Fur Elyse

Life is full of irony, both literal and figurative, and a deeply rooted appreciation for the absurd has served me well. Cynicism and gallows humor inoculate those of us for whom unchecked empathy would otherwise render inert. Strength through sarcasm, if you will.

In the strikingly picturesque seaside county of San Luis Obispo, located almost exactly dead-center between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with it's gorgeous sunsets and perfect weather, high ranking schools and precious, small-town vibe, sincerity and innocence can get you killed.

Trust me. I grew up there.

Mirroring the irony of that phenomena is Beethoven's most haunting melody, his 59th bagatelle, Fur Elise. Bagatelle is a word used to describe "a short, lighthearted and generally frivolous piece of music". Reconciling that description with the delicate, mournful melody of Fur Elise is like try to reconcile the beautiful small town where I had my first kiss, my first date, and so on, with the nightmarish brutality of what would become one of the most notorious "thrill killings" of that era.

My personal relationships with both the victim and the three perpetrators made it all the more disturbing, from my perspective, both then and now. But, alas, this story isn't about me. Try to think of me, if you will, as your Nick Carroway, and I, like he, will make an honest attempt to transcribe these events with as much objectivity as one who was present, such as Nick was present, and who, although, not technically involved, will be affected by the dark outcome nonetheless. There is one important difference, of course; the Great Gatsby, was, after all, a work of pure fiction, while my story is entirely, unfortunately true.

Irony, juxtaposition, contrast...all central and reoccurring themes in this tale. Darkness vs. Light. Good vs. evil. Reality vs. Illusion. Sanity vs. Bat-shit, meth-induced, homicidal psychosis.

I'm going to skip the Pahlers vs. Slayer angle. While the fact of the Victim’s parents attempting to sue the “death metal” band, Slayer, and the public debate that ensued, is a noteworthy aside, it really has nothing to do with my story. Dateline NBC, the local and national news media as well as the California Supreme Court have already covered that angle quite thoroughly, in any case.

This is just a memory, or rather a small collection of them, to be precise.

I met Elyse Pahler the first week of ninth grade. We had PE together, and aside from the huge, overly enthusiastic cowboy I was paired with for the square dance routine, she was the only person who spoke to me those first few days. The first time she struck up a conversation I recall being slightly puzzled; did she think I was someone else? Or was it my own memory at fault, maybe I had met her somewhere before and simply forgot? But I soon realized that was just Elyse; she spoke to everyone as if they were an old friend that she was thrilled to have bumped into. She was warm, uninhibited and unapologetic-ally loud. She wore blue eyeliner and laughed a lot. She was everything I was too uptight and self-conscious to be. She was fun.

We were too fundamentally different to become close friends, especially in the egocentric era of the ninth grade. In fact we were about as different as two girls of an age could be; she was sunny, open and often frustratingly literal, I was moody, sarcastic and wore my angst with as much pride as any freshmen girl sporting a borrowed varsity jacket, but I genuinely enjoyed her company.

Having a bit of an "alternative" childhood, I had only entered public school two years prior and not a single person from my Junior High school ended up in any of my 9th grade classes. Arroyo Grande High was true to it's name, it was the size of many college campuses and when I was enrolled there were over 3,000 students from as far north as Shell Beach and as far south as Nipomo. I was also going through a rough patch at home; my parents had split just a year before and I wasn't handling it well. When I did make it to school I rarely stayed, preferring to ditch and head down to the river to get stoned.

There was a regular group of kids who did the same, although I was one of the few females. That's where I first came into contact with the three boys who were already on a collision course with Elyse, their paths destined to collide in the most spectacular and horrific way imaginable.

I had already met Jacob, being casual friends with his older brother, and although I detested him from the moment I laid eyes on him, I had no such misgivings about either Joe or Royce.

Just goes to show what a brilliant judge of character I was.

Jacob was the polar opposite of his older brother, Ben, but unlike my differences with Elyse, which were more about personality and style preferences, Ben and Jacob were like Cane and Able reincarnated. I'll let ya'll draw your own conclusions as to who represented whom.

Ben was a mellow, soft-spoken, good looking boy with a slow smile and a quick wit, while Jacob was a vicious little loudmouth with zero self-awareness. He had terrible acne that he was constantly picking at so his face was always bright red, and he must have damaged his hearing with that garbage he euphemistically referred to as music (and this is coming from someone who cut her teeth in a NOFX mosh pit at twelve) because he always spoke several octaves above what was necessary and/or appropriate. Being in a car with him was a guaranteed migraine. I tolerated his presence out of respect for his brother, but only to a point. I.e. If I ran into him in a public place I wouldn't automatically leave, but I've never been known for having an overabundance of tact, and while I've gladly suffered many a fool (especially if they had weed) I drew the line at misogynistic little turds like Jacob Dellashmut.

