"Hi. Come on in. Don't be nervous. Go ahead and sit down in that big old chair behind your desk and make yourself comfortable. Don't worry about that pistol in the drawer on the left. It ain't there no more. Hell, if you notice, the letter opener in that cubbie up front is gone too."
He sat there behind his desk just starting to sweat. He had not had the chance to take his overcoat off and for sure that played a part. The fact that a pistol was pointed at him did nothing to mitigate the heat. He sat and looked at the drawer to his left. He saw that it was still a little bit open and had no doubt that his gun was long gone from there anyway.
"I ain't here to kill ya but kill ya is what I will do if I have ta. You understand that part of this don't ya, sir? I mean, you been in a spot where violence was never the desired outcome, but you had had to make up you're mind beforehand, that if it came to that, you would do it without hesitation?" The stranger waited a bit as if he actually wanted a reply, and in fairness, maybe he did, but when one was not forthcoming he proceeded with, " I am here to collect $26,000 or else to hurt ya in such a way that no other degenerate gambler would ever again wind up in dept to my employers for such a sum."
They eyed each other for a beat and the man with the gun smiled just slightly. Might not have been a smile at all but just a crinkle of the wrinkles around the mouth. The man with the gun pointed at him pursed his lips against a smile, but his eyes, even in the fear of the moment, gave away a sense of amusement. "Yeah, I know. Nothing that happens to you will ever stop another degenerate bastard. We all assume that we'll hit the flush on the next card."
With that, the stranger moved gracefully to the bar and set out two glasses and began to look over the liquor. "If we really knew how to manage the odds, we wouldn't wind up in the debt of men who have no style, or grace, or ...necks."
The stranger settled on the Scotch. Specifically he poured two fingers in each glass of the MacAllen 25. "Ya know, somebody who has this kind of taste in Scotch, and the means to buy it, shouldn't ever have to go to a loan shark to cover gambling debts." He sat one glass on the desk and sat down across from his unwilling companion and stared at the slightly smokey, vanilla spirit. "But I guess if Momma don't know about hubby's debts and she holds the purse strings, it can get interesting, am I right?"
The man with the gun smelled the Scotch and then sat it back down without taking a sip. The man with his life replaying before him spoke in a whisper very much like someone watching a movie in a crowded theatre, "You know your Scotch and your gambling."
"And you are one cool son of a bitch. Most folks faced with a pistol in the hands of a man prepared to use it, they get cotton mouthed. They can talk mind ya, beg even, but not without coughing or some such first. You, sir, are a bit different, aren't ya?"
The man smiled first and then laughed that quiet kind of laugh that only comes out at things that aren't really funny. "Never bet big on something when you aren't willing to go all in."
"That sir, is toast-able. To going all in." And with that the two men at opposite ends of the gun sipped their Scotch. The drink had no burn. It was smoke and caramel and vanilla and old leather and warm goodness that trailed down the throat and found the back of the conscious mind and just slightly numbed the lips. It is the perfect drink, especially if it might be the last sip you ever take.
"What if I don't have the money? I know you can hurt me. I have thought that I had prepared myself for the hurt, but apparently I am even more of a coward than I thought. I am terrified. But in a cool way." And he smiled at that.
The man with the gun smiled back and shook his head. "I hate causing the pain, if that matters to ya. I have dreams about the things I have done to men and women like you. I hear things just as I start to go to sleep that keep me awake nights. Surely we can find some source of money to spare us both that nightmare? You seem like the smart type, present situation excluded."
The cool man sipped his Scotch again and just before he swallowed, inhaled a short, quick breath and let the vapors from the liquor waft its way throughout his consciousness and seep slowly out as he exhaled through his nose. "I am not afraid of dying. Never thought I would be able to say that honestly. I mean, you have to have a good poker face to do what I do for as long as I have done it. But looking like you don't mind and actually not giving a shit are two wholeheartedly different things. Do you understand that?" Before the man with the gun can answer, the cool man continues, "Of course you do. You've had all your chips in the center of the table with just a Jack high. The only thing keeping those other assholes at the table from calling with a pair of sixes is that ice cold, dead eyed look."
