Of Cabbages and Kings: bullies

Showing posts with label bullies. Show all posts

I Was a Juvenile Cacoa Dealer

Posted by Unknown at 7:30 AM Labels: band candy, band fundraisers, bullies, high school, selling stuff at school, sugar addiction

Call it the entrepreneurial nature of youth. Or desperation. Call it a laziness that meant I didn't have to drag my 13-year-old butt down gray Jersey streets for hours, alone, in the bleak autumn chill.

Call it meeting local market demand. Or easy money.

Hey, call it "Clarence," if you like.

But under this mild-mannered exterior...

Below this honors student halo and within these polished shoes of goody-two...

There lurked a flagrant rules-violator and illegal goods pack mule at the institution of learning we'll call Edgar Allen Poe High School.

And the benefits far outweighed any burden on my teenage conscience.

Yes... you guessed it... I was dealing in...

Band Candy.

"Do you have it? Do you have the stuff?"

Tanya "The Moo" Mueller was a big-boned, big-chested, big-bellied, big-fisted girl with thighs like a junkyard car crusher. She'd sooner block tackle you as look at you. I knew; a few of my friends had unwillingly played her tackle dummy.

But "The Moo" and I had found unexpected common ground. Yes, each time her great shadow would fall over me in the girl's locker room like an indoor solar eclipse, oh, I'd still flinch...

I'd still anticipate knuckles against my newly braces-free teeth. But what I'd get was a twenty tucked hastily into my hand. As long as I had those band candy chocolate bars... that sweet, sweet sugar rush... I had immunity.

High school was survival of the fittest and while The Moo could never be called fit, I could count on her candy addiction to keep me safe.

So my stash was secreted in my book bag. Who would ever suspect Miss Priss wasn't carrying thick tomes of Earth Science, American History, Language Arts and copies of Le Petite Prince?

Perhaps the vague whiff of mint or peanut butter might linger as telltale evidence... But nothing more... nothing more.

I was careful. I had a rep for being discreet.

So buys were made in hasty pre- and post-class rushes, slipped carefully from bag to purse, under desks, between the covers of Trapper Keepers bearing innocent kittens or rainbows. Thanks to the overall student body, plus "The Moo's" cravings, why sometimes 30-50 bars a day would change hands.

The Crispies, the Almond Bliss, the Peanut Blasts, the Mint Mind-Melts... Each one had its buyers, and I made sure the shipments kept rolling in.

Now you probably wonder-- do I feel no guilt as an illicit choco-trafficker? Do I feel no adult pang of regret over abusing the which rules our educational administration so deeply entrusted me with? Do I feel no remorse over contributing to The Moo's obvious food addiction? Or the wasteful spending of hard-earned allowances for which my smuggled goods were exchanged?

And the answer is... nah. I made it over the border to Canada. I high-tailed it to Florida once. These were, of course, pre-scheduled band trips I'd funded with the chocolate bar dough. But still.

Everyone has their price. And mine was $1 for plain, $2 for specialty.

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Question for the day: Any other former band members here? And what, if anything, did you have to sell for your fundraisers?
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Brook-Bagging Louie Stamoolis

Posted by Unknown at 4:00 AM Labels: being a kid, bullies, bullying, humor, kiddom, standing up to a bully

As a bully, Dwayne Pasternak was an underachiever.

Oh, he probably could have gotten good at it, if he'd just applied himself a little more. But on a scale of Bullying as an Artform, his work was like a Starving Artist painting...

Unoriginal... Cheap.... Initially getting your attention, but eventually just blending in behind the sofa.

He was the kid who'd call you "dogface," if you just happened to look his way. The one who'd trip you on your way to class so you'd drop your books. The boy who'd snap your bra.

I always felt his repertoire lacked range.

I mean, Teeny DeLuca, now she'd shown first-rate creativity when she tried to give me lead poisoning. And Arnold Kosninski, he used skilled spin-doctoring to enrage his victims. But Dwayne, well, he'd never make into the Bully Hall of Fame... His lack of imagination held him back.

