Known in the neighborhood as Crazy John, he at least had the courtesy to ask before the chase ensued whether I wanted it now or later, my face torn off, that is. I always answered him with a scream and a run as if he were some horror movie monster, and I think we both played into the drama. Really how could someone tear a face off in broad daylight and get away with it, yet be unable to capture the face in the first place? Of course, I didn’t think about this logic as he came after me like a madman. When the rush of adrenaline subsided, I always celebrated my escape. Crazy John terrorized me for an entire summer and several more months. The ordeal made me realize I wasn’t such a bad runner.
One day our chase ended up right in front of Steven’s house. It was heading right for the highway and who knows what would’ve happened if I had tried to dodge the speeding cars and trucks. Steven stepped out in front of us. He pushed me to the side and motioned John to stop. John went right for him talking smack in his face, but Steven didn’t back down to the older kid. He returned the lip service and then all of a sudden the two of them were going punch for punch. Steven began to double up. For every hit John landed, Steven scored two. John’s mouth was gushing and Steven’s nose was running with red. John attempted to end it all by slamming Steven’s head into the telephone pole in front of his own house. Steven stopped right in his tracks, grabbed the back of John’s hair, and rammed his face into the pole, once, twice, three times, and one final fourth grand slam that turned John around and sent him walking home. Steven shouted at him as he walked away,
“Don’t mess with him again.”
Steven gave me a thumbs up, wiped the blood from his nose with his wrist, and walked right into his house. No one had fallen. Both were a bloody mess. But I and several on-lookers who had gathered from the surrounding houses all knew Crazy John had been defeated, and he had been beaten by a kid three years younger than him. John never chased me again.
$$$
One other kid had bullied me around a little— just for kicks. Paul Roma demanded I do push ups and run in circles, and I obliged. I think he had seen too many military movies. I did the pushups laughing, which angered him more. I enjoyed the exercise. It wasn’t until he threatened to meet me out after school that I became concerned. That day I exited a different door and took a different way home. Outsmart the hunter. I can remember the panic, the rush as I escaped out the other side of the building, and it reminded me of bad dreams I had had of Hulk Hogan in the character of Thunderlips chasing me through the neighborhood and busting down every door I hid behind.
On one occasion, Paul’s older sister even got in on it. I remember looking out the door and seeing Marie waiting outside the school clenching her fists. Once again, I found a different exit. With a big Italian family, I feared he had enough sisters and brothers to block every entrance of the school if he wanted.
One day he came to school with a cast on his arm. He had fallen and broken it. The next day I got there early and left a Mauled Paul Garbage Pail Kid card on his desk. Paul arrived and became enraged when he saw the trading card with a beat up kid who bore his name. He slapped the hard cast into the palm of his other hand threatening to get whoever it was that left the card. This was met with laughter from most of the kids in the room.
We never did fight. He didn’t scare me the way Crazy John had. Paul’s pursuit was more of a game to me. In a way, I antagonized him and we bickered our way into a kind of friendship.
I compared Paul’s aggression to a kind of initiation that made me one of the boys. Paul would become one of the greatest friends a person could ever have— a life saver who’d take the shirt off his back for you or leave his door open when you had nowhere to go.
Paul warmed up to me even more once Steven entered the picture. We all lived on Venice Street in our town on the south shore. Steven’s house was the first one on the block, a beat up old brick house. Paul’s house was down toward the end near the water awkwardly plopped on a small plot of land and was among the biggest in the area. And I lived somewhere in the middle in the upstairs apartment of a brick house with a sloped driveway.
Steven and Paul took a liking to each other and started to spend time together. Paul ended up to be a pretty cool kid with all kinds of interests. He played the drums, he liked good rock music, and he drew awesome illustrations. The three of us started to hang out and it was all good times from there on. Our clan was growing.
7
AS PAUL AND STEVEN got to know each other better, I ducked out for a while with a quieter friend named Judd Reed. He wore smart looking glasses and looked like the kind of kid that would go on to build rockets. He was the spelling bee champ, who aced his tests and always had an answer. I appreciated his intellect and the break from the wildness of the other kids, though I have no recollection of how we even became friends. Every week for about six months, I went over to Judd’s house where we played Transformers and talked about crazy space-age science fantasies. We also went to the movies on the weekend. It was good innocent kid fun.
Then something snapped in me one day at the end of fifth grade. Suddenly one day I didn’t go to his house like I usually did. I just didn’t feel like it. I strangely knew there was another road I had to take. In a sense, I knew Judd was going somewhere different too. It wasn’t that he was too good for me or me too good for him; I just knew we were changing.
It was always me going to his house. His mother probably didn’t trust my environment because he never came over. She must’ve known something. This one-sidedness helped me justify my abandonment of a best friend. I could tell Judd was hurt by my sudden estrangement. I couldn’t help it though. Maybe I was just one of those wild ones like everyone else.
Judd was so far ahead of his time and didn’t really belong in that rotten neighborhood. His parents knew it and pulled him out of public school after sixth grade. For the remainder of high school, Judd commuted on a train to the city to a special school for the gifted. At least two hours a day were spent on his commute with all those grown adults going to work in Manhattan. Two hours of childhood a day, gone. But at least he got out of our town.
Sixth grade for me would be a path Judd wouldn’t and couldn’t relate to. Nor would his mother appreciate it. I was coming out of my shell and trouble comes along with that.
My new spiked haircut was really a part of this second coming. I was sick of my moppy mess. I looked around and saw others gelling and spiking their hair back. So I went to the barber and for the first time I knew what I wanted.
“Give me a spiked haircut. You know, the Billy Idol Rebel Yell look,” I told the man.
“I know it well,” the man said.
I walked out of the shop a new kid. I went back to school the next day and kids starting talking to me instantly. It was shallow, but looks were important. A simple haircut gave me a chance to become someone new, someone confident after several years being an outsider.
$$$
In the first week of sixth grade, a nasty kid named Sean Norris said some rotten things to a pretty girl named Sue, whom all the boys pined over, myself included. I went over to his lunch table and demanded he go apologize to her. He said no, ignored me, and went back to eating his lunch. It wasn’t like me to erupt but that was it— I slammed his face right into his lunch tray. Sean got up crying with tater tots in his eyes, peas and rice in his nose, and ketchup smeared all over his face like blood. He ran out of the room, and I was dragged out to sign the “black book” in the principal’s office. When we got into trouble we were forced to sign the “black book” which was a journal book with a list of names that probably read back as far as the 50s of all the worst kids that ever passed through that town. Where were all those names now?
I don’t regret it though. This same kid would go on to sodomize a younger boy just a couple of years later. Sean went away somewhere upstate for that one and probably