Passing Strange
He seemed very bright. Brighter than most of the kids in my school, no question about that. I don't rightly recall his name anymore, though-I think it was something like "Brendan." He was two grades ahead of me (he was a senior and I was a sophomore), and I never saw him around much. In fact, the only time I did see him was when he decided to show up for German class, where he regularly sat right in front of me.
He didn't show up very often-which was sometimes a relief. He was a tall kid, so when he sat in front of me, I had trouble seeing the board.
Nobody much liked Brendan-he had long (for the time), unkempt, greasy hair, wore dirty clothes, always smelled vaguely of sweat and was extremely loud. He knew he was smarter than everyone else there, and took no pains to hide the fact. Even the German teacher (a portly fellow who, to be honest, didn't speak very good German, but played one hell of a concertina), hated him, and the two of them would often erupt into loud political arguments in the middle of class.
Brendan knew full well that nobody liked him, but simply didn't seem to care all that much. You could tell in the relaxed, lanky way he carried himself along, his books, when he decided to bring them, dangling loosely at his side. He always had a sly smirk on his face, too, as if he had a funny secret that he chose not to share with anybody. With that same damn smirk on his face, he would put down the other kids in class, using terms he knew they'd never understand.
Brendan, though, for some reason, took some sort of a shine to me. Before class-as well as sometimes during and afterward-we would talk about politics (back when I gave a damn), psychology, literature, chess, whatever. Usually if he wanted to talk during class, he wouldn't bother being surreptitious about it, either. He wouldn't whisper. He wouldn't even turn around in his seat. What he would do instead was crane his neck backwards until he was looking at me upside down. Then he would ask his question, or make his comment.
He was an anomaly in that school. And maybe that's why I was intrigued. I wasn't yet at the point-I hadn't had enough experience-to distinguish between the true intellectual eccentrics and the people who just know how to play one. (I've since met very few of the former, and far too many of the latter.)
As we talked over the course of that school year, I learned precious little about him. A few things, though. I knew that, along with his classes at East High, he was also taking some courses out at the local university. That explained why I never saw him around much. I also learned that he shared a house with two other college students-which was also a very strange thing for a high school student in Green Bay to be doing. I forget what he told me when I asked what the deal was with his parents. Something vague.
That spring, though, one week turned into two, and I began to wonder what had happened. Idly, perhaps, but I still wondered.
One day not long after I began to wonder, my psychology teacher walked to the front of the class shortly after the bell rang. He looked awfully dour. This was a man who, almost without fail, was low-key, but happy-go-lucky. He never screamed, he never raised his voice. He always spoke to us as if we were adults, which was cool. That also meant that he'd occasionally let the rare obscenity slip out during his lectures, or share the odd off-color joke (especially when dealing with Freud). That day, though, he was visibly upset.
"Forgive me if I seem a little off today..." he began, "but I just heard that a student of mine was involved in something pretty awful."
Instinctively, somehow, I knew that he was talking about Brendan. He wasn't going to give us his name, I knew that. But I knew he was talking about Brendan. I also instinctively knew that he hadn't died in a car accident. Nothing so pedestrian as that. Besides, whenever a student died, they made an announcement over the p.a. This was something worse than death, somehow.
"I don't want to go into details," the teacher continued-and when he said that, I suddenly put everything together.
The story had been all over the Green Bay Daily News that morning, but I only had had time to skim it briefly before running for the bus. I certainly didn't read it carefully enough to pick up on the names.
It seems that someone on the west side of town had heard some strange noises coming out of the house next door-the house where three college students lived. When police showed up to investigate, they found the three students at home. They also found a 20-year-old profoundly retarded man locked in a closet in an upstairs bedroom. The man had first been reported missing about a month earlier.
Brendan and his two friends, it was said, had lured the man into their house one day after seeing him on the street. They tied him to a chair and refused to let him leave. Then over the next weeks, they began conducting a series of what were referred to in the papers as "psychological experiments" on him. The details of those experiments were never made public. Despite the shocking nature of the crime and the amount of coverage it had been given initially, the story vanished within two days.
At first I was as stunned as anybody to hear what this kid-this kid I talked to whenever he was around, this kid who'd invited me over to play chess-had done. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wasn't surprised at all. What had been shock at first soon faded into the grim realization that he knew exactly what he was doing, and thought it was all quite interesting.
All I know about the fate of Leopold, Loeb and Brendan is what that psychology teacher told us later-that the three of them were "clearly very, very deeply disturbed people" who were subsequently institutionalized. I have no idea if they ever stood trial for whatever it was they did to that retarded man.
I hadn't thought about Brendan in quite some time. I only remembered him a few nights ago at the bar, while Morgan and I were sharing stories about people we knew in high school who'd come to bad ends. Funny how things get dredged up sometimes.
As a sad footnote to this story, two years after Brendan's secret was discovered-mere days after I graduated from high school in 1983-that psychology teacher went missing himself. His wife told police that she was especially worried about what he might do because he hadn't been taking his medication and had slipped into a very bad state.
Some 10 days later, his car was found, abandoned some 200 miles to the north, near a bridge. His body was found the next day, having been carried about a mile downstream.