Back to middle school. That’s where I really started to fuck up and spiral downwards.
The middle school I went to was a jungle.
They say kids can be cruel. And they’re right. At this school, the kids were beyond cruel, they were merciless fucks.
This was back in the early 90s, before Columbine, before school shootings in America became a normal occurrence.
First hearing about the school shootings, as they unfolded, like a row of falling dominos, my reaction wasn’t shock, it was one of understanding.
Not that I agreed or supported it, because I didn’t. It was just that I could comprehend why these things happened after the myriad of bullying incidents I’d witnessed.
And I wasn’t innocent. I’d participated, been on both sides.
But my middle school, that was bullying to an extreme.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The usual targets were the nerds and the usual perpetrators were the jocks,
“cool” kids. One kid, named David, got it the worst of anyone.
An awkward, small, spastic and skinny kid, he was a perfect target, sticking out like a perfect victim with his bushy, messy hair and short shorts. He wouldn’t fight back most of the time either, he’d take it. Kicks in the rear, wedgies, pushed into the locker, every stereotypical middle school bully victim bullshit, tripe, he took it.
Once I participated in a circle of kids, encircling him, slapping, kicking him, one at a time. Poor bastard. He’d only really fight back if you hit him in the head, and then he’d be ready to go. His counterattacks were weak, though, and he’d be pummeled every time.
The poor bastard!
I remember later, after middle school, freshman year of high school, sitting next to him after we’d bumped into each other at a McDonald’s near the local high school.
Our high school wasn’t as brutal, and many cliques had gone their separate ways.
There wasn’t nearly as much bullying there. But anyway, I sat next to David, and we chatted over burgers, cokes and fries. Talking with him, I suddenly realized what an asshole I’d been for fucking with him. He was a decent guy. A likable person. I felt like shit for teasing him, beating on him. I can’t remember if I apologized, but I should have. If somehow he ever reads this, I apologize now, seriously.
Maybe if kids sat down and talked more, got to know each other, as people, there’d be less incidents of harassment, bullying. People simply getting to know each other could solve a lot, I think…
He was one of many who got it bad but was probably the worst.
Another incident I recall starkly, one that sticks in my mind to this day, happened in my middle school cafeteria, at lunchtime. This cute mixed-race Asian girl, Tori, was circling lunch tables, cheerfully, smiling with her whole face, light glinting and bouncing off her braces as she was inviting people to a party. She was flanked by another super cute girl, and they were making lists of things to bring to the party.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent From behind, from the throngs of teens in the cafeteria, from the patina of zits and braces and awkwardness, emerged a lioness, a Colombian girl, named Juliana.
Juliana was chunky, always in heavy makeup, and generally ghetto as fuck. She approached menacingly, surging forth, like a lion in the Serengeti.
The lioness’s forehead was furrowed. There was venom in her eyes. Tori didn’t even see her coming.
Juliana didn’t say anything, just stopped in her tracks, cocked back her arm and slapped Tori upside the head, viciously, so hard I could hear the clap.
Then she walked away without uttering a word.
I have no idea what precipitated it. Maybe a rumor. Maybe a thing that upset Juliana. Tori was generally a sugar sweet girl. I can’t imagine what she must have done. But whatever it was, it was serious enough to warrant the aforementioned corporal punishment.
Tori stood for a second in shock. She had no idea how to react. I think she’d come from an upper-middle class family. I don’t think she’d ever been slapped. And as Juliana stomped off, Tori just stood there, frozen, the joy of her party-planning erased, washed from her face. She then broke into tears and was accompanied away in her girlfriend’s caring arms.
What a shitty thing to do, that sort of sneak attack. Of course, I’d done it myself, to others, but seeing another person do it, especially it happening to someone I liked, especially during a moment of joy, seeing that made me realize how ugly it was and made me feel shitty about when I was younger, whapping those kids in the hallway… I wonder if they cried as much as Tori…
Afterwards, too, she didn’t have the party…
Back to the lioness, it wouldn’t be the first time there was trouble arising from the fiery Colombian.
Another incident almost ended extremely badly for me and my friend, Tony.
