Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  Working in Pairs

  Most of the anecdotes mention the still-unexplained phenomenon that all groomgrabbers worked in pairs, never alone, and never more than two. It’s possible that since the first groomgrab by James Roddick and Anton Marshall happened with just the two of them an unspoken tradition formed. There is also the possibility that the still-tenuous feeling surrounding homosexuals and children20added an extra note of caution to the grabbers, that is, two homosexuals together was somehow less questionable than one homosexual alone with a child21. Other theories include the ‘Ostensible Parental Substitution Matrix Principle’ by Dr Timothy Prong of the University of Nome, Et Al, whereby the grabbers subconsciously acted as mother/father figures as a sort of ‘Ideal Parental Pair’ to enhance the grabbee’s feeling of comfort, thereby displacing the ‘Actual Parental Dichometric Placement’ in the something-or-other for the somesuch and so on22. There is also an interesting idea put forth by the Gay and Lesbian Association for Public Statements in which the pleasure of the experience for each member of the grabber-grabbee group is enhanced by sharing it with two others rather than just one, the grabber being able to share the joy of the child with the other grabber and the child feeling as if he or she is being selected by not just one adult but by two, making the child feel all the more special.

  There seems to be no consensus among the grabbers either. Given the veil of anonymity that descended shortly after the Sally Jessy Raphael interview23, there exist only nineteen verified interviewed grabbers, all within the first two months of the trend24. There is scarcely a mention of the significance or even reason for working in pairs. All grabbers seemed to act in unspoken agreement or with subconscious purpose. An (August 29, 1999) interview in the Chicago Sun Times with a grabbee known only as Colin contains the only mention this researcher could find in any of the published materials on grabbing25:

  “At first, my lover and I just thought it was a neat idea. You know, sort of sprucing a kid up without any of the leftover responsibility. All of the good, none of the bad. Like being a grandparent for a day. But then it just sort of took on a life of its own. It was kind of an unspoken thing between the two of us that we never mentioned and that we never talked about with anyone else until one day we saw this seven-or eight-year-old girl hopping over cracks in the sidewalk. And her hair was all ratty and her jacket was frayed, but she was having a good old time leaping over cracks. There was just this sort of feeling between me and my lover, and we grabbed her. We took her to the mall, bought her this Bugs Bunny bomber jacket that she loved and some patent leather shoes she picked out. We took her to Chinese and taught her how to use chopsticks. Then we took her back. This was before the Fendi became popular, but it turned out no one was looking for her anyway. I’ve no idea what happened to that girl, and to be honest, my lover and I don’t really talk about it. Just sort of think of it and smile together, you know?’

  Colin’s remarks suggest a happy-go-lucky conspiracy, a kind of benevolent coup that one person wouldn’t have the guts to do without another to egg him on. The couples26came upon the idea and it blossomed at the urging of both. This would explain the ‘euphoric’ atmosphere so many grabbees note, feeling the thrill of the danger and rule-breaking of it all. Unfortunately, given the anonymity that has remained in place for the last 15 plus years, all of this tantalizing speculation will have to remain just that.

  ‘A Sweepstakes Appeal’

  ‘I remember there was this air of excitement hanging around the neighborhood and especially the school. We’d all seen groomgrabbing talked about on TV and the web, and everyone was coming up with reasons why it would or wouldn’t happen in Monmouth27. People were saying it was too small. Other people were saying that’s exactly why someone would be grabbed from Monmouth, because most of the grabs were happening in small towns. You know, it’s like when there’s a super huge Powerball Jackpot, like that one last year that got up to two billion? Everyone talks about it, everyone wants it, nobody really thinks anybody will, but everybody secretly hopes28.’

