Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

  “For lack of a better word,” said JR’s mother, Diane, “they decided to make Bill their project.”

  Other kids, too, were always drifting in and out of the group, not to mention Vance Lattime’s house. But as the summer of 1989 edged toward fall, the nucleus was Ralph, JR, Pete, and Bill.

  They were ‘Brookers. Together they were full of teenage bravado, smirk, and swagger. And what tied them together perhaps more than anything were the strains – always loud – of their favorite music, heavy metal rock and roll. The numbing guitars and defiant lyrics of bands like Van Halen, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Poison, and best of all, Motley Crue, were the background music to their daily lives.

  They found comfort in their tight-knit group, but it was their individuality that truly made the camaraderie click. They complemented one another.

  Ralph, sinewy and with a broken face, was a little older and was always considered the strongest and the best fighter. He was slowly pulling away from the group because his girlfriend did not care for the others.

  JR, who wore thick glasses ever since he was one year old, was more thoughtful, a kid who devoured books, laying out his own cash for an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe, and who was eternally happy under the hood of a car or taking apart something in order to figure out how it worked.

  Pete was probably the most innately intelligent. He had a passion for reading, wrote well, and liked math. Yet he seemed bored at Winnacunnet, had to repeat his freshman year, and ended up in an alternative program designed to retain kids who looked as if they would drop out. His given name was Patrick Alan Randall, but he got a nickname when he was just a baby. His father, a fisherman, looked down at the kid one day and said matter-of-factly, “Looks like a Pete to me.” And so Pete he became. Randall was a diehard, loyal friend. He was a handsome, clean-cut looking kid, too. But beneath it there seemed to be a seething anger and the promise of violence if pushed too far. Some people worried that Pete one day could end up behind bars.

  Billy, meanwhile, was more of a dreamer. He liked to doodle cartoons, taught himself to play his electric guitar, and seemed more gentle, friendlier somehow, than the others. Beneath his dark eyebrows, his brown eyes were melancholy and his features soft. And sometimes when he was speaking, Billy’s voice would drift off to such a quietness that you would think he was talking to himself. He also had a tendency to exaggerate about himself. Now and then, Billy would brag about his late father having been a biker, which was true only in that his dad owned and liked motorcycles. Flynn also told his friends that he had a quarter of a million dollars in trust waiting for him on his eighteenth birthday, the proceeds from his father’s life insurance. His mother said it is closer to $24,000.

  At JR’s they would spend their spare time, digging into car engines or relaxing and letting heavy metal wash over them.

  Occasionally they would grab Mrs. Lattime’s video camera and record themselves in full-blown teenage silliness, albeit a rough kind. Some footage shows them one by one riding bikes up a homemade ramp, flying into the air, and landing in some brush. Another scene captures them standing in a circle trying to catch an arrow they would toss at one another.

  But some segments seemed worthy of those television shows in which folks send in their outrageous or humorous home videos. Billy Flynn, for example, once did a mock commercial for the Ralph Welch School of Guerrilla Tactics. “This is the deadly foot,” his voice intoned, as the kid’s sneaker filled up the screen. “This is the deadly hand,” and a hand came into view. “And most of all, the deadly toes!” And there was a set of toes wiggling away.

  The Lattimes enjoyed the kids, trusted them, and in a pinch had no qualms about leaving Ryan, their daughter’s baby, in their care. One time, Diane Lattime stepped out for a minute, giving JR and his friends command of the baby. When she came back, the walls were shaking to the roar of Motley Crue. In the kitchen were the boys, including the one-year-old, all of them pumping their fists in the air and shouting, “Crue! Crue! Crue!”

  The kids adored the baby and never missed a chance to play with him. Ryan could even get away with calling Pete a name few kids at school would ever dare to pin on him: Pee-pee.

  Yet angelic they were not, and in some people’s eyes they were punks first and last. The kids developed a nasty reputation as small-time thieves, stealing motorcycles or breaking into cars and taking radios. And if a stranger left his keys in the car, one of them might very well climb in, go for a ride, and leave the vehicle around the block, chuckling at the image of some guy wandering around looking for it.

