Clint Atkinson, on at least two occasions that I can recall, vowed that he would kill me. Once he said it to my face in a church youth group van, and I don't remember what his reason was, but he'd cooled off by the next time I saw him. The other time, Matthew relayed the message to me, covering the telephone mouthpiece and quoting Clint as saying, "Tell John Thompson that I'll kill him next time I see him." That time, I'd more-or-less purposely tripped over his Nintendo wires as he was coming close, at nineteen years of age, to defeating Castlevania. He'd slammed a nylon-string guitar across my back, and then stormed out the sliding glass door from Chris' basement. It was fifteen minutes later that he talked to Matthew. We kept an eye out for him for about a week after that- one night I was even startled awake by a rustling outside the window, and couldn't make myself go back to sleep.

I met Clint halfway through my first day at Holcomb Bridge Middle School, in November of 1989. As the new kid, I was banished to the far corner of the cafeteria until such a time as I might insert myself within an established social circle. My tablemates didn't constitute such a group, because none of them were friends, their only similarities being that each in his turn had been cast out with equal viciousness from middle school society.

Brian was there because he was a big fat liar. That is to say, he was big, and fat, and he lied about anything and everything. He always said things like his family owned Coke, or he knew judo, or he'd been selected to be one of the new Mouseketeers. Nobody liked him, and I was no exception. I think he made a play early on for me to be his wingman, but I ignored him and ate my pizza rectangle.

Jeremiah didn't say much, and when he did he stuttered and squeaked a little. His clothes had obviously belonged to an older sibling, and he was too tiny to fill anything out. And with self-esteem as shot as his already was, it only took a handful of none-to-clever "bullfrog" references to send him shuffling over to the outcaste table.

Then there was a kid whose name I won't bother to guess at, as I never heard it come from his own mouth. He was Indian, spoke very little English, and everyone said that when he narrowed his eyes and began to mumble, he was cursing you. Not cussing at you; cursing you. Like, to turn you into a bullfrog.

And Clint. I sat across from Clint. The first thing I remember him saying to me was the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared,” matter-of-factly, as he retrieved a set of interlocking silverware from the front pocket of his backpack, to eat his school lunch. I said, “Prepared for what?” and he stopped for a moment, didn’t look in my eyes but above my head, as if trying to phrase it in a way I would understand, until finally, still looking up, he said, louder, “Just be prepared,” and returned to meticulously slicing his Salisbury steak. I had the feeling that if I were to push the issue any further, I would simply be met with an even louder, but otherwise identical, response.

Clint had committed the most heinous and unthinkable of middle school crimes: he was entirely lacking in self-consciousness. His voice was crass, his accent pure Appalachian; he was incapable of whispering, except to himself as he walked down the hall. He cussed inappropriately. He mostly wore gaudy OP knockoffs and Jams- Ray once succinctly described his wardrobe in a simple but evocative four-word phrase: “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.” He was by far the easiest target in a school full of nine to fourteen-year-olds desperate to lob their insecurities onto someone else.

I was never in an academic classroom with Clint- he had learning disabilities, which made me exceedingly jealous, because it was common knowledge throughout the school that the SPED teachers were smokin’. But in seventh grade we shared a homeroom, and I remember him sliding in one morning, sporting Dwayne Wayne flip-up sunglasses, screaming the hook to “Unbelievable,” and before he could entirely descend from the “Oh!!!” part, Madame Bonnenfant had sent him directly to the office. I remember very little else about seventh grade.

Except that that was also the year that David Bradley and I decided that it was our Christian Duty to start praying for Clint at Wednesday Night Bible Study. Somebody, who’d obviously never met Clint, suggested that we ought to invite him to church, and the proverbial wheel was set in motion. Clint became a regular on youth group trips, flaunting beaded leather bracelets where every color meant something about Jesus, crying at passion plays, joining the youth choir only to be exiled to the back row of the choir loft. He signed my yearbook in 1991, and scrawled something about being a great friend at school and church.

But back then I didn’t feel like Clint’s friend. I felt like I was too bent on helping him to like him. I treated him like a cripple, talked to him like a kindergartner. On a youth group trip to the Bahamas I led him all around the cruise ship to find his lost wallet, and when he finally smashed his fist through a glass fire-extinguisher box in frustration, I stood between him and a furious youth counselor, demanding that he treat Clint as a human being. Meanwhile Clint bled.

As he became lodged within the weekly routine of the church, he ceased to be solely mine and David’s charge. Something about the atmosphere of the place kept him coming back, and somehow he made himself part of it, just as I had. Say what you will about organized religion, but when it comes to providing a place for kids who don’t fit anywhere else, it’s a better option than the corner lunch table.

When Fista arrived on the scene sophomore year, he must have staged some sort of a coup that knocked us all out of position, but he accomplished it so covertly that I’m unable even to recall the circumstances of our first meeting. I remember knowing of this kid from South Georgia with a self-administered haircut, running in tangential circles to his, long before I spoke to him. By the time I finally came around, a regular solar system of souls had begun to revolve around Fista and the basement of his Boxford Place cul-de-sac home (hence the term Box Palace): a few from church and school; the rest, like Fista himself, expatriates from LaGrange.

