My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf: Some Thoughts.

 

In high school - in life - there’s that one kid who slips through the cracks.  In some instances, everyone barely notices this kid. In others, the kid draws attention to himself by being a class clown or indulging in some form of carnival geek routine that inspires laughter.  Whether people are laughing with him or at him doesn’t matter to the kid - so long as he’s being noticed.

By the end of senior year, that kid’s class cycles out of high school, and disseminates to various colleges or job prospects.  But what about that outlier?  Sometimes he’ll be brought up in conversation.  “Yeah, what about that guy?  What happened to him?” Some people have leads.  Other people can only speculate.  Still others make up stories about the kid that are the stuff of urban legend.  These days, one of the crowd will joke, “He probably became a serial killer / mass murderer / child molester, and we’ll see him on TV.”

For Jeffrey Dahmer - the weird outlier who slipped through the cracks - he was not the source of wild speculation or jokes for long.  In the eyes of a high schooler with the nom de plume Derf Backderf, this outlier, the butt of many a joke, actually did become the nightmare figure made popular by tabloid media and the chatter overheard near millions of water coolers.

Backderf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer chronicles the many close encounters he had with the young man who would become the monster that would saturate the media in the 1990s.  However, the story itself does not begin in the full glare of the idiot’s lantern.  It begins in the late 1970s at Revere High School in Bath, Ohio.

Drawing on his personal experiences with Dahmer along with anecdotes and corroborating stories from his friends, Backderf composes the story of a kid named Jeff whose nature and upbringing were partially concealed behind the family garage and the dense forest that surrounded it.  What was known was that his father, a chemist, and his stay-at-home mom had arguments so voluble that no mind was paid to Jeff.  He was in earshot of all these verbal clashes and was left to contend with his bizarre sexual obsessions through alcoholism and flaying roadkill with a pocket knife deep in the forest beyond curious eyes.

At school, Backderf and his friends formed The Dahmer Fan Club, who encouraged the weird kid’s exploits by having him mimic palsied fits in the hallways and insinuating him in the yearbook photos for extracurricular classes of which he was not a member.  

The teachers, counselors and other authority figures of the school paid no heed to Jeff.  They neither recognized the signs of his mounting psychosis nor did they reach out to this lonely kid who broadcasted his pain to every one in school by drinking booze directly on school grounds.  How could anyone pick up these muted cries for help anyway?  “High school in the seventies was far different than today’s locked down, zero tolerance institutions,” Backderf explains.

There were no security cameras, [and] no strip searches.  Kids were smoking weed in the bathrooms and chugging beer in vans in the parking lot.  Even the teachers partied.  The younger ones were straight out of sixties counterculture.  I recall one in particular, who once bragged to one of the jocks, “I bet I can roll a joint faster than you!”

So, Dahmer’s cries for help were muted by grating shouting matches at home and the white noise of daily adolescent activity at school.

Backderf advises the reader to pity Dahmer, but not to empathize with him.  According to Backderf, a high school friend named “Mike” had driven young Jeff home one night:

As the timeline of Dahmer’s murders was constructed, it was determined that as Mike sat there in the driveway with Jeff on that warm summer night in late June [1978] the dismembered body of the young hitchhiker [that Jeff had picked up, pp. 173-175] was either stuffed in a drainage pipe beside the driveway or in the back of Dahmer’s car, which was parked just a few yards away.

Very few outliers are Jeffrey Dahmers.  Some lead lonely, detached lives.  Even more finally enter the sunlight of everyday human concourse and appreciate its radiance more so than the average denizen that makes up our species.  The mass media would have us think differently, making us believe that every square peg is a hair’s breadth away from picking up a weapon and slaughtering scores of unwitting victims.

Backderf is not the mass media.  He simply recounts life in sleepy Bath, Ohio:  A small suburb whose shadows veiled a great deal of dysfunction, hidden grief, emotionally stunted parents — and a rara avis who quietly sharpened his talons to prey on the objects of his lust:  Beautiful men he imagined lying dead beside him in bed while he toyed with their bodies in whatever way he liked.

- JJB