my child will never be grabbed because he/she has so many friends and is so well-loved, I can’t ever imagine him/her looking quite pathetic or lonely enough to be grabbed. For everyone else, however …’
This was, of course, more or less an outright lie on the part of the parents. Economics Nobel Laureate Ken Kern-Terwilliger of the AT&T Gallup Nielsen Institute calls this phenomenon the ‘Martin Cramwell Would Be a Terrible Governor; Long Live Governor Cramwell’ Effect29 in which poll participants, afraid of the opinion of the polltaker, lie about their real feelings. As a matter of fact, parents were actively placing their children in solitary spots: leaving them with only a ratty tennis ball at the public park, say, or forcing them to walk any number of miles home from school. National statistics of child neglect cases covering the years before, during, and after the height of the trend look like an especially precipitious bell curve30.
Not that it mattered. Colin, in the interview quoted earlier, indicates that groomgrabbers were expert at picking out fakes:
Are you kidding? We have to spend all our lives secretly looking for other gay people in things like church and work and school. Oblivious is one thing we’re not.
Most fakes were easy to spot. As Colin puts it, ‘Children in stained white t-shirts do not bounce rubber balls off blacktop wearing Kenneth Cole shoes.’ Even more easily, all groomgrabbers usually had to do was ask if there was any doubt. Paradoxically, a child instructed to look like an appealing candidate to a groomgrabber would usually want to please the grabber so much that they would reveal the lie in an effort to win trust. Children don’t really learn irony until they get to Joseph Heller in the eighth grade.
As it is, every major study has attempted to cross-section the ‘average’ groomgrabbee and has come up lacking. Both the UMNHVIPBSL study and especially Blandershot-Fields cross-referenced, graphed, mapped, collated, coded, signified, indexed, concordanced, cataloged, enumerated, scheduled, classified, and alphabetized the grabbees until finally throwing up their hands in frustration. The youngest grabbee was four, the oldest thirteen, and about all anyone has been able to generalize is that groomgrabbees were between four and thirteen.
Grabbees were evenly split between boys and girls. They fell along racial lines at roughly the same rate as represented in the population. There were grabbings in all fifty-two current states plus Guam, with the only even mild statistical spike being a larger-than-average number of grabbings in Alaska31. Interestingly enough, the grabs cut across all financial and social strata as well, which would seem to contradict the point of the groomgrab. Booher, the first grabee, makes for an interesting study on this matter. West LA at the time was a fairly wealthy neighborhood. Booher, who it turned out lived in a $2 million home and had a six-figure trust fund, should not necessarily have been a test case for looking like poverty. Nonetheless, despite his wealth, as his groomgrabber Roddick said, ‘Money doesn’t always mean a kid’s not going to fall through the cracks.’ To which Marshall added, ‘Or have appropriate taste.’ The grabbers seemed to concentrate on how pathetic the grabbee seemed rather than his or her financial background. Another reason for the demographic well-roundedness of the grabbees might be the much-discussed notion of homosexuality as a vertical minority, encapsulating bits from every other group including the rich and the poor. As Blandershot-Fields writes, ‘Maybe it’s as simple as they went with what they knew. ‘
Official Reactions: A Note To Historians
Of course, groomgrabbing was, by any definition, as illegal as treason, and future historians removed from the Zeitgeist might quite credibly wonder where the hell the authorities were in all this? But picture if you will the state of the country at the time: The manned Mars mission had been sabotaged by extremist MarsFirst!ers; the Namibian Potato-Chip Debacle had its claws deep into the nation’s economy, sending unemployment into double digits; and the Argentinian War victory was turning out, thanks to the MSCNN investigation, to be even more Pyrrhic than previously thought. Malaise wasn’t even the word for it; the country was downright morose32. It’s the same reason Bonnie and Clyde and the James Brothers became cultural heroes at earlier parts of the previous century.
The Winfrey Administration, naturally, reacted to the trend with what became its legendary pragmatism. On February 17, 2001, shortly after the inauguration, the White House issued a press release stating, ‘I don’t see anyone getting hurt. In fact, I see people getting helped. What’s the problem?’ Not a single one of the over four-thousand known incidents of groomgrabbing resulted in even an arrest33. Local politicians typically opposed it until they met someone who was groomgrabbed, then the issue just dropped34. The official opinion seemed to be a need to condemn groomgrabbing, but secretly, everyone liked it and wanted it to go on.
At the bottom of it all, like so many other things about groomgrabbing, the true cause for the lack of reaction remains elusive.
The End
As does, it seems, the end of groomgrabbing. The last known groomgrabbing was on November 3, 200235, and after that, nothing. There weren’t even scattered grabs or copycat grabs. What happened? Why did it stop? It’s a circular question that leads back to why it began in the first place. A whim meets opportunity, and then the whim leaves. Blandershot-Fields touches on the subject only briefly36, but suggests that groomgrabbing simply ran its course the way all trends do.
The author has another theory. Rather more than a theory, actually. An unknown fact of groomgrabbing, not shared with any of the studies so far discussed in any forum, is the fact that all groomgrabbers imparted a single instruction to all grabbees. The author knows this because, as previously stated, he was a groomgrabbee himself. He has confirmed this with numerous private interviews with other groomgrabbees37 who are in agreement that the time for the instruction is near. They have graciously agreed to let the author be the first to make the instruction known, partially because this format38 lends itself so nicely to rumor.
The instructions were simply, ‘Pass it on.’
The way all trends do, groomgrabbing is going to make a comeback.
The first groomgrabbing of the second wave happens sometime next month39.
Ponce de Leon is a retired married couple from Toronto
From Elizabeth Bronwyn, Public Health Nurse (Ret.), Toronto, Ontario, to Dr Wayne Bronwyn, Ophthalmologist, Boston, Massachusetts. Handwritten. Mailed from unknown address, presumed to be central Australia.
Son,
As we’ve said many times, your father and I are enormously grateful to you for this trip. Our fortieth wedding anniversary has turned out to be the best we’ve ever had (except, perhaps, our always irreplaceable first). Our time here has been so wonderful, and we’ve come to know such great joy. Great Joy. How can I even say it? I can’t, son, I just can’t, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to communicate it to you in any way that you’ll understand until you’re older yourself.
We’re staying. There’s no way around it, so there it is. We’re staying. For good.
I know this is a great shock to you. Knowing you, you probably have some strong feelings on the matter, and six weeks ago, we’d have thought we were as crazy as you’re thinking right now. But such things have happened