Until he decided to brook-bag a kid named Louie Stamoolis.

Louie Stamoolis was a seventh-grade human computer... input and output. His math was of Texas Instruments quality. He remembered dates and events like he lived them. He even seized foreign languages like Napoleon did countries. Louie was brilliant.

But because Louie was storing all of this data in his brain, regrettably, it left very little room for anything else. Like manners... modesty... or a sense of humor. And the giant weight of his brain also seemed to press on the back of his eyes, straining his tear ducts.

Louie Stamoolis could cry at the drop of a hat.

It didn't even have to be his hat.

Add to that, he was small for his age, with an almost pretty face, and long dark lashes. He was a target for his intelligence, his looks, and because he was a little bit hard to like.

The crying only made it worse.

So, one day as school let out, I was headed on home and spied Dwayne Pasternak playing keep-away with Louie's backpack.

Dwayne was tall, wiry, and with a straw-colored flat top. With his plaid flannel shirt and that scrub-brush hair, he looked like a scarecrow teetering in the wind-- the book bag dangling high over Louie's head.

Louie's pale face was streaming with tears and he'd jump. And miss. And sob. And jump again. And whimper.

"You want it?" laughed Dwayne, "Come get it. Or consider yourself brook-bagged, Stamoolis!"

Brook-bagging meant tossing someone's backpack into the stream that ran outside the school. Many a text book and homework went the way of the brook. Teachers knew papers turned in with crinkled and smeared pages had probably been resurrected from a serious brook-bagging.

Well, at the very threat of it, Louie Stamoolis' tearducts started working overtime. And that's when I heard a bored, irritated voice say, "Aww, just give him his stupid bag back, Dwayne."

Oh. That voice was mine.

Dwayne fixed his attention on me, with a look of vague recognition like, "Hey, hadn't I bullied you before?"

But strangely, Dwayne didn't really scare me. What was he going to do to me? Snap my bra again? Call me ugly for the umpteenth time? By eighth grade, I'd seen it all, and survived to tell about it. But picking on Louie Stamoolis... that was like flipping a turtle on its back to see it struggle.

Someone had to take the side of the turtle.

"You stay out of this," Dwayne snarled.

"C'mon, Dwayne. It's not cool. Just give it to him," I said.

And that's when Dwayne started racing down the hallway.

I looked to see what Louie planned to do about it. But he just leaned against the lockers, sobbing like Joan Crawford trying for an Oscar. So maybe it was a lack of fear. Or maybe I'd just watched too many Wonder Woman episodes. But I left Louie in the middle of his big scene-- and ran after Dwayne.

Now, Dwayne wasn't really expecting to be chased-- let alone by a girl. Down the metal stairs we went, one after the other, with a clatter like thunder.

Bang! went the school doors and out onto the sidewalk we flew. Dwayne sprinted. I sprinted, too. And that's when, true to his underachieving nature, Dwayne lost all initiative and dropped the bag. It lay there on the pavement in the center of the bridge over the brook-- the shining prize in my quest for justice.

Dwayne called me some names over his shoulder for good measure, as he ran on home. A parting shot of a desperate man. The weak words of the defeated. I picked up the backpack.

I smiled at the bag, gave it a little hug, and thought, "No brook for you today, my friend." And jogged back into the school to find Louie.

Louie was right where I'd left him, having a meltdown at his locker, his world ending in the form of a drowned red Nike backpack. I handed him the rescued bag with flourish and a warm triumph swelling in my heart. Or maybe that was just my asthma kicking in after all that running.

"Here!" I proclaimed. "It's safe!"

But Louie snatched it from my hand like I'd tried to brook-bag him myself. He glared up at me, gave a swipe to his running nose, his tear-stained eyes, and slung the bag on his shoulder. Without a word, he stalked off.

I stood there, watching Louie's retreating back bob off into the afternoon sun, and I shook my head.

I bet Wonder Woman had these moments, too. The scenes they never showed us.

