Monsters & Bullies

Monsters & Bullies

As a preschooler I had to deal with a real life boogeyman.  There was a man (late teens - early 20's) with mongolism who lived directly across the street from us with his parents.  They mostly kept him in their house and they closely supervised him on walks around the neighborhood.  He would occasionally escape from the house and wander around unsupervised.  Someone had given him a bullwhip and practicing with it was the only outside activity that seemed to fully engage him.  One afternoon he ended up in the backyard of our next door neighbor for several hours smashing the side of their detached garage with his whip.  I was restricted to our side of the street and needed little encouragement to abide by this restriction.  After the bullwhip incident I would survey the area from inside our house before venturing outside, being sure to look out at least one window on each side.  His father was a truck driver who would occasionally park his truck (sans trailer) in the street in front of our house.  It had a particularly nasty looking fifth wheel (black and greasy) and I have always associated that with his son, even when I was driving trucks in the oilfields I would get chill bumps just looking at an exposed fifth wheel. 

My grandmother in Jeromesville had her own black and greasy monster in her basement.  It was a large Myers water pump (they had a well as there was no city water then) which sat at the back of a dark tunnel extending under her driveway.  Her basement was dark and scary,  and the man-size pump made it downright creepy.  If you ventured down there alone, you soon learned to be aware that the pump could spring into action without the slightest warning when the water pressure fell below a certain level.  This would send me tearing up the basement stairs at least as far as the landing,  where there was a door to the outside.  Eventually I learned to listen for the pump to turn off and then venture down to the basement.  This guaranteed a 15 minute interval to get down there, find what you needed, and get back;  unless someone flushed the toilet.

My preschool life in our old neighborhood was prudently restrictive.  I was not allowed to venture far from the house and would not have been comfortable doing so even if it was allowed.  Mrs. Brubaker (who I called "Baker") lived two houses down from us on the same side of the street, and often served as my babysitter.  Most of these times I went to her house and quite often on summer weekdays she was also babysitting her grandson Mike.  Mike was just two years older and we would pal around for entire days,  usually staying near her house or on the strip of sidewalk between her house and ours.   But the two of us together were more adventurous than either of us alone, and we began playing in the field behind our houses.  Then one day a group of five older boys (probably 11 or 12 years-old) invited us to go with them back into the woods.   The woods began about 25 yards from our lot line and were about 60 yards deep before they emerged on the cleared Duff farm property (in 1954 the site of Luray Lanes).   They took us to their fort in the middle of the woods and would not let us leave.  They tied us to trees and made believe that they were pirates and were going to torture us. 

Scut Farcus

A funny thing is that one of them looked just liked the bully in "A Christmas Story",  my jaw literally dropped the first time I saw that movie.   They kept us there for a long time, we were thoroughly terrified.   They untied me first and concentrated on Mike,  I was probably too little for it to be much fun.  Finally they untied him, swore us to secrecy, and told us to go home.  We would not have told anyway because we figured it would just get us into trouble for leaving our area.  After that experience, I paid attention to those stories parents tell kids about the possibility of being abducted by a stranger.   Mike and I were amazed at how little it took to go from a state of security to one of danger.  

Along the same lines was an incident several years later in the new neighborhood.  My friend Craig and I were playing together two blocks away from my house,  in a section of the subdivision that was just being developed and still had dirt roads.  Three older boys who we did not know approached us and grabbed me.  They sent Craig to get some money, they promised to release me if he brought back enough ransom.   Craig went away and a few minutes later my father appeared with Craig in tow.   My father was about as angry as I had ever seen him.   He appeared so unexpectedly that these idiots were frozen to the spot.  They profusely apologized and promised to not do anything like that again. 

The most divisive incident occurred early in our stay in the new neighborhood.  My friend Mike and I had gone exploring with Mike's next-door neighbor John.  John was a year older and very big for his age.  But the demographics of the neighborhood meant that he tended to hang around with kids a year of two younger.  He is in our home movies of my ninth birthday party (the last one I ever had),  the oldest of my invitees and someone who towers above the rest of us.  The day of the incident, the three of us wondered down to the new homes construction area of the subdivision and were having fun until John pulled out and opened his pocket knife.  Something I then said set him off.  He grabbed the front of my shirt and poked a hole in it with his knife.  Although this crossed the boundary of fun I didn't feel especially threatened at the time, I didn't believe he would actually stab me.   We finished playing and walked home together.   It was nothing I was going to mention to my parents until my mother saw my shirt and went ballistic.  I never lied and was not going to start with this incident, particularly since the idiot had left impossible to conceal traces of his handiwork.   When my father got home the incident was escalated, with all three families meeting at John's house.  There was no dispute as to the facts.  I was surprised by how upset my parents were and puzzled by how defensive John's parents were.  His parents took the knife away and we were forbidden to play together, much harder on John because he had fewer options.   My father always believed that their defensiveness came from being first generation Americans who viewed any dispute as a persecution.  John's sister had taught me to ride a bicycle and was upset with me for getting John in trouble.  I eventually convinced her that John had done something I simply could not conceal and that I was shocked at how the situation had escalated, but our relationship never returned to where it had been before the incident.  Several years later John and I would walk home from football practice together, but we were always careful that neither set of parents saw us.

My parents enrolled me in a YMCA learn-to-swim class when I was roughly eight.  It was not a success and I came to view this pool (amazingly still around) as a monster.  A few years later after my younger brother had learned to swim I willed myself to return and to successfully complete the program.  I still don't like swimming or inside swimming pools but being able to pass the swimming test (four lengths) as a college freshman allowed me to dodge PE swimming and take tennis and bowling instead.

