Instant Urban Legend

Today was the first day everyone was back on campus after the shooting. I have decided to call it the shooting even though when I addressed my class I use the terms “tragic event” and “crazy female-hating-shotgun-toting-fucker invasion” and “the, ya know, thing that happened here.”

I knew that I’d get to hear the other side of the whole ordeal if I opened it up to the class. One of my back-of-the-room students told everyone about how during an attendance call in an earlier class, a professor called out the name of the shooter and her class went silent. She hadn’t even known that the shooter was her student. According to the storyteller, the prof started crying and said something about how he (the shooter) was so quiet, she never knew. She cried so much that she sent the students home. Other stories circulating were something about phone calls the shooter made to the Detroit Police warning them what he was going to do, another about an ongoing MySpace fight that got out of hand, another about how so and so had just talked to the victim and they knew something was wrong, and another few suggestions about connections to religious cults.

There is something about violent crime or gnarly events that ignite the storyteller in all of us. I’ve been around just enough violent crime to know that no story, no event ever goes un-topped. Either someone adds some flavor to the original event or someone has to tell about the time this one girl rrrrreally got shot, or this one family was held hostage and robbed, or this one crazy homicidal maniac did this or that with a curling iron…

It feels like something is happening when we tell  horrific stories, we listen, we shake our heads, we can’t even believe how awful people can be. And today, when I looked around the room at the faces of the people listening, among the raised eyebrows and tilted heads I recognized the few drawn faces of those that had lived out one of those stories before. The last time I felt that uncomfortable I ended up in a three-month malt liquor and codeine syrup stupor.

I hope everyone pulls through.