The 2nd Bully Adventure

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

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Just a heads up. This story is really about a bully, but it takes some setup. The context is both important and fun, so bear with me as I set the stage some.

I both feared and was looking forward to 7^th grade.  Grammar school had become too small a world for me, and a new, much larger school meant many more people to meet and maybe expand my list of friends . With any luck maybe I would even find a special friend because last year we were so young and stupid for labeling all girls as gross bacteria best avoided. Entering 7th grade, I was older. much more mature and anxious to act my age.

Hey, who’s giggling?

Anyway now, 7th graders are older than last year, so we had to also be wiser – ready for full on sophisticated relationships – unless we had to both talk and make sense. That skill was not scheduled until, um, let me check – yep – age 42 for guys and, wait, this can’t be right – 14 for girls. . . ?

Hmm, I may need to second-source this data. Let me get back to you on this.

In my case, a grammar school crush never got off the ground because, mostly I was scared to death to approach the object of my affections because I was much younger than 42 and didn’t say anything about it, but here in Junior High, I was older, much more mature and ready for a great romance.

Now, I just needed the perfect girl to appear. It took several weeks for her to rise above the crowd, but she finally did and wow, she perfectly fit my estimate of what she’d be like.  We shared only one class and there, she sat half a room away making casual conversation impossible. Fortunately, Petaluma Junior High was not so big that I couldn’t figure out where to find her, and watch — so I could study from afar, you know, to verify her character. And you can drop those thoughts of how I was “stalking” her, because there was no social media in those days where then I could have studied her on-line.  Instead, I HAD no choice but to watch the real her.

I know that my analysis could have progressed faster by asking others, but that would expose me to much more (read as ‘any’) judgement which I was unwilling to risk. I also was still too new to junior high school. This left me with learning how to manage deliberate but casual and non-conspicuous, first-hand observation.  Also, I looked it up and it didn’t qualify as stalking unless I started drooling.

So, I analyzed;  Wow – she sure is cute.  She never stops smiling and what a smile!  She has a great sense of humor, just a bit silly but adorable.  She sure looks good in that yellow knee-length frilly dress with the small shoulder ruffles. No other boyfriend in sight (always a plus) and apparently plenty of friends of her own, so she’s popular but not snotty about it.  Always nicely dressed without being a style queen.  She clearly merits more, maybe months of careful study.

I watched for months.  I knew her class patterns, where she liked to sit for lunch, and I knew how to be close enough to hear her voice without being detected (actually pretty easy if you think it through.  Having your eyes on someone is obvious, but your ears – with a book in hand, no one could tell what or who you are actually listening to and I had no problem simply sitting alone kinda-reading a book.  Anyone who knew me knew what a book worm I was) so my collection of facts slowly grew to include:

She knows how to laugh at herself without going too far.

She and I may share a few friends, hmmm.

Yes, I really want to meet this gal.

I just have no clue how to do that.

Maybe, more study. . .

What? We hit the summer break and school is done for the year! How did that happen? I’m not ready yet.

Her smile haunted me that summer and when I came back for the new academic year as an even more mature eighth grader ready to step up and meet this girl, Arrgh – she’s gone! Nowhere to be found. Who just moves away from Petaluma? This is so unfair! How am I supposed to find her now? How much longer do I have to wait for FaceBook to be invented. . . ?

By careful clawing for data, I discovered that she’d moved away. I moped about my failure for most of 8^th grade. It felt like hundreds of months.

I was tired of the moping when it was time for 9^th grade. I was ready for a new year, a new chance to find my way and determined to squash my out-of-control emotions if need be. The hormones had had their fun, but 9^th grade was going to be on my terms.

Early on, I somehow attracted the attention of another really neat gal but was struggling to make our relationship work. Did you know that the list of skills needed between good friends and those needed for romantic relationships are wildly different?  You did?  Okay, why did no one think to tell me? Or that those unmentioned skills require multiple decades to master? I have firsthand knowledge of this because I lacked more than a few of them and this gal and I, we’d get on fine for a few days, then one of us would cause an emotional crash of some kind. Looking back, I began to understand how experts could claim that girls mature sooner that boys because this gal sure had the jump on me.

