by Mike Edison
9
PUNCHING BACK
Now I am going tell you something I have never told anyone before. It’s still very difficult for me to talk about. I didn’t even tell Dr. Headshrinker, not until after I wrote this and sent it to her.
When I was in junior high, I was bullied by a boy much bigger and stronger than me. One day he beat me up and took my green army field jacket I had saved up for and bought at an army surplus store on Route 1. It probably doesn’t seem like a big deal now—teenagers seem to always have those jackets—but in 1978 you couldn’t just go to the mall and buy rebel couture. I lived in a sea of Sears Toughskins®, and I had sought it out very specifically because I saw John Lennon wearing one in a photo. In my pre-punk, proto-hippie daze, he was my authority-questioning, anti-establishment hero. No one else I knew had anything nearly as cool.
With my long hair and mirrored aviator shades, I thought I looked pretty badass in that jacket, but back then I was anything but, and a few blows to the head later—in broad daylight, as they say, right on the fucking sidewalk when I was walking home from school—it was his. He rained fists on my face and took the jacket right off my back as cars filled with kids and parents drove by on their way to after-school piano lessons and gymnastics.
When I was in junior high, the kids who shared my interest in smoking pot were not mellow stoners—they were animals. Getting high with them was like climbing into a lion’s cage. They were unpredictable, and had little higher calling than to get fucked up. They championed Lynyrd Skynyrd (the band most overrated by morons and most underrated by Stones fans, who should know better), and mediocre, second-tier hard-rock acts like Mahogany Rush (who were basically a Jimi Hendrix cover band with a bigger phase-shifter). They were blunt-edged-and-dangerous New Jersey rednecks.
The only reason I ever hung out with them was because they knew where to score pot, or they sold it themselves. Also pills, lots of pills. I used to buy black beauties and bust them open and snort the amphetamine sulfate powder on the inside, which, if I had been a real beatnik—“burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” or some such nonsense—might have been a very hip thing to do. But at thirteen years old, out behind the VFW hall around the corner from my junior high school at eight in the morning, not so much. I was pretty miserable at home, so this was how I got my kicks.
Eventually I came in from the cold—the pot thing evened itself out and I fell in with some dilettante Dead Heads and guys who liked to jam on Black Sabbath—great stuff for your budding drummer. They were actually decent musicians—guys I’d later form bands with to play keg parties and street fairs, which mostly kept me out of trouble (idle hands and all that). The weed became a catalyst for creativity and not the activity itself, exactly as it should have been. But for now, I had to take it where I found it.
The boy who beat me up spent his weekends drinking beer and lifting weights with his father. I think he could bench-press over three hundred pounds, which is just monstrous for a fourteen-year-old. He could have taken my head off like the twist-cap on a bottle of Budweiser®. I saw his garage once when I went over there to buy some weed, and it could not possibly have been more different from our garage, which was so clean it could have doubled as an art gallery. Our snow shovel, practically floating on its proprietary hook, was like a Duchamp masterpiece. My basketball, which also had its own very specific place where it had to be returned after we played HORSE in the driveway, could have been an early Koons installation. This kid’s garage, aside from the beer cans that littered the place, looked exactly like what I imagined a medium-security penitentiary would, with free weights and barbells everywhere, the merest ode to joy coming from a Hustler centerfold taped haphazardly to the wall. Ashtrays were filled to overflowing. I have to admit, though, that I was kind of in awe that he was allowed to drink and smoke with his dad, even if it was only on weekends.
Getting beaten up and ripped off right out in the open was pretty much the worst ten minutes of a three-year junior high school career that was almost 100 percent miserable.
What hurt the worst is that I couldn’t fight back—the son of a bitch was not only a thousand times stronger than me but also full of fierce, unchecked aggression that just came naturally to him, like walking or breathing. He could fight without even thinking about it. The next day he came to school wearing my jacket, and I had to suck it up and take it like a giant fucking pussy. I was far too embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone about it, and whenever anyone asked me where my cool army jacket was, I just tried to disappear.