The man with the gun smiles again and sips his Scotch. He settles back in his chair and makes a show of making himself comfortable. Like any story teller, he can tell when a story is about to start. He crosses his legs and rests the pistol on his knee in a way that says, "Go ahead with your story. But...it better be a good story."
"Don't mistake me. I am scared to death of the things you could do to me - to hurt me. My imagination is of all these creative things you could do. The fact that you seem so intelligent is a concern to me. I know the stupid can be cruel, but the idea of someone like you turning ... The fact that you bring reason and patience to the issue - that's just the scariest damn thing I can think of."
The man with the pistol sat there - said nothing - gave no indication that the words meant anything to him. The cool man brought himself back to the problem at hand. "Twenty-six thousand dollars, huh?
The man with the gun raised one eye brow to acknowledge the number. The first sign of impatience. Circling around to the beginning of the conversation would not be a good thing. The cool man gulps the last of his Scotch and sits his drink down with just a hint of amber coloring the glass. "You know how I learned to play cards? My momma taught me. Good ole Texas housewife who knew her way around a deck of cards. And the frailty of human will. She could size a person up in minutes and fillet them if she needed to. Woman never paid full retail for anything in her life. Every charity she supported got all kinds of donations from businessmen who were never known to be a soft touch for anybody else. She just knew things about people and she played on that."
"Fortunately for my daddy, she loved him. Oh, she still maneuvered him around the board like everybody else, but she was supremely careful that he should never be aware of it. That took more work but she must have felt he was worth it. He died a happy man who thought he had made all his own decisions his whole life. Not many of us get that kind of peace on this side of the grave."
"I came along and she knew she loved me when I was a baby. When I got to the point that I had ideas of my own, she started having her doubts. When she realized I could see the strings she was pulling, she had to pause and reassess the whole situation. I was thirteen years old when I started calling bluffs nobody had ever called on her before. Three months after my 13th birthday she took me to a card game at Sleepy Jay's bar. She never questioned the fact that I already knew the difference between a straight and flush but just sat me down in front of middle aged men with 300 dollars and a hard look and a simple command, "Make money. Don't lose money."
"I sat down there and made 2700 dollars from old men who had never lost that much so fast from somebody so young. They called me when I wanted them to and they folded out when I had nothing. And the only two people who weren't surprised were me and Momma"
The man with the pistol smiled at him. It was a smile that said, "I ain't gonna ask the question. Just come on with the answer/"
"Yeah, I know. I said Momma taught me how to play cards and it is the truth. Just not all that accurate. I learned to play cards by hanging around the courthouse long after I was supposed to be in bed. She ran games out of the courthouse where my daddy was the county magistrate. I watched lawyers and district attorneys and folks serving 30 days play for dollars, dope, and favors. And my momma took a cut of all of it. I remember them all being so polite. Poker players are almost always the most polite."
The man with the gun laughed loudly while shaking his head. "You are a cold and cool son of a Bitch. Your momma is Ms. Wetta out of Katy, TX? Who set up shop in Houston 50 years ago? Who ran a little bit of Vegas for all the refinery workers down there in the gulf?"
"Yessir. That's my momma. Wonderful woman. Ahead of her time, really. She realized that all the money was green whether it came from black folks, brown folks, or the lily white folks who came to Daddy's re-election parties. I learned the game when I was 6 years old from the older black gentlemen who sat behind bars and played for cigarettes and rock candy. The rock candy was my lure, as you might imagine."
The man with the pistol sips the last of his Scotch. He smiles at the cool man but says nothing. The cool man sees the silence and raises an eyebrow. The man with the pistol blinks and inhales deeply. "Rumor was that a young black girl got herself shot at one of Ms. Wetta's games."
The cool man takes two fingers and pushes his glass towards the man with the pistol and smiles while waiting on his re-fill. "That was your Momma that died the night Junior Robinson had a full house beaten by quad sixes. They say he was just too fat for anybody to have found that itty bitty Derringer on him."
The man with the pistol sits very still. He knows now that $26,000.00 is nothing to this man. And he knows that it was no accident that brought him here this night. All alone with a man who was expecting him all along. His hand felt sweaty around the hilt of the pistol. But the best cards aren't always the winning hand.