However, as I said, I saw nothing nearly so reprehensible in either of the other boy's characters, and owing to their close association with Jacob, I ended up spending at least several afternoons in their company. It was often just me and them, otherwise alone down by the river, and looking back it was eerily apparent that several of those occasions fell in between Elyse's disappearance and when they found her body eight months later.

While the realization definitely chilled me, I told myself that I wasn't ever in any actual danger. Which is as absurd as it is naive, which is another trait I've never been accused of possessing.

I may not have fit the bill for their sick little game, I wasn't blond, sweet or a virgin, but there's no way around the fact that I sat there and smoked, joked and laughed with the monsters who took the life of an innocent girl. A girl I knew. A girl I genuinely liked. So when Royce had his little come-to-Jesus moment and finally led the authorities to where they had buried her poor, desecrated little body, I couldn't help but play my own little game. And a dark game it was. Playing chess with Mr. Reaper, ol' Grim, Daddy Death, I knew I'd never win and yet a quitter I am not. Like a Faustian fiddle match I played on and on through night after lonely night, holed up in my head with the curtains drawn close, my eyes locked up tight, trying to remember each and every detail of each sordid little gathering. I was my own Interrogator, caustic and credulous. I was a hostile witness, evasive and wary.

Did we ever discuss Elyse? Surely we must have, it was literally the talk of the town. But I would have remembered, I'm sure I would have recalled...but could they have discussed her, with me, without there being SOME indication of what they'd done??? Surely they would have given up the game, had her name been a topic, surely I would have picked up on SOMETHING. For as vicious as their crime, they were no hardened criminals, not yet, not then. Surely I would have picked up on something, an undercurrent of tension that wasn't there a moment before, an anxious exchange. Something. I was the clever one. Miss Marple in tight jeans, Phillip Marlow's great-grand-niece.

They were DORKS for shits sake!!!

But that was it, wasn't it? That was it in a freakin' nutshell. The why and the what-for all rolled up in that one, childishly judgmental, incredibly telling little outburst. My inner inquisitor wears a smug little smile as she gets up to leave the room. Her work here is done. I confessed.

My dreams of becoming a detective suddenly turned to ashes in my mouth, fell through my fingers like sand. Eat your heart out, Sam Spade! Philip Marlowe, watch your back. As if to seal the deal, my childhood dog, Bogie, had to be put down that year. Bad omens seemed to abound.

At least I don't have to play that miserable little game anymore. I lost. No surprise there, the game is rigged, after all, the house always wins. I was never naive enough to imagine any other outcome. Not really.

The last time I saw Jacob it was through a shatterproof window in SLO County Juvenile Detention Center. I was always a little wild, and that was my fifth (but thankfully also my last) trip "up state".

As clueless as ever, he banged on the door, shouting my name like we were long lost bffs, and I was suddenly furious. That's one of the two times in my life that I've literally seen red. I was being led, in line with several other young tools, so when I stopped walking it caused a minor pileup that almost knocked me to the floor. When the indignant guard made it up from the rear and saw me, standing in front of Jacob's window, both hands raised in what had to be the most enthusiastic finger gesture ever to be seen outside of New Jersey, tears streaming down my face, he was just about to bawl me over (this sort of thing was generally good for at least a night of restriction) but when he saw Jacobs face, still sporting a huge, bewildering smile as he waved and gestured to me, the guard drew up short. Instead of whatever he was planning to say he simply stepped in front of the door, cutting off our eye contact and breaking the spell in one fluid motion. He closed his hands over my own, effectively lowering the offending digits without further comment, turned me back into the right direction and said "okay kid. let's go".

I don't know why that moment is so clear in my head. I actually played cards with Royce; he was in gen pop, remarkably. It wasn't because of his newfound guilt or even his part in taking down Jacob, although there's always been a part of me that wondered if Royce was ever truly an active participant. It's easy to picture him as simply a lost, uber insecure kid who's not the brightest, with underlying emotional issues, who took too much acid and went along with his two best friends when they went off the deep end.

But even if that picture is accurate, I still hated him. I did then and I do now. Because, in the words of Edmund Burke, "evil triumphs when good men do nothing". Even if he never laid a hand on Elyse, and that's a pretty big if, he's still responsible for her death.

