Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries Read online

  One of the very last boxes I opened before the removal vans came contained a videotape. Kubrick was on the tape, addressing the camera, looking nervous. It was an acceptance speech. He’d been awarded the D. W. Griffith Award. It was just a few months before he died.

  “Good evening,” he says. “I’m sorry not to be able to be with you tonight . . . but I’m in London making Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and at just about this time I’m probably in the car on the way to the studio. . . .”

  All this time I’ve been looking for some kind of Rosebud and I think I find it in a few lines in this speech.

  “Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film,” he says, “also knows that although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”

  I think Kubrick knew he had the ability to make films of genius, and to do that—when most films are so bad—there has to be a method, and the method for him was precision and detail. I think his boxes contain the rhythm of genius.

  PART THREE

  EVERYDAY DIFFICULTY

  “I’ve thought about doing myself in loads of times.”

  —“Bill” to Christopher Foster

  Santa’s Little Conspirators

  It is a Monday in late October and I’m standing inside a smoke-filled Lotto shop in the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole, population 1,600. This shop sells only two things: cigarettes and Lotto scratch cards. Chain-smoking inveterate gamblers sit at the counter and frantically demolish mountains of the scratch cards. They have names like Royal Jackpot, Blame It on Rio, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  Outside, people are going about their business on Frosty Avenue. Friends are chatting on Kris Kringle Drive. A gang of hoodies are slouched against the candy-cane-striped streetlights on Santa Claus Lane, having just emerged from the Christmas-themed McDonald’s.

  Everything in North Pole is Christmas-themed. It is Christmas Day here 365 days a year. The decorations are always up. It never stops being Christmas here. Never. Wherever you are in the world, if you write a letter to Santa, and address it simply “Santa, North Pole,” your letter will most likely end up in this tiny Alaskan town.

  Actually, specifically, your Santa letter will end up right here, in this smoke-filled scratch-card and cigarette shop. It’s late October, and boxes of them are already piled up on the counter near the fruit machine. They’re automatically forwarded here from the post office. I pick an envelope up at random. It has only one word scrawled on it, in a child’s handwriting: “Santa.” It’s postmarked Doncaster, UK.

  I get talking to Debbie, who works here, selling scratch cards to the gamblers. Debbie is herself a chain-smoker, a blowsy strawberry-blonde with a tough, good-looking face. She says she can frequently be found alone in here in floods of tears, having just opened yet another heartbreaker.

  “Just before you got here,” she says, “I opened one that said, ‘Dear Santa. All I want for Christmas is for my mother and father to stop shouting at each other.’ I just fell apart.”

  “We get a lot of ‘Could you bring my father back from Iraq?’” says Gaby, the shop’s owner. Debbie answers as many Santa letters as she can, whenever she gets a break. She writes back using her elf name: Twinkle.

  And she has help. Each week in November and December, a box of Santa letters is sent over to the nearby middle school, where the town’s eleven- and twelve-year-olds—the sixth graders—write back in the guise of elves. It is part of the curriculum.

  Six of last year’s middle school elves, now aged thirteen, were arrested back in April for being in the final stages of plotting a mass murder, a Columbine-style school shooting. The information is sketchy, but apparently they had elaborate diagrams and code names and lists of the kids they were going to kill. I’ve come to North Pole to investigate the plot. What turned those elves bad? Were they serious? Was the town just too Christmassy?

  I need to tread carefully. So far I’ve tried to ask only one person about it—James, the waiter in Pizza Hut—and it went down badly.

  “North Pole is the greatest place I’ve ever been,” James told me as he poured my coffee. “The people here are always ready to do! We stay on track and we move on forward! We don’t let anything get us down. That’s the spirit of North Pole and the spirit of Christmas. People here are willing to put their best foot forward and be the best kind of people they can be.”

  “I heard about the thing with the kids over at the middle school plotting a Columbine-style massacre,” I said.

  At this, James let out a noise the likes of which I’ve never really heard before. It was an “Aaaaaah.” He sounded like a balloon being burst by me, with all the joy escaping from him like air.

  “That was a, uh, shock. . . .” said James.

  “You have to wonder why. . . .” I said.

  “This is a very happy, cheerful, cheery place,” said James. “Anything more you need?”

  “No,” I said. And James walked back to the counter, shooting me a sad look, as if to say, “What kind of a Grinch are you to bring that up?”

  • • •

  MONDAY NIGHT. People keep telling me that everybody in North Pole loves Christmas. But I’ve found someone who doesn’t. Her name is Jessie Desmond. I found her on Myspace.

  “Christmas is a super big deal around here,” she e-mailed me before I set off for Alaska, “but for me it is a general hate. Please don’t go off me about that.”

  We meet in a non-Christmassy bar of her choice on the edge of town. She’s in her early twenties. She was educated at the middle school and is now trying to make her way as a comic-book artist. She has the Batman logo tattooed on her hand.

  “Christmas really grates on me, all the time, in the back of my head,” she tells me. “Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. It drives me nuts.”

  “But there must be something you do like about North Pole,” I say.