"There is something else you should know about your daddy the Judge..."
"My daddy liked pretty young black girls and you and I are probably brothers." Called and raised.
"Nice to meet ya big brother. Now, why shouldn't I just shoot ya right betwixt the damn eyes and be on my merry way?"
End Chapter One
Friday, August 16, 2013
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!
The earliest fight of my life is not one that I can remember. I have no recall whatsoever but I have been told of it often. It involved what could be construed as a deadly weapon - a forklift to be honest. My opponent - who had tortured me for months and caused my mother to respond in anger at the sound of his name - was left bloody and broken and missing two teeth. I was not brutal. I had not learned that in my life yet.
But again, I don't remember this fight. I have had it told to me with pride and defiance and certainty that only comes from love and anger. I don't remember his name but I remember us being friends. I like the fact that memories of joy and happiness and contentment are the things that I summon up when I try to find this memory that simply isn't.
Of course I was only 3. My mother pointed out that the other boy was 5 and had been a terror who sent me home crying on more than one occasion. My mom used to watch us playing from the kitchen window of our trailer out across the trailer park to the front yard of his family's trailer and she said that our fun would invariably end with him slapping or kicking or punching me until I ran home to her.
She gave me no sympathy except to clean any blood or dirt away to be sure that I was not seriously hurt. To all of my complaints she simply responded that it would continue until I put a stop to it. Unknown to me she had gone to the boy's mother at least twice before to discuss the issue but was greeted with the response of "Boys will be boys," and a vacant grin known only to lobotomized mental patients. At least that is how my mother described the woman. She may have been biased.
My dad was co-owner of a sawmill and before that worked at a mobile home manufacturing plant. Some of my earliest memories are of the gigantic forklifts used to move material around. These were not the tiny little things that I would later use in various warehouses as an adult. Nor were they the things you see on cable TV that are the size of a small house (although to a 3 year old that is exactly what they looked like).
These things were big enough to move huge bundles of lumber and later logs. It was a no brainer for my parents to purchase a large (a third of my body size at the time) forklift toy made by Tonka. I had days and days of fun playing in the shadow of our trailer stacking and unstacking whatever items found their way into my imagination.
Apparently this was the perfect confluence of selfishness and independance and bravery. The five year old put in to take my forklift from me. According to my mom, he could not get it out of my hands, so he settled on kicking over the sticks I had been stacking up like logs (just like my dad, don't ya know) and then he slapped my face. My mom describes this like it was a John Wayne movie or a Clint Eastwood movie or an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie depending on the decade in which she has recited the tale. She says I turned around, spat on the ground, and then came around with the Tonka forklift for all my three year old limbs were worth.
The poor kid's mouth exploded with blood and at least two teeth. He lay there on the ground with me standing over him. Momma said she ran out to see to him and that my eyes were the size of saucers. Apparently his mother watched from her kitchen window too because she came running over to see to him too. I just stood there breathing deeply with the bloody forklift still clutched in my right hand. The woman was hysterical and crying and her son was crying. She and my momma both felt around inside his mouth to be sure the teeth had come out cleanly and that none of the rest were broken.
A day later, after the boy had been to a dentist to make sure that everything was alright, the woman came over to talk with my mother about the incident. She pointed out how much pain her son had been put through. She talked about the cost of the dentist. She talked about the danger of metal toys and the possibility of serious injuries. My mother made sympathetic clucking noises of support without any commitment or real comment. Finally the woman could stand it no more and said,"Dammit, Carolyn, what are you going to do about that boy?"
With the most idiotic smile that a woman of her intelligence could manage, my mother replied, "Oh, well, boys will be boys, won't they?"
I won't be including any of the fights between Mark and me here. Its not that I feel any sense of privacy about those times that my brother and I visited violence upon each other, but rather, if I am going to take the time to recollect all the times I have been a bad brother, this would be an altogether different story and probably much longer. I will stick to folks I am not related to or at least not related that closely.
