I was young once and it lasted a good long mile. Like my grandfather before me. You may have heard of my grandfather if you’re a true crime enthusiast. He became an infamous spree killer way back in 1957. His transition was sudden.
In 2003, some talentless hack cobbled together a short documentary on my grandfather’s crimes. What’s left of our family refused to cooperate with it. I watched the atrocity on The Criminal Channel and, like most of their programming, it was cheap sensationalistic tripe. Piss-yellow journalism for the necrotic jollies of death-fetish wankers.
My grandfather’s actions are not easily understood. But he didn’t do it to make his “fans” dance. He had no interest in bowing to dumb morbid applause.
In the wisps of steam curling from my chipped coffee cup, I can see my grandfather’s gray face. He had a weathered complexion. He doesn’t look aggressive or dangerous in any of the photographs I’ve pored over. He had a placid, disarming visage and once in a while he’d even crack a smile.
None of the pictures capture the pitch-black insanity behind his eyes. I have no doubt it was there.
There’s an old home movie stored in the cellar of my aunt’s house. It’s five minutes long and was recorded in 1953, right after my grandfather returned from the Korean War. He looks stiff and awkward and waves at the camera. He only appears for a few seconds but there he is, standing on a lawn, four years away from front page notoriety.
He endured combat in Korea and everyone wonders about the horrors he might have encountered there.
Whatever injuries his psyche suffered would still be fresh, unsutured wounds for the stilted figure in the grainy, jittering footage.
But I can’t detect any residual trauma-shock as I watch him smile shyly at the camera and wave into the future.
My father said he didn’t talk about his war experiences. Ever. They learned not to broach the subject.
But I think armchair psychopathologists place too much importance on his military service. There’s vague, circumstantial evidence that he was damaged before he was drafted.
I’m already beyond my grandfather’s age when he met his end. He cut a lot of lives short that day, including his own.
For me, the atrocities he committed grow more acute as the decades fall away.
Violent crime can ripen and ferment, gaining flavor and strength. I have studied the issue.
I shake salt and pepper over two soft-boiled eggs and then massacre them with my fork. The yolk oozes over the toast.
It looks like surgery. Like trying in vain to contain a bursting appendix, slippery fingers working in a leaking pocket of peritonitic pus.
My grandfather’s name was Del Bardo and he hailed from Wisconsin. When he embarked on his death-trip he’d been married to my grandmother, Alice, for ten years.
My father was ten when it happened. His kid sister still slept in a crib.
On the morning of June 12th, Del left his little brick house on Lafayette Street and drove off in his white 1956 Plymouth Fury Sedan.
He had an arsenal in the backseat.
After the act, news reports threw around words like, berserk and amok but I believe the man had a twisted mission. He was determined to make a personal statement.
If only to himself.
But alas, his motives would perish with him. He was not the type to write manifestos. He was a private man. He never sought attention until he decided to die with guns blazing.
I’ve started drinking coffee again. I used to drink it excessively and my doctor was concerned about my ticker. My blood pressure was set to boil over. So he made me quit coffee and prescribed pills (propranolol) to lower my blood pressure. It worked and I survived without caffeine for a solid year. But lately, I decided one or two cups in the morning probably won’t kill me. I really did miss the stuff for that one dry year. The fatigue was real. So was the irritability. I started snapping at my students.
The hypertension pills I take give me vivid dreams which I try to record in a journal in case they’re important. I see things. When I dribble cream into my coffee, it generates gray, churning faces. This illusory phenomenon is called pareidolia. Our brains need to construct meaning out of chaos. As a kid I used to see the faces of my classmates in pictures of mushroom clouds and believed I was looking into our doomed future. We all thought we were going to burn to death in a radioactive hurricane in those days. I told my students to be grateful the Cold War was over. One less giant, apocalyptic thing to worry about.
I take a bite of egg/toast. My breakfast has gone cold. All these damn reveries. Maybe it’s the medication. Everything slows. My appetite dwindles.
My grandfather was having an affair around the time he embarked on his killing spree.
Her name was Janice Tzounopoulos and she lived one town over, in Eastman. They were the same age, almost to the day. She was married to a carpenter named Kristoffer who didn’t care if his wife cheated as long as she related the details of her sexual escapades after the tryst. He derived some kind of vicarious thrill from it.
Apparently, their marriage was otherwise sound.
My grandmother Alice was not so open minded. When she learned of Del’s infidelity she threatened divorce. They started sleeping in separate bedrooms. Del assured her that he’d ended the affair but my father said he continued to sneak around behind her back.
Alice was honestly bewildered by her husband’s random homicides but she never forgave his sexual betrayal.
I have a newspaper article in my scrapbook that tries to explain the events of June 12, 1957. It quotes a psychoanalyst named Dr. Wilhelm Ernst who asserted that my grandfather’s emotional dysregulation was characteristic of childhood trauma. An event in his toddlerhood had left “mnemic residue” that shorted the circuitry in his brain and turned him into a “werewolf.” He called the massacre the result of a past “infantile sadistic occurrence.”
He was one of those “experts” who used the word amok.
In 1969, Dr. Ernst was accused of plagiarism. He misappropriated some theoretical concepts without proper citation in his book about cellular depression (Ernst, Wilhelm. Feeling Bad at the Speed of Light. Nu-Groove Publications, 1967). He died of a pulmonary embolism in 1976.
I don’t feel bad for him. His assertions were laughably misguided. Most people misunderstand my grandfather’s mindset. Because you just can’t know. We’re all isolated in our own skulls, battling shadows of ourselves. Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment for a reason.
Dr. Ernst was quoted liberally in that stupid TV documentary.
On the last day of school, I screened that show for my classes.
They were appalled but a few students thought it was cool that I was related to a famous mass murderer. And these kids today are well-versed on the subject. They live in a world with lockdown drills, serial killer coloring books and you can buy assault rifles with specially-marked cereal box tops.
My grandfather is legendary to them. But he was not the type to livestream his crimes, had the technology existed then. I get the feeling he would have resisted any hint of self-aggrandizement. He was selfish for purely selfish reasons. He didn’t kill with a vainglorious spirit. He’d consider that uncouth.
God, I can’t finish these eggs. My plate is making me feel sick. The food has transmogrified from an appealing meal to rancid garbage. Before I retired, I never ate breakfast. I didn’t have time. I had to get ready.
Now time is all I have.
That’s why I finally decided to concentrate on my grandfather. The research is difficult. All the direct witnesses are dead, except for my aunt Gladys.
And she’s not much help given her infancy at the time of the event.
I don’t want to talk to the victim’s families. That would just be way too emotional to deal with.
My conclusions are largely speculative anyway. And they probably wouldn’t agree with me.
I scrape the remains of my plate into the trash.
I’m finished.
Crumbling Asphalt 