If you’ve never been beaten up, here’s something you should know: It usually doesn’t hurt as much as you might think it would. Everybody should have their asses kicked at least once. It builds character. It teaches you not to be afraid of getting hit.
You get punched in the head and the gut and then you get up and walk home and try not to cry, because it is a very lonely feeling. Maybe if you got socked in the eye, you go get a bag of ice or frozen peas or a steak to stop the swelling. You’ll probably be sore as hell, but after a few days you’ll be fine. Except for the humiliation. That could take a while.
I spent weeks brooding on it, wondering what I should do. I thought maybe I’d bring my Swiss Army knife to school, and the next time he started pushing me around I’d cut him. Then I realized that the knife was actually less threatening and more pathetic than I was—its biggest features were a toothpick and tweezers. So I did my best to avoid him, but he still went out of his way to catch me walking home. He got off on scaring the shit out of me. Just watching me flinch made him howl in glee.
Only recently have I even allowed myself to think about this—it really is just about the worst memory of my entire childhood, and it went on for the better part of seventh grade. But I’m glad I did. When I finally got up the nerve to look up this boy who made my life so miserable, I found him on a social media site sporting a ribbed wifebeater and clutching the saddest-looking shih tzu I had ever seen. I felt sorry for him—the shih tzu, that is. It’s terrible, I know, but thirty-five years later, seeing him looking so pathetic made me feel just a little bit better.
MY FATHER WENT TO a very elite prep school and knew well the value of the pedigree, if not the actual education. He graduated high school in a class of just eighteen kids, and all of them went on to Ivy League universities. It’s also probably worth mentioning that the town that he grew up in was largely considered one of the best school districts in the entire country, and even that wasn’t good enough for his parents.
My junior high school was like a work camp for children, and that’s no joke. They weren’t teaching much over there other than conformity and supplication. Show up on time, follow the rules, and get out in one piece. Punch the clock. Do not talk back. It wasn’t education—it was crowd control.
The school district we lived in was largely made up of working-class Protestants and Catholics—third-generation Americans like me, but whose grandparents or great-grandparents came from a much different Europe than did mine. The usual stereotypes often prevailed, and there was a low-spoken but palpable strain of anti-Semitism.
There was also a bar directly across the street from my junior high (who zoned these things, W. C. Fields?) where the guards—that is to say, the teachers—drank after work. They also sold beer and liquor (“packaged goods,” as they’re called in New Jersey), and I bought a six-pack there once when I was still underage (no one ever gave a second look at even the most horrendously fake IDs they used to sell in Times Square for five bucks). The place felt like the Azkaban prison in the Harry Potter books. It was truly soul-sucking—just being in there for a few minutes made me feel like I would never, ever be capable of another cheerful thought.
My mother wanted to send me to a private school, but my father would have no part of that. “He told me, ‘No, I’m not spending the money on him,’ and that was the entire conversation. I knew that the school you were going to wasn’t good e
nough. You were bored and starting to get in trouble. We certainly could have afforded it, but he was already past caring. He gave up on you the second he realized that you were not going to be a tennis-playing preppy like he was. He was done with you, and just moved on to your brothers.”
I asked her how old I was when that happened.
“Nine,” she told me flatly. She carried that sadness with her for a long time.
MY FATHER MADE IT A BIG POINT to distance himself from his own privileged upbringing, and yet, the summer when I turned nine, I was shipped off to the same twee and very expensive sailing camp on Cape Cod where he went when he was a kid. I was supposed to come out the other end transformed. Not quite like in the movie Tommy, when the little boy’s dad takes him to a brothel to visit Tina Turner as the Acid Queen, but you get the idea.