The next fight I can remember fairly clearly. I was in kindergarten. Never really liked my kindergarten teacher or her teacher's aide very much. If you know anything about me at all, it does not surprise you that I had a problem with authority. My father could command me - I stood in awe of him for most of my life (and his since it was so short). I get how we are to interact with God from how I revere my dad. My mother did not command the same fear or reverence. I somehow saw all of her flaws without ever being mindful of his. Even as I grew older and my dad grew less perfect, I chose not to focus on the clay, but looked higher. My mom never got such a pass.
Later in my life as a teenager, Tanner (officially my agriculture education teacher /unofficially my mentor), could control me. He figured out that logic would work on me. It had to be logic masquerading as jokes and simplistic questions, dull edged and rounded, so as to not give a surface to support anger or indignation. But logic worked on me.
Funnily enough, Tanner's wife was my first grade teacher and first hand witness to the third fight on this list. But the second happened while I suffered under the type of woman who did not believe my five year old protestations that I did not like peach cocktail. She was the type that forced me to take a taste instead of maintaining the peaceful detente that the peaches and I had reached on our own. I had the joy of watching with a perfect view as my stomach refused to be intimidated with the rest of me and threw up on her shoes. You have not been mocked until a puke smeared five year old has smiled up at you while you stand in vomit soaked stockings.
One day before recess, we were told that we were not allowed to fight or wrestle on the playground. Apparently some of my brethren had engaged in this activity the day before. I marvel at how memory works since I have no memory of the day before this day. I don't know what I did that day except I remember remembering that I did not know anything about what the teacher's aide was talking about. I remember not remembering but I don't remember the day before the day that I remember. Got that?
Anyway, I was running down to my favorite half buried tractor tire on the playground (did I mention I went to kindergarten in deep South Georgia?) when Darrell O'Steen turned around in mid run and tackled me. He got both hands all the way around me and was laughing like a maniac. I had just managed to struggle free when the teacher's aide called both of our names, announced we had been warned, and had us both sit for the remainder of the play period. I remember angrily through tears trying to inform this stupid, stupid woman of her mistake. Trying in vain to point out that I was attacked and was the victim in this instance and feeling the burning white hot angry self-righteousness when it fell on deaf ears. Any other authority figure victimized by my quick wit, or acid tongue, or break room lawyering, you have this woman to thank.
Like I said earlier, Tanner's wife was my first grade teacher for my third fight that I can recall. We, my classmates and me, had spent the year working around Eddie. Eddie was exceedingly stupid and the poster child for social promotions in school. I have told several people that Eddie was still in first grade even though he was 23 years old. I have been told by several people that this is a gross exaggeration. Maybe I have let my sense of hyperbole get away with me but I still swear he was shaving by the time the rest of us had the misfortune to get to know him. Our play time was enjoyable to the extent that Eddie could be distracted with rainbows or butterflies. If Eddie became aware of us, it would be to pull things off of us the way he did the butterflies.
Roughly three quarters of the year had gone by when Eddie finally targeted me. I remember making the decision to not back down. It seemed so simple then. I back down now and let him have his way and I go sit quietly to the side. Okay. What do I do tomorrow? And the day after that?
I have no idea what the argument was about but I said no or yes or whatever the hell the prelude was to him grabbing me. I must have seen how he grabbed and slung others. I remember knowing to keep my arms in and up with my fists in front of my chest. He grabbed my collar like he had so many times before with so many of his other non- shaving classmates before and my right hand shot up under his chin. I still smile when I think of that clicking noise. Nobody wants their teeth to click like that.
I turned my head down and watched my fists pound into this stomach again and again as his loud teeth caused him to forget to sling me away for the tiniest of moments.
When he remembered, it was to sling me into one of the pine trees on the playground. Coincidentally, it was against this same tree that one of my senior pictures was taken. It was nice having the tree behind me. Clarified the argument about running away with a logic that I might not have mastered otherwise. Instead I stood my ground and traded blows with a boy I swear could have legally driven us to the emergency room after it was all over. Apparently we both had given into the moment and were swinging blindly with no intention of stopping since Mrs. Tanner and her aide could not get us to stop and were forced to wait until we were spent on the ground and simply dragged us apart by our feet.
