BULLIES

By Gregory F. DeLaurier

I was born and raised in a small tough working-class city up in Northern New York. Wrote a novel about the place.

Growing up there, you had two choices—be bullied or be a bully. For the first few years of my life, say from kindergarten to third or fourth grade, really up to middle school, I was bullied. Mercilessly. Physically…punches, shoves, trips, but really even worse, verbally…faggot, queer, girly fat boy (note a theme?). I was indeed fat (for a while), and quiet, and bad at sports, and smart, and so naturally a target.

By fourth grade, I had gotten tired of it all, and I knew what I would have to do: I WOULD BECOME A BULLY. I would no longer be the gazelle, I would be the lion.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing this, having little experience, so I looked around to see what kids seemed to get bullied as much as, if not more than, me. And I found him. He was in the third grade. A Jew (not necessarily anti-Semitic, just made him different and that was enough). Wore thick black rimmed glasses. Stuttered. PERFECT.

So…one day walking home from school, I spied him in front of me. Now was my chance. I pushed him from behind and he fell to the ground. He’d been carrying a piece of blue construction paper with scraps of other pieces of paper awkwardly glued to it. The kind of ‘art’ we all made in primary school. I grabbed it from him, tore it up, and threw the scraps at him.

He got up, crying, holding these pieces of paper, and said, That was f-f-for my Mommy.

Oh no. Why did I do that? To this day, some sixty years later, I can still feel the shame and revulsion I felt then for what I had done. It was for his Mommy! Davey Crockett would not do this, Hopalong Cassidy would not do this, the Lone Ranger would not do this, Lash LaRue would not do this, Zorro would not do this. But I had.

I tried to say I was sorry, said maybe we could glue it back together or something. But he just pushed me away. Leave me alone…

He walked home, crying, carrying the remnants of his gift for his Mommy. I walked home a ways behind him, tears of shame and regret welling up inside me. I walked in the house, and just let go, crying and wailing. My Mom, home on an odd day off from her job at Woolworths, ran to me from the kitchen.

What’s the matter?

I…I…I pushed a kid down, tore up his picture he made for his Mommy.

Why did you do that?

I don’t know, I don’t know…

She hugged and held me.

That’s OK, baby, that’s OK. You made a mistake, you did a bad thing. But you are a good, kind boy. You know what you have to do.

I knew and dreaded what she was going to say, so I preempted her…

I have to go to his house and apologize.

            Yes, you do.

My mom grabbed a wash cloth, wiped my face, sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a glass of milk and a brownie. When I finished, she said,

Are you ready?

I nodded yes, got up, put on my coat, headed to the door.

I’m proud of you.

That helped…a little.

I knew where he lived, just a couple blocks away, in a strange collection of shot gun apartments all connected. There were seven such places and unless you lived at one end or the other you had neighbors’ walls on both sides.

My aunt, my father’s sibling, he the youngest of thirteen, she the oldest, lived in the apartment on the left end as you faced the building. As a very young child, she was one of the many relatives who baby-sat me while my parents both worked to, barely, pay the bills.

She was kind and gentle, but had this way of grabbing my cheek between her fingers. A sign of affection I suppose, but it hurt. Maybe it was a French-Canadian thing as she still spoke in broken English, interspersed with long phrases in the French of her homeland.

She lived with her husband, a giant of a man who was mentally challenged and had worked as a garbage man. They both were illiterate, but together made a life for themselves and were happy.

Hilda and Victor. They must have been in their late seventies at the time, which meant they had been born and came to adulthood in the 19^th century. And here I write as the second quarter of the 21st century begins. Time and space, often an illusion.

My most vivid memory of Hilda is her sitting me down at her kitchen table while she baked cookies. But first she had to put wood in the stove, light it and get it going.

This kid lived in the third apartment from the right. I remember there was a menorah in the window, lit or not I do not recall. I knocked. A short, pretty, dark-haired woman wearing a flowery house dress opened the door.

I know who you are and what you did. What do you want?

I stared down at my feet, nervous and embarrassed.

I…I came to apologize for what I did. It was real mean, and I’m really really sorry.

She folded her arms and stared down at me.

Why did you do it?

            I don’t know, I don’t know, I wish I hadn’t…

            OK, you apologized.

She shut the door. It would have been a nice story if she had invited me in, praised my courage. If I had talked to her son and we had become best friends. But none of that happened. He and I never became friends, never hung out. Actions have consequences. I do know he moved to Israel later in life, and I hope he found peace in that troubled land.

As for me, I was never a bully again. Of course, I have been mean and petty, unkind and cutting, thoughtless and hurtful. In other words…human. But I have tried to be otherwise. I have never again attacked or belittled or dismissed someone who is weak and vulnerable. I remain atoning for what I did so many years ago.

After I retired from my career as a bully, I was left vulnerable. After all, bully or be bullied right? Not necessarily, as I came upon a strategy: find the toughest guy around and become his friend.

His name was Pee-Wee (of course it was). Nobody but nobody messed with him. He was big and strong, from the wrong side of the tracks, with a perpetual scowl on his face. There would be fights after school, this would be high school, and anyone stupid enough to fight Pee-Wee soon found himself ‘asleep’ on the ground.

But, I noticed, he never bullied anybody. Never took his anger or frustration or whatever out on someone weaker. I liked that, I liked him. I respected him. We became friends.

To be honest, this wasn’t some clever scheme on my part, it just happened. I remember I simply talked to him, not down to him. I made him laugh, I listened to the words he did not often say. He was smart, thoughtful, clever. Traits he kept well-hidden. An unlikely friendship, to be sure.

A side benefit to this friendship was that nobody dared bully me. If they did, they would have to answer to Pee-Wee, and nobody wanted that. At times, I would have to grant special dispensation to someone who had mistakenly hit me or hassled me somehow.

Please, please call Pee-Wee off. I’m sorry I messed with you.

So be kind. You never know, it may pay off.