At camp I was lonely and miserable. I had zero in common with those kids, and I didn’t want to go sailing. All I wanted to do was play baseball. And I was the only Jewish boy there. The moment the other kids figured that out, I got a lot of strange looks. Many of them had never seen one before. At least one kid felt my head to see if I had horns.
The camp was predominantly old-school Boston Catholic. They said the Lord’s Prayer as a large group before Sunday breakfast. I had no idea what it was all about, except it was some sort of honor for a boy to be chosen to begin the prayer for the entire group, and for some reason no one ever picked me.
The old man thought these were the people I should be making friends with. I guess he hoped some old-fashioned New England gentility was going to rub off on me, but it was never going to happen. We just vibrated at different frequencies.
Looking back, I can see pretty clearly that the moment I got back from camp and he realized that I had not been transmogrified into a miniature version of himself is the exact moment my mother was talking about. Quod erat demonstrandum, I was a failed project. “There were two more children coming down the pipeline,” my mom told me. “He thought maybe he’d have better luck with them.”
THE KID I PUNCHED was my size, and it was a fair fight. That’s my story and I am sticking to it. I balled up my fist and wound up like a cartoon character. Or perhaps Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, who was one of my favorite wrestlers in those days. He was pretty cartoonish, actually, with giant forearms totally out of proportion to his body, which made him look like Popeye with cheap peroxide hair. But there was nothing fake about the way I hit the kid, right on the buzzer. He went flying backward over a lunch table, ass-over-teakettle as they say, and he landed in a heap. I wish I could have hit the bully like that. Given a fair fight, apparently I had some tooth, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good.
His crime was calling me “hymie” and a “fucking kike.” I don’t remember how the argument started—some lunchtime bullshit between hormone-crazed thirteen-year-olds—but it was probably as much my fault as anyone’s. Between worrying about being beaten up every day after school and dreading getting screamed at by my mom about what a deadbeat my dad was (never mind Dad’s constant put-downs and willful neglect), I was probably just wanting for some attention. But when I punched that boy, it was righteous. He had crossed the line. “Asshole,” “douchebag,” or “dickwad,” I could walk away from. “Hymie” and “kike,” not so much. So I hit him.
I didn’t tell my folks when I got beaten up, and I certainly wouldn’t have told my parents about this, either. But seeing as I was picked up by the scruff of my neck by the Frankenstein-like shop teacher on lunch duty that day, and shuttled straight down to the vice principal’s office—my feet didn’t touch the floor even once—I really didn’t have much of a say in the matter.
I was sentenced without trial to a three-day suspension. Oddly, the vice principal, a beleaguered forty-year-old man with acne scars and a tired pompadour, didn’t have anything to say about the Jew slur. I guess he didn’t consider it any worse than the shit kids usually say in cafeteria fights, of which there were plenty. Every day someone else got creamed.
I had been taught emphatically in bar mitzvah classes that this sort of thing should never go unremarked—that this is exactly how a lot of bad shit gets started—and I mistakenly thought he would see the purity of my cause. I was wrong, of course. My parents didn’t come around to my way of thinking, either.
What the hell? Don’t I get some respect for standing up for myself and dropping that anti-Semitic fuck? I owned it like a six-pointed blue badge of courage. Jews were an abject minority in that school, and the vice principal probably thought we were a bunch of whiners (which may or may not have been true), but couldn’t he at least pretend to be concerned?
We all knew how this was supposed to play: My mother was supposed to be upset because her kid got into a fight and was suspended. And my father was supposed to tell me sternly that I should have been the bigger man and walked away, while telling me out of the side of his mouth how proud he was that I stood up for myself and clobbered this Hitler youth. Well, that didn’t happen. My father just told me that he was very disappointed in me and then let my mother deal with it. Not surprisingly, she chose to make the whole episode all about her, screaming at me like a lunatic, “I can’t believe I have the kind of son who gets into fights! What did I ever do to deserve this?”
