Burke in My Bedroom
I can feel him standing over my shoulder as I type this. Older Burke—29-year-old Burke—who sat across from Dr. Phil during an interview in 2016. Previously, he’d been the only Ramsey not publicly interviewed after his younger sister, JonBenet, was killed. He had lived in silence for 20 years. Burke and JonBenet metamorphosed into ghosts the morning of December 26, 1996. In the interview, Burke called it the 20 year anniversary of her death.
He smiled when he said it.
Specialists in tweed blazers later remarked that it was a nervous smile: a byproduct of Burke’s lack of social interaction while growing up in solitude, as his parents hid him from the press.
29-year-old Burke lurks in the far corner of my bedroom when the lights are out and I’m in bed, wedged between IKEA pillows. I pull the comforter up past my nose in an attempt to remain unseen. Each breath is more shallow than the last; if you don’t move he won’t see you. It’s been a long while since I’ve resorted to that logic. As a child, I used to hide beneath layers and layers of protective blankets, sweating as I counted down the hours until I was saved by the break of dawn.
During the investigation, psychologists sat with young Burke and inquired about his relationship with his sister. They continued to prod him and eventually asked about the night of her murder: the broken window leading to the basement, the flashlight that was used to crack open her skull, how it felt to be the older brother of a pageant tour celebrity. He was restless in his chair to begin with. Now, he began to fold in on himself as if the secret resided in his gut. He sat barefoot, with his knees inching closer to his chest, and watched his hands intently as they thumb-wrestled.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but I’m woken up by an iPhone that might as well be a screaming baby or a police siren. I’m quick to shut it up and get in the shower. I lather soap over my skin while my hair marinates in conditioner. I hinge back and tilt the crown of my head under the hot water stream. I skip my skin care routine entirely, knowing it will inevitably obstruct my vision. The pimples sprouting in the hollows of my cheeks will live to see another day. My eyes are peeled open in Clockwork Orange fashion as I peek over the shower curtain to keep lookout. As steam thickens in the bathroom, I imagine young, restless Burke, watching me as keenly as he watched his hands that day with the psychologist.
I Wouldn’t Want to Marry a Murderer
I’m begging for a distraction to fuel my procrastination while working on a project in a dimly lit library. My unyielding craving is merely writer’s block in disguise. I look around the room in search of something that could amuse me.
Eventually, I surrender and refresh my Instagram feed again.
Nothing.
I wonder if JonBenet would have replaced Emma Stone in La La Land had she still been alive another 20 years.
I consider making a LinkedIn account.
I tap my feet with full awareness that I am irritating everyone around me.
I spot a student sitting across the room who looks remarkably like Burke. However, I’m not wearing my glasses and find it difficult to believe that Burke would either be in downtown Manhattan or dressed in a T-shirt from the latest Supreme drop.
I roll my eyes and flutter my lips, hopeful that my vexation will catalyze some grand idea that will prove to my professor that I’m not “such a ditz.”
It doesn’t.
Finally, like an answer to my prayers, I get a text message from my boyfriend:
“I need to talk to you later.”
“What do you mean? Tell me now,” I reply.
“Don’t be worried. It’s not about us… it’s about my family.”
My boyfriend is a murderer.
My boyfriend is a murderer.
…is what I’m wanting to say as unintelligible gibberish comes sputtering from my mouth, piercing the silence of the library.
My boyfriend is a murderer and his family has taken extreme measures to protect him. My boyfriend is a murderer and his mother wrote a very detailed, three-page long ransom note to eliminate any suspicion that he is guilty. My boyfriend is a murderer and one day he simply snapped after years of steeping in boiling hot resentment.
Now, the Burke doppelgänger is looking at me with disdain (along with many other apparently diligent students sitting nearby; one of them goes so far as to “shhh” me, but I pick up my boyfriend’s call anyway).
“I have two families,” he confesses.
