Bully (Beltane 2015)

Bully (Beltane 2015) - a reading (on YouTube)

In high school, I drove a moped. Not exactly stylish but it was cheap and reliable enough to get me back and forth to work, and to school on the days I missed the bus. What it lacked in panache it more than made up for as a bully-magnet.

As I’ve said before, bullies seem to think I’m an easy target, I think because I’m quiet and generally keep to myself. I tend not to make an issue of things if I don’t feel I have to. But once an issue kicks off, I don’t back down until it’s resolved, one way or another.

My ride topped out somewhere around 35 mph and that’s if I had a tailwind. Because of that I drove the back roads around town as much as I could. But I couldn’t avoid a few stretches of four-lane divided roadway where the speed limit was 40 to 45, which meant 50 in most people’s minds. When I drove those roads, I hugged shoulder so I wouldn’t get clipped, and so people could more easily get around when they saw an opportunity.

I don’t remember exactly when it started, sometime over the spring. One day, I was driving the little beast home from school along one of those stretches, consumed in my own thoughts, when a car crept up just behind me where I couldn’t see it and blew its horn. I about jumped straight out of my seat and barely kept control. That was an adrenaline rush I really didn’t need. I never got a good look at the driver.

Turns out, this became that driver’s favorite pastime, pulling up just into my blind spot and laying on the horn. I began to recognize the car and to look for it in my mirrors but didn’t know who drove it. I’m pretty sure after that first encounter he went out of his way to find me. So like most teenaged males, I instinctively took to flipping off that car every time it blew its horn and then sped by. For a while, that became our shared ritual, BEEEEP, (jump), middle finger.

That changed the day that car tried to run me off the road. Instead of speeding away as normal while I flipped it off, it made a quick swerve up beside me. For a moment, all I saw was a broad, steel quarter panel closing off the asphalt. It might have been faded green but I can’t be sure. Somehow I avoided it by darting onto the grassy shoulder, and still managed not to lose control. Now the driver had my full and undivided attention. I took that personally.

I reported the incident to the police but they were disinterested. Basically, the officer said that unless he witnessed something himself there was nothing he could do (or would) even though I gave him a description of the vehicle and a partial license plate. Thanks for nothing RPD. Protect and serve, my ass.

So I figured I needed to take my protection into my own hands. While I could make an effort to take the bus to school, I still had to get to work. I worked 20-30 hours, 4-6 days a week. I had access to my mother’s second car when I needed it but there was no way she was going to relinquish it to me full-time. So I had to come up with another solution.

My testosterone addled brain focused on a weapon to defend myself. Or at least to leave a mark on this guy’s car if he tried running me off the road again. I settled on a miniature wooden baseball bat, the kind they sell as souvenirs at Major League games. It was about as long as my forearm, spun from oak, and emblazoned with Boston Red Sox down the side. My grandfather had bought it for me the only time we’d seen a game in Fenway Park together.

It fit perfectly along the moped’s stanchion, right behind to the steering column. I designed a mechanism that would hold it in place but would still allow me to retrieve it one-handed on the fly. Satisfied with that, I drilled a hole near the handle and threaded it with a leather strap so I wouldn’t lose it. My inexperienced mind figured that perhaps a simple warning would send the message I was serious and I wouldn’t have to use it. Ah, the naivety of youth.

I think it was a week later before my theory was put to the test. By this point I still wasn’t positive who was driving the car other than it was someone I went to school with. But I did know which neighborhood he lived in. One about midway between mine and my best friend’s, G.

I was driving home from school, watching my side mirrors, and sure enough my shadow pulled up behind me and blared its horn. I completed our ritual by flipping him off. But instead of speeding past, he slowed down to tail me, riding no more than five feet behind me, gunning his engine off and on. Oh, this wasn’t good.

I quickly reassessed my situation. At that moment I was keenly aware that the back roads I normally used would leave me pretty vulnerable. They were not well trafficked so there would be no witnesses to whatever happened. And if he decided to run me off the road, I was probably as good as dead. All he had to do was nudge me since he outweighed me by a couple tons. But I still had two advantages he couldn’t match.