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Cortez' Six and the Edgar Allen Poe Junior High School Cardsharps

Posted by Unknown at 4:00 AM Labels: bullies, gambling in school, humor, junior high school, kiddom, lawsuits, playground

"No running, jumping, skipping, sports equipment, hopscotch, tree-climbing, gum-chewing, or pointy, pointy arts-and-crafts."

The swing sets had been removed for our own safety, as had the jungle gym. This left the school playground flat and empty. A desolate black macadam sea.

Such was the start of lawsuit fever in the 80s. And rather than run the risk of being sued by an angry parent when little Suzie sprained her knee in a tragic hopscotch accident, the school determined they had two choices:

They could wrap us all in giant bags of foam packing peanuts...

Or they could just remove everything on the playground that might cause injury.

Or temptation.

Or, you know... fun.

As a result, after lunch, many a kid decided that going out onto the playground wasn't really worth the effort. With all the play taken from it, there was only ground. And bullies had a habit of making you TASTE ground when they didn't have anything else to do. Like out on a Jersey blacktop wasteland.

Then one day one of my lunch pals, Felix "the Cat" Cortez-- the kind of kid who was practically a jaded divorcee by age 12-- plunked the deck of cards onto the cafeteria table with a narrow gaze.

"Gin rummy," he proclaimed. "Play for points. Highest points at the end of the school year-- which will be me-- is the winner. Everybody else? A giant loser." He smirked at the kids around him. "Which we already knew. So who's in?"

Well, every one of us knew gin rummy sure beat lunch followed by a knuckle sandwich.

"Me," said Pete Cobb, a sci-fi/fantasy nut who knew how to wield insults like Excalibur. I once bought an insult book just to keep up with him.

"I'm in," said Manuel "Manny" Esteban, a talented young singer with a baby-face, who never quite got over the fact he wasn't selected as the most recent member of Menudo.

"I am gonna cream you buttwipes," announced Jan McNeely, who knew more colorful curses than a Jersey cabdriver, and who'd dyed her blond hair black in some grand statement she no longer remembered anymore.

The group turned to my friend Josette.

"Well... " began Josette hesitantly. I know she was weighing what her CCD teacher would have to say about this, and whether gin rummy was just one more step on the road to Hell. But the peer pressure was simply too much. "...Okay."

"Thorson?" queried The Cat, raising an eyebrow over the table at me.

"Never played it," I said, "but I'm in, too."

The Cat cackled. "Never played it? Girl, you are gonna be dead in the water."

"We'll see, Felix, we'll see," I said, trying to sound sure of myself.

"Rules of the game," began The Cat. "Seven card. Four of a kind or same-suit runs. Jokers, my friends, are wild. Cut the cards to see who goes first. High card has it."

We made the cut and Manny came up aces.

And this was the beginning of Cortez' Six, the greatest gin rummy tournament that Edgar Allen Poe Junior High School had ever seen.

Day after day we would choke down our peanut butter sandwiches, gorge our bananas and slurp down our Capri Suns, only to stash away our lunchboxes and clear time and space for the next deal.

Josette kept track of points meticulously in her Trapper Keeper notebook. She had the best handwriting of our group, and anyway, we all knew we couldn't trust anyone else with the tally.

Months went by this way. Initially, The Cat was well in the lead, but as time went on, the rest of us began to close in.

Pete Webb dealt name-calling with every hand...

Jan McNeely cursed with some crushing losses...

Manny was nearly ejected from the game many times for his annoying humming. Which, in retrospect, was probably a tell...

And even I grew more and more confident in the game by the day, eventually wiping the smug smile off the Cat's face as the tally grew neck-in-neck.

Winter turned to spring, and as the trees budded on the school playground, we remained immune to their greenery.... Unmoved by the gentle breezes. Just a few weeks more and the tourney would be over. Just a few weeks more and we'd separate the men from the boys...

Er, the women from the girls...

Er, the loser kids from the, um, non-loser kids.

And then, somewhere in the middle of a hand, a shadow fell over our table. We looked up to see Mr. Selleck, the wiry hatchet-faced vice principal in his perpetual brown tweed suit.

"What are you doing?" he asked, peering down on we six with the cards fanned in our hands. I half-expected The Cat to laugh and answer dominoes, but his expression was very grave.

