Feature

The Generation Gap in My Living Room

"No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks" has gone ballistic. "Copycat" incidents multiply. The meme moves on. Standing on the steps of the William McKinley School as the media swarmed, Vincent Grippo, head of School District 20, said, "It's not the system; it's the society." It's comments like that that recall motorcyclist Marlon Brando's being asked what he was rebelling against and answering, "What have you got?" Indeed, the horrific details of Harris and Klebold's rampage aside, there's been an undeniable current of sympathy for the murderers. As many times as the memorial crosses for Harris and Klebold in Jefferson County's Clement Park were ripped down by the grieving and angry, someone put them back up again. The gnawing fact is, like the people they killed, Harris and Klebold were only kids. Somewhere, somehow, along the line they should have been protected, or slapped -- anything.

In the end, that's what it comes back to, kids and parents. Last week I was riding uptown on the No. 6 train and saw a woman reading a book called Get out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall, by Dr. Anthony Wolf, which, as many parents of teens know, is one of the better manuals on how to live with the teenage Frankenstein in your midst. The woman's eyes and mine met; we acknowledged the presence of the book and sighed. Nothing needed to be said.

Still, I doubt Dr. Wolf's book would have been much help to Mr. Thomas Klebold of Littleton, Colorado. In all this, I think of him most. Geophysicist; arguer for gun control; married to the former Susan Yassenoff, whose grandfather endowed the biggest Jewish community center in Columbus, Ohio, Klebold named one son for Lord Byron and the other after Dylan Thomas. Off the bare surface, he doesn't sound so alien; the fellow father imagines himself having a pleasant, even far-ranging conversation with Mr. Klebold. Yet his son turned out to be a Jewish Nazi mass murderer. To think of Mr. Klebold's grief is to swallow hard and walk shakily away.

The other night I told my daughter that since the Columbine massacre, the sale of columbine seeds has increased tenfold in some places around the country. Not that she cared, much. We were in a cab, going to a club called the Bank, a hangout for her goth crew, and I was far from an invited party. She was too busy arranging her black tights, black coat, black shirt, and black eye makeup to care much about the sales of pink and purple flowers. Despite reporting the mordant graffiti found on her high-school wall -- 15 jocks got killed in colorado and all i got was this lousy trench coat -- she was still mad that the media morons continued to associate Klebold and Harris with goths. "They said they got ideas from the lyrics of KMFDM," my daughter railed. "That's so stupid. Half the stuff the band says is in German and no one can understand it anyhow, so you know that's not true." Then she said it was time for me to split, because there was no way she was going into the Bank with her dad.

And let me say: I didn't feel so good about it, watching my daughter standing there with her subculturist friends, all of whom seemed very nice even if made up like a brace of Morticias. No, it didn't feel good at all seeing my daughter waiting on line to enter a club on Houston Street, past eleven o'clock, in her black velvet coat, those homie boys checking her out. But I'd already said okay, and there wasn't any going back now, not without the most egregious of scenes. Then the bouncer, an obligatorily fearsome Mr. Five-by-Five, parted the rope and the line began to move. Industrial blare tumulted from the door. Already having waved good-bye, my daughter stood with her back to me, paused in the vestibule, awaiting entry. An orange light shone down from the ceiling upon her hair. From the day she was born, she has always had very beautiful hair. People remarked on it, always. Through all these years, her hair has never been cut. She just lets it grow, and it is beautiful still, long and shiny, hanging down. When we're battling, as we are so often during these teenage times, I forget how beautiful her hair is, and how beautiful she is. But now, the orange light pouring down, the luminousness could not be missed. She just shone. And then the bouncer beckoned again, and my daughter entered the club, disappearing into darkness filled with noise. It was a moment to take a deep breath. Because you never know.