Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  One fellow Blackjack employee said Eric was nice and went out of his way to wait on female customers, but could be angry and paranoid. Joseph Jonas said Eric “seemed to lose his temper easily while talking to customers on the telephone.” One former employee didn’t even know Eric’s real name until after the shooting because he asked people to call him “Reb.” Eric would also speak German and once put on German polka music—until Kirgis told him to turn it off.

  Dylan was different from Eric, at least according to Blackjack employee Kim Carlin. He was shy, backed off from food fights, and if she asked him something embarrassing, he would turn red and grin.

  The month before Columbine, Christopher Lau bought Blackjack from Kirgis for about $15,000. At that point Eric and Dylan were working three to five nights a week, with the longest shifts running from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eric was earning $7.65 an hour, Dylan $6.50. Their last night of work was four days before Columbine, on Friday April 16, 1999.

  Lau also called them good employees and never had to discipline them. The only problem he could recall was catching them behind the store lighting a newspaper on fire. Eric, Lau added, was his best employee while Dylan was “hyper, loud, energetic, a good worker, punctual, no problems.”

  ∞

  Dylan was intimidated by girls. He did the sound board for theater, where he liked being around other “weirdos,” but in general did not know how to interact with other people. He liked learning, but not school. He had girl friends, but never a girlfriend. (Tom Klebold says Dylan would go out with a group of friends—what Tom called “group dating.”)

  It wasn’t a romantic relationship, but in the summer of 1997 Dylan met Devon Adams through friends she had at Blackjack. Devon, two years younger, would be entering Columbine as a freshman. Eric and Dylan would be juniors.

  By the time school started, Devon was friendly enough with Eric and Dylan to have breakfast and lunch with them. Dylan was not a morning person and would sleep until noon or 1:00 p.m. on the weekends if he could. For breakfast he would eat donuts and orange juice, or soda pop. Sitting in the middle of the cafeteria, Eric and Dylan would do class work. Or at least pretend to. They could quote every line from the movie Natural Born Killers, and Dylan, usually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, preferred to talk. (Eric’s AOL profile listed his favorite movie as the mysterious Lost Highway by David Lynch.) Devon also says she was marked for speaking with Dylan: A jock would say, “Why are talking to that faggot? Are you a dyke?”

  But the Dylan that remains in Devon’s mind is “Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. I’m just trying to make my way through high school.” And funny Dylan. When Devon was confirmed in the Lutheran church, Dylan gave her a yellow greeting card: “Now you can become like a voodoo priestess and have a temple in Africa and cast spells and shrink heads,” he wrote. Dressed in jeans and a red Chemical Brothers T-shirt with a rainbow, he gave Devon her presents before the party started because a couple girls he didn’t like were going to be there.

  At Devon’s sixteenth birthday in July 1998, Dylan wore a gray Chemical Brothers T-shirt and baseball cap with the Boston Red Sox symbol sewn on the front. The cover of the pre-printed birthday card Dylan gave her reads, “What are the chances you’re getting a birthday present?” Inside, the card says, “Between slim and nun.” A tall, slim cowboy is next to a nun.

  “Ahh a nice dab of mildly distasteful prewritten, pointless humor to brighten yer day AAAA?!!,” Dylan wrote. And because Devon had totaled her 1973 Pontiac Ventura one week before her birthday, Dylan added, “Happy B-Day. Don’t run me over or you’ll lose yer license and ill be pissed he he he.”

  Devon recounts, without any irony, how she had a murder mystery party at her house called “Lethal Luau.” Her mom made fried rice and caramelized onions. Devon pushed Dylan to wear a Hawaiian shirt; he would otherwise think he’s too cool for that, but wore one out of respect for her. He played a tourist named “Les Baggs” and had a good time.

  Devon thought Tom Klebold was “very fair-minded.” “Like one time, Dylan came in two hours past curfew and Dylan had promised to be in on curfew—it may have been midnight—and his dad got really angry at him and I think he took away Dylan’s keyboard for two days, to his computer, and Dylan loved that computer. Just made it totally not possible to use the computer for two days, but it was fair punishment. I can’t remember his parents ever grounding him. They just said you have to be in an hour early or something like that cause I think his parents knew how important Dylan’s friends were to him.”