First, I exploited my maneuverability. I set him up by driving past my normal turn, tricking him into believing I was taking the long way home on the most public of roads. He seemed content to settle in for a slow-motion chase. So it caught him completely by surprise when I darted down a side street across several lanes of traffic without so much as leaning to advertise my intent. I was there and then gone before he could react. He overshot the turn and had to wait for a break in traffic to double back.

I knew that move wouldn’t buy me much time. But I also knew my second advantage lay at the end of the road I’d just started down, maybe half a mile away. Now we were in a race, one I could only hope my cleverness would help me win. I opened up the little beast for everything it was worth, using every trick I knew to eek out just a little more speed. I prayed it was enough combined the delaying tactic I’d used. I ran at least one stop sign just so I wouldn’t have to slow down.

When I heard his engine rumbling in the distance, I casually retrieved my makeshift billy club from the stanchion and hung it from my right handlebar as a warning. I wasn’t planning on going quietly that into that good afternoon.

Just as he was racing up behind me, I reached my goal, a pedestrian bridge across a ditch that connected my neighborhood to the one just north of it. I had just slipped through the chainlink posts at full throttle when I heard the squeal of brakes behind me. My second advantage was that I knew the terrain and had picked the most favorable location. Had I not made that bridge, I knew I had a set of dirt trails immediately to my right and left where his car also couldn’t go.

Once I was safely across the bridge, I circled back to look. I found myself confronting an irate underclassman from my high school, BR, and his friend, whose name I didn’t know, both standing beside the still running car. BR was clutching a pair of numchucks and yelling something that I couldn’t understand through my helmet and over my puttering engine. But their postures were easily read. They were itching for a fight and livid they’d been outfoxed. I left them where they stood without a word and headed home. I was confident they didn’t know exactly where I lived but I knew I’d just narrowed it down to a neighborhood for them. I figured they’d start trolling streets to find for me soon.

By the time I got home, I’d realized that my improvised billy club was no match for two guys and a pair of numchucks. But I wasn’t about to back down and hide. I’d been face to face with bullies twice before and understood that, win or lose, only standing up for myself earned anything other than continued confrontations. Thankfully, both BR and his friend were smaller than I was. There had to count for something.

I quickly re-evaluated my strategy. A billy club wasn’t my only choice of weapons. I passed over the hand ax and the spiked flail I’d brought home from Spain. They required getting into close quarters. Besides, I needed something felt comfortable with taking on two opponents. I’d practiced with a quarterstaff for more than a year, but a 5-foot weapon is a bit cumbersome to haul around on a moped. That’s when my eyes settled on the sword hanging on my wall, a gift from my father from several years before. I’d practiced with it, too. Many of the defensive moves I’d learned from the quarterstaff overlapped.

So I slipped it through a belt-loop and called G to tell him I was coming over. If this was going to go down as two on one, I needed backup and G was the best I had. He was a year older than me. We’d met at school and ID’d with each other because we were both geeks and gamers. We’d worked in the same restaurant briefly. He’d introduced me to a side of music I’d never heard. We formed the kind of bond you think at that age will last forever. He always had my back. Looking back, I hope he felt I had his. I should probably mention G lived in public housing, one city north of mine.

Of course, getting there meant transiting across the front of BR’s neighborhood. That didn’t bother me. I would be on a very public road. Besides, I’d had just about enough of this and was more than willing let them know. So I remounted my metallic pony and headed off toward G’s, about five miles away. I sped along a four-lane suburban boulevard, head held high, looking like something out of a modern Don Quixote.

Sure enough BR and his buddy were lying in wait at the front of their neighborhood. Or maybe they had retreated to rearm and were just heading out to find me. I guess I’d saved them the trouble. They quickly fell in behind me at a respectable distance. I wouldn’t shake them again. This time they’d given themselves enough time to react. Clever monkeys.

I sensed a moment’s hesitation when I turned into G’s neighborhood. This was the south in the 1980s. In my hometown, public housing had a reputation for being rough. The police only went there in numbers. But it was broad daylight so BR dutifully stuck to my tail.

