afternoon in a booth at McDonald’s doing fractions. I don’t think I would have ever cracked them if it hadn’t been for my grab.’
Working in Pairs
Most of the anecdotes mention the still-unexplained phenomenon that all groomgrabbers worked in pairs, never alone, and never more than two. It’s possible that since the first groomgrab by James Roddick and Anton Marshall happened with just the two of them an unspoken tradition formed. There is also the possibility that the still-tenuous feeling surrounding homosexuals and children20added an extra note of caution to the grabbers, that is, two homosexuals together was somehow less questionable than one homosexual alone with a child21. Other theories include the ‘Ostensible Parental Substitution Matrix Principle’ by Dr Timothy Prong of the University of Nome, Et Al, whereby the grabbers subconsciously acted as mother/father figures as a sort of ‘Ideal Parental Pair’ to enhance the grabbee’s feeling of comfort, thereby displacing the ‘Actual Parental Dichometric Placement’ in the something-or-other for the somesuch and so on22. There is also an interesting idea put forth by the Gay and Lesbian Association for Public Statements in which the pleasure of the experience for each member of the grabber-grabbee group is enhanced by sharing it with two others rather than just one, the grabber being able to share the joy of the child with the other grabber and the child feeling as if he or she is being selected by not just one adult but by two, making the child feel all the more special.
There seems to be no consensus among the grabbers either. Given the veil of anonymity that descended shortly after the Sally Jessy Raphael interview23, there exist only nineteen verified interviewed grabbers, all within the first two months of the trend24. There is scarcely a mention of the significance or even reason for working in pairs. All grabbers seemed to act in unspoken agreement or with subconscious purpose. An (August 29, 1999) interview in the Chicago Sun Times with a grabbee known only as Colin contains the only mention this researcher could find in any of the published materials on grabbing25:
“At first, my lover and I just thought it was a neat idea. You know, sort of sprucing a kid up without any of the leftover responsibility. All of the good, none of the bad. Like being a grandparent for a day. But then it just sort of took on a life of its own. It was kind of an unspoken thing between the two of us that we never mentioned and that we never talked about with anyone else until one day we saw this seven-or eight-year-old girl hopping over cracks in the sidewalk. And her hair was all ratty and her jacket was frayed, but she was having a good old time leaping over cracks. There was just this sort of feeling between me and my lover, and we grabbed her. We took her to the mall, bought her this Bugs Bunny bomber jacket that she loved and some patent leather shoes she picked out. We took her to Chinese and taught her how to use chopsticks. Then we took her back. This was before the Fendi became popular, but it turned out no one was looking for her anyway. I’ve no idea what happened to that girl, and to be honest, my lover and I don’t really talk about it. Just sort of think of it and smile together, you know?’
Colin’s remarks suggest a happy-go-lucky conspiracy, a kind of benevolent coup that one person wouldn’t have the guts to do without another to egg him on. The couples26came upon the idea and it blossomed at the urging of both. This would explain the ‘euphoric’ atmosphere so many grabbees note, feeling the thrill of the danger and rule-breaking of it all. Unfortunately, given the anonymity that has remained in place for the last 15 plus years, all of this tantalizing speculation will have to remain just that.
‘A Sweepstakes Appeal’
‘I remember there was this air of excitement hanging around the neighborhood and especially the school. We’d all seen groomgrabbing talked about on TV and the web, and everyone was coming up with reasons why it would or wouldn’t happen in Monmouth27. People were saying it was too small. Other people were saying that’s exactly why someone would be grabbed from Monmouth, because most of the grabs were happening in small towns. You know, it’s like when there’s a super huge Powerball Jackpot, like that one last year that got up to two billion? Everyone talks about it, everyone wants it, nobody really thinks anybody will, but everybody secretly hopes28.’
Elizabeth Bopp-Twernig,
Grabbed aged seven in 2000
Bopp-Twernig mentions an aspect of groomgrabbing also discussed by Blandershot-Fields in the UHH study. She (Blandershot-Fields) writes that as the trend spread and the months passed, groomgrabbing began to take on ‘a sweepstakes appeal. The grabbings came, in a surprisingly short amount of time, to be regarded as a prize, a luck of the draw windfall which anyone’s child could win.’ Anyone else’s child, that is. According to an Us-People sidebar feature at the time, parents tended to preface any comment about groomgrabbing with something along the lines of ‘Well, 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 Alaska
