Patrick Ness - Topics About Which I Know Nothing

‘I suppose not,’ he says. ‘But the end of the hall,’ he says to himself, shaking his head as he starts dialling again.

Through the still-open door, we hear a distant scuffling, then something that might be a muted voice or it could be the air conditioning malfunctioning like it often does, then a faint crash, followed by a few more crashes, then an uncomfortable high-pitched sound, which again could be the air conditioning.

We all carry on with our calls. Maryam reaches out and closes the door.

Much later, the boss comes in. There is a cut across his cheek and a bandage peeking out from his shirt collar. He is walking with a limp, and there is a funny smell. Without saying a word, he walks over to Tammy’s table, folds up her jumper, puts it in her bag, picks it up and leaves. We watch him go. Percy looks at his watch.

‘Where did the day go?’ he says.

We get ready to leave, and one by one we enter today’s sales numbers on the weekly quota sheet, first Maryam, then me, then Percy.

It takes us a minute to realise we’ve had our best day ever.

Nabbed! The Groomgrab 1 Phenomenon at the Turn of the Millennium

For fulfillment of the requirements of SOCI 917, ‘Methodologies, Dichotomies, Paradoxes, Iconographics, and Uncomfortable Shoes: The Millennial Nonsense and Why Everyone Made Such a Big Deal Out of It Instead of Pretending It Was Just Another Stupid Year, Which It Was.’ Professor Megan Woodhall/Sjoboen-Pimlico/Wren, Instructor, University of Western Los Angeles, Including Brentwood, Malibu, Santa Monica, and Scattered Portions of Ventura County November 30, 2015

It seems to have begun the way all trends do, with whim meeting opportunity.

The first groomgrab 2 , as they came to be known 3 , can be traced back to July 14, 1999 to an area of Los Angeles then known as Westwood. James Roddick, 28, gay, single, and Anton Marshall, 27, also gay, also single 4 , were driving home from a movie when they spotted seven-year-old Aaron Booher playing ball by himself on the sidewalk. ‘“Desultory” was the word that came to mind,’ Marshall is reported to have said. Some eleven weeks later, just when groomgrabs were on the upswing, Roddick and Marshall appeared on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show to describe that historic first occurrence.

Roddick: [Booher] was just bouncing the ball, all by himself.

Marshall: It was the saddest thing.

Roddick: So Anton goes, ‘Poor kid, doesn’t look like he’s having any fun at all.’

Marshall: It was true, and you should have seen his clothes. I mean, who puts their kids outside in corduroy in July?

Roddick: Or any month?

Marshall: Really. Just because he’s seven doesn’t mean he doesn’t notice what he’s wearing.

Roddick: Right. So I said, ‘Someone should just grab him and take him to the Gap.’

Marshall: Re-do him top to bottom.

Roddick: Buy him an ice cream cone or a Mrs Field’s.

Marshall: Give him a nice time, in other words.

Sally Jessy: And that’s when you -

Roddick: That’s when we picked him up, yes.

Sally Jessy: You ‘grabbed’ him.

Marshall: Hence the name.

Three and a half hours later, Marshall and Roddick dropped Booher back on the same sidewalk, dressed in a new tan, short-sleeve, sueded crewneck sweater; khaki walking shorts; and a pair of Timberland Kids sandals. He also carried bags filled with Gap Kids polo shirts, a Guess Kids belt, a stuffed Godzilla, and a Richard Scarry book on multiples of five 5 . Booher’s parents, Mr and Mrs Donald Booher, were unaware anything had happened until Aaron returned home. The police report includes the fact that Aaron repeatedly asked his mother, his father, the police officer, anyone he could find: ‘Can I go again tomorrow?’

All arguments and counter-arguments to the practice of the ‘groomgrab’ begin here with little Aaron Booher’s question. ‘You see,’ say the grabbers, ‘Booher was never in danger and had a little fun injected into his life for the first time in ages.’ Anti-grabbers, with some merit, point out that seven year olds also often find activities like vomiting and bee-stomping fun, i.e.a seven year old is not exactly the best judge of what good, healthy entertainment is. However, the point of this paper is not to judge the action 6 , merely to map its movement across the country and see just how the country got swept away in this most peculiar of fads.

Witness Marcy ‘Pebbles’ Morrison, youngest granddaughter of (then) 9th Circuit Court Judge Bosco Morrison 7 . The younger Morrison, in her seminal Take Your Hands Back On Me ! 8 , the first real study of groomgrabbing as a cultural phenomenon, reports that ‘my own, personal groomgrabbing was the most exciting couple hours of my life to date. Nothing else has come close. I would trade the best sex I ever had for that time in my childhood. In a heartbeat. It was the first time any adult had treated me like a special little human, and for no reason, just because I was there.’

Morrison goes overboard somewhat by calling her groomgrabbing an experience of feeling unconditional love 9 , but you can see her point. A research survey by the University of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Including Parts of Barbados and St Lucia conducted in 2003, roughly a year after the trend had died down, reported that the groomgrabbed children ‘overwhelmingly’ reported the grabbing as an unequivocally positive experience. Looking at the survey’s raw data, ‘overwhelming’ is actually an understatement for once. Fully 99.58 per cent answered ‘emphatically yes’ when asked if they considered their groomgrabbing to have been a good experience 10 . A smaller, more recent study of groomgrabbed children conducted by sociologist Zorah Blandershot-Fields at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, reported not only the same almost-impossibly-high satisfaction rate as the UMNHVIPBSL study 11 , but also showed scholastic achievement including SAT and AP scores miles and miles above the national average 12 . Naturally, in addition to the scientific studies, the anecdotal evidence is voluminous 13 .

Some excerpts:

Ronald Laramie, Butte, Montana: ‘I didn’t even think there were any gay people in Butte, so getting groomgrabbed never really entered my mind. As far as I know, I was the only one in the whole state to be grabbed 14 . My grabbers were this older couple who’d apparently driven all the way down 1–90 from Deer Lodge, which, my God, has like seven people so you can just imagine the kind of risk they were taking. I was ten, and they took me to one of those pizza-arcade places, Charlie Cheese or something 15 . They also bought me a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia and this great little black suit with an antique Golden Girls tie. It was a ton of fun, and I pretty much became a celebrity. They even asked me to be Grand Marshal of the Elk Parade, which is a big deal in Butte.’

Jessica Mankiewicz, Encino, California: ‘It happened when I was seven, and I remember it was near Halloween. My two guys were Harry and Reed. Reed was Asian, and Harry had wavy red hair. It’s funny how clear it all still is. Anyway, they asked what I wanted to be for Halloween, so of course I say Spidergirl because that movie had just come out 16 . So what do these guys do? They take me to the studio to get outfitted! My guess is that one of them had to work at the studio, because otherwise how would we have gotten back there? But I got this kickass little Spidergirl suit made of the same rubber they used in the movie. It weighed like 35 pounds. I dragged and sweated my way through trick-or-treating, but how cool was I that year?’