxury of figuring out why I did what I did to him. It was the matter of tears: I couldn’t control my own, so I figured out a way to control his. I was a kid who cried whenever my father yelled at me. My tears were a source of great shame, so when I found a boy whose tears I could turn on and off like a faucet—well, it gave me what shrinks would call a necessary sense of mastery. As the bully stands sentry on his victim’s road to manhood, so does the victim stand on the bully’s road to self-knowledge, and in time, my shame over my tears has been succeeded by my shame over what I did to him. I am grateful for the time and freedom I was afforded, but I’m sure he isn’t; I’m sure he wasn’t. I’m sure he prayed for something to stop me b
ecause he knew that my own leisurely prerogative wasn’t enough. I’m sure he would be grateful for any laws or policies that would keep his children from going through what he went through. And so, one day, I called him. I told myself that I was calling him to see what he thought about Jonathan Miller, and to see if he thought the difference the antibullying movement would have made in his life justifies its existence. But, really, I was calling out of some terrible curiosity. To see if I could speak his name without threat. To see if I had, through some kind of perverse nostalgia, exaggerated what I did to him. To see if he remembers.
He remembers. I knew it before I even spoke to him. I knew it when a little girl answered the phone, her voice like a babbling brook and said, “Daddy, there’s a phone call for you”—because I knew he was a father, and so had something to protect. I had never called him anything but Timmy—his name seemed to exist to be spoken in the diminutive—but when he came on the phone, I heard myself saying, “Timothy?” He had a deep voice, deeper than mine. He didn’t sound like a Timmy anymore.
“Yes?” he said.
“This is Tom Junod.”
He sighed. As if he had been waiting. His voice fashioned itself around a squint of enmity. It consigned me to something, and not just the past. It was poised, and it was patient, and it did not budge. “Tom, how did you get my number?”