When the dust of high school had settled, the core Box Palace group emerged: Fista, his brother John, Matthew and Jeff from LaGrange, our elder statesman David Kipp, myself, and Clint*. If Fista was the heart of the palace, if David was the brain, then Clint was the soul. He was our people, our scapegoat: whatever we felt he dramatically illustrated. Where we felt estranged, he was near untouchable; where the prospect of life after high school was nebulous to us, it was, at best, uncertain for Clint. I know that I wasn’t the only person to wonder aloud how Clint would survive in this big fat ugly real world. Maybe the answer to the question was obvious, and maybe we ignored it.

Clint himself became impossible to ignore. He had an inexplicable fascination with the music and fashions of the nineteen-sixties, and with Cyberpunk-era (and only Cyberpunk era) Billy Idol. In a basement full of aspiring musicians, Clint sang exactly like he talked: loudly and without tone or rhythm. When Fista undertook to teach him guitar, he was content to learn a single chord- G7. He couldn’t hold the strings down though, so a weak G major was all that ever came out. He wrote entire epic songs with that chord, and his moaning melodies scarcely, if ever, coincided with the key.

One of his most infamous compositions was titled, “Young Eyes Coming to America.” As I recall, the piece focused on an instance that had occurred when he’d traveled to Germany to visit his older brother. They’d gotten into some kind of a scuffle with a pair of Turks (I think?), and the Brothers Atkinson had “beat them up with our hands and our legs, also known as karate.”

The superfluous use of the parenthetical “also known as” went on, like countless other Atkinson utterances and mispronunciations, to become a staple of Palace parlance. It's worth noting that even my wife, a decade after the fact, and having met Clint on only one occasion, has been known to throw an AKA or two into her speech.

A brief and incomplete list of Clintisms:

Hell broke loose from Heaven’s gates
Once in a Blue Disco
Acrostic Guitar
Michael Snipe
For some apparent reason
something about a Catholic girl on a leg

Sure, we mocked and goaded Clint, with and without his awareness. There was the Castlevania incident, of course, and more instances where I made myself equally as annoying. We implied often that we’d had relations with his mother, as boys are wont to do. Jeff and I once taunted Clint into exposing himself in the church gymnasium. We told everyone his middle name was Horace, resulting in little John sending waves of discomfort through one of his parents’ after-church luncheons by calling across the table, “Pass the potatoes, Clintoris!” We sent him storming out the sliding doors more times than I can count, but we knew he’d always return, sulking just a little bit.

I hope to God that we did the right thing in treating him the same as we treated each other, not holding back or coddling him. I wasn’t always sure. Some days I wished we could revert to treating him as a patient, acknowledging the obvious differences between him and us.

A few weeks ago when I saw Clint, the first thing he said to me, with a firm handshake, was “Good job, John Thompson.” I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I responded in kind. He’d just moved into a room of his own in Athens, and was working full time as a groundskeeper for the university. He laughed more than he overreacted, and I refrained from calling him Clint Horace more than a handful of times. He and Fista and David and I shared drinks and stories outside at a café downtown. We relaxed, fell back into the roles we’ll never outgrow, in a group of friends we’ll always fit into. When he’d left, I stuck around for Matthew to get off work and when he arrived, we talked some more, until late, about the palace and, inevitably, about Clint.

Clint Atkinson killed himself last Thursday, the 22nd of April, and I haven’t slept well the past few nights. I’ve been attempting for a week now to say something meaningful about Clint- to eulogize, in a few paragraphs, my oldest friend. My thoughts invariably take on an anecdotal shape, and for the most part I’ve recalled nothing that doesn’t get brought up every time three or four of us get together. The only difference is that instead of wondering how a person like Clint makes it through this life, well, now we know. At least in this case, he doesn’t. It seems like you’re supposed to say something in these situations like “It just doesn’t make sense,” but of course it does.

I make no judgments regarding suicide. People who have had the kind of charmed life I’ve had have no right to make them. I can’t begin to imagine being dealt the cards Clint was dealt. A long, hard row to hoe, as they say. I hope I helped to make it easier, for a while, or I hope he at least knew that I tried, and that he forgave me for not trying harder.

* I put this at the bottom because this is supposed to be about Clint, but it can’t help but be, at least in part, a brief love note for the Fista: I think it can probably be said of more than one person that meeting Fista was the best thing that ever happened to them, but no one more than Clint. Fista never condescended or pitied with Clint. The nicest people to Clint had always been missionaries, but Fista was his friend, and he showed the rest of us how to do the same. I count myself privileged to have had a chance to observe Fista’s patient interactions with Clint, because I’m certain that in those moments, I was seeing a generally unhappy young man at his happiest, and best.