Laughter surfaces from the depths of my belly. My boyfriend, on the other hand, remains silent. His voice sounds hollow, like he is straining to speak through a tightness in his throat. He’d been anticipating this conversation for months, and yet I can’t seem to relinquish my deranged laughter. I feed him a lukewarm apology using an imaginary, impending deadline as an excuse to hang up. I sit at my desk in the library, defeated by guilt, and pretend to not feel glares coming at me from all directions. Burke has permeated my subconscious—filling up space in my brain like gas particles endlessly spreading to occupy their container. He doesn’t need a flashlight to break into my head.
JonBenet and Her Final Act
Candy canes lined the driveway leading up to the Ramsey mansion, as if they were strategically planted by elves and grew every winter from the snow-laden ground. Bright yellow Christmas lights hung from the roof, mocking the stars in the sky. On the front lawn, a decorative Santa Claus rode off in his sleigh like he, too, was fleeing a crime scene.
Just as JonBenet was the poster child for talent and beauty, the Ramsey family exuded the ideals of American society. John and Patsy Ramsey had a happy marriage and two darling children: one boy and one girl, of course. They were concurrently admired and envied by their neighbors in Boulder, Colorado. John created a computer company in the 1980s, while Patsy built her own slice of the American Dream: The mother of the starlet, a retired pageant queen herself, hosting extravagant dinner parties in her three-story mansion, so impeccable it could have been mistaken for a set in Hollywood’s Universal Studios, like that of Home Alone or The Parent Trap.
Six-year-old superstar JonBenet was found dead in the basement of that home.
“Murder of a Little Beauty,” People magazine plastered across their cover.
The American Dream was sealed into a casket and buried deep below the ground.
The candy cane-lined, Christmas light-trimmed utopia—now tainted by bloodshed and suspicion.
Little JonBenet was a walking caricature of the American elite. She’d strut across stage with a smile that suggested she had never been told “No” in her lifetime. She stepped into the spotlight with the intention to win. JonBenet was success. But in her final act, with a fracture in her skull and bruises around her neck, the beauty queen’s murder revealed what was always masked by performance.
Theories of who could have committed such a heinous crime multiplied: it was her brother; it was her parents; it was the Santa Claus they had hired for the Christmas party the night before; it was an obsessed fan who was sick of watching her from the back row; it was a pedophile who was involved in Boulder’s child sex-slave ring. In time, each of these suspects was found innocent. Yet, the investigation of her death excavated discoveries about the Ramsey family, and the Boulder community as a whole, that cracked their pristine exteriors. The bloodstained truths of the white, upper middle class glowed under the UV light of JonBenet’s crime scene.
Shirley Temple, You’re My Hero
“As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right,” President Roosevelt proclaimed. “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.”
In her tap shoes, Shirley Temple swept the nation and became a curly-haired vision of hope. Her Mary Janes sparkled to match her eyes. She saved Twentieth Century Fox from financial bankruptcy, and saved Americans from abandoning their last morsel of faith in the American Dream.
Watching video compilations of some of Temple’s greatest performances, I find myself longing to live in an era where I could trade in a nickel and dime for two hours of Shirley screen time. I am victim to her hypnosis. Her shuffling feet were like wands waved to make America forget Black Tuesday and bread lines.
If a comet came plummeting toward Earth, annihilating all of humanity (or, say, in year 2024, when the irreversible damage of climate change makes the planet inhabitable), and the only evidence of American culture was Shirley Temple’s filmography, one would think we were quite lavish people. In her on-screen performance of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” from the blockbuster film Bright Eyes, Temple sings, “I’ve thrown away my toys, even my drum and trains.” She continues, “On the Good Ship Lollipop/It’s a sweet trip to a candy shop/Where bonbons play/On the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay.” Temple wore a plaid mini dress that exposed her fleshy thighs. Her face round and topped with signature curls. I imagine her on set, taking her time choosing between vanilla or chocolate cupcakes, and eventually settling for both.
Outside the perimeter of Twentieth Century Fox studios, however, not many six-year-olds had toys, never mind toys to throw away, and they’d be waiting for a ticket to Peppermint Bay that would never come.
Dimples, whiteness, and glowing skin—together, a powerful weapon used to combat the Great Depression. Shirley Temple created what JonBenet’s death destroyed.