  None of them were overly excited about school, and their grades were for the most part middle-of-the-road. With the exception of Billy, they were physical kids, but none of them intended to go out for school sports. The idea of joining a club or running for class officer was a laugh.

  As such, it was probably not 100 percent altruism that fall when Billy and JR, now sophomores, agreed to help out with Project Self-Esteem, Winnacunnet’s drug- and alcohol-awareness program for freshmen.

  It was, more likely than not, just something to do. And if nothing else, it wasn’t a bad pace to meet girls.

  ◆◆◆

  The first time Pamela Smart blipped across Billy Flynn’s radar screen was at Winnacunnet High School during a meeting for Project Self-Esteem discussion leaders. One of the guidance counselors introduced the petite SAU 21 media center director to the group and the fifteen year old’s hormones kicked into gear. He turned to Lattime and said softly, “I’m in love.”

  Billy’s was not the only adolescent head to have been turned by Pam. At periodic meetings of the discussion leaders, which led up to the three-day program with the ninth-graders later in the school year, lots of the boys would flutter around her flirtatiously.

  Flynn made sure he got into Pam’s group when the facilitators broke into units of four or five. At that point they would work on discussion exercises in which everyone told about themselves. It was then that Billy learned of Pam’s passion for Van Halen and her experience as the Maiden of Metal.

  Billy would talk about himself, too, saying that he also was a metalhead and that his favorite group was Motley Crue. He also talked some about losing his father. It had obviously caused him some pain.

  Still, Flynn did not appear to take Project Self-Esteem very seriously. He joked around with Lattime a good part of the time, and out of school along with his buddies was drinking and snorting cocaine.

  What he was interested in was Pam. “She’s hot,” he told his friends, then went off in typical teenage fashion about his utter desire for her. As time went on, Billy would skip lunch or study hall and with another friend from Project Self-Esteem, Tommy Sells, wander across the parking lot to the school board building to visit her.

  Another student, meanwhile, had also developed an instant attraction to Pam. Cecelia Louise Pierce approached the media center director that first day and introduced herself. Cecelia, whom her mother called “Critter” or “Crit” since she was a baby, was an affable, talkative kid. She was embarrassed by a problem with her weight, though, and her antennae were always up for slights, both real and imagined, about being from Seabrook.

  From the very beginning, it was obvious that Pam was unlike anyone in Cecelia’s world. The girl had lived in Seabrook all of her fifteen years, and although she was never close to them she had known JR and Pete since she was little. Her parents had been divorced when she was a baby. Her mother, a woman of some heft who was also named Cecelia, remarried Allen Eaton (one of the more common surnames in Seabrook) who himself came from a family of sixteen kids.

  Cecelia’s mother and stepfather were working people, with educations that stopped at high school. There was nothing glamorous about them nor their day-in and day-out efforts to stay on top of the bills, keep food on the table for Cecelia and her younger sister, and now and then scrape enough together for a vacation or maybe a school ring for Crit.

  But Pam was something else altogether. She was attractive,
full of energy, and when Cecelia talked to her it was as if she listened, as if she cared.

  Like Billy, Cecelia basked in Pam’s glow. As they came to regularly work together in the meetings as facilitators, Pam and Cecelia became friends. And when the girl mentioned that she thought she might someday go into journalism and that Pam’s job looked interesting, Pam threw out the idea of her working over at SAU 21 as her intern.

  To Cecelia it sounded like a good idea. She could come over to Pam’s basement office two periods a day and get credit for helping typeset the school-board newsletter, edit, and whatever else needed to be done. What’s more, she could be around her new friend.

  More and more, as she started her internship that November, Cecelia came to cherish Pam’s friendship. Since the time she was little, Cecelia had a best friend, Karen Crowley, but now room was being carved out for Pam, who was becoming almost like a big sister. She was Cecelia’s confidante and role model, someone who knew what was out there beyond Seabrook.