In little league I was first coached by an old guy named Thomas, he looked to be about 70 and approached coaching in the same style as Walter Matthau's character, minus the drinking and the swearing.  They typically had 14-15 players on a team but the advantage of our old coaches' lack of engagement was that he distributed the playing time equally - as intended by the league.

Then in the Spring of 1961 we got a new coach, this time unfortunately it was someone whose son was on the team.   At the first practice that year I learned that one of our players had not returned, something I could not understand because I enjoyed playing baseball more than anything in my life.   Yet by the midway point of that season I knew that I would not be returning,  what had once been a joy was now  a joke.   The new coaches' son played every inning.   When he struck out  he would return to the bench and cry,  and since he was the biggest kid on the team the rest of us would cringe from the embarrassment and wish we were somewhere else.  A very small portion of his extra playing time came at my expense because I could hit but his father stole playing time from all of us.

Initially I did not complain, but each game I seethed with an outrage and disgust I had never before experienced.  It was in retrospect an interesting dynamic,  each time he ripped off someone in this fashion my contempt for him grew a little bit more,  and that someone so vile was permitted to openly carry on this theft only fed my fury.  There is something especially pure and true about a child's first sincere hatred of a specific adult,  a "piss-on-your grave" disgust more intense than any similar feeling they will ever experience.   This is because what a child lacks in perspective they make up for in uncluttered analysis. 

Strict parenting had made me very respectful of all adults.  But by late in the season I had only contempt for this dog robber and the league officials who permitted such a horrible role model to continue in his position.  I began openly chastising him late in games when his son was yet again getting special treatment.  He confronted me the first time but that only gave me a close-up opportunity to stare at him in disgust.  After that he ignored me,  what can you do when a formerly timid and polite ten-year-old suddenly becomes disrespectful?  He continued ripping us off but I like to think that my daily needling made him cringe.

The surreal part was years later when this clown's obit appeared in the paper full of euphemisms extolling his virtues as a youth leader,  the euphemisms a huge inside joke for me and my former teammates.

I credit to this experience my strong connection with Colin Smith in "The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner";  and my lifelong refusal, even at my most timid, to buckle under to authority.  In the climatic race Colin has a comfortable lead with a sure win; but just yards from the finish line, he stops running and remains in place, despite the calls, howls, protests.  Colin looks directly at The Governor as a rebellious sneer plays on his face. The expression remains there as another runner passes him and crosses the finish line to victory.  When we saw that film in Junior High a lot of my friends did not understand the ending, but I got it - I understood it as if I were my biography.

I can make all this sound fine but it wasn't.  As a result of a dog robber coach,  1961 would become a time of extreme disconnection for me.  My base of friends significantly changed while at the same time adults almost overnight had lost their moral authority.  Without anything to anchor it my identity became extremely fragile and poised to be shattered by the next traumatic incident.

The most damaging incident occurred when I was age twelve,  and molested at school by two slightly older and much more mature girls.  At the time I was about 5'1" and eighty pounds.  They were postpubescent,  I was not and would not be for another year.  And coming from an extremely repressed family I was completely clueless about the whole dynamic and could not at the time comprehend what was causing them pleasure or why I had been singled out.  I still have a vivid memory of the pleasured looks on their faces.  I was too ashamed of the incident to tell anyone about it,  but I was a long way from being O.K.

I was lured into this trap by one of them,  who had been my friend until her sudden growth spurt and maturation left me in the distance.  Because I trusted her my guard was down or I would have been suspicious of the other one,  who at the time I considered the prettiest girl in the school and therefore unlikely to be taking any kind of healthy interest in me.  I've dealt close-up with the occasional rabid mad dog type,  but this was the first and only time I've confronted someone whose eyes showed only calculated malevolence.

 In an extremely creepy karma-like thing (as technically Karma is not about reward or punishment) I would one day get the wish I had at age twelve that they experience fates worse than death.  As the one-time friend was stricken with MS and the other with acute dementia in her early 60's - although I swear that the latter's appearance began to noticeably decay within months of the incident - as if her internal malignancy was slowing working its way to the surface.  I can't adequately convey the range of emotions I felt after learning of these developments.

I do not believe that these bullying incidents that I experienced as a child caused me to develop a low level of self-esteem,  but rather a disenchantment with the world.  Such exposures to the absurdity that is human nastiness do not diminish one's self-esteem but simply produce a world that is less firm than it was before each experience.   In this way they were extremely important to my development,  to being where I am now.  Worth pondering in any retrospective analysis of the free will vs destiny dynamic in the shaping of one's life.

It seems to me that our destiny is to live within a certain constrained range of pathways,  a sort of pyramid in which we start life at the top and proceed through our lives toward a the widening bottom.  With the good and bad incidents that make up the process of living determining where we find ourselves (which specific branch of which specific path) we are on at each stage of life.  Once on that path we can select to go right or left only at certain branching points,  and the choices that will grow out of that decision will never put us back on the path that we did not choose.

The center of this fixed range is like a mean in statistics.  In this sense the free will portion of living is a constant regression to the mean.   Rarely is anyone able to actually cross the mean of their range,  for most people it will never happen.  Early on something swung them to one side or the other of their range and while life will regress them toward the mean it would take an almost impossibly extreme development to cause them to cross it.  This is because the earlier events are much more influential to the development of one's basic nature.  Early on in life basic nature becomes fixed,  possible pathways are reduced, and outcomes become limited.