I never got punished at school because my dad pointed out that I should have been given my merit badge for bear wrestling when he saw Eddie and finally learned how old he was. The school was too happy to pretend that the whole thing had never happened.
I was in the second grade when I was in my fourth fight. It was, unsurprisingly, on the football field. I say unsurprisingly because all of us first grade boys longed for the day we could take second grade PE and play football with Mr. Bussey as our quarterback. When the fight finally happened at the end of the year, I have no idea where Mr. Bussey was. Must have been called away for something.
I didn't want to get into a fight I couldn't win. And it also took a major threat to get me steamed enough to throw the first punch. I remember tolerating Lamar. I remember being pushed into the wall of the restroom on the way to the urinals by a boy who was going thru the second grade for the second time.
It happened all year and I was not alone. I remember others having to submit to tiny, petty indignities that may not have seemed to be all that big a deal to the one boy who was larger than all the rest of us.
I remember my own petty revenge that backfired. I had a birthday party. It was a party that was to have enough guys there to play a full game of football with one guy playing QB for both teams. And everybody said they would come. And everybody took evil delight in the fact that Lamar was not invited no matter how much he liked football. The day of the party came and most everybody was already there when my mother called me to the phone.
It was Lamar. He asked if it was my birthday. He asked if there was a party. He asked if we were planning on playing football. I said yes to all of his questions while trying to find my resolve to tell him that it would be a cold day in hell before he would be welcome at my house. He said," That sounds like so much fun. Ray, would it be okay if I came and played with you guys?"
I couldn't tell him no. I could not be that cruel. I was not yet brutal. He came over and despite a few friends literally asking me, "What the hell.." even as 2nd graders, we played football for hours and had fun.
On the last day of 2nd grade we fought at school. Fight is too strong a word. It was mainly a wrestling match. Remembering the best tumbles of Ricky Steamboat and Superfly got me out of the tough parts. And it established that I was not one that he could push around any more.
And then he had to fight Joey Thomas. And Stacy Anderson, and Donnie Ray Anderson, and Scotty Ivey, and Donny Burch, and Wesley Gilliard. Nobody was letting this opportunity pass. And a teacher could not be found. I still don't know if we were lucky or if the teachers were having a moment like my mother all those years before. We came away thinking something was settled. We came away with PRIDE.
Fighting the world for so long since with no clear cut signs of accomplishment, I wonder sometimes if we should not have sent Lamar some sort of card or cake or even cash. It was one of the few times the world made sense and so closely resembled a fairy tale
.
But again, I don't remember this fight. I have had it told to me with pride and defiance and certainty that only comes from love and anger. I don't remember his name but I remember us being friends. I like the fact that memories of joy and happiness and contentment are the things that I summon up when I try to find this memory that simply isn't.
Of course I was only 3. My mother pointed out that the other boy was 5 and had been a terror who sent me home crying on more than one occasion. My mom used to watch us playing from the kitchen window of our trailer out across the trailer park to the front yard of his family's trailer and she said that our fun would invariably end with him slapping or kicking or punching me until I ran home to her.
She gave me no sympathy except to clean any blood or dirt away to be sure that I was not seriously hurt. To all of my complaints she simply responded that it would continue until I put a stop to it. Unknown to me she had gone to the boy's mother at least twice before to discuss the issue but was greeted with the response of "Boys will be boys," and a vacant grin known only to lobotomized mental patients. At least that is how my mother described the woman. She may have been biased.
My dad was co-owner of a sawmill and before that worked at a mobile home manufacturing plant. Some of my earliest memories are of the gigantic forklifts used to move material around. These were not the tiny little things that I would later use in various warehouses as an adult. Nor were they the things you see on cable TV that are the size of a small house (although to a 3 year old that is exactly what they looked like).
These things were big enough to move huge bundles of lumber and later logs. It was a no brainer for my parents to purchase a large (a third of my body size at the time) forklift toy made by Tonka. I had days and days of fun playing in the shadow of our trailer stacking and unstacking whatever items found their way into my imagination.