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned Jew paranoia? And getting on the phone to the Jewish Defense League or the junior high school principal or whoever’s job it should have been to get to the bottom of this scurrilous rash? She spent most of her free time in those days on some vague Jewish charity—from the outside, it would seem that she’d be down with the cause and take this shit to heart—but it was all kayfabe crap, just something to do with the ladies. No one had ever threatened her for being Jewish. Her biggest problem related to her Jewish-ness was opening the package of the kosher turkey breast every Wednesday, which, admittedly, was no little feat—the tinfoil tray it came in could cut you.
What did my parents know, anyway? It’s not like they ever stood up for anything in their lives. They were suburban nihilists—they believed in nothing!
Except, of course, that teachers were to be obeyed and never questioned—and let me tell you, there were some rotten ones in that school who deserved some serious scrutiny. They were overworked, bitter, untalented, likely hungover from drinking at the bar across the street, and existentially crushed by their shitty jobs. I had teachers who would lament wistfully, “These are the best days of your life. Cherish them—you’ll wish you could relive them.” Really? Now, that was heartbreaking, that an actual adult would look back with fawning nostalgia to a time when they lived with their parents, had no money, and never got laid. Boy oh boy, their lives must have sucked! And these were the people to whom I was supposed to pay blind obeisance?
And then there was the lunatic fringe, represented by my English teacher, who wanted to ban Slaughterhouse-Five and Catcher in the Rye from the school library—the former because it questioned the existence of God; the latter because it promoted anti-social behavior. I’m not sure what it says about me, but as you now know, I believe in both of those things.
Parent-teacher conferences were the worst. Even when I was in grade school and was getting straight A’s, my father would go to these things with the same seriousness of purpose that Churchill brought to Malta, and he would inevitably return with the report that I was not applying myself. I had heard rumors that when some kids brought home good grades, their parents rewarded them. Me—I got yelled at, because I somehow hadn’t managed to build an atom smasher and win the science fair. I built that computer and then… NOTHING!!!! I could never catch a break.
Also, apparently I had an attitude problem.
I’m not quite sure where I learned not to trust authority figures, although it certainly had something to do with my friend Eric’s dad’s record collection. Listening to George Carlin and Bob Dylan definitely set me on the path. Whatever mentoring my old man gave me was worse than useless—it was neutering. He had
impressed upon me for so long that there was only one way of being a success in life, but I was just never any good at kissing ass.
“Your father was successful because he was very good at sucking up and selling the message that the people in authority needed to deliver,” one of his former colleagues told me. “That’s how it was done in his world, that’s how he got ahead. And that’s why he resented you, because at an early age you had this great sense of self. You weren’t afraid to say ‘fuck you,’ and this sort of independence was threatening to him. He took it very personally—if you were to ever become a success, it meant that his system was flawed.”
What my father never understood is that I never wanted to be a rebel—at least not one without a cause. James Dean tried that, and look where it got him. And that whole Marlon Brando thing in The Wild One: “What are you rebelling against?” “I dunno, whatta ya got?”—it was sexy as hell, but it never struck me as being all that bright. It was kind of like screaming at the rain. Fighting with everyone seemed a very unhappy road to travel. Call me a hippie, I don’t care: I am quite certain that life is best when it is an expression of love. But know this, too: After I slugged that kid in the cafeteria, no one ever called me “hymie” again.
WRITING THIS NOW, I’m thinking maybe it’s about time I found some compassion for that bully. Actually, there was a real loneliness about that photo. That dog of his wasn’t exactly the kind of pet a tough guy keeps, and the way he was clutching it just made him look desperate for some love. Maybe drinking beer and pumping iron in the shadow of a Hustler centerfold wasn’t the nurturing environment he needed to blossom into a fully functional adult human being. Maybe he just wasn’t equipped to liberate himself from a cycle of violence and stupidity. Of course, maybe he was just a dick, and still is. Who knows? I’m not going to call the dude—he probably doesn’t even remember me. Beating me out of my jacket was just another day at the office for him.