So, that relationship finally and completely went off the rails and crashed; rolling down and into the Petaluma River where the lights went out and the train simply sank into the murk. It left me miserable with ridiculous emotional scars. After I made him nuts with my moping around, Dad told me to buck up and that I’d get over her – which just made me angry, until a chance sighing completely washed away all memory of this short and failed relationship.

I felt so bad about that failed relationship that I dredged up the memories of that gal who moved away just so I could mope about something different, I guess. I wished she had never moved and actually ‘saw her’ around campus, but I was always wrong. It was this one gal who sorta looked like her, but up close, clearly wasn’t.

Soon this was making me nuts. Because I saw this imposter more and more often. One day, I finished up my math class with Mr. Ashberry, who always left me laughing about something, and was heading for my locker down near Ms. Smart’s English class – when I looked up and – dang, there she is again . . .  the fraudulent reminder of my social failure back in 7th grade.  Why – why does this get under my skin so badly and why do I bother trying to get a closer look only to find it’s the wrong girl? Why can’t I just ignore her?

Well, I couldn’t and so just this one more time I had to check her out. Against my own better judgment, I determined to find out for sure if it could be her. I quickly wormed my way through the open hallway and past the apparition where she was surrounded by friends – I then spun like I’d forgotten something to get a full-frontal view of her– and there was no mistaking that face and that smile.

So, it seemed that the God of young boys was not through with either of us yet. as it turned out – he’s concerned about more than just keeping us alive through high-speed box sliding and close encounters with homicidal buckeyes and so he must have decided to stir things up again early in my 9th grade by (YES!) bringing her back to Petaluma Junior High School. Her family had moved away for only one year. Again, who does that?

It was — it really was her– and a much more mature her – oh man! There’s no way she’ll ever get into that yellow dress again.

I would not have believed that she could be any cuter but wow – she really is.

So, just like that, the lingering light of my emotional pain over the failed relationship was snuffed out (just like dad said it would – urg – I really hated it when he was right about such things) and now my anxiety gauge was registering something just over 110% of possible AND I could not let her get away again. No excuses were acceptable. I knew I had to reconstruct my wasted 8th grade courage and this time had to meet her.

I completely de-focused on my next class and began to assemble a great master plan with each step carefully thought through.  Once decided, I was dying to get going.  Reviewing all my how-to-project-a-fun-personality notes, I steeled myself for the great gamble with my emotional well-being and took the seriously courageous step of – asking a mutual friend who happened to also be a girl,  to arrange an introduction. Yea – I went with the 3^rd party strategy this time.

Hey – I was only in 9th grade and age 42 was still several decades out.

Laugh if you like, but we were introduced and started a great romance. She was fun, cute, quite the smart-aleck, and was the daughter of a local pastor – so, yes, I learned how to treat a lady by going steady with one.  Learning about her was so much easier, now that I could actually talk to her. It was so much better than all that amateur stalking I did in 7^th grade.

Through her I found several undiscovered emotions I never knew I had.

One day a good friend pulled a stunt on her with a bunch of friends around us and I thought it was humiliating – unacceptable and way over the line. It was all I could do to not slam him into the nearest wall to save myself the words needed to cause the same amount of pain. I recognized that she took it all in stride and laughed it off. My making a scene would have been far harder on her – so I followed her lead and mostly let it go.  Instead, I made it a point to stay between her and him from that day forward. He’d have to go through me to get to her and he was sharp enough to see that that wasn’t soon going to

After school the two of us were always together and went wherever the gang was going.  My favorite place was downtown Petaluma at the corner of Washington and Kentucky. It was Kings Diner. They made the best milkshakes in town.  I know this was true because I was in the 9th grade now and was an expert with such things.

