A Real Bad One, 1

Random memories about violence.

Trust me, it’ll make sense in a minute.

An experiment to see if this is a good place for various stories that I can go from small to big on, or just randomly toss them out like now.

A week ago I read this:

" Have you ever considered you might be a cunt? "

(Brief plug: The West’s Awake is fantastic. I read it for a lot of reasons, but started because I recognized in it the voice and philosophical soul of my now long-gone Irish relatives, the half of my ancestry that is not Danish.)

The response from deep within was to have the mechanical claw pluck out a conversation with Fathermouth from about 38 years ago, which is to say I was about 7, give or take. I’m sure of this because of the other details- it was had in the truck, which was really the only time he and I were alone, on the way to a Chinese restaurant which closed around that time.

I’m surprised to say I don’t remember what prompted the question, but it almost doesn’t matter, because I thought about it all the time.

“Do bad people know they’re bad and what do they think of themselves if they do?”

Yes, I talked like this when I was 7. Yes, I have spent most of my life saying things like “bad people” and “good people.” I have matured considerably in that I do not say “good people” very much anymore except to be nice to people who are worried that they are one.

His response was pretty prompt. “I think most bad people eventually come to a point where they look at themselves and accept what they are and either choose to hurt people as little as possible or just do what they want because it makes them happy.”

Note that Fathermouth’s response did not include something along the lines of “…or choose to stop being a bad person and be a good person,” because one of the most common, important life lessons in the Mouth house was, “people don’t change.” It is the thing I remember my father repeating perhaps most of all, with some possible competition with other things that don’t bear repeating.

I am fairly certain that Fathermouth and I got into a heated conversation about this topic at least once a year- and usually many times more than once- up to and through my adolescence and ending sometime after I took my last philosophy elective in college. “People can’t change.” “Yes they can, or what’s the point of anything?”

But when I was 7, adults knew the truth and when you asked them questions, you had to take the answer you get because, well, you asked for it. So, bad people were bad people, and good people were good people. Stop fucking around and do your homework.

“How do you know if you’re a bad person?”

“Like I said, they [bad people] just know someday.”

I wish I knew whether the next story happened before or after that conversation- because it colors it differently, now, in my reflection, but ultimately it really doesn’t matter. I’m not sure because it was at a very similar time- somewhere between 7 and 9- and my temporal landmark, this time, was a boy I’ll call Alan.

Alan and I were friends because our mothers were friends, and they were friends because they were both in the hospital at the same time during their pregnancy and my mother wanted to try having friends outside of work. They hung out for a few years but didn’t have much in common besides having once done a similar thing with their uterus, but by then the playdates that had gone along with them hanging out had meant that WE were friends, Alan and I, sort of, and so we continued our association for a little while, drifting at some point around middle school, like you do.

My parents were very adamant from an early age that they would not give me money for things. When I was a little older I was able to earn an allowance (paltry compared to a lot of my schoolmates) by doing a few chores, but as far as “Can I have $20 for X?” “$20!? No fucking way.” Anything over a random, “can I have an extra dollar for chocolate milk” or something was a “no,” or more frequently, “save up your own money.”

I don’t and didn’t resent them for it. My parents had unconventionally strict principles about money that are among the things that, for all the really mind-blowing bad stuff, was incredibly valuable upbringing.

Alan was in a similar position because his mom was *gasp* divorced and single, which lots of people gasped about in the early 1980s and didn’t have a lot of discretionary income to throw him pocket money. Because of our collective problems, I, ever entrepreneurial, cooked up a solution.

There was an old raceway near our neighborhood that had a section of metal bleachers- the cheap seats- right up against the fence on the edge of the property. We were able to wiggle under the chainlink fence and get in there- since there were only races a couple times a week, it was usually completely unattended. It was usually pretty poorly kept, which meant that there were very often literally hundreds of beer and soda cans under the bleachers in the tall grass and busted-up asphalt. I would grab big black garbage bags out from under the sink and Alan and I would slither under the fence and spend an hour or two filling them with cans, throw the bags back over the fence (which required perching precariously on the top bleacher and always took a few tries), and slither back under, then walk about a mile or so to the scuzzy beer distributor that had a recycling center.

This would often get us as much as the aforementioned $20, which felt like huge money for kids our age and social class at that time and kept us generally out of trouble if one overlooked that we were trespassing while handling used bottles and cans without gloves. We could only really do it once a week, but seeing as how we only hung out that often, it worked out.

One day, when we were about halfway to the recycling center, dragging these enormous overstuffed garbage bags down the street, a couple of older kids, about 12 or 13, came up the street behind us and saw what was to them a pretty bizarre scene. One was tall and skinny, with dark hair, and the other one was almost a stereotypical bully character from an old cartoon- pudgy overweight but not in the way that makes you look less dangerous, redhead, with a baseball cap. If it had been 40 years earlier he probably would have said “aw nuts” and was poorly raised because his father had died of coal miner’s lung.

I don’t remember which one started it, but they both started really laying into us, walking along just behind us but never fully overtaking us and kicking the bags so we’d stumble, talking about how much the garbage bags reeked of old beer, asking if we were bums, if we slept in a box together, if we were getting money for our mom to buy drugs, if our moms were whores, if *I* was a whore to help raise money, and so on.

Alan was an extremely even-tempered boy; he never got particularly upset about anything and was very resistant to taunting. While not large, he was bigger than me- I was always very, very small until I grew roughly a foot in one year of high school exactly when being tall was the last thing you wanted- and while I had never seen his interactions with boys in his own school, I didn’t get the sense he fought anyone, he just kind of coasted quietly under the radar.

