Sunday, July 12, 2009

Growing Up in a Mean Area

The area where I grew up had a good share of characters. I expect I was one of them, at least in the eyes of others. But some of those people were prime examples of why cousins (and siblings) should not marry and have children.

There were plenty of "odd" characters even in my class, but the older classes were filled with them. And what made things bad was that, the odder a person was, the more likely they were to be a "tough".

My brother likes to tell of how one monster of a boy in his class used to sit in the back of the room in math class picking at the wall. Now this boy would have been about sixteen years old. The walls were plaster walls and not sheet rock. In September, when school began, there was a small, pencil-sized hole in the wall. The boy (I'll call him Dorf) began picking at the plaster. The math teacher would yell at him and he would quit, only to start again later. By the time the school year ended Dorf had picked a hole large enough to drive a golf cart through. The school wasn't big on repairs in those days.

The toughs in the are really were tough. When they had parties which got out of hand the police would come in force. And the toughs were stupid enough to fight. Most people were kind of terrified of them. I was. I was only six. But that was no defense against these guys.

I remember getting on the bus late to go home one day. That was always a problem because it meant finding a place to sit would not be easy. I would have to rely on the kindness of others, and there just weren't that many kind people on that bus. There was only one seat with room. Chris's cousin, Dale, had the window, and a seventeen-year-old who had wrecked his car was next to him. They didn't want me to sit with them. I didn't want to.

But the bus driver got mad and ordered me to sit there. The tough let me, but only for a short while. Then he knocked me to the floor. Dale thought it was funny, and the tough, having an audience, knocked me around until enough other students had got off so I could sit somewhere else.

I tried sitting on the floor, but the driver would yell at me. He didn't yell at the tough. He was an old man and was probably scared of the tough. So, to make himself feel better, he yelled at me. So I got pushed around by a nut case ten or eleven years my senior, and yelled at by an adult who should have been looking out for me. At times, it was a nasty area to grow up in.

The boy across the street, Bob, was odd, but he wasn't a tough. What he liked to do was sit in his car, in the driveway, and rev his engine for hours at a time. I don't know what he was doing. Pretending to race, or something. Guess it was better than him actually going out on the roads, but it was annoying. I remember his dad was always in the garage welding. He never sold anything, or brought it anywhere. He just - welded.

Although I was big, and although I was strong, I was still a favorite target for the toughs. They were older, bigger, and stronger. And I was not an aggressive little guy. I liked to have fun. I made fun of things. Any things. Including toughs. They didn't think it was funny. Sometimes I would be making fun of them while they were in the process if inflicting pain. I guess that explains the t-shirt my siblings bought me for my birthday one year. It had a graphic on the chest: A rat about to be killed by an eagle. The rat had it's paw in the air - middle finger extended. The caption was: Last Great Act of Defiance. I was known from my early years as a boy who would accept all kinds of suffering - just to prove a point.

As I aged, some of the more clever toughs abandoned their mistreatment of me. They recognized something I had yet to realize myself. I was as big as them now. And stronger than most.

It would take a moment of fear which would put an end to the physical torments I endured. I wasn't paying attention and got myself cornered. Angry with myself, I took it out on my attackers. They would continue to taunt me and call me awful names, but the physical stuff was done.

In time, they all graduated. (I expect the teachers gave them passing grades just to keep them moving and get them out the door.) By the time I was a Freshman, it was all over. No one who wasn't at least four years older than me would try my size and strength. They knew I was afraid of them, but they weren't willing to risk their own bodies.

Every so often I wonder what happened to these people. So cruel as kids, did they carry that over into adulthood? Probably. Or did they actually grow up and learn how to leave people alone? That's kind of my motto in life. Leave people alone.

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