  His senior year Dylan gave Devon rides home at least once a week when her boyfriend couldn’t do it. Devon paid Dylan $5 out of her own pocket but told him the money was from her mom because Dylan wouldn’t want to take her money. On those drives home, they talked about school, teachers, and the swamp man toy that hung from his rear view mirror and spurted water out the mouth if you pressed the stomach.

  Six months before Columbine, Dylan and Devon were at a friend’s house watching a movie when kids next door shined a laser light on them. Dylan, Devon, and their friend snuck up on the kids and flashed a halogen lamp in the window. “So we were proud of ourselves because we conquered over the little fifth graders,” Devon recounts. They rounded out the night “spaze dancing,” jumping up and down and listening to KMFDM or Nine Inch Nails. “He’s either really hyper or really kicked back,” Devon adds. In a photo, Dylan looks stoned as he flashes two thumbs up, but Devon assures that was not the case. “I’m straight-edge [drug-free] and he knew it, so he didn’t do anything around me,” she explains.

  By that time, Dylan had long hair that dropped below his ears and streamed out of his baseball cap, about the same way he looked the day of Columbine. His favorite shirt was dark green with white lettering that read, “AOL: WheRe KewLz HaXORz ArE.” Translation: “AOL: Where Cool Hackers Are.” Explanation: It’s a joke because it’s so easy to hack on AOL.

  One of Dylan’s favorite gifts to Devon was $10 cash. One time, Devon fell in love with an anteater Beanie Baby. Dylan hated Beanie Babies, but for Christmas 1998, four months before Columbine, he bought her one that was gray, white, and black. “Needless to say, I’ve collected anteaters ever since,” she says. After Columbine, she toted the Beanie Baby across the country when she spoke on gun control alongside Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel was killed at Columbine.

  Devon thinks the anteater is good luck because it gives her confidence. “You know, ‘cause, in the line of what I do, the gun control stuff, I get discouraged, because there’s a lot of opposition, there’s a lot of people who aren’t willing to listen. And I’m remembering just why I’m doing it. To keep those guns out of the hands of another kid like Dylan who, I don’t know, feels he has no other way out, or something. Just keep him from having access to that deadly weapon.”

  But Devon never saw the violence when Dylan was alive. When they whacked each other with foam noodles in the pool, it was all fun and games. Other guys tackled her when they played football, but not Dylan. And when she cut her leg on the field, Dylan flipped out. He called a time out and washed her leg off. He didn’t like dogs and was scared of Devon’s Siberian husky, but dealt with the animal, again, out of respect for her.

  “He didn’t want to disrupt anything, you know?” Devon says. “He was always very respectful of everything.”

  Devon did see flashes of anger in Dylan. It might be a “dumb” occasion like getting a bad test grade, or a spat over something inconsequential. At first, Dylan suppressed the anger. “I remember one time when he and I got in a fight cause I said something I shouldn’t have to him; I was just was really, really angry at him, I don’t remember why, I was just mad at him, and he just walked away, and I don’t know if he ever got really mad about it. But he just walked away, and he just stayed away from me for about a week. And then it was fine. We talked about it. It was fine. But he was really, really upset for a while.”

  She heard about Eric and Dylan
blowing things up on the nighttime “rebel missions,” or launching “tons of fireworks.” She knew Eric named a bomb “Pazzie,” and another “Anasazi,” after an ancient people who inhabited southwest Colorado, who some believe practiced cannibalism. But she says, “Half of the student population knows how to build pipe bombs and stuff. And everyone likes playing with fireworks. I had no idea. No clue at all.”

  The biggest gun Devon knew Eric and Dylan shot was a BB gun at targets in Zach Heckler’s backyard. But she believes easy access to weapons pushed Eric and Dylan to follow through with their plan. And guns appealed to them because, with them, “You’ve got more power than anyone else in that building.”

  Eric, Devon believes, was the live wire who helped Dylan get from Mr. Nice Guy to Columbine killer. “He [Dylan] was entirely one person around Eric and then someone else around everyone else,” Devon says. With Eric, Dylan was “Crazy Dylan,” she adds. “Crazy videotapes in the basement. Crazy go shoot people. Make bombs Dylan. You know?”