At six years old, Temple developed a character that tended to the needs and desires of the American people during a time of extreme impoverishment. Temple gave Americans the opportunity to get their fix of youth, beauty, and whiteness. On the hierarchy of needs, Shirley Temple climbed above anything welfare could buy.
*Exit Stage Right*
Shirley Temple lived on to become United States Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and served as Chief of Protocol of the United States. Her career in film diminished as she grew out of her gingham pinafores. Her later work with the UN often goes unnoticed, and her red ringlets are eternally bonded to her name.
American pop culture quickly discarded the child star after she shed her baby fat. The audience shifted their focus when they could no longer fetishize Shirley Temple. The sight of a grown woman didn’t evoke the same hope that her previously plump character did. As she became more and more educated, more and more proactive, she became less and less useful as a vessel for the American Dream. Temple was no longer a blank slate onto which society could project their dreams of prosperity.
Although she didn’t die before reaching adolescence, like JonBenet, Temple is also preserved in her youth. People across the U.S. were infatuated with the two child stars; the American people were seduced by their innocence, tempted by their purity. Their characters were collections of the unnatural: fluorescent smiles; bows; costumes; touched and re-touched hair; makeup that would be foreign to many other girls their age. To believe in them is to believe in what doesn’t actually exist. In their small, white bodies, these girls were made to be portals to paradise for those who are desperate to escape brutal realities.
Watermelons, Skull Replicas, and Cheap Wigs
In the CBS special, “In the Case of: JonBenet Ramsey,” a replica of a human skull rests on a table in a laboratory. It’s blanketed by a ratty blonde wig that is in desperate need of a brush. A 10-year-old volunteer is brought in to reenact the blunt force trauma to JonBenet’s skull. The child steadies his focus when asked to strike the dummy. Holding the flashlight tightly in his grip, he pauses for a moment. When he’s ready for the blow, he swings his arm all the way around to gain momentum, like a Little League pitcher. The sound of the flashlight whacking the head echoes. A sound that will stay with me, tucked away in the folds of my brain. The wig is stripped from the skull to reveal a fracture nearly identical to JonBenet’s.
One by one, boys dressed in transparent ponchos and protective glasses attack watermelons with flashlights in the Netflix Original, “Casting JonBenet.” The first boy to appear on screen uses two hands to repeatedly beat his watermelon. Bang bang bang bang bang. His lips start to curl in and his teeth are exposed. He struggles to follow the melon as it starts rolling away. Finally, it falls off the table and escapes JonBenet’s fate. The next boy is so eager to have at it that he nearly hits the hand of the man who is placing the watermelon in front of him. I wince at the idea of a tragic misstep. He is more successful than the last, eventually getting the watermelon to ooze seedy guts. Even then, he continues to dismember it. When the watermelon is mangled to his liking, he grins, exposing silver and blue braces. One, two, three—the last boy breaks the watermelon in half so quickly. Who’s child is this? On the third blow, it explodes like a piñata. Red and green fly into the air. The little boy reaches out and puts a piece of the juicy fruit into his mouth. I will never be the same.
Burke’s Back
Burke lurks in the far corner of my bedroom when the lights are out and I’m in bed, wedged between my IKEA pillows. In time, I’ll be able to fall asleep without trying to camouflage with the comforters. Eventually, I’ll be able to bathe without peering past the shower curtain. He’ll always reside in the folds of my brain, with the echoes of those boys smashing watermelons.
My life will resume as it was… But Burke lives in my bedroom, and JonBenet’s award-winning smile was forced, and Shirley Temple served as a distraction while the American government scrambled to recover the economy. Each idea is more arbitrary than the last, in terms of my day-to-day life, and yet they haunt me. They are microscopic viruses that are always there, despite my not being able to see or feel them. Once in a while, the virus will break out and I will be painfully reminded of its existence. Otherwise, I’ll habitually mold into the structures of society and fall victim to its predisposed ideals. The American Dream is stained and tainted and bloody. And, when you know it, it haunts you.