Some days she had to go straight home but she lived close enough to the campus for me to walk her home.  We enjoyed each other’s company and got on fine, we were surrounded by good friends, but one day I had to deal with an idiot – the bully who inspired this story.

Despite her best efforts at turning me into a civilized young man – I managed to make plenty of mistakes but this day, I think I got it right.  Here’s how it unfolded.

While walking her home, a young shmuck came up behind us and taunt her with crude, insulting and even threatening comments. I shouldn’t really call him a bully because he clearly wasn’t even that smart. I was right there with her. I was over a foot taller and easily outweighed his puny 90 some-odd pounds. Looking back, I think the twerp was actually trying to commit suicide by boyfriend.

We tried to ignore him at first, but he was having none of that and only increased the tempo – yelling things I won’t repeat here. I took her by the hand and walked us faster, all the while sensing her fear and tension building. I’ve never been a fighter, but my male, damsel-in-distress gene, was lit up like a road flare. He wanted to scare her, but this only gave me time to figure out how I wanted this to play out. I laid down what I thought was a decent plan but worried that he might get violent.  If I waited long enough, would he finally go away or try to strike her?  If he hit me, it couldn’t be too big a deal, but there was no way he was going to get the chance to touch her.  But could I actually hit and disable him?  How could I best stay between her and him at all times? He was such a small jerk; I worried how to defend her and cream this moron without upsetting her or overly wounding him.

Suddenly, he accidentally gave me an unexpected opening to settle things quickly.  His afternoon shadow appeared at our feet, so I knew almost exactly where he was even though he was behind us.  On the other hand, he was now too close, and I knew it was time to put a stop to his threats. With the loud-mouth owner of that shadow within reach. I dropped her hand, spun and grabbed him by the shirt front and lifted him off his feet and swung him over to where a car was parked beside the sidewalk and drug him over the hood, windshield, roof and trunk – trying to drag him across anything that looked like it would carve out a chunk of skin. He howled or screamed every time he bumped over some piece of trim and yelled something about how his older brother was going to find and beat me to a pulp.

When I ran out of car, I dangled him above the curb and pointed out to him that his brother was not here, and that I was. His eyes were huge, and his expression changed, perhaps he finally realized what a stupid idea this had been.

Then, considering it to be the wiser of two options, I threw him into a large batch of juniper bushes that were right there in someone’s front yard. He yelped miserably as he landed – I think with good cause because, well, if you’ve ever had too close an encounter with a juniper patch – you know how much pain he was suddenly in.  I maintain that it was a better idea than the alternative of throwing him out into traffic, which I had considered and rejected, because my girlfriend was still right there hoping this would all pass quickly with no more exposed bloody tissue.

We continued to her home, quietly, with both her arms wrapped lovingly around my victorious, strong left arm because mom taught me about staying between the girl and traffic when walking down the street together, so she was safely on my left (thanks Mom).

You know, I found this stage of the encounter — not at all unpleasant.

I never saw this pint-sized action figure want-to-be again but I was on the alert for any sighting of him for the rest of the school year, nor did I encounter anyone who claimed to be his brother (but think about it, would you claim blood relationship with such a head case?) so I’m at peace with the thought that by now, natural selection has most likely taken him out of the gene pool by some other means.

The whole event did give me something to think about for many weeks. I had never treated anyone like that before (wait – do sisters count?) and can only think of two other times that I had to raise my hands in defense of myself or someone else.

I had no real desire to hurt him at the start, but there was never a question that this punk was going to stand down or I would forcefully stop him. The only real question was whether I could bulls-eye him into the center of that juniper patch.  Okay, there arguably might be one more question – whether he ever got out of that juniper patch.  Surely, he did and went home to lick his wounds, but what if he’s still in there. . . ? Ick!

Anyway, this gal and I remained close until, ugh, she moved again.

Nuts!  Producer, please roll the happily-ever-after photo and music anyway.

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