IT HAPPENED:

BY JENNY ZHANG
AUTHOR PORTRAIT BY RICHARD KERN

I met John Mark Karr one summer in Paris when I was 18. I had a grant from school to write short stories set in France. Never did it, of course, but who cares! I was too busy making friends with a self-professed killer/alleged pedophile and letting him stroke my hair and call me creepy pet names without objecting.

John had been staying for free in the bookstore Shakespeare & Co., and right from the start, I could tell he was a pariah. Most of the other travelers and writers living in the bookstore stayed clear of him, and some schemed to kick him out. I dropped by in the afternoons, at first, to try and flirt with the Scandinavian boy, Nels, who had walked on fire. I gave up on that pretty quickly and became BFF with John instead.

John was funny. He was always sweating, but somehow the beads of sweat stopped just short of his eyebrows and dotted his forehead like a second hairline. He had red-rimmed eyes. I don’t remember him ever blinking.

He used to wait for me by the Henry Miller section of the fiction aisle every night. He was always dressed in ratty clothes that were a few sizes too big. He looked like someone’s younger brother—you know, the one who jacked off to really fucked-up porn, got pushed into lockers at school, and wrote ten-page-long love letters to girls who laughed hysterically when the other boys called him a “dickless, nutless fag.”

He sat on this one low footstool and told me stories about being a nanny. It was weird looking down at him, a 40-year-old man talking about giving little boys and girls long, leisurely baths. “I just love being around kids,” he said.

Often, he would obliquely allude to how he had been forced to leave Germany and Austria and how he was legally barred from entering either of those countries because of the “incident.” Whenever the “incident” came up, his entire face would darken, and he would say, “She [the children’s mother] had it all wrong. I never meant to hurt them. I did it out of love.” His anger always seemed to me slightly artificial, elaborately constructed to give himself a sense of depth and elevated drama. “She had no idea what love was. If she did, she wouldn’t have treated me that way. She was a sick woman. She made up sick lies and pinned them on me.”

Photo by Reuters

I had learned the technique of laughing at the disturbing things that way-older guys who wanted to fuck me and then cry in my arms said to me early on in my life, and I used it often with John. I would slap my knees and laugh, Oh you. You and your sweetly deranged, made-up stories about fleeing Germany because you were molesting small children. What’ll you come up with next?

He liked me because I reminded him of an eight-year-old German girl named Jenny who he used to nanny for. He called me his sweet little Jenny and busted a nut every time I showed up to the bookstore in pigtails.

He worried constantly about me and warned me against the perverts who lurked on every corner, waiting for me to cross the street so that they could pounce on me, whip out their dicks, and spray a load on my face.

“You have to be careful. You’re my sweet little girl, and John can’t let anything happen to you. You can’t trust anyone, Jenny. No one.” I was happy with the attention he gave me. I purposefully made my voice higher and wore my skirts shorter. The more we spoke, the more frequently he would refer to himself in the third person.

“Jenny?”

“Yes?”

“John would like to ask for your permission to let him walk you to the metro stop tonight.”

“OK, sure.”

“And may John hold his sweet little girl’s hand the entire way?”

“Yeah, why not.”

It became a routine. John walked me every night to the metro stop, and he held my hand the way I used to hold my mother’s hand, limp but needy.

He cried on my last night in Paris. He wrote his email address down for me in neat, careful handwriting. I can’t remember if he was John Mark Karr back then. Maybe he was just John. It’s hard to remember these things now.

When I came home to New York, I immediately found an email from John with a photo attached. It was a huge close-up of himself—so big that I had to scroll down to see his entire face. He looked nerve-racked in the photo. His jowls sagged, and he had a pained smile, teeth showing. You could count the beads of sweat on his face like you could count the zits on your 14-year-old postpubescent former self. He wrote me something to the extent of, “John was so happy to meet his sweet little Jenny in Paris this summer. Please don’t forget John, or he will be so sad to never hear from his sweet little girl again.”

I immediately forwarded the email and photo to my boyfriend at the time with the subject header “HAHAHAHAHA look at this creep who wanted to pedophile me all summer,” thinking if that didn’t scare him off from wanting to be my boyfriend, I didn’t know what in the world would.

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