"Gin rummy," Jan McNeely spoke up.

"Well, you can't do that. It's gambling!"

My heart was pounding in my chest. Would we be expelled for this? Or get detention? I just couldn't understand why this was a problem now, so close to the end of the year, because Mr. Selleck had to have walked past us a thousand times during the course of a hundred other rounds.

"We're only playing for points," I explained, and held aloft Josette's notebook as evidence.

But Mr. Selleck was already scooping up the cards from the table and grabbing the remaining ones from our hands. "No, I'm sorry, it doesn't matter. This is gambling and... and, well... that's simply not allowed in school." He seemed to be winging it with this little speech. "I have to take these. I'm sorry."

"It was only points!" Manny exclaimed.

Mr. Selleck's pointy mustached face went a bit red and he wouldn't look us in the eye. "Look, I'm sorry. Just go out onto the playground."

On the playground. Great...

We grabbed our lunch boxes and bookbags and slumped from the cafeteria, out onto the playground. But by the time the bell to class had rung, we'd already developed our own theory for the breakup of Cortez' Six.

"Papercuts," laughed Felix. "We could have mortally wounded ourselves from papercuts from those cards."

"And-- gasp-- sue the school!" Josette agreed.

"Did you know 15% of visits to the school nurse involve paper cuts that won't stop bleeding?" I suggested. "Oh, it's true!"

"My cousin almost lost his effing arm that way," Jan confided with a grin.

Yes, we determined-- somewhere in the vice principal's office there would soon be a dangerous deck of cards secreted away in a folder, a drawer, or a wall safe.

And maybe Cortez' Six never did get to determine who was real cardsharp among our ranks...

But we sure as heck had fun those remaining weeks plotting the heist of that Bicycle deck of 52.

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Bully for Me: The Fourth-Grade Recess Showdown

Posted by Unknown at 6:00 AM Labels: 80s, bullies, bullying, dukes of hazzard lunchbox, humor, memoir, nostalgia, scut farcas

Bullies. Harry Potter had Dudley Dursley... Ralphie Parker had Scut Farcas… And in terms of these epic battles of Good versus Evil, fought and lost on the Great Playground of Life-- why, me, I had Tanya “Teeny” DeLuca.

Teeny was, in fact, really small. But what she lacked in size, she more than made up for with a troublemaker’s finesse.

Her procedure was like that of a barracuda. This thin fish with razor-sharp choppers slowly, carefully sidles up to its potential meat and then-- BANG!-- shoots in for the kill. Atypical behavior for your average grade-schooler, okay. But this Wild Kingdom episode played itself out over and over again, for myself and every other member of the fourth grade.

Oh yes, no one was truly immune from the torment, the fists, the cornering after class. But it wasn't long before she'd honed in on Yours Truly as one of her extra-special targets.

In retrospect, I can hardly blame her. With braces, glasses, good grades and a chronic case of politeness, I see now that it was just another well-worn scene in this, our natural world. Cheetahs pick off the injured gazelle... Bullies trounce the gangly nerd-girl in the brown plaid and loafers.

It’s the circle of life.

Her first move in class was, as I think back on it, a exercise in Bully Genius. Not surprising, really, because she'd been honing her skills for about two years now on the mean streets of suburban Jersey.

It's good to have a hobby.

This particular day, she'd bided her time until our teacher was out of the room, and then reached across the aisle from her desk to mine, and seized my hand. In a second, she'd dug her fingernail into its surface, deeply enough to make it bleed.

Holding on with the power of a constrictor, she worked feverishly to rub her pencil point neatly into the wound while I struggled.

"There!" she hissed, smile peeling back over glistening white predator teeth. "I put lead in there! You have lead poisoning now! You're going to die."

"Oh no! Lead poisoning!" I cried, cradling my arm as she released it. I recall wondering whether the school nurse had an antidote for that... Or for the death thing. I could see the silvery graphite there in the wound, imagining particle by particle seeping into my blood. I cried and mourned my untimely demise. I'd had such big plans. And now they were gone, snuffed out at age 8 by lead poisoning.

