Around 7pm on Tuesday, October 23, 2006, my plane touched down at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport after an exhausting 24 hour trip from Moscow. I had been working in Asia for a long, bureaucratic year followed by a couple months of rough travel via cab, ferry, train, and horse, a trek finally concluded with a flight back home through Zurich and Chicago. When the seat belt lights turned off the passengers jumped to their feet as if prompted by a dog whistle. Unwilling to join the mad scramble for luggage, I remained in my seat while the others awkwardly clogged the aisle for the next ten minutes.
It was then that a morbid sensation crept over me, like a warped combination of vertigo, diaphragm paralysis, and some kind of static shroud numbing my torso. Maybe the Swiss had spiked my complimentary pretzels with delayed release angel dust. Or maybe culture shock had simply come early. Either notion seemed doubtful as I was perfectly lucid and had yet to soak up the buzzing aura of highways and billboards outside. Finally I got up and staggered off the plane, unable to shake the clinging disturbance.
Hours later came the horrible news that Justin Horne had been murdered. Right when my plane landed. The mental tightrope I'd been walking between clenched tension and off-kilter denial suddenly snapped. Too much to bear, a primitive survival mechanism from deep beneath the forebrain quickly released a numbing agent, and I drifted through the rest of the week in a blank stupor.
Death is a concept I came to terms with long ago. It's probably a lot like that carefree time I spent before I was alive. But the sharp, deliberate act of killing has always been too gruesome for the mind to process neatly. Particularly in Justin's case, shot at close range in his home with a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun. The culprit was his roommate/landlord, who had failed to pay their electricity bill and Justin was confronting. Mid-conversation he shot Justin and then killed himself.
Beyond the obvious tragedy of losing a friend was the cruel, stone-cold fact that my corner of the world had just lost one of its most distinctive social renegades. But far from a shining champion of truth and decency, Justin was more like an unbreakable mutant who refused to be caged. If there was ever a boundary he would attempt to crash through it, whether lined with razor wire or patrolled by common sense.
Many were repelled by his legendary will to menace. He was a serial provocateur and hyperactive libertine who thirsted for stimulation and drew it from the shock and confusion of innocent bystanders if he had to. Somehow he got his hands on an Adolf Hitler trading card which he'd reveal to stunned strangers, silently stroking the portrait as if it were a totem inhabited by his master.
His sense of humor ranged from hellish depravity to a half-sarcastic whimsical pranksterism I doubt even he knew how seriously he took. Running around the high school like a maniac dressed in a Scream costume while people were in class probably had less to do with inciting fear than with Justin relishing the absurdity. In a similar vein his midnight hikes invariably resulted in him turning off his flashlight in the middle of the forest and sprinting off into the darkness, only to stealthily return to stalk those left behind. He did this so often it was more annoying than anything else, but we all knew he was hardwired for the kind of petty mischief that most boys shed at the onset of adolescence.
That treacherous hyena even stole a shirt of mine, a keepsake with "Class of '00" written on the front. When I caught him wearing it at a party he darted into the other room and changed clothes, eventually offering the ridiculous explanation that he had gotten it from "the store." I hadn't even bought the thing; it was left behind by a friend visiting from the east coast. Without skipping a beat he weirdly started muttering that his theft was warranted because I should have given it to him as a present. It was as if the fiefdom of his own bizarro imagination bled into the reality he shared with everyone else, a mindset totally bewildering to the uninitiated but endearing to his friends, at least when we weren't getting burnt by it.
Justin had a certain maniacal charm that got him out of trouble almost as often as in it. As rascal incarnate his atrocities were somehow easier to forgive than if they'd been committed by someone you really expected to behave. Sitting next to him on the bus was like sharing a seat with a clothed spider monkey, a jabbering bundle of chaos who occasionally poked you in the ribs but always made your trip memorable. I've laughed harder with him than maybe anyone I've ever met, and when I'm playing hover bingo in some holographic nursing home in the year 2093 I have no doubt those moments will be worth more to me than anything I could have possibly shared with the people who wholly dismissed him.
There was brilliance beneath his feral exterior. It is true that the departed are easy to romanticize, but Justin had a real gift that almost none of his staid contemporaries fully appreciated. Many threw in their lot with GPAs and social standing as the forced march from K through 12 gradually wore down their character. But Justin kept on being Justin, grinning like a fiend while constantly hurling bombs at the sanctity of expectations.
I shared a middle school health class with him once that included a Reefer Madness-style drugs and alcohol unit. For Justin's project he wrote and illustrated his own comic book starring a sword-wielding anti-dope superhero who valiantly sliced apart hapless pot smokers. It was one of the finest displays of satire I'd ever seen, total subversion of the party line delivered instead of the expected paean to sobriety. The teacher was so baffled by this "health" presentation that he threw up his hands and passed it, while the other students stared on, quietly awaiting instruction.
Genius bubbled up to the surface more often than once in his short career. When he was twelve or so he shared with me something that he wrote, a poem whose words escape me. But its tone sunk in, and the warm echoes of that afternoon bus ride ripple through my head whenever I reflect on the beauty of language. His layout of rhythm, depth, and structure was masterful, colored with accessible nuance and layers of interlocking metaphors. It convinced me right then and there that if this reckless beast ever found the discipline, success in the art world would be his for the taking.
But Justin's lifestyle was his preferred expressive format, an audacious and radioactive slap-stick comedy laced with sick humor, frenzied recreation, botched schemes, and a constant undertone of rude wisdom. I often saw him talk circles around the comparatively polished--model citizens too conditioned by the rat race to realize that he was making a fool out of them and the arbitrary metric by which they weighed their accomplishments against his own. It was a poetry of sarcasm disguised by low-brow mania, often entertaining no one but himself and alienating countless observers incapable of understanding his twisted brand of social commentary.
Justin regularly swallowed the label of freak as the price of living on his own terms, and for that I am eternally grateful. The bulk of life's flavor is derived exclusively from the odd. It is not the mundane shades of convention that sear the deepest into memory, but those salient jolts of the unexpected. The wild live so that the herd might have something to consider, and in a nobler age the eccentric would be praised for their off-beat insight. Justin Horne was far from perfect. But life was more interesting with him than without him, which is why he'll live on in memory as the invaluable trickster, beast, rebel, and friend we loved so much.