So when I sat down and made small talk for thirty minutes, give or take, with Royce, it wasn't out of friendship or forgiveness, or even morbid curiosity.

I knew he most likely wouldn't tell me what I wanted to know. I had to try, though, because at the time I was still stuck in the game. I was still struggling with my memory of those days a year before, when I had made such a spectacularly poor judgement of character, such a potentially deadly mistake. The implications of my stupidity had shaken me to the core. It was, by and large, the reason I was sitting in Juvenile Hall, as well. My shattered nerves were causing me to drink with even more reckless abandon than before. I wasn't sleeping, my already thin frame was looking downright emaciated. I was falling apart. Thankfully it was the 90s, so Seattle heroin chic was en vogue.

I was ghostly pale with dark circles under my eyes that simply wouldn't go away. I was always tired but I couldn't sleep, so I drank. When I drank I often blacked out, as a 110 lb girl with no appetite will often do after consuming three 40oz bottles of malt liquor or the occasional fifth of southern comfort. I'd wake up in strange places, have no idea how I ended up there.

I was flunking out of high school. I was a mess. I had to get a handle on this thing before I ended up in my own shallow grave. I know that on some level I thought that might not be so bad. It would be like the day I broke my surfboard on my forehead when I was twelve and almost drowned. That wasn't scary. It was...peaceful. Until the fickle Pacific spit me back out, dazed and concussed and three miles south of my street.

Once, that year, I sobered up in the hotel suite of an exotic, rich middle aged couple from Casablanca. I'd done a bunch of coke and came to just in time to tell them that I was sorry but I decided I didn't want to go home with them after all. My only memory from the night before was eating alone in a diner when the waiter told me someone paid my bill. Flash forward to sitting on a woman's lap in a car with doors that opened like wings, to the vague thrill of a high performance engine being topped out on the PCH at 4am, then the next thing I know she's in lingerie on the phone with someone describing me, saying that she didn't care about the cost but I needed the passport by the end of the day so I could travel with them. I recall vaguely wondering how they were so well connected they could pull a passport out of thin air, but luckily by then I was sober enough to hear the klaxon warning bells that were so loud I wondered, for one giddy moment, why the two of them didn't react.

Even with the cocaine dumping dopamine like powdered sugar in a fat cop's lap, I could hear them, loud and clear. DANGER, WILL ROGERS. ABORT. ABORT. Nothing wrong with my judgment then!

I made it home. Like I always did. Accept for the few times I didn't. But waking up in a cell is still waking up. It's still a win.

And I was even given a second chance to ask Royce what I wanted to ask.

It took me about 25 minutes to work up to it, and I could tell he was bracing himself, probably repeating the non-answer he gave me over and over in his head, on the advice of counsel, of course.

I knew I wouldn't hear what I wanted, what I needed to hear, before I even opened my mouth. But I went ahead and asked, anyway.

It was a small thing. That subtle pushing of the envelope, the creation of awkwardness and tension in a space where, only moments before, the veneer of civilization had held such tasteless topics at bay.

But I couldn't let it go. So I asked.

"Royce?"

His pained countenance turned dutifully, ever so politely in my direction.

"Did you guys ever talk about her...about Elyse (like there'd be any doubt who I meant, but still, I got the tiniest measure of satisfaction when he winced, ever so subtly, at her name) with me? In front of me, I mean? Last summer?"

I'm starting to babble. I'm disgusted by the pleading quality I hear in my voice. He's been shaking his head for a moment now, and as I trail off I think, briefly, "this is it! he's answering my question!"

But no sooner do I complete the thought than he murmurs "I'm sorry. I can't talk about it."

And he gets up, turns and walks away.

Twenty five years have gone by, since all of this took place. I've fallen in and out of love, gotten married and divorced, had my heart broken more than once.

All things that were taken off the board for Elyse long ago. Definitely weeks, if not months, before her death. Probably the moment that Fiorello laid eyes on her and started obsessing, talking about her with his two friends. But enough about them. I HATE that I remember them so clearly, can recall in such vivid detail the last moment we spoke, when my memories of Elyse are so much more nebulous. I have no solid memory of the last time we spoke. So when I think of her, I alway try to remember her the first time we met. It was funny and sweet and untouched by the evil of soulless men.

That's where she belongs, anyway, so I try. I close my eyes and refuse to recognize the darkness and horror that surrounds her name in the town where I grew up. Where I became a woman and left her behind, forever innocent, with her blue eyeliner and gentle smile.

for Elyse