"And if you tell, you'll really get it," she warned.

Worse than death by lead poisoning? Oh good gravy, did the tortures ever end?

I spent the rest of the day not feeling very well, convincing myself it was the poison seeping into my system, and too afraid to tell anyone what happened. By evening, my mom had set me straight about that whole pencil graphite not actually being lead issue. And my world seemed a brighter, cheerier place once more. In the world of Kiddom, trauma could wash away like chalk paintings in summer rain.

But Teeny, oh, she wasn't done with me yet. Later that week she cornered me on the playground with a couple of hulking sixth graders at her side, pummeling me with foul words I’d never heard before. Every couple of days thereafter brought brand new perils.

Then the tide turned in one single day.

Recess had never actually been much fun, even when it wasn't Bully Season. Because the school was afraid of some kid getting injured on the playground and being sued, they ripped out all the swing sets and jungle gyms so we wouldn't hurt ourselves. We also weren't allowed to run, use balls, bats, or other sports equipment, play hopscotch, jump rope or climb the trees...

They considered wrapping us all in bubble wrap, but were concerned about heat rashes.

Cards were forbidden because it was gambling. An out-of-control set of jacks could poke out an eye.

This left us wandering around the macadam like a bunch of laid-off union workers-- bored, surly, and looking for anything to liven things up a little.

Josette and I would pretend we were characters from Star Wars or The Dukes of Hazzard-- pretty much anyone less likely than we were to have their lunch money stolen-- and hope we were invisible.

But Teeny's keen graphite-colored eyes could see.

I don't know what it was exactly that set her off this day. The offending glint off my bottle lenses in the sun? The haughty snap of my elastic argyle knee socks? The overconfident rattle of the metal lunchbox in my hand?

But Teeny DeLuca was ready to rumble.

She cornered me at the flagpole, pushing, and spitting out filthy names like tobacco juice, which I was convinced she chewed in her off-hours. And as I looked down at her contorted little mug sneering up at me, suddenly I realized...

This wasn't fair. I didn't deserve this.

Just because I got good grades, and wore thrift store clothes, and couldn't see, and had crooked teeth, and stringy hair and maybe wasn't exactly the social butterfly of Classroom 18, it didn't mean I had no right to exist...

Just because I didn't have dock worker epithets... or fists of fury... or a bunch of sixth graders with anger management issues ready to back me up, didn't mean I had to take this...

I mean, what did I have?

I had a durable, metal "Dukes of Hazzard" lunchbox.

Ah, that wonderful, wonderful sound! The glorious clatter of lunchbox on outstretched fist. The contact made her cold, marble-like eyes fly open wide with shock and renewed rage. She tried again, knuckles flying, but for every punch—wham! The Dukes struck again.

This battle-- Teeny versus the Dukes went on and on-- possibly until our fourth grade moving-up ceremony. By this point, a crowd had formed around us and Teeny was beginning to realize their overall sentiments were not exactly on her side.

"You put down that lunchbox and fight fair!" she spat, anger and now fear creeping into her voice.

But I’d put up my Dukes for the first time in my life, and I wasn't stopping now.

Then suddenly my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Ciccetti was there, guiding me away. Someone else had a hold of Teeny, who was kicking and struggling, still ready to finish the round.

The bell rang and we were officially sent to our corners.

I heard words like "suspension" soar over the crowd like a paper airplane. And that's when I started to cry. Not only would I have suspension for fighting in school, but my lunchbox was dented. My parents were not going to take kindly to this. First lead poisoning, and then public execution. All before I was ten.

And to think I’d shown such promise.

That's what ran through my head as Mr. Ciccetti escorted me into the school. He held the door for me, as I walked through the threshold to certain doom, tears streaming down my face and speckling my steamed-up glasses.

I remember how he smelled warmly of cologne as he leaned down and asked me just one single question:

"Did you really hit her?"

"Yeah," I breathed in-between hitching sobs.

His mustache rippled a bit, finally turning up at the ends. "Good."

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