That Wondrous Time I Got Beat Up

Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept to himself. He was about as athletically astute as I was, not to be mean about it. When he kicked the ball out of bounds that day, he did so with the flailing panache of a mime in overdrive. Tony gave it his absolute all, his foot barely grazing the ball, his unimpeded leg flying upward then at an ungodly angle. For one brief, shining moment he looked like a Rockette. His pronounced wheeze of effort and wildly windmilling arms completed the picture. As Tony settled into his dejection and embarrassment, another little guy on his team – a repulsive parasitic bully I’ll call Jerry, ran up to Tony and kicked him in the ass so hard it lifted Tony’s feet
off the ground. 

“HEY!!!” I was not a brave avenger sent by the gods to protect the defenseless. I was one of the defenseless. I was Captain of the Defenseless. But when the little jackass Jerry kicked Tony with all his angry strength, I saw red. Where did this come from? I think I know. 

Cheekbones and Haughty Forehead

In third grade at Clarke Elementary in Cheyenne, Mrs. Petrie asked us all to bring in the recipe of our favorite treat. She would mimeograph the pages and make us all cookbooks of our classmates’ favorite foods. Is that what a book is? It seemed like a miracle. First our recipes were shared around the class. We all sniffed the xeroxes and got to reading.

I’d brought our Angel Food Cake recipe. My tastes today still run to the fluffy and bland. A kid in my class named Michael – a penurious farm kid from just out of town – brought in a recipe for “Breakfast Cookies.” Michael was my quiet buddy with always-mussed hair and a varyingly worried expression. He wore the same checkered shirt every day, the hem shiny and frayed with wear. The cuffs on his oversized jeans came halfway back up his shins. 

In the lunch line we waited in blanched sunlight and a girl in my class named Lisa told Michael that of all the ink-clumped mimeographed recipes shared through our weekend assignment, his was the worst. “We tried your Breakfast Cookies and they were awful.” Tony looked down and away, horrified. Her macabre attack was an air horn in a stilled chapel. My scalding blood sprayed into my head and I saw stars. I remember this. Someone can say that?! 

I looked sideways at Tony, his eyes brimming, and I crushed my beige circular milk ticket in my shaking right hand. Passerby would have seen a stick figure with a lazy eye and crewcut, seizing up. I was just about paralyzed with hatred. It made me lightheaded with rage rage rage helpless helpless unliberated rage. It all burst inside me very suddenly, a painfully concealed firework. Lisa’s beribboned hair and self-satisfied little face with its cheekbones and haughty forehead – if she’d taken a shot at my mom’s Angel Food Cake recipe at that moment I would’ve squealed like a fruit bat and lunged. I trace a lot of my deeply buried anger to that episode with Michael and Lisa. 

As for justice – no. Tony would never know what my instincts on his behalf cost me, and would later taunt me for my crummy grades in German. I almost had to laugh. The soccer thing with Tony and Jerry would disabuse me of the notion that a crooked universe invariably self-corrects. Even if it does, the three billion years the organic process takes to majestically unfold is no help in the immediate aftermath of poor decision-making. 

A Hello to Arms

I yelled reflexively at Jerry, Tony scurried away, and two big guys, Bill and Sandy, suddenly appeared like djinns on either side of the weasel-faced little Caesar; bodyguards in a mob movie. A feral punishment was headed my way as inexorably as a plummeting grand piano. “Huh,” I chirped. “Are these your bodyguards?” I didn’t offer it as a challenge. I was numbly waving my antennae around, a stunned shrimp staring through his stupid eyestalks at the approaching cuttlefish.

“Yeah, we’ll see you later,” Jerry said. The three of them turned and walked away. My predicament slowly emerged from the murk of my pea brain with a commiserating grimace. “What’re we gonna do, Jeff?” My asymmetric puff of Brillo hair tried to stand on end and couldn’t. 

Last class of the day was Geography with Mr. Clements. He was a tall, fast-talking guy with close-cropped blond hair and a mouth like a fish, through which he would sometimes offer indecipherable exclamations. I still remember on the first day of class he’d yelled pedantically “Fifty percent just don’t! Get! The message!” A non sequitur that hangs in the mudroom of my memory – a poster I can’t take down.

After Geography, I went down to the bike racks and Jerry, Bill, and Sandy were there by my bike, a blue Raleigh ten-speed. Jerry had his little paws clamped on it. I unlocked it and tried to pull it away from him. He was glued to it like a lamprey, and after two timid tugs I wrenched at it in exasperation. Then came the wonder – a beige blur that landed on my right cheekbone and felt like a baseball wrapped in a thin layer of dough. Hunhh! Was that … was that a POW! Holy cow! Am I being POW! POW POW! I was being punched in the face like in the movies! But there was no audible crack of fist meeting face, like on Gunsmoke or Bonanza. It sounded like someone hitting a couch cushion with a tennis shoe. The sense of brute reality almost POW POW! POW! 

There was something sanctifying about it. To this day I wonder if I was wearing a half-smile of revelation that Jerry mistook for insolence. I didn’t ask. The next day I walked into my math class (on whose teacher I had a mad crush) with a cheek so swollen I could see it with my right eye. A tiny crystal of anger lodged in my clockworks then and began to grow and vibrate with a recognizable and nourishing frequency.

Rage at All the Swaggering Jerks who Impugn our Breakfast Cookies! 

That day in third grade I had clapped back at Lisa, to little effect. “Well-Lisa-we-tried-your-cake-and-it-was-terrible!” I’d bleated before I knew I was saying it. “Ha ha ha!” she brayed triumphantly. I still see her head thrown back, her fists on hips like Pippi Longstocking. “My recipe wasn’t for cake, liar!”