Once we were in the network of streets that mostly went by alphabetical designations, BR closed in a little tighter as if either thinking none of the witnesses here mattered, or more likely, clinging to me as if he and his friend belonged. That was all the opportunity I needed.

As I approached G’s duplex, once again I didn’t slow or give any inclination of what I was about to do. I just swerved up onto ten feet of lawn at 35 and dropped the moped against the side of the building with a crash. Once again, the overeager BR overshot. That gave me enough time to prepare to face him and his friend when they circled back around.

They quickly did only find all six foot one of me standing on the grass, my feet planted squarely with a longsword at the ready, fully prepared to use it, a sack full of crazy in my eyes. What I didn’t realize at the time was G was leaning on a heavy oaken quarterstaff as he stood outside his back door. He had heard my moped drop against his living room wall and run out to see what was happening.

BR, who was closest, barely cracked the driver’s side window. His friend, who was hanging out the passenger side and shouting across the roof, initially did most of the talking. The conversation followed predictable lines that went something like:

Me: You want a piece of me? Come on!

BR’s friend: You’ve got a sword.

Me: B has numchucks.

BR’s friend: You had a club.

Me: He tried to run me off the road.

BR (finally speaking): You flipped off my mom while I was in the car.

Me: Then tell your mom not to sneak up behind me and blow the horn.

BR (looking at G): I’m not taking on two of you.

G: I’m just here to make sure your friend stays put.

BR: Then put down the sword.

I slung it down point first about three feet away, leaving two and a half feet of feet of Toledo steel quivering in the ground in front of me.

“Come on!” I yelled, curling both hands in a bring-it gesture. “I don’t need a sword.”

His friend just slid down into the passenger’s seat, suddenly realizing this was not his fight. BR said something about watching myself, rolled up his window and drove away.  G and I just watched them go as we leaned on our weapons. Then we went inside where I immediately started shaking from the adrenaline crash. I didn’t think this was over.

The next day, I drove my mother’s second car to school, figuring if there was going to be a repeat performance, I wanted a cocoon of steel around me for protection. As I walked by the band room toward my locker, a sophomore I recognized but whose name I didn’t know rushed up to me, grabbed my hand and started shaking it. I was confused.

“I hear you pulled a knife on BR yesterday. He’s needed someone to do that for a long time.”

“How’d you hear about that?” I asked, not correcting him about the type of blade.

“Half the school knows,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

As I walked past the cafeteria, I noticed a number of people staring at me and whispering behind their hands. Seemed I’d gained some notoriety. That actually scared me more.

The next thing I knew G’s brother, who was several years older than both of us and worked at the school, pulled BR and me aside at the lockers. “Settle this. Right now.”

We traded the same spars as the afternoon before. I tried to keep my voice steady but failed. Only this time when BR tried to end it by telling me to watch myself, I looked down at him with the same crazy in my eyes and said evenly, “If you do it again, you’ll get the same response. Or worse.”

G’s brother stepped in with “That’s it. It’s over. Now get out of here” (looking more at BR than me).

I didn’t have any more trouble with BR, or anyone else for that matter, for the rest of my high school days. My demonstration had worked.

---

Looking back, sometimes I wonder if I should thank BR for teaching me some valuable lessons. While he wasn’t the first or the only, he certainly did reinforce the impression that sometimes confrontation is unavoidable, that sometimes you have to stand your ground. That being able to think through your anger almost always pays dividends. That knowing something about your adversary and the element of surprise should never be underestimated. And neither should crazy eyes.

Or maybe that incident carried no real lesson. Maybe it didn’t matter why we fought, only that we almost came to blows before one side backed down and the other wouldn’t let him save face just to make sure it never happened again. Maybe we fought because we could, or maybe because we needed to. Or maybe, we fought just to prove ourselves because winter had ended, and life now filled the air. Maybe we just needed to test ourselves against it.

I think in that, we may have been no different from a pair of territorial bucks locking horns with a crack in ritual combat as a sacred rite at Beltane. The day the horned god rules over the impulses of all young men. The day that marks the first of Celtic spring.

© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III