  At the same time, Pam could relate on Cecelia’s level. For Christmas, for example, she gave the intern a Bon Jovi tape, New Jersey, a perfectly appropriate gift considering the nature of their relationship. But more than that, it was a present the kid actually liked.

  What Cecelia took to more than anything, though, was that Pam treated her with a basic kindness that she felt was lacking in her life. Pam would often hug Cecelia, which in itself went a long way to building trust and affection. And Smart was not above saying she was sorry.

  “When we get in a fight, my best friend never apologizes to me,” Cecelia would later say. “I always have to say, ‘I’m sorry, please don’t be mad.’ And with Pam, we really only got in one fight and it wasn’t even really a fight and she was like, ‘Please, don’t be mad at me, I’m sorry.’ And all I was thinking was, ‘Here’s this girl, she’s twenty-two, she’s my friend, and she’s actually apologizing to me.’”

  ◆◆◆

  For five years, the Florida Department of Citrus had been sponsoring a high school video competition. The idea was for kids around the country to compete for various prizes, including a trip to Disney World, by making a commercial touting the nutritional value of orange juice.

  The competition had never gone over particularly well at Winnacunnet High School. But one day in December, Cecelia noticed a flyer for it on Pam’s desk. They got to talking and decided it might be a fun project.

  Pam got the school’s permission, then she and Cecelia started recruiting kids. Cecelia got her friend Karen interested. Billy, who at first thought it a lame idea, was attracted enough to Pam to get a couple of school friends and take part.

  By January, when the project got underway in earnest, only three high schoolers – Billy, Cecelia, and Karen – were involved. Flynn’s pals had pulled out. One had moved and the other was involved in after-school sports. So Pam recruited Tracy Collins, the girlfriend of Greg’s buddy Brian Washburn. Tracy was just out of high school herself.

  The concept for their video was simple, and appropriately enough, sophomoric. The group had gotten together and tossed around ideas, settling on rap lyrics and acted-out scenes depicting orange juice’s role in the life of modern and primitive man.

  Throughout the winter, the group would meet several times a week, on Saturdays and after school, for a few hours. As in most everything she took on, Pam was the driving force behind the video. She rounded up the kids, cajoled them when they weren’t interested, and pushed it through to completion.

  Billy Flynn and Cecelia Pierce in a public relations photo taken by Pam for the orange juice video competition.

  For the most part, Billy was the cameraman. It was a job he liked better than performing. Even when horsing around with his friends in the Lattimes’ backyard, Billy was more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. Playing the part of a caveman, say, was something that just was not in Billy’s makeup. It was not cool. Running the equipment, he figured, at least had some dignity.

  Without much enthusiasm, Billy did appear on the video at one point, shooting baskets for a scene apparently showing the youth of modern times hard at play.

  He had a speaking part, too, though one less comedic than his promotion for the Ralph Welch School of Guerrilla Tactics: “Although times have changed, man still longs for the taste of refreshing Florida orange juice. Today, thanks to modern technology, the process of making freshly squeezed orange juice has become much simpler. Even though time has progressed, orange juice has maintained its nutritional value.”

  For taping, Pam drove the school board van, mostly around Seabrook – to the beach, Cecelia’s grandmother’s house, behind the recreation center, and to the apartment where Billy lived with his mother and younger brothers.

  Billy’s mother, Elaine Flynn, remembered one time that the kids came over to tape a scene, when she met Pam for the first time. “I thought, Ah-hah! Now I know why he’s involved with this commercial, even on his weekends,” she said.

  Everyone appeared in one scene or another. Pam, in particular, was an active participant. Once, while taping out behind Cecelia’s grandmother’s house, the media center director took the old woman aback when, in the dead of the New Hampshire winter, she stepped out of the bathroom and went outside in a skimpy leopard-skin patterned outfit, apparently to play the part of a cavewoman. In the commercial, Pam, who could almost pass for a teenager herself, can be seen gathering wood and wringing out her clothes by a stream, propelled no doubt by Vitamin C.