Apparently this was the perfect confluence of selfishness and independance and bravery. The five year old put in to take my forklift from me. According to my mom, he could not get it out of my hands, so he settled on kicking over the sticks I had been stacking up like logs (just like my dad, don't ya know) and then he slapped my face. My mom describes this like it was a John Wayne movie or a Clint Eastwood movie or an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie depending on the decade in which she has recited the tale. She says I turned around, spat on the ground, and then came around with the Tonka forklift for all my three year old limbs were worth.
The poor kid's mouth exploded with blood and at least two teeth. He lay there on the ground with me standing over him. Momma said she ran out to see to him and that my eyes were the size of saucers. Apparently his mother watched from her kitchen window too because she came running over to see to him too. I just stood there breathing deeply with the bloody forklift still clutched in my right hand. The woman was hysterical and crying and her son was crying. She and my momma both felt around inside his mouth to be sure the teeth had come out cleanly and that none of the rest were broken.
A day later, after the boy had been to a dentist to make sure that everything was alright, the woman came over to talk with my mother about the incident. She pointed out how much pain her son had been put through. She talked about the cost of the dentist. She talked about the danger of metal toys and the possibility of serious injuries. My mother made sympathetic clucking noises of support without any commitment or real comment. Finally the woman could stand it no more and said,"Dammit, Carolyn, what are you going to do about that boy?"
With the most idiotic smile that a woman of her intelligence could manage, my mother replied, "Oh, well, boys will be boys, won't they?"
I won't be including any of the fights between Mark and me here. Its not that I feel any sense of privacy about those times that my brother and I visited violence upon each other, but rather, if I am going to take the time to recollect all the times I have been a bad brother, this would be an altogether different story and probably much longer. I will stick to folks I am not related to or at least not related that closely.
The next fight I can remember fairly clearly. I was in kindergarten. Never really liked my kindergarten teacher or her teacher's aide very much. If you know anything about me at all, it does not surprise you that I had a problem with authority. My father could command me - I stood in awe of him for most of my life (and his since it was so short). I get how we are to interact with God from how I revere my dad. My mother did not command the same fear or reverence. I somehow saw all of her flaws without ever being mindful of his. Even as I grew older and my dad grew less perfect, I chose not to focus on the clay, but looked higher. My mom never got such a pass.
Later in my life as a teenager, Tanner (officially my agriculture education teacher /unofficially my mentor), could control me. He figured out that logic would work on me. It had to be logic masquerading as jokes and simplistic questions, dull edged and rounded, so as to not give a surface to support anger or indignation. But logic worked on me.
Funnily enough, Tanner's wife was my first grade teacher and first hand witness to the third fight on this list. But the second happened while I suffered under the type of woman who did not believe my five year old protestations that I did not like peach cocktail. She was the type that forced me to take a taste instead of maintaining the peaceful detente that the peaches and I had reached on our own. I had the joy of watching with a perfect view as my stomach refused to be intimidated with the rest of me and threw up on her shoes. You have not been mocked until a puke smeared five year old has smiled up at you while you stand in vomit soaked stockings.
One day before recess, we were told that we were not allowed to fight or wrestle on the playground. Apparently some of my brethren had engaged in this activity the day before. I marvel at how memory works since I have no memory of the day before this day. I don't know what I did that day except I remember remembering that I did not know anything about what the teacher's aide was talking about. I remember not remembering but I don't remember the day before the day that I remember. Got that?
Anyway, I was running down to my favorite half buried tractor tire on the playground (did I mention I went to kindergarten in deep South Georgia?) when Darrell O'Steen turned around in mid run and tackled me. He got both hands all the way around me and was laughing like a maniac. I had just managed to struggle free when the teacher's aide called both of our names, announced we had been warned, and had us both sit for the remainder of the play period. I remember angrily through tears trying to inform this stupid, stupid woman of her mistake. Trying in vain to point out that I was attacked and was the victim in this instance and feeling the burning white hot angry self-righteousness when it fell on deaf ears. Any other authority figure victimized by my quick wit, or acid tongue, or break room lawyering, you have this woman to thank.
