We moved to a suburb of Seattle when I was little. The area was full of rising young families like ours. Within 20 years, the city would have the highest per-capita income in Washington state, higher than Seattle. Our house was surrounded by a circle of houses/families, snuggled inside like a shameful secret the other houses were conspiring to hide.
Before our house was built, the kids in the surrounding houses had cooked up the plan that they’d build a park in the empty lot. Kids build a park? Why not fly to the moon, raise the dead?
Remember, at that age one easily passed between the evanescent seam separating reality from make-believe. A kid comes upon a discarded refrigerator box. Reflexively, he clambers in—no, boards the vessel. No, assumes command at the helm. “Chart a course for the Andromeda system, Mr. Peters!” Multicolored medals from previous battles adorn his breast and his bearing is noble, like a jungle cat. Fear the chin!
Then we moved in, destroyed the prospect of the kid-built park, and instantly became pariahs. They’d never forgive us.
Except they all did and we became best buds—except this one older girl. She hated our guts—my guts. My guts. It got so I‘d always find a way home that didn’t pass by her house—which was hard, as she was my next-door neighbor.
Consequently, I carried fear around in my back pocket and I’d pull it out and turn it over and over in my sweaty mitts if I sensed her presence. If I’d see her in her front yard, I’d reroute myself and come home around the back side.
She’d never join all the kids when we’d get together in the Barkers’ backyard for Kick the Can or War or some other game. So, I got, you know, the last laugh.
Did she watch us play from her darkened room? Had she only fantasized that she had been part of the gang, part of the Park Scheme, watching from afar? Maybe she decided to hate me because she thought it would give her entrée to the gang.
Maybe bullies have reasons.
Consider this one kid—his family moved into our cluster of houses but remained standoffish. They weren’t a good fit for this upwardly mobile neighborhood.
For one thing, they were a blended family—adulterated.
Additionally, there were more cars than garage spaces so the extra cars were parked on the lawn.
If there had been a Neighborhood Association, they no doubt would have convened to discuss What About These . . . Newcomers?
Neighborhood scuttlebutt had it that the kid had inebriated himself by drinking too much cough syrup. One night when we were playing Kick the Can or something in the Barker’s backyard, one of our regulars came through the fence with this lanky kid in tow.
“Hey, it’s the Stoned Kid!” I called out. “Hey, Cherry Flavor!” I’ve always had a way with words.
A week or two later, I was riding my bike to the community pool, when the Stoned Kid and a compatriot who looked like a poster child for the Aryan Youth League—donate today!—confronted me at the bottom of the hill. He grabbed the swooping handlebars of my Stingray and held me fast. As he and the Buzzcut Nazi threatened and intimidated me, he would shake my bike to make it clear he was in control.
“Hey, kid, who said you could ride your bike here?” the Stoned Kid snarled.
“Yeah—faggot!” Buzzcut said.
“See that? That’s my house—and you can’t ride here!”
“Yeah!”
“I-I-I uh,” I offered, stuttering in time with my quaking heart.
“I should kick your ass! And you couldn’t do a damn thing about it, you wimp.”
“Yeah!”
“I think I will kick your ass—right now!”
“No, please,” I said, whimpering like a faggot, for all I knew. Good God! Why not piss your pants? “I’m just going to the pool!”
Anyone else—everyone else—wouldn’t have stood for the humiliation. Perhaps swing your bike’s tire pump in this face. The club of justice! However, I was the lone faggot in the galaxy, apparently, whatever that was—the faggot, that is. I knew what the galaxy was. It was where Lost In Space was filmed.
When they felt they had sufficiently humiliated me by asserting their dominance, they let me pass, but The Message had been delivered: I had an Enemy—another Enemy. Someone was Out To Get Me. First the older girl, now this deviant.
I’d always take the long way around to the pool rather than pass by his house. But I always knew he was there. Home was safe because you had walls but going out into the neighborhood was a risk always. One took one’s chances.
So I lived my childhood suffering in the elevator fart stink of fear, unable to move, expecting the worst.
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Maybe bullies have reasons
Thanks for writing this. I have my own version of your story. I grew up on the side of Seattle's Beacon Hill in the Catholic neighborhood just above George Town and had many experiences as the kid on the outside. Bullied often. Found routes to and from home that avoided the bullies, just like you. Often in fights that never ended well for me. I think I was twelve when I started boxing at the Y. I don't remember ever having a fight again. My boxing career didn't last more than a few months, but I speculate that I might have seemed more confident and perhaps less of an easy mark.