  Elizabeth Bopp-Twernig,

  Grabbed aged seven in 2000

  Bopp-Twernig mentions an aspect of groomgrabbing also discussed by Blandershot-Fields in the UHH study. She (Blandershot-Fields) writes that as the trend spread and the months passed, groomgrabbing began to take on ‘a sweepstakes appeal. The grabbings came, in a surprisingly short amount of time, to be regarded as a prize, a luck of the draw windfall which anyone’s child could win.’ Anyone else’s child, that is. According to an Us-People sidebar feature at the time, parents tended to preface any comment about groomgrabbing with something along the lines of ‘Well, my child will never be grabbed because he/she has so many friends and is so well-loved, I can’t ever imagine him/her looking quite pathetic or lonely enough to be grabbed. For everyone else, however …’

  This was, of course, more or less an outright lie on the part of the parents. Economics Nobel Laureate Ken Kern-Terwilliger of the AT&T Gallup Nielsen Institute calls this phenomenon the ‘Martin Cramwell Would Be a Terrible Governor; Long Live Governor Cramwell’ Effect29 in which poll participants, afraid of the opinion of the polltaker, lie about their real feelings. As a matter of fact, parents were actively placing their children in solitary spots: leaving them with only a ratty tennis ball at the public park, say, or forcing them to walk any number of miles home from school. National statistics of child neglect cases covering the years before, during, and after the height of the trend look like an especially precipitious bell curve30.

  Not that it mattered. Colin, in the interview quoted earlier, indicates that groomgrabbers were expert at picking out fakes:

  Are you kidding? We have to spend all our lives secretly looking for other gay people in things like church and work and school. Oblivious is one thing we’re not.

  Most fakes were easy to spot. As Colin puts it, ‘Children in stained white t-shirts do not bounce rubber balls off blacktop wearing Kenneth Cole shoes.’ Even more easily, all groomgrabbers usually had to do was ask if there was any doubt. Paradoxically, a child instructed to look like an appealing candidate to a groomgrabber would usually want to please the grabber so much that they would reveal the lie in an effort to win trust. Children don’t really learn irony until they get to Joseph Heller in the eighth grade.

  As it is, every major study has attempted to cross-section the ‘average’ groomgrabbee and has come up lacking. Both the UMNHVIPBSL study and especially Blandershot-Fields cross-referenced, graphed, mapped, collated, coded, signified, indexed, concordanced, cataloged, enumerated, scheduled, classified, and alphabetized the grabbees until finally throwing up their hands in frustration. The youngest grabbee was four, the oldest thirteen, and about all anyone has been able to generalize is that groomgrabbees were between four and thirteen.

  Grabbees were evenly split between boys and girls. They fell along racial lines at roughly the same rate as represented in the population. There were grabbings in all fifty-two current states plus Guam, with the only even mild statistical spike being a larger-than-average number of grabbings in Alaska31. Interestingly enough, the grabs cut across all financial and social strata as well, which would seem to contradict the point of the groomgrab. Booher, the first grabee, makes for an interesting study on this matter. West LA at the time was a fairly wealthy neighborhood. Booher, who it turned out lived in a $2 million home and had a six-figure trust fund, should not necessarily have been a test case for looking like poverty. Nonetheless, despite his wealth, as his groomgrabber Roddick said, ‘Money doesn’t always mean a kid’s not going to fall through the cracks.’ To which Marshall added, ‘Or have appropriate taste.’ The grabbers seemed to concentrate on how pathetic the grabbee seemed rather than his or her financial background. Another reason for the demographic well-roundedness of the grabbees might be the much-discussed notion of homosexuality as a vertical minority, encapsulating bits from every other group including the rich and the poor. As Blandershot-Fields writes, ‘Maybe it’s as simple
as they went with what they knew. ‘

  Official Reactions: A Note To Historians

  Of course, groomgrabbing was, by any definition, as illegal as treason, and future historians removed from the Zeitgeist might quite credibly wonder where the hell the authorities were in all this? But picture if you will the state of the country at the time: The manned Mars mission had been sabotaged by extremist MarsFirst!ers; the Namibian Potato-Chip Debacle had its claws deep into the nation’s economy, sending unemployment into double digits; and the Argentinian War victory was turning out, thanks to the MSCNN investigation, to be even more Pyrrhic than previously thought. Malaise wasn’t even the word for it; the country was downright morose32. It’s the same reason Bonnie and Clyde and the James Brothers became cultural heroes at earlier parts of the previous century.