  Eric was the tough guy filled with aggression, she says. Scary and intimidating, he dressed commando and was never happy. He might get a CD he liked, but would then get angry and kick something. Eric was the lurker who tried to be like everyone else, but couldn’t connect. The guy who ticked people off, even Dylan. It showed in Eric’s death when almost everyone who knew him said they weren’t really friends with him, or had had a falling out.

  “He [Eric] just kind of hung out and was a pain in everyone’s bum,” Devon says.

  Dylan was the leader when it came to everything else in life. “If Dylan liked something, Eric automatically liked it,” Devon says. “Bands, clothing, all the different stuff.”

  It wasn’t so much that Dylan’s parents “missed” Columbine, Devon says. They didn’t even see it. He kept it hidden. When Devon realized what was happening the day of Columbine, she knew it was Eric, although it’s still hard for her to believe Dylan was there too. She can only conclude, “It was the two of them against everybody else.”

  ∞

  Eric and Dylan both followed the throbbing bass of techno, electronica, and industrial, whether the beats were melodic or hard-driving. Eric called his favorites—Rammstein, KMFDM, 242, Orbital, and Loreena McKennitt—“fairly unique,” although in truth they were still plenty popular. (His wingnut attraction to new-agey Loreena McKennitt probably came from her song on the soundtrack for Soldier, a sci-fi, shoot-’em-up film Eric must have enjoyed for its Doom-like overtones.)

  And there were other reasons behind Eric’s favorite music. He said he enjoyed Rammstein because they were German and he could understand their words. But in his own mind, any German band, no matter the band’s actual beliefs, probably made him feel closer to the Nazis.

  KMFDM takes the initials from the German phrase Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid, or No Pity for the Majority. The band does not give permission to reprint its lyrics, but Eric wrote that he liked them “because of the points they are trying to get across.” He listened to the song “Son of a Gun,” before he played soccer and noted that it “shows the way I feel about myself.” The song’s fast and tough, and its overdone beats talk of explosions, apocalypse, and through it all, a superhero.

  Eric, in true fashion, also pontificated about the bands he hated: 311, Aquabats, Blink 182, Less Than Jake, Pietasters, Reel Big Fish, and “Puff freakin daddy!!! He sucks! He can absolutely NOT rap!!! No one can, because rap is GAY,” he wrote in one of his web diaries.

  And he didn’t like rap videos: “They are all the same!! 5 stupid cheerleaders in color coordinated nylon outfits dancing around infront of a curved orblike camera with a dumbass guy walkin around swingin his arms sayin ‘uh huh yeyah werd up you know what im sayin uh huh mmmmhm yeya babey.’”

  Dylan wasn’t so much into lyrics. When it came to techno, says Devon, “Like, the more bass he could get in that music, like subwoofers and stuff, the better. He really liked that. A lot of it is mostly instrumental, which he liked a lot. He didn’t have to deal with all the lyrics and stuff. He wanted to make up his own mind what the music was about. He did not like to be told what to be feeling. He was an individual. He always strove to be an individual. He didn’t always succeed. You can just lose yourself in techno music. I remember nights staying up with him and he just drifted off. Music shuts off the outside world.”

  Sue Klebold says she once asked Dylan about a poster of shock rocker Marilyn Manson in his room and he replied that he didn’t really listen to the lyrics, but the music. Another one of his favorite bands was the Chemical Brothers, and at one point, he talked with Devon about going to one of their upcoming concerts. But Devon notes, “He obviously never ended up going to it because it came in summer of 1999.”

  ∞

  Eric and Dylan made videos that showcased both their goofy humor and their violence. One short shows Eric and fellow film student Eric Veik beating up a dummy, getting chased by police, and arrested. In another, Harris pretends to be teacher Rich Long, and is asked about the technology he uses to keep the school computers safe.

  “I use a shotgun, I keep the old shotgun under the desk,” he says.

  How does he keep up with growing technology?

  “I use drugs,” he says.

  In one skit, students wax a girl’s yellow, ten-speed bicycle as it leans against a wall. The bike is then pelted with dirt. Eric and Dylan smash it with a hammer and sledgehammer.

  “After all this, it still retains its shine,” a salesman says.

