IN THE LIGHT OF THE POLITICAL SITUATION OF OUR LATER ADOLESCENCE, ONE OF THE MOST TROUBLING AND MUCH DISCUSSED ASPECTS OF THE TRAUMA FOR THOSE OF US OF THE 4 WAS THAT MR. JOHNSON HAD NOT APPEARED TO CONFRONT, RESIST, OR THREATEN THE ARMED OFFICERS WHO CAME FORCIBLY INTO THE ROOM THROUGH BOTH THE DOOR AND THE EAST WALL’S WINDOWS, BUT MERELY CONTINUED TO WRITE KILL OVER AND OVER AGAIN ON THE CHALKBOARD, WHICH WAS NOW SO FILLED THAT HIS NEWER KILL, KILL THEM’S OVERLAY AND OFTEN OBSCURED HIS EARLIER EXHORTATIONS, FINALLY RESULTING IN LITTLE MORE THAN AN ABSTRACT MASH OF LETTERS ON THE BOARD. WHILE THE JAGGED LENGTH OF CHALK, THE BROAD ARM MOTIONS, AND THE PROXIMITY OF MR. JOHNSON’S BRIEFCASE ON THE DESK WERE CITED AS THE PERCEIVED THREAT TO HOSTAGE SAFETY THAT JUSTIFIED THE SHOOTING IN THE EYES OF THE C.P.D. BOARD OF INQUIRY, THE REAL TRUTH IS THAT IT WAS CLEARLY MR. JOHNSON’S FACIAL EXPRESSION AND SUSTAINED HIGH SOUND, AND HIS COMPLETE OBLIVIOUSNESS TO THE OFFICERS’ COMMANDS TO DROP THE CHALK AND STEP AWAY WITH BOTH HANDS IN FULL VIEW AS HE COPIED HIMSELF WITH EVER INCREASING INTENSITY ONTO THE BOARD’S VERBAL CHAOS, WHICH PROMPTED THEM TO OPEN FIRE. THIS WAS THE ONLY REAL TRUTH — THEY WERE AFRAID.
Of the so-called 4 Hostages, it was only Mandy Blemm and Frank Caldwell (who would later, at Fishinger Secondary, attend both Junior and Senior Prom as a couple, maintaining a steady dating relationship throughout those years in spite of Blemm’s reputation, after which Caldwell enlisted in the U.S. Navy, eventually also serving overseas) who were attentive and aware enough throughout the first part of the incident to recount for DeMatteis and I later how very long it was that Mr. Johnson remained facing and writing jaggedly on the chalkboard while emitting the high, atonal sound while the classroom behind him turned more and more into a bedlam of surreal and nightmarish terror, with some of the children crying and quite a few (Blemm later named them) reverting, under the strain, to early childhood coping mechanisms such as sucking their thumbs, wetting themselves, and rocking slightly in their seats humming disconnected bars of various lullabies to themselves, and Finkelpearl leaned forward over his desktop and threw up, which most of the pupils closest to him appeared to be too mesmerized with fear to even notice. It was in this interval that my own conscious awareness finally left the window’s mesh and returned to the Civics classroom, which to the best of my memory occurred right after the chalk in Mr. Johnson’s hand snapped with a loud sound and he stood rigid with both arms out and his head to the side, the sound he produced rising higher and higher in pitch as he turned around very slowly to face the class, his entire body trembling electrically and his face. . Mr. Johnson’s face’s character and expression were indescribable. I will never forget it. This was the first part I fully saw of the incident the
Dispatch first called Deranged Substitute’s Classroom Terror — Mentally Unbalanced Instructor Stricken at Blackboard, Appears ‘Possessed,’ Threatens Mass Murder, Several Pupils Hospitalized, Unit 4 Board Calls Emergency Session, Bainbridge Under Gun (at that time, Dr. Bainbridge was Superintendent of Schools for Unit 4). Philip Finkelpearl’s throwing up was also a factor. There is something about someone throwing up anywhere within a child’s earshot that serves to direct and concentrate his attention with an almost instant force, and even when my awareness returned in full to the classroom, it was Finkelpearl’s vomitus and the associated sounds and odors of it that I first can recall being struck by. The final frame I remember was when it was revealed in midair, during the ridicule, in a close-up, stop-action view as it rose end over end in the air and the wicked boy prepared to swing his cane, that the true subject of the clay statuette Ruth Simmons had fashioned was, in reality, a human being, who in her distraught distraction she had given four legs instead of two, despite the crude human features, creating a somewhat monstrous or unnatural image as in Greek myth