  The Winfrey Administration, naturally, reacted to the trend with what became its legendary pragmatism. On February 17, 2001, shortly after the inauguration, the White House issued a press release stating, ‘I don’t see anyone getting hurt. In fact, I see people getting helped. What’s the problem?’ Not a single one of the over four-thousand known incidents of groomgrabbing resulted in even an arrest33. Local politicians typically opposed it until they met someone who was groomgrabbed, then the issue just dropped34. The official opinion seemed to be a need to condemn groomgrabbing, but secretly, everyone liked it and wanted it to go on.

  At the bottom of it all, like so many other things about groomgrabbing, the true cause for the lack of reaction remains elusive.

  The End

  As does, it seems, the end of groomgrabbing. The last known groomgrabbing was on November 3, 200235, and after that, nothing. There weren’t even scattered grabs or copycat grabs. What happened? Why did it stop? It’s a circular question that leads back to why it began in the first place. A whim meets opportunity, and then the whim leaves. Blandershot-Fields touches on the subject only briefly36, but suggests that groomgrabbing simply ran its course the way all trends do.

  The author has another theory. Rather more than a theory, actually. An unknown fact of groomgrabbing, not shared with any of the studies so far discussed in any forum, is the fact that all groomgrabbers imparted a single instruction to all grabbees. The author knows this because, as previously stated, he was a groomgrabbee himself. He has confirmed this with numerous private interviews with other groomgrabbees37 who are in agreement that the time for the instruction is near. They have graciously agreed to let the author be the first to make the instruction known, partially because this format38 lends itself so nicely to rumor.

  The instructions were simply, ‘Pass it on.’

  The way all trends do, groomgrabbing is going to make a comeback.

  The first groomgrabbing of the second wave happens sometime next month39.

  Ponce de Leon is a retired

  married couple from Toronto

  From Elizabeth Bronwyn, Public Health Nurse (Ret.), Toronto, Ontario, to Dr Wayne Bronwyn, Ophthalmologist, Boston, Massachusetts. Handwritten. Mailed from unknown address, presumed to be central Australia.

  Son,

  As we’ve said many times, your father and I are enormously grateful to you for this trip. Our fortieth wedding anniversary has turned out to be the best we’ve ever had (except, perhaps, our always irreplaceable first). Our time here has been so wonderful, and we’ve come to know such great joy. Great Joy. How can I even say it? I can’t, son, I just can’t, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to communicate it to you in any way that you’ll understand until you’re older yourself.

  We’re staying. There’s no way around it, so there it is. We’re staying. For good.

  I know this is a great shock to you. Knowing you, you probably have some strong feelings on the matter, and six weeks ago, we’d have thought we were as crazy as you’re thinking right now. But such things have happened here, such wondrous, remindful things that have invigorated us. We’ve suddenly and unexpectedly rediscovered what it means to have new experiences and a new outlook. When you’re our age, I hope you’ll be lucky enough to know what it’s like to have your first completely new point of view in twenty years.

  Through a friend of ours back home, we’ve already arranged the sale of the house. (We’ve known someone who’s wanted it for years; he was only too happy that we finally obliged. Don’t worry, we’re getting our money’s worth.) Because we’re from the Commonwealth, immigration doesn’t look to be a problem either, especially considering that my health and your father’s are excellent. (See what you missed when you naturalized? The only place in the world Americans are welcome to stay is America. And you, especially; a doctor in a country with no nationalized medicine. Tut tut, one last time.)

  Yes, I know, what in the blazes are we thinking? After 61 years, what can I say? When you know, you know.

  Your father says not to kick yourself for giving us the trip. You’ve no idea what a wonderful thing you’ve done.

  All our love,

  [signed]

  Mom & Dad

  P.S. We’ll write soon.