I, on the other hand, slowly became red-faced, slowly started crying silently, and slowly started picking up my pace, stopping just short of running. Since the older kids didn’t see any visible reaction, they eventually got frustrated-

kids, when your mom tells you to “ignore the bullies,” your mom’s a fucking idiot, this only works (sometimes) when you’re over 20-

-and grabbed the garbage bags out of our hands, shook out their entire contents onto the adjacent lawn of what was then a big bank in the area with a fancy grassy campus, and walked away laughing.

Alan silently began picking up the cans, but I stared at their backs fuming. Among the bottles and cans we had picked up that day, we had found a couple of dirty old golf balls in the tall grass. I took one out of my pocket and threw it at the receding figure of the tall dark-haired one.

It was a long shot, and my memories are distorted by time and being in a smaller body, but it was a good distance, so I was about as stunned as I was triumphant that it hit him squarely in the back of the head. The two turned around and immediately gave chase. I immediately began running. Alan did not.

Small though I was, I had the boundless energy and speed of a kid that age, so it took a good three blocks of weaving in and out of cars and yards before the ginger kid finally caught up to me, grabbed me by the back of the shirt, slammed me face-first into a wall a few times, then dragged me by said shirt all the way back to where his friend had been keeping Alan under guard.

Apparently someone had called the cops at some point because when we got back to the bank there was a cruiser in front of Alan and the dark-haired kid, the cop standing up against the driver’s side door, and when the ginger kid saw him the cop said flatly, “don’t run.”

He summoned us both over, took a kind of bored account of what had happened, and made the older kids leave with a roughly 10-minute start while Alan and I picked up our cans before he let us go. Nobody’s parents got called, nobody got a ride home in the cop car. I lied to my parents later about why my shirt collar had been completely stretched out and ruined. I don’t remember what the lie was.

If it’s been boring you so far, here’s where the story gets interesting.

There were only a few places for a kid my age to hang out in my town at that time that didn’t require adult supervision, and one of them was the pizza place, which ALWAYS had two arcade cabinets, and always really good ones. I would ration my quarters out during the week and play, and when the money ran out, watch other people play, and later on in life, maybe bring a boyfriend to play Street Fighter II (a game I never managed to excel at but was as excited to watch experts at play as normal people are about football). It was a reasonably safe place and my parents were typical of the era that if they knew where I was, that was good enough.

One day, a month or two after the previous incident, the ginger kid walked in. I thought he was walking towards me, but he was walking towards the video games and didn’t recognize me until he nearly slammed into me.

“You’d better leave me alone,” I said lamely.

“Shut up,” he said, pushing past me and starting a game, “my friend’s in the hospital, you gave him brain damage.”

I stared in shocked disbelief for a full minute or so, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to stop playing and kick the shit out of me, I left, walking fast, then running once I was outside.

This started a pattern where I would stay away from the place for a few weeks, eventually get bored and realize nothing happened, go back, and see him after a month or so. Each time, the story evolved.

My friend has to get surgery because he’s going blind and deaf.

He’s in a coma.

He’s brain dead.

He never did anything else to me besides telling me dark stories about his friend’s worsening condition; never roughed me up again or followed me home or tried to find out who I was or called the police or anything.

Eventually, I just stopped running into him. He was a teenager, after all, and was busy with complicated and mysterious teenager things elsewhere. Maybe he started studying really hard for his PSATs.

Understand that when you’re roughly 8 years old, the notion that a girl your age is able to throw a golf ball at a boy twice your size- who is then subsequently healthy enough to chase you down, rough you up, and walk home- with enough force to give him deadly brain damage that progresses over half a year, and his parents will do absolutely nothing in the name of seeking justice like contacting the police or asking the only other eyewitness to identify you, is entirely possible.

Bad guys do bad things. Cops catch bad guys. People don’t change.

Every single time I’d run into the ginger kid, I would barely sleep for about a week. I dreamed about being executed in the electric chair (I had read about this recently at that time, after seeing the Chamber of Horrors at Madam Tussauds). I dreamed his parents were allowed to beat me into a coma for revenge. I dreamed he was haunting me. My parents- who already had a pretty erratic and dark family climate in the real world- crying, calling me “murderer.”

After a string of such nights, I’d talk myself out of the story or I would just get exhausted obsessing over it and feel brave enough to walk back to the pizza place.

One of the things that’s most interesting about reflecting on the experience, decades later, is that when I look back on the emotions and events of the time, the emotional memory doesn’t change, even if my rational understanding of the story matured.

It doesn’t matter that I know the continued narrative torture the kid inflicted on me was bullshit. (It’s also interesting to reflect on what the mind of the bully was, to have managed to glean satisfaction from causing torment and anguish you would never actually get to witness firsthand or even be sure it was working. It’s a clever level of mental sadism I wouldn’t expect most kids that age to have had the patience for.)

It doesn’t matter that it was laughably embarrassing rather than awful within just a few years, when I eventually became a teenager myself, and busy with complicated and mysterious teenager things that were mostly far more awful in their present moment than dwelling on being tricked in the past.

But remembering it, the playback of the feelings are the same. Little me, hiding under many layers of sheets and blankets as I was wont to do when I needed complete darkness, crying, nobody knowing the terrible thing I had done.

Have you ever considered that you might be a cunt?

A real bad one like.