They seemed to come out of nowhere sometime in my freshman year. I didn’t know who they were, just that they seemed to be older than me. At first it started out as just heckling. They’d pass me in the halls and snarl at me or call me a sissy. I ignored them at first but that only made them more aggressive. By the time I got to my junior year they would ambush me between classes and shove me around, threatening to strip me down and paint my balls black with shoe polish or run my underwear up the flagpole.
I was too embarassed and too scared to tell anybody about it and so I just bit the bullet and put up with them as best I could. But it finally got to be too much so I enlisted my twin brother’s help, (a most unlikely ally at that point in our lives) and had him accompany me after the classes where I seemed to be most vulnerable.
I lived in terror of these two guys, these hoodlums who had it in for me for reasons that they never took the time to explain and that I never understood. I knew it had something to do with the fact that I was different. (Everything in my life had something to do with that.) But I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how I could have generated so much hatred and animosity just by being different.
After my junior year the bullies graduated and I thought I was finally free of them. But one day that summer while I was walking into town from our house out in the farmlands they came up on the highway behind me, pulled their car off the road, jumped out and came after me.
When I realized what was happening I took off running for all I was worth but I didn’t get enough of a head start and pretty soon they got close enough to grab my jacket. In sheer terror at that point I managed somehow to slip out of my jacket and kept running until I got to the closest house and ran screaming hysterically through the front door, scaring the old lady that lived there half to death.
I hated those guys for what they did to me. They made my life miserable and I lived in constant terror of them for four long years. I didn’t know who they were. I never knew their names. I’d never had any contact with them at all when they first started bullying me. I guess they just looked at me and decided they didn’t like me. And I think that really sucks.
This is a fucked up culture. We breed these insanely intolerant assholes, these jerks who feel compelled to harass and ridicule anyone not like themselves. And then we all act so shocked when kids like those in Littleton pick up guns and take their revenge. The harassment gets so intolerable that it drives you to the edge of desperation. And some obviously get pushed over the edge.
I had access to guns. We had several of them at home. But after shooting a good bit of my thumb off with one of them on my 14th birthday I wasn’t in the frame of mind to pick one up for any reason. Unlike the boys in Littleton, I just kept running. And crying and running and crying and running. I guess maybe there’s the distinction between homo and hetero sensibility.
Late one night after a football game I was in the school parking lot and headed for home alone on foot when I heard the unmistakable voices of the bullies coming from behind me. Our house was only a couple of fields away from the school so I took off running as fast as I could into the dark, stumbling over and into the cold muddy furrows - too terrified to even scream and finally getting caught in the barbed-wire and electrical fence that kept my brothers pigs in check.
As I wiped the mud from my crying eyes and lay cut and bleeding from the barbed-wire, getting the shit zapped out of me from the electrical fence and hearing the pigs snorting at me in the distance, I felt a deep sickness and grief welling up inside of me. How could anybody hate me this much?
What was so wrong with me?
I’d lost the bullies somewhere out there in the dark but I knew that they’d never really be gone. So I guess it wasn’t all that surprising that I left home the night I graduated from High School and moved to a town fifty miles away where my piano teacher lived.
More than thirty years later I’ve stopped looking over my shoulder but I can still remember what it all felt like then.
Most of us can only take so much before we snap and feel the urge to strike back at those who bully us into a place of constant humiliation and fear. I guess I'm lucky that I got outta there before I snapped or I might not be sitting here writing this tonight...
...because there were times when I really did want to kill them.
Bullies
Copyright 2004 by Tom Clark
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