Like I said earlier, Tanner's wife was my first grade teacher for my third fight that I can recall. We, my classmates and me, had spent the year working around Eddie. Eddie was exceedingly stupid and the poster child for social promotions in school. I have told several people that Eddie was still in first grade even though he was 23 years old. I have been told by several people that this is a gross exaggeration. Maybe I have let my sense of hyperbole get away with me but I still swear he was shaving by the time the rest of us had the misfortune to get to know him. Our play time was enjoyable to the extent that Eddie could be distracted with rainbows or butterflies. If Eddie became aware of us, it would be to pull things off of us the way he did the butterflies.
Roughly three quarters of the year had gone by when Eddie finally targeted me. I remember making the decision to not back down. It seemed so simple then. I back down now and let him have his way and I go sit quietly to the side. Okay. What do I do tomorrow? And the day after that?
I have no idea what the argument was about but I said no or yes or whatever the hell the prelude was to him grabbing me. I must have seen how he grabbed and slung others. I remember knowing to keep my arms in and up with my fists in front of my chest. He grabbed my collar like he had so many times before with so many of his other non- shaving classmates before and my right hand shot up under his chin. I still smile when I think of that clicking noise. Nobody wants their teeth to click like that.
I turned my head down and watched my fists pound into this stomach again and again as his loud teeth caused him to forget to sling me away for the tiniest of moments.
When he remembered, it was to sling me into one of the pine trees on the playground. Coincidentally, it was against this same tree that one of my senior pictures was taken. It was nice having the tree behind me. Clarified the argument about running away with a logic that I might not have mastered otherwise. Instead I stood my ground and traded blows with a boy I swear could have legally driven us to the emergency room after it was all over. Apparently we both had given into the moment and were swinging blindly with no intention of stopping since Mrs. Tanner and her aide could not get us to stop and were forced to wait until we were spent on the ground and simply dragged us apart by our feet.
I never got punished at school because my dad pointed out that I should have been given my merit badge for bear wrestling when he saw Eddie and finally learned how old he was. The school was too happy to pretend that the whole thing had never happened.
I was in the second grade when I was in my fourth fight. It was, unsurprisingly, on the football field. I say unsurprisingly because all of us first grade boys longed for the day we could take second grade PE and play football with Mr. Bussey as our quarterback. When the fight finally happened at the end of the year, I have no idea where Mr. Bussey was. Must have been called away for something.
I didn't want to get into a fight I couldn't win. And it also took a major threat to get me steamed enough to throw the first punch. I remember tolerating Lamar. I remember being pushed into the wall of the restroom on the way to the urinals by a boy who was going thru the second grade for the second time.
It happened all year and I was not alone. I remember others having to submit to tiny, petty indignities that may not have seemed to be all that big a deal to the one boy who was larger than all the rest of us.
I remember my own petty revenge that backfired. I had a birthday party. It was a party that was to have enough guys there to play a full game of football with one guy playing QB for both teams. And everybody said they would come. And everybody took evil delight in the fact that Lamar was not invited no matter how much he liked football. The day of the party came and most everybody was already there when my mother called me to the phone.
It was Lamar. He asked if it was my birthday. He asked if there was a party. He asked if we were planning on playing football. I said yes to all of his questions while trying to find my resolve to tell him that it would be a cold day in hell before he would be welcome at my house. He said," That sounds like so much fun. Ray, would it be okay if I came and played with you guys?"
I couldn't tell him no. I could not be that cruel. I was not yet brutal. He came over and despite a few friends literally asking me, "What the hell.." even as 2nd graders, we played football for hours and had fun.
On the last day of 2nd grade we fought at school. Fight is too strong a word. It was mainly a wrestling match. Remembering the best tumbles of Ricky Steamboat and Superfly got me out of the tough parts. And it established that I was not one that he could push around any more.
And then he had to fight Joey Thomas. And Stacy Anderson, and Donnie Ray Anderson, and Scotty Ivey, and Donny Burch, and Wesley Gilliard. Nobody was letting this opportunity pass. And a teacher could not be found. I still don't know if we were lucky or if the teachers were having a moment like my mother all those years before. We came away thinking something was settled. We came away with PRIDE.
Fighting the world for so long since with no clear cut signs of accomplishment, I wonder sometimes if we should not have sent Lamar some sort of card or cake or even cash. It was one of the few times the world made sense and so closely resembled a fairy tale
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)