|
From the moment Willamette Week detailed Tom Curtis & Co.'s alleged crime spree last spring, Portlanders have wondered how such seemingly good kids could have gone so wrong. Fascination grew when The Oregonian reported that Curtis partied in Mexico with unrepentant members of his high-school class. Tom Curtis and his cohorts are not the first of their kind. Their alleged conduct has antecedents in other schools and in other communities. Our Guys, Bernard Lefkowitz's book about the true story of a well-to-do New Jersey community stigmatized by an awful incident in 1989, provides some insight into understanding what happened here, in Northeast Portland, beginning in 1996. Our Guys is a tale of cultural dysfunction in which a group of kids who come of age in privileged surroundings seem incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong. The kids involved are--like Tom Curtis and Ethan Thrower--popular jocks. They are among their school's most celebrated citizens when a number of them entice a mentally retarded girl into one of their homes and rape her with a baseball bat. As with the more recent events here, the community's reaction in Our Guys is first one of surprise and denial, then of growing outrage. A bone-chilling portrait of kids desperate to compensate for woefully incomplete interior lives and imaginations emerges between the lines of Lefkowitz's painstakingly researched book. The world of Glen Ridge's problem jocks comes across as emotionally flat; their lives appear needlessly coddled and overprotected. For years prior to the rape, the main characters of Our Guys misbehave in a community that, time and again, serves more as their enabler than as their conscience. Class disruptions go unpunished. Parents defend their offspring against the authorities. Scrapes with the law are not taken seriously. Does any of this resonate in the accounts of this crime spree that have appeared in the local press? In the comments of the teacher who told The Oregonian that Tom Curtis was always acting out in school in order to get attention? ("He had a stack of discipline referrals that would have resulted in more serious consequences if it had been someone else.") Or in this newspaper's report about Curtis getting off scot-free after an ugly incident in which a Portland police officer saw him punch a 53-year-old 7-Eleven clerk? Our Guys has one striking dissimilarity: It's a book about rape, not armed robbery. On closer inspection, though, the difference melts away. That is, many experts say the desire for power and control--not sex--is what motivates rapists. So, too, it seems power and control are involved when a person dons a mask, walks into a place of business and puts a gun to someone's head. Assuming they are found to have committed these robberies, something clearly went wrong with these "good" Portland kids, and a lot of people now say they saw it coming. More than anything else, Lefkowitz's book suggests why their conduct wasn't attended to sooner. In Glen Ridge, at least, the sociology of the place prevented anyone in a position of responsibility from taking effective action, and no one saw the danger until it was too late.
originally published August 19, 1998 |