  Jessie thinks about this. “Well, if you get into an accident or something, everyone’s willing to help you,” she eventually says, shrugging.

  I decide it’s safe to ask Jessie—being anti-Christmas—about the mass-murder plot.

  “Do you know the boys?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head.

  “Apparently they drew up a list,” I say.

  “Well, I have a hate list on my wall too,” Jessie replies.

  “Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t have access to weapons.”

  “I have a revolver in my bedroom,” Jessie says.

  “Do you stand in front of the mirror with it and shout ‘Freeze!’ and imagine what it’s like to kill your enemies?” I ask.

  There’s a silence.

  “I might,” says Jessie, finally.

  I ask Jessie if she’ll take me to her house and show me her gun. On the way she tells me she suspects the boys were just like her—all talk—and the town only took them seriously because everyone is terrified of everything these days.

  Although this is late October, Jessie’s house is extremely Christmassy. Her parents, Mike and Edith (a former Miss Alaska), are great fans of Christmas.

  “Did you see my Christmas balls up front?” Edith asks me. “The nicest thing about living in North Pole is that you can leave your Christmas decorations up all year.”

  “Are there people in North Pole who don’t like Christmas?” I ask.

  “I don’t know any,” says Mike.

  I glance at Jessie. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor at their feet, displaying no emotion.

  Mike shows me the mounted head of a sheep he once shot. It’s wearing tinsel.

  “You never think that having decorations up all year round is too much Christmas?” I ask.

  Edith shakes her head.

  “No,” she says firmly. “No. I love Christmas. It’s my favorite time.”

  “Jessie,” I say. “Will you show me your gun?”

&
nbsp; “Sure,” she says.

  I tell Mr. and Mrs. Desmond that it was lovely to meet them, and I walk with Jessie down the corridor. We pass a row of paintings depicting Santa in various festive settings, in front of log fires, etc. Across the corridor is Jessie’s bedroom. It is free of anything Christmassy.

  “Does your mother know . . . ?” I begin.

  “That I don’t like Christmas?” says Jessie.

  I nod.

  “I’ve told her,” she says. “But I don’t think she believes me.” She rummages around her wardrobe and pulls out her revolver.

  “You’re the first person to see it,” she says.

  She straightens her arm like in a police movie. She says she sometimes pretends to kill the kids who bullied her in middle school. “I walk up to them when no one is around and I bop them over the head and shoot them!” she says. “Ha-ha!”

  Jessie says the person I should really ask about the plot is Jeff Jacobson. He teaches sixth grade at the middle school. He must have known the boys. Plus Jeff was mayor of North Pole until last week. If anyone who knows is willing to tell, it’s Jeff, Jessie says.

  I leave Jessie’s and call Jeff Jacobson. He says I’m welcome to visit him tomorrow at the school during the lunch period.

  Dusk is settling. One of the town’s two giant Santa sculptures—the one outside the RV park—lights up. It’s lit from below, which gives Santa’s eyes a hollow, creepy look, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

  • • •

  TUESDAY MORNING. Apparently the kids who were plotting the shootings were Goths. Earl Dalman, the owner of the permanently Christmas-decorated Dalman’s Family Restaurant, the most popular restaurant in town, tells me this. Just about everyone who lives in North Pole eats breakfast at Dalman’s. It has a lovely, festive, community feel, even if the decorations are looking frayed.

  There’s Debbie—Twinkle—who looks like she’s been up all night opening letters to Santa. There’s Mary Christmas, who runs the Santa Claus House gift shop. That’s her real name. It’s on her birth certificate. And there’s Earl Dalman, the owner of the diner. We get to talking.

  “Do you know anything about that shooting plot over at the middle school?” I ask him.

  “The kids were Goths,” he says.

  “Really?” I say.

  Earl gives me a look to say, “Well, of course they were Goths. What else would they be?”

  “Where I come from,” I explain, “Goths aren’t dangerous.”

  “Really?” says Earl, surprised.

  “Goths don’t do anything bad in the UK,” I say. “They’re a gentle and essentially middle-class subculture.”

  “Huh!” says Earl.

  “I suppose the difference is that the Goths in Britain aren’t armed,” I muse. “They’re so death-obsessed, it’s probably good to keep them away from guns.”

  Earl gives me a look as if to say, “There’s nothing wrong with gun ownership.”

  Then he tells me that—as a result of the shooting plot—his daughter has pulled her kids out of the middle school. The Dalman kids are being homeschooled instead now.

  “It shook everyone up,” says Earl.

  I have a few hours to kill before I get to go inside the middle school and meet Jeff Jacobson, and so I visit a sweet, twinkly-eyed lady called Jan Thacker, local columnist and author of the book 365 Days of Christmas: The Story of North Pole, Alaska, the Little Town That Carved Itself Out of the Alaska Wilderness and Became Known, Worldwide, as the Home of Santa Claus.

  Her book begins, “So does he? Does Santa really live in North Pole? . . . The police chief believes it, and who is more honest than the chief of police?”