  From Dr Wayne Bronwyn, to Derek Bell, Executive Secretary to Ambassador Margaret Gottscheid, United States Embassy, Canberra, Australia. Via facsimile.

  Mr Bell:

  Per our phone conversation of today, I am faxing you the letter I received from my parents, Mr Henry L. and Mrs Elizabeth ‘Beth’ R. Bronwyn, this morning.

  As I cannot possibly reiterate too clearly, the letter is so utterly out of keeping with any pattern of observed behavior that I am led to conclude that they are almost certainly being held in Australia against their will through unknown circumstances or by some unknown person.

  To summarize what I attempted to express over the phone, here in short are the reasons I am alarmed:

  (1) My mother describes her health and the health of my father as ‘excellent.’ This cannot possibly be the case. My mother is 61 and my father 62. In addition, my father has high blood pressure, and my mother has migraine headaches. It was only after extensive consultation with their physicians that I went ahead with the gift of the trip, a trip that was originally planned at two weeks and which my parents themselves suspiciously extended to six. And for that matter, why bring the subject of their health up at all?

  (2) I do not care how much anyone wants to sell a house, it seems highly unlikely that the entire transaction can be secured between two parties at entirely different points on the globe in a few weeks’ time. As they did not provide the name of the ‘friend,’ I have been unable to find out any further on the matter as of today, although I did talk to Mrs Olive Ray, a close friend of my mother’s. Mrs Ray had not heard of any such deal or of any plan of my parents’ to stay in Australia. This leads to reason number three.

  (3) My mother would not have kept such a thing from Mrs Ray. She, Mrs Ray, seemed to think that the matter was not cause for much concern, that my parents had been struck by a fancy which would pass or that perhaps they were merely playing some sort of prank, the source of the prank being their ongoing enjoyment at my expense for becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen after marriage to my wife. My mother even refers to this in her letter, but in such a way as to prompt reason number four.

  (4) My mother says ‘Tut tut, one last time.’ What exactly can ‘one last time’ mean? This is ominous evidence indeed.

  I have included my parents’ itinerary, although they did veer from it since they extended their trip. I have also included a blown-up and darkened copy of the envelope in which the letter was sent in hopes that the postmark might be of some help.

  Fax me back as soon as possible with some kind of response. My parents are elderly, and I am greatly concerned that harm has fallen them. In the meantime, I am going to do some work of my own to get to the bottom of this. I am more than prepared to fly to Australia if that is what is required.

  As a naturalized citizen, I trust I can expect the same assistance from your Embassy as any native-born American. I’ll hear from you soon.

&nb
sp; [signed]

  Dr Wayne Bronwyn.

  From Derek Bell to Dr Wayne Bronwyn. Via facsimile.

  Dr Bronwyn:

  The Embassy is in receipt of your fax dated 6 October. The fax follows our lengthy phone conversation of the same date. We are still looking into just exactly why you were mysteriously cut off, Dr Bronwyn, and also why you were not able to re-connect to my office. At any rate, on to your fax.

  As I attempted to explain to you over the phone before we were cut off, I am not sure what you would like us to do in this matter. You said in our conversation that your parents were of sound mind when they left on the trip, and though it seems plausible that one older person might possibly lose their bearings on an overseas trip, it seems unlikely that both would, especially considering that you yourself felt strongly enough to send them on a trip by themselves halfway around the world. Also, while 61 and 62 are somewhat up there in years, I don’t know many people who would call that elderly. The Ambassador is 66 herself, and hale as ever. If your parents were in their late eighties, for example, I would be more inclined to lean towards some sort of mysterious circumstances or scam, again going on the inference that you believed enough in their mental states and personal health to send them on the trip in the first place.

  In addition, I have never heard of any scam coming out of Australia’s center dealing with the mysterious actions of older tourists. It’s a big, red desert with a few oases, and the tourist trade there is too valuable to have missed any such scam happening on any scale. For that matter, I suddenly find myself unclear on exactly what sort of scam you might be talking about.