Survived by One: The Life and Mind of a Family Mass Murderer

5. “I Was Doing Really Well”

47 5 “I Was Doing Really Well” By the early 1980s, America’s youth culture was being driven by a relatively new art form: music videos. When MTV took to the airwaves in 1979, new stars were born. They were fashion icons as well as rock stars, and they could sell a million T-shirts or pairs of shoes—as well as records—with a single close-up. One of the cultural phenomena of MTV was that media saturation made mainstream that which once seemed revolutionary. But after running the same three to four minutes on the air a few thousand times, even the most breakthrough new look got old, or worse, tired. Hair got longer, and nobody cared. Clothes got tighter, shorter, and ripped to shreds, and television’s ability to serve it up en masse made it all seem less outrageous than it would have once been. With each new production , the video stars tried to visually outdo one another. But through incessant repetition, the medium put all of that outrageousness into a blender and homogenized it. And what once was edgy became soft and safe. Tom Odle’s band preferences (guitar bands more than video stars) indicate he was more concerned with the music than with being a fashionista . But the look he adopted—that of the long-haired, flannel-shirted, concert-T crowd—would have commanded more attention from parents, teachers, and administrators just a few years earlier. Tom and his friends may have felt like they were rebelling, but they no longer looked as rebellious . Had he looked more like he felt, someone may have tried a little harder to intervene in Tom’s life. “I Was Doing Really Well” 48 Sex, Drugs, and Early Criminal Behavior I graduated junior high school without any problems. I was thirteen years old entering high school. Because my birthday is in December, I was always the youngest in my class. High school was different. Rod and I were still friends, and we continued doing the bowling thing. My mom and I went to a bowling tournament once, but that was as far as it went. It was fun though, because I got a city trophy out of it for winning the city mixed doubles. I was still watching my brothers and sister as the built-in babysitter. That year I met another guy who would later turn out to play a part in my life that screwed things up. I had continued smoking, despite the incident in which I got sick after being forced to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes. I just had to be cool like all the other kids who hung out on the smoker’s corner: the long haired kids with the jeans, flannel shirts, concert jerseys, and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. I was getting out a little more, but not like I wanted. When I was supposed to be watching the siblings, I was sneaking out of the house and doing other things like going to parties, which is when I started to drink and do drugs. I first started smoking reefer when I was a freshman in high school, about thirteen years old. I didn’t do it too much at first, but as time went on and I enjoyed the feeling, I really got into it. But I never did it at school. Not yet, anyway. I would smoke cigarettes, but that was it. I changed my dress to match that of the cool kids. I finally even convinced my dad to stop cutting my hair, so it started to grow out. My grades were never of any interest, and I was always able to float by with the exception of English class. I hated that class. I could never understand all the diagramming of sentences. So I failed the class and had to make it up during summer school. I was introduced to sex when I turned fourteen. I was a freshman in high school and still had my paper routes. One day, I was collecting for the month, and this one woman asked me to come into her bedroom because she said that’s where she kept her purse. Her name was Linda, and she was a long-legged blonde. She was only wearing a robe, and it came open in the front, or she let it come open. I don’t know Sex, Drugs...