  Jan and I chat for a while, and then she takes me into her back room, which is full of guns—a glinting rack of them—and a number of stuffed wolves she’s killed.

  The stuffed wolves have ferocious facial expressions. They’re snarling, their teeth bared, their eyes aflame with hatred, ready to pounce.

  I tell Jan she must have been very brave to shoot those terrifying wolves.

  “Were they pouncing like that when you shot them?” I ask.

  “No,” Jan says.

  Then she explains: The local taxidermist, Charlie Livingston, tends to give the wolves ferocious expressions however they were behaving at the moment of their death—even if they were just wandering around all doe-eyed, looking for a pat and a play.

  It’s surprising to see such a twinkly-eyed old lady so heavily armed, but this is normal for North Pole. It solves the mystery of where the plotters would have got the guns. There are guns everywhere.

  This is mainly because of all the bears. There are bears everywhere, and moose. I suspect this is why the town is so Republican. There are virtually no liberals. When you’ve got that many bears, you’re not going to be liberal. You know what liberals are like with bears. We just scream. We let out a high-pitched scream and run away, our arms in the air.

  It is all the more surprising, then, that Jeff Jacobson is a gentle-hearted liberal, a card-carrying Democrat. I’ve been told that sometimes, at night, Jeff can be seen driving around North Pole, quietly putting up decorations in underprivileged parts of town. Now it is lunchtime, and Jeff is putting up decorations in his math classroom. He’s wearing a Santa hat and a tie covered in snowmen. We talk a little about how much he misses being mayor.

  I don’t think Jeff gets on with the new mayor, Doug Isaacson, who’s apparently a steely-eyed, shaven-headed staunch Bush Republican. Doug Isaacson’s big idea is apparently to get all the shopkeepers in town to wear elf costumes as a means of generating increased tourist revenue. Jeff feels this is just window dressing, and what’s on the inside is what counts, Christmas-wise.

  Jeff tells me this is a good week for me to be in North Pole. Tomorrow his sixth graders will get their first-ever batch of Santa letters to answer. They’ll give themselves elf names and write back on Santa’s behalf.

  “We live in a world of text messaging and video games,” Jeff says. “Being a Santa’s elf connects us with real people all around the world.”

  “Can I come along and watch them do it?” I ask.

  “Of course,” Jeff says.

  “Jeff,” I say. “I hear some of last year’s elves were caught plotting a mass murder.”

  For a second Jeff freezes, Christmas decorations in hand. Then he recovers and carries on pinning them up.

  “It was going to be on a Monday,” he says.

  “How was it thwarted?” I ask.

  “One of the kids—the one who was going to be bringing the weapons in—didn’t show up that day,” Jeff says, “and so they postponed the plan. And while they were discussing the postponement, the plan was overheard, and the police intervened.”

  “And what was the plan?” I ask.

  “They were going to bring some knives and guns in,” he says, “and they were going to kill students and teachers. They were going to disrupt the telephone system. They knew where the telephone controls were. And they were also going to disable the electricity. Turn off the lights. And carry out their plans. And these were well-thought-out plans. They had diagrams. They had a list. . . .”

  “How many people were on the list?” I ask.

  “Dozens,” says Jeff. “And each kid was assigned who was going to do who. With what.”

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  Jeff shrugs. Then he smiles. “These boys had just turned thirteen years old,” he says. “They were going to disable the telephone system. That sounds terrifying, right? Well . . .”

  Jeff rummages around in his pocket and pulls out his mobile phone. He gives me a look as if to say, “Well, duh!”

  “So maybe they once saw someone in a James Bond movie disable a building’s communications system,” he says.

  The more Jeff tells me about the ins and outs of the plot, the more it strikes me as a mix of very chilling and very stupid. After the shooting, the boys were going to run to the station and catch a train t
o Anchorage, where they’d create new lives for themselves using aliases. One boy’s alias was going to be John Wayne.

  The thing is, they hadn’t checked the train timetables. The shootings were going to occur at lunchtime in the cafeteria. Even if they gave themselves an hour to kill their enemies and get to the station, they would still have had a five-hour wait on the platform for the Anchorage train.

  Lunchtime is over, and Jeff’s sixth graders run into class. They are only twelve, just a few months younger than the plotters.

  “To see those little boys in handcuffs . . .” Jeff says. “I taught five of them. It broke my heart. As teachers we had to carry on like it was a normal day. But we were being ravaged inside with our emotions. Some teachers were having anxiety attacks. One is still suffering badly with stress. . . .”

  I’m not allowed by law to meet the kids, but I’m determined to meet at least one of their parents this week. I ask Jeff if he’ll try and arrange this. He promises he will. I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow afternoon for the class where the kids get to open the letters to Santa for the first time.

  • • •

  WEDNESDAY MORNING. Doug Isaacson—the new mayor of North Pole—stands atop a snowy nature trail and surveys his town below.

  “Imagine being in England two thousand years ago when your towns were just getting started,” Doug says. “How would you set them up for future generations? That’s where we are! We can do that here! That’s awesome.”

  “How old is North Pole?” I ask.

  “Fifty years old,” says Doug.