  “What the hell are you doing with my sister’s bike?” Dylan screams, chasing the salesman off.

  In “Radioactive Clothing,” Eric and Dylan are government agents trying to stop radioactive clothing from taking over the world. The film opens with Eric and Dylan sitting in the back seat of a red Pontiac wearing sunglasses. Dylan, trying to showcase his humor, laughs as he tries to say his lines. Eric, his typical violent self, says they may need more weaponry. They park the car and get out.

  Dylan wears a trench coat and his AOL T-shirt. Eric has on black pants, a white T-shirt, and a black KMFDM baseball cap, backwards. They pull some fake guns out of the trunk. “Keep your eyes open, keep your fuckin’ fingers on the triggers,” Dylan says.

  With their guns drawn, two each, as it will be at Columbine, Eric and Dylan enter a house. Radioactive clothes are tossed at them from off camera, and they fire back. It’s a bit comic, and the film appears to end. Afterward, in an off-screen moment, they kick back with a cigarette outside the house.

  ∞

  The other side of Dylan, which no one professes to have known about, was depressive. At the top of his diary on September 5, 1997, six days before his sixteenth birthday, he wrote “Life sux,” and more:

  “oooh god I want to die sooo bad . . . such a sad, desolate, lonely, unsalvageable I feel I am . . . not fair, NOT FAIR!!! . . . I wanted happiness!! I never got it . . . Let’s sum up my life . . . the most miserable existence in the history of time . . . my best friend has ditched me forever, lost in bettering himself and having/enjoying/taking for granted his love . . . He NEVER knew this . . . not 100 times near this . . . they look at me [name deleted] like I’m, a stranger . . . I helped them both out thru life, & they left me in the abyss of suffering . . . The one who I thought was my true love, [name deleted] is not . . . The meanest trick was played on me—a fake love . . . She in reality doesn’t give a good fuck about me . . . doesn’t even know me . . . I have no happiness, no ambitions, no friends, & no LOVE!!!”

  Dylan contemplates using a gun on himself. “What else can I do given i stopped the pornography. I try not to pick on people. Obviously at least one power is against me. [name deleted] . . . funny how I’ve been thinking about her over the last few days . . . giving myself fake realities that she, others MIGHT have liked me just a bit . . . ”

  On the edge of the paper he writes, “A dark time, infinite sadness. I want to find lov
e.”

  In one poem he notes, “people are alike/I am different.”

  He seems to leave a suicide note: “Goodbye, sorry to everyone. I just can’t take it, all the thoughts . . . too many . . . make my head twist . . . I must have happiness, love, peace. Goodbye.”

  October 14, 1997. Dylan writes his name at the top of his diary entry, then crosses it out. He draws an arrow at his own name. “Fuck that,” he writes, and continues (referring to the jocks and others as zombies):

  “hell & back . . . I’ve been to the zombie bliss side . . . & I hate it as much if not more than the awareness part. I’m back now . . . A taste of what I thought I want . . . wrong. Possible girlfriends are coming . . . I’ll give the phony shit up in a second. Want TRUE love . . . I just want something i can never have . . . true true I hate everything. Why can’t I die . . . not fair. I want pure bliss . . . to be cuddling with [name deleted], who I think I love deeper than ever . . . I was hollow, thought I was right. Another form of the Downward Spiral . . . deeper & deeper it goes . . . This is a weird entry . . . I should feel happy, but shit brought me down. I feel terrible . . . [name deleted] lucky bastard gets a perfect soulmate, who he can admit FUCKIN SUICIDE to & I get rejected for being honest about fuckin hate for jocks . . . Why is it that the zombies achieve something me wants (overdeveloped me). They can love, why can’t I? . . . How tragic for my . . . DUMASS SHITHEAD . . . MOTHERFUCKIN . . . FUCK!”

  This is the postscript: “No emotions. Not caring. Yet another stage in this shit life. Suicide . . . Dylan Klebold.”

  Junior Criminals

  There was no more extraordinary time to trap Eric and Dylan than during a nine-month period when they were high school juniors. Police and school authorities tracked them for a string of crimes and misdemeanors from September 1997 to May 1998. But no one added it up. The authorities cross-referenced the crimes, but no one came down hard enough. Then the police simply gave up.