Left and Right Michael Howard
I
met John Timbs in ninth grade when I was fourteen and he was fifteen, he having failed second grade, though he’d always maintain he was held back and that that was different. We were in the same history class and we bonded over a shared interest in the Third Reich, of all things. My own curiosity at the time was limited to Nazi atrocities—Einsatzgruppen and so forth, normal stuff—but Timbs’ fascination ran a lot deeper. He was into the political structure of Hitler’s Germany; the machinery of totalitarianism; the various forms of repression. If it’s possible for a fifteen-year-old to be a fascist, Timbs was a fascist.
Probably there’s a connection between that and what he ultimately did. I don’t know. Neither of us had many friends at the time. We didn’t play sports or do any extracurricular stuff. So for the next couple years we mostly hung out with each other. I remember the first night I went over to his house. His parents and his dad’s brother sat in the dining room drinking beer and talking loudly. It was impossible not to overhear their conversation, peppered with words like “nigger” and “spic” and “fag.” That was kind of a jolt. Timbs hardly ever talked about politics back then, but when he did it was from a hardright perspective, which I guess he got from his
25.
