or best fit.
Rowe (first name, unimportant) met a sad end after high school, around 6 months after graduation. Ohio has different rules for alcohol and establishments than Indiana. For this reason a dive touts enterance to 18+ persons, being given a paper writstband indicating legal and non-legal drinkers. This is interesting in theory, might even be good, if the people were faithful to that policy. The place had no quams about underage drinking, since those checking ID, saw that it was roughly rectangular and had a picture and letters on it. Honestly there had to be 14 year olds there too. Worse still, 30-year olds. Drunk 30 year olds and yonung teens -- so gross, it should have been nuked. Anyway,
Rowe apparently was driving back, with other underage drunks in the car. He failed to make a turn and flipped the car. It was my understanding that he bled to death, pinned under the car, his "friends" fled possible arrest for 'minor in posession'.
This was an anti-climatic end to someone who made a mortar for a class project to fire a tennis ball. He enlisted my help to put things together. He had to make due with what he had -- and he was alive because of that.
He read a munitions manual for a book report (sound crazy yet? Other stories will confirm it)
He made a mortar from cardboard tubes and socks for stuffing and wadding.
He used an electric start to fire it.
He carried the weapon just outside the school. I plugged it in.
[Foom!] Words don't describe the volume of the blast. People exited rooms. I ran around the corner to see his vanishing act. In seconds, like Copperfield, he was gone in a large cloud of smoke. There was an odd print on the window of the door. We later found out that it was melted sock that didn't come off the window.
I opened the door and still no Rowe. Finally, coughing hacking, he was there. What no one had scene is him rapidly dropping the large shattered firework and putting out the fire on his arm. He suffered second degree burns. No one remembered that he wasn't trying suicide, specifically, but rather "launching" and tennis ball.
He generally brought some weapon to school, showing to a select few -- no one really wanted to know. As far as I know, no one picked on him, he was just bizarre and a loner. Had he lived, he would have made news for crime no doubt.
He also palled around with RC (not likely to be mentioned in any later post) who openly made anti-Semetic comments and once nearly blew up himself and Rowe by playing with a live grenade.
I guess I posted this because this was a route I could have taken -- the road less travelled, for a reason, leading ultimately to destruction of others and self.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Survial of the best suited
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There's a side story here. RC suspected that Rowe was not driving the car, but became the posthumous scapegoat for another drunk driver, GR, due to his inability to speak to the police, or even breath. RC sited the fact that the police thought the position of the body and the car were unlikely for a driver, and the fact that the group that was in the car with Rowe scattered into the wind and didn't speak of it. Maybe it was too traumatic, or maybe the less said, the better. In any case, MH characterizes his correctly, if anyone was going to end their life like that, Rowe would have been my first guess. He will remain in a small Waynedale cemetary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the stone far outliving his biology and memory. It seems absurd to live only 19 years, but some people are just hell bent for early fertilizer. I recall hearing from RC that he tortured animals, and that alone makes me not feel sorry for him. But too bad for him he didn't live long enough to reevaluate his life with a tempered, adult mind.
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