or The Isle of Dr. Moreau. The import of this detail in the narrative I do not remember, though I recall the detail itself very clearly. Nor can I remember for just how long the Civics classroom remained like that, with Mr. Johnson in extremis with both arms extended outward at the chalkboard (when you’ve been intensely preoccupied, coming back to what is actually happening around you is somewhat like coming out of a movie theatre in the afternoon, when the sunlight and sensory press of the street’s activity nearly stun you), looking simultaneously electrocuted and demonically possessed (there is no other way to describe the way his upturned face was transformed, with its look of both suffering and ghastly exultation, or rather it may have been that the two different expressions alternated so rapidly on his uptilted face that in the mind’s perception they became conjoined), and making that sound, with what Ahearn and Ellsberg and others in the front row said looked like every single hair on Mr. Johnson’s head, neck, wrists, and hands standing straight up, and the children in the classroom sitting bolt upright with many of their eyes bulging out and rolling around and around in their heads like cartoon characters’ eyes, with sheer terror. It was in the midst of this scene that Chris DeMatteis awoke in the rear of his row with a small plaintive shout — which is how he sometimes woke up when he had fallen unconscious in school. In retrospect, my impression is that Chris’s absently panicked cry of awakening is what started the class’s other pupils openly screaming and rising from their desks to begin an hysterical mass exodus from the Civics classroom (rather the way one random infantryman’s firing his weapon will precipitate the start of a battle when, up to that point, it had been just two tense and ready armies facing each other with weapons drawn but not yet fired), and what wrested my attention from the sight of Philip Finkelpearl’s vomit hanging in strings and clots from the side of his bolted desktop was the sudden simultaneous mass movement of the class’s pupils as all of them except Chris DeMatteis, Frank Caldwell, Mandy Blemm, and I began running for the door of the classroom, which unfortunately was closed, and the mass of children behind Emily-Ann Barr and the fleet Raymond Gillies (a Negro) and the others who had reached the door first and were clawing hysterically at the knob of the door drove the first children physically into the door with such force that there was a gruesome sound of the impact of someone’s face or head against the thick, frosted glass of the door’s upper half; and, as the door (like all classroom doors of that era) opened inward and there was a rapidly growing mass of panicked children in the way, it seemed a very long time before the door was forced open by someone bulky enough — in hindsight I believe this to have been Gregory Oehmke, who at age ten was already well over 100 pounds and had a neck the same width as his shoulders, and who would also go on to serve overseas, though I base this belief not on directly seeing Oehmke do it but only from noting the brute savagery with which it was yanked open, hitting and scraping several children with the edge of the heavy door as it was forced open, and causing one of the tall Swearingen sisters in roughly the middle of the herd to lose her footing and disappear and presumably get badly trampled in the subsequent exodus, for when the noise of the screaming children receded north up the hallway and the door was slowly closing on its pneumatic hinge, and two unidentified sets of hands reached quickly in to grasp Jan Swearingen’s ankles and pull her from the Civics classroom, she did not move or in any way revive as she slid facedown on the checkered tile, leaving a lengthy smear of either her own blood or someone else’s that was already on the floor from some other mishap at the door, the long braids both Swearingen sisters tended to play with and even to chew on when distracted or tense trailing behind and missing by just inches getting trapped in the crack of the slowly closing door.