I think this is one of those ideas that you could get away with in the 70s, like when they sunk twenty-foot tall steel girders into pure concrete and told us it was a playground.

 

Anyway, most of the kids made up these notes that were like, life just isn't worth it; I love you, mom and dad; I just want to end it all, jump off a building, blah blah blah. Pretty boring stuff, especially when you have twenty kids reading them out loud in front of the class.

 

But then, this one kid named Kevin wrote about how his little brother had used a disposable cigarette lighter to melt down all his Super Friends action figures, and Kevin imagined how horribly they all must have suffered at the hands of his little evil brother, screaming and writhing in agony as their flesh melted. Kevin was especially upset about what had happened to Wonder Woman. Don't ask. Anyway, after all this gruesome and disturbing detail about his Super Friends action figures, Kevin wrote that he planned to throw himself over the guard rail at the polar bear habitat at the zoo. That way, even if the polar bears didn't eat him, he would at least freeze to death.

 

I thought it was a pretty creative, although painful and excruciating, way to kill one's self, and like most of those present when he read it aloud to the class, I found the whole thing unsettling. I think even the ones who thought it was funny were still scared of that kid after he read that.

 

Everyone kept talking about it and the local paper even did a story on it, with a picture of the kid and his little brother, and they even showed him playing with their Super Friends action figures (except Wonder Woman, which, it turns out, was unavailable at the time they ran their story).

 

The thing about it was that, with all that attention, no one was really paying attention to Kevin, or what dark corner he'd dragged the whole thing out of, or what kind of insane and violent crap a kid like that would start thinking up when he eventually hit puberty. No: What people were talking about was Kevin's brother, and why he would have melted down those action figures like that, and how that was sociopathic behavior and everything. So they sent him to this special school where they would only give them chalk and crayons to write with, which seemed monumentally unfair to me, since that kid hadn't actually done anything.

 

ANYWAY....shortly after that, despondent over the trauma of having his brother taken away screaming in the back of this ambulance, Kevin actually did jump over the railing at the polar bear habitat. An observant trainer managed to fish him out before the polar bears got to him, but he lost three toes to frostbite and he walked with a limp after that, which made him extra creepy but fortunately less dangerous.

 

An overzealous public prosecutor at the time tried to prosecute the General Manager of the zoo (remember this was the 70's, and no one was held responsible for anything). He argued that the zookeepers should have been able to reasonably forsee what would happen, especially given the public scrutiny that Kevin's story had received. Across town, Kevin's parents were grilled by DFACS for neglect, and the archdiocese finally got around to asking why that pot-smoking nun would even give such a twisted assignment in the first place, so they transferred her to a mission for retarded Eskimo kids on top of this mountain in Alaska or something.

 

The weirdest thing is, after all that devastation and the lives that were ruined, nothing ever happened to Kevin. He went to West Point and now he's one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

 

But I was thinking, this would make one kick-ass episode of Law & Order)