A Sad and
Frightening Tale
by Gene
Lass
My dad worked in the restaurant
and food supply
business his entire career, providing things like produce, frozen goods,
spices, soup bases, and equipment to schools, hospitals, and restaurants all
over Kansas City. He knew all the chefs and cooks, the kitchen managers, and
the restaurant owners, and he knew where you wanted to eat, and where you never
wanted to go. As Anthony Bourdain would reveal to the world in “Kitchen
Confidential” decades later, the business is full of secrets and drama.
One night when I was in 8th
grade, there was a story on our local news that hit close to home. Missing man Daniel
Latti had been found dead in the trunk of his car near a hotel in East St.
Louis. It’s already unusual to be found dead in one’s own trunk. What was more
unusual was, his car was parked with the trunk backed up against a tree. He
also had a small caliber gunshot wound to his head. Police ruled the death a
suicide, though they never explained why he would have backed the car against a
tree, why he shot himself while in the trunk, or how he could have climbed into
the trunk to shoot himself with the car backed into a tree.
Dad knew a few things. One,
Latti was in deep debt. He had invested in a restaurant and catering business,
and as is usually the case in the restaurant industry, it was failing. To stay
afloat, he had borrowed money from the wrong people. No one knew specifically
whom he owed money to, but there were plenty of bad options.
The other thing Dad learned
was a detail they didn’t include in the news stories: When Latti was found, his
pockets were turned inside-out, a mafia sign that he owned money. Mafia
involvement answered the rest of the questions about his death, from the trunk
to the ruling of death by suicide. Chicago, New York, and Washington weren’t
the only places where such things could be bought or arranged.
The news of Latti’s death
faded and life returned to normal. Then two years later, there was news that
shook my school. Latti’s son John was found dead from an apparent suicide. This
also made local news, as it always does when a teen is found dead. He was in
middle school, 8th grade. I was a year older, a freshman and didn’t
know him, but we lived in a small suburb, so I knew people who knew him. It was
believed that he killed himself because he missed his father and wanted to be
with him.
Students throughout the
school district were
advised that if we had a hard time dealing with this, we should talk to our
parents, as well as school administration, who would be able to help. It’s
always a concern that teens will copycat each other when it comes to suicide,
and at the time this was a particular concern because of the purported effects of
hidden and explicit messages in heavy metal music driving kids to kill
themselves.
I was pretty blasé’ about
the whole thing. As I said, I didn’t know John, and didn’t see why his death
would make me think I should kill myself, nor did I think I should want to kill
myself because of a song. Not that I wasn’t suicidal. I was and had been for
several years at that point, I just thought it made a lot more sense to want to
kill yourself because the world was a fucking shithole, and that it also was a
person’s own business if they wanted to do it. So, after a few days of buzz
around the school of what happened, things again went back to normal.
Senior year I ended up
getting involved in A/V Club, mainly because it got me out of homeroom, and so
I could hang out with my girlfriend, who joined the club with me. There, I met
Mrs. Latti, a very nice lady. Dad would sometimes send me to school with things
for her kitchen like spices, soup base, and olive oil, because he knew she was
having a hard time making ends meet. She was still raising two kids, now on one
income, and Daniel had left her with nothing but the house and its mortgage.
Mrs. Latti was typically very upbeat, but sometimes she would listen to the
song, “The Living Years” by Mike and the Mechanics over and over again in her
office with the door partially closed and not say anything all morning. It was
very sad.
Later that year, something
very weird happened.
I had gotten involved in
Drama Club, and as part of that took part in the state one-act play competition,
this time as part of the crew instead of the cast, because it seemed like more
fun. Our play was the classic “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” and we
actually did really well, winning all the competitions, until we found
ourselves in Stevens Point, WI, at the finals, where we again won. That got us
really nothing but bragging rights, but it was cool to win.
The night before the
finals, we were staying at the Holiday Inn Holidome in downtown Kansas City. I
was assigned to be one of the room leaders, meaning I was in charge of myself
and the other 2 guys from our school staying in the same room. It was still
before curfew, so we scouted around and ended up hanging out with more of the
cast and crew in another room. Freshman Rob Mitford, who was playing Linus, was
sitting on the floor playing with a Ouija board with Scott, one of the freshmen
on the crew. One of my classmates, Shannon Henreid, who was playing Sally, was
standing in the corner of the room, watching, and I was in the opposite corner.
On the floor, the guys using
the Ouija board contacted a spirit. It said it was male.
“What’s your
name?” Rob asked
The planchette moved over
the letters J O H N.
From her spot in the corner,
Shannon suddenly
looked less bored.
“How old were you
when you died?” Scott asked
The planchette moved over
1, then 4.
“Wow, that’s
like our age!” Scott said.