  Together they wrote the lyrics, which Pam fine-tuned: “We start each day with work to do/ We get our energy from orange juice/ We all need nutrition and there’s no excuse/ Cause you can get plenty from orange juice….” On and on it went.

  Billy, who was taking a music class, helped pave the way for Pam and the kids to use the electronic music lab to mix the thumping rap music and the vocals.

  When it was completed, the video lasted a little more than two and a half minutes. Pam wrote a story for the SAU 21 spring newsletter, On the Move, about it and included a picture, taken in the music lab, of Billy and Cecelia. She told an assistant that the story was important and asked that it not be left out of the issue.

  All the same, the video would win nothing in the competition. Even for a teenage production it seemed to be lacking.

  What did happen in the three months that the video was produced, however, is that Pam developed a loyal little following. What seems to have started with good intent on Pam’s part, a desire to work with kids, was gradually changing into something more sinister.

  The kids never got much closer to one another as a result of the project, but everyone looked up to Pam. Unlike most adults, she never appeared to be patronizing them. She spoke their language and enjoyed the same music they did. Rather than lecture them or run on about her glory days at Pinkerton, Pam instead spoke of meeting Eddie Van Halen and of getting backstage passes for heavy metal concerts.

  Then, when the work on the video was done for the day, she would take them to eat at Wendy’s or to hang around Salisbury Beach and talk. As time went on, she would even go with the kids to places like Sneakers, a teenage, non-alcoholic dance club in Salisbury.

  Before lone, Pam’s role as an authority figure was all but nonexistent. In many ways, it was as if she were one of the kids herself. An older one to be sure, but popular, the one all the younger kids wanted as their friend.

  All of Pam’s charges showed signs of it, but by far the most vitriolic was Cecelia Pierce. The girl was proud of her relationship with the pretty media center director. She grew possessive, going out of her way to sit next to Pam in the van, for example, and became upset if anyone got there before her.

  She even let her affection for Pam come between her longtime friendship with Karen, growing angry when her best friend mentioned possibly becoming Pam’s intern the following year and worrying aloud that she was trying to steal Pam from her.

  Cecelia never had a friend like Pam, someone who was prett
y and intelligent and self-assured. She made Cecelia feel important just being with her. Pam paid for everything when they went out, be it lunch or whatever incidentals came up. And when Cecelia began to learn to drive, Pam would always let the teenager take the wheel of her Honda CRX.

  It got to the point that the friendship soon came to affect the girl’s home life. Cecelia saw her mother as overly strict. Pam, on the other hand, was fun. More and more, Pam’s desires would come up against what Cecelia’s mother wanted. For example, if the family was about to go shopping at the mall and Pam called, saying that it was time to work on the video, off Crit would go.

  “As this relationship went on and on,” said her mother, Cecelia Eaton, “I liked it less and less. I was actually getting angry. I even said to Crit: ‘You’d think Pam was your mother. Well, I’m your mother, not Pam.’”

  Cecelia’s grades also began to dip, and Mrs. Eaton even went to school officials about how much time her daughter was spending with the school board’s media center director. “I noticed it, too,” an assistant principal told her. Apparently, it went little further.

  Billy Flynn had also adjusted his life to spend more time around Pam, working on the video and obviously flirting when he would make his way down to her office for his daily visits.

  He wore a black leather jacket and an earring and he ran with a tough crowd in Pete, JR, and Ralph, but almost everyone who knew Billy thought that by himself he was as threatening as a golden retriever.

  Carrying only one hundred and fifty pounds on his lanky five-foot-eleven frame – and most of that from a heavy diet of junk food – Billy was quick to help Pam carry equipment or boxes if he saw her struggling across the parking lot. If Pam or the girls were having a hard time crossing a patch of ice during the making of the video, he would come to their aid. Or if someone was cold, he would offer his coat.