Shannon quit leaning against
the wall and
stared intently at the kids, but didn’t say anything.
“Who were you close to in
life?” Rob asked.
The planchette spelled out
F A T H E R.
Shannon kept staring, not
blinking.
“How did you die?”
Scott asked.
It spelled out W I R E.
Rob and Scott looked at
each other in confusion. Shannon, now breathing heavily said, “That’s it, I’m
out of here!” and bolted from the room. I followed her to the atrium area,
where she was leaning over the railing, looking at the pool area below.
“Hey,” I said,
coming up next to her. “What’s
wrong?”
Before the one-act
competition, I knew Shannon from French class, and from chamber choir. She sang
alto and I sang bass. She was cute but not girly. She never wore makeup, and
was plagued with chronically bad skin. I sometimes considered asking her out,
but she seemed to have a sense for when I was thinking about it, deftly heading
me off by talking to someone else, or leaving.
She looked at me and laughed
gently. “You don’t
have to save me, Jean.” She pronounced my name Zhawn, what I was called
in French class.
I rolled my eyes at her.
“I know.” Our
interactions were normally limited to rolling our eyes at whatever was
happening, wherever we were. I stayed where I was and said softly, “So what’s
wrong.”
She shook her head, accepting
that I was
staying.
“Those kids were too
young to know John Latti.
They would have been in grade school when he died and didn’t even go to the
same school. I was his best friend!”
She looked up and paused.
Her eyes got wet. The
tears were there, but she held them back. When she spoke again, the words came
in a rush. “Everyone thinks he killed himself because they said on the news
that he hanged himself. I never thought he did. I always thought it was a mistake.”
She looked me in the eye,
speaking carefully. “He
didn’t use a rope. They never said it on the news, but I went there after he
died, and his mom told me. It was a wire loop. I saw it before, when I was down
there with him. There was a box on the floor and a wire loop hanging there from
a support beam. It was dark in the basement. John’s mom sent him down to get
something.”
Shannon paused again, her
face contorting. “I
think he tripped on the box and got his neck caught in the wire. That’s where his
mom found him, dead. They said it was quick. He wasn’t depressed or suicidal! He
missed his dad, but he didn’t kill himself to be with him. John told me himself,
as hard as life became, he knew his dad wanted him to live. Those kids wouldn’t
know about the wire, or any of that.
She looked at me again,
the tears coming now. “He
was my best friend!” She sniffed, then laughed. “We used to play that we would
get married one day. I thought I should tell him, once I figured out I liked
girls, that we weren’t going to get married, so he could make other plans. I
told him before I even told my parents. They still don’t know.”
She laughed again and smiled.
“He just rolled
with it. He said he still wanted to take me to prom one day. Guess that’s not
happening.”
She pulled a tissue out
of her pocket and wiped
her nose. “After that, I was able to tell him everything. He knew how hard it
was to be the good kid of the family. We were both the oldest kids. John
figured after his dad died that he’d have to be the man of the family and help
his mom with the other kids. Another reason he wouldn’t want to die.”
Hearing this from Shannon
made me love her a
little. I’ve always been drawn to intelligence and pain. There were plenty of
blonde, big-haired girls in chorus and drama club, girls with perfect makeup
and better grades than me. I had no interest in them. They might as well have
been made of plastic. I wanted the ones with hearts, stories, and preferably
some guts. At that moment, even with her acne and lack of makeup, Shannon was
the coolest girl I knew.
The tears dried on her cheeks
and she sniffed
again. “In my family, Pat has always been the bad kid, even though he’s not
bad, he just doesn’t get straight A’s without trying the way I do.” She uttered
a curt laugh. “I get the A’s, but I have no idea what I’m going to do with
myself. No plan at all.”
She looked down, then looked
at me again. “One
day last year, before school, I went down to breakfast high on acid, with
another piercing in my ear.” She pointed at a small gold stud in her left ear,
the size of a pencil point. “I wanted to know if my parents would notice, if
they saw me at all. They didn’t. I smoke a pack of cigarettes a week, and they
don’t notice that either. For them I’m invisible and Pat can’t do anything good
enough. I could kill someone in the living room right in front of them and
somehow, they’d blame it on him. John saw that the first time he came over, in
4th grade. He could tell. He knew me better than anyone, and I knew
him. There’s no way he wanted to die.”
We were quiet then. I wanted
to hug Shannon,
thought about it. Standing less than a foot away, I could feel her breath,
smell cigarette smoke lingering on her jean jacket, but I didn’t try to touch
her. I thought it was enough to be there with her and let her tell her story.
I’ve
always thought that in his way, through
the Ouija board, John was saying goodbye to Shannon. I hope she thought that,
too.