The Colombian’s boyfriend was another chunky young soul, also ghetto as fuck, a fellow named John, who was a reputed crack dealer, and a fellow eighth grader at
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent our school. (This was the guy I wrote of earlier, the one from Saturday morning detention, who claimed to have gang-raped his teacher…) My friend Tony, like me, was a bit of a dumbass and was a fellow skateboarder/poser/guitarist/smoker. We had recently gotten hold of fake acid, paper tabs that some older girls had sold to us, ripping us off, the fucking assholes…
(I’d done real acid before, so I knew, right after taking this shit, that it was fake, and was very disappointed…)
But Tony somehow thought it was real. Placebo effect, I guess. He thought he was tripping, but, really, he was just stupid and imagining things.
(Another time later, a group of fiends, including me, gave him another hit of fake acid, and he did the same thing, acted like he was tripping, waving his hands in front of his face, saying he was seeing trails, and we just smoked weed and laughed at his stupidity, didn’t tell him it was fake, because it was too funny to stop. For weeks after that, he would claim he was having “flashbacks,” dude.
Until, finally, we came clean, told him it was a prank. But still, he wouldn’t believe it...)
A lot less funny, however, was Tony taking the fake acid to school and offering to sell Juliana a tab. Not so smart to attempt to sell a violent crack dealer’s girlfriend acid.
The crack dealer’s friend, JD, who I’d been cool with, met me in the lunch line at the cafeteria, looped his arm around my neck, hugged me closely to his tall frame, his hard body, and walked me out of the cafeteria, forcibly.
At first, I’d greeted him warmly, since we’d been friendly, but I could see something was amiss. I’d asked him if everything was alright, and he didn’t respond. His face was cold, stone cold, and angry as a hornet. A chill went down my spine. I had no idea what was going on or why he was so pissed, and he wouldn’t answer me as I tried to talk to him.
He pulled me into a bathroom and from every corner, and from out of the stalls, big Black dudes emerged. They all looked furious. I was friendly with them before, never had a single issue with any of them, nor wanted any issues, but they circled
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent me, and probably would have beaten the honky ass shit out of me, if it wasn’t for a friend of mine who saw the pissed off JD pull me into the bathroom, and alerted the vice principal, who, at first, didn’t think it was a big deal and didn’t do anything, until my friend prodded him, told him it looked serious.
(Thank GOD for that friend. A true friend is one who saves you from being violently beaten by gangbangers and crack dealers…) The vice principal stepped into the bathroom, thankfully, before any hands were thrown, and saved me from possibly being permanently handicapped.
As the group was dispersing, the crack dealer, John, who, again, I’d been friendly with, walked by me and called me a “bitch.”
I was confused. I genuinely had no idea what I could have done to warrant such extreme uncivility and possible hospitalization.
I met up with Tony, and he told me he’d jokingly offered acid to Juliana, and that John, the crack dealer, before nearly thrashing me, had pinned him to a locker in the hallway, that morning, and pulled a gun, put it to Tony’s head, and threatened to kill him (and me!) after school.
It was guilt by association. It was no secret that we smoked cigarettes, weed, drank, did whatever drugs we could find. So those guys must have thought we were selling, too, moving in on their turf. Or, probably, it was merely to do with Tony being dumb enough to offer Juliana acid. Fake acid, at that.
Of course, inside, I was raging, knowing what trouble Tony got me into. These weren’t the people you wanted problems with. I might have been wanting to punch him in the nose but given that both our lives were in danger, literally, there was no use in that. We had to stick together.
We’d seen what the crack dealer and his posse could do.
(Yes, I said posse. I had a posse too. Here’s to you, Lebron James!) There was a Latin kid named Aaron, who transferred to our school. He looked pretty tough. I think he was from a rival gang, and he’d ran afoul of John and crew, and I saw the Latin kid get jumped, swarmed on, the shit beaten out of him,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent the kid punched in the face, kicked while on the ground by John and two of his friends after school, at the bus stop.
The next day Aaron brought a handgun to school, pulled it on them in the hallway. Our Spanish teacher was nearby and talked him down, talked him into giving up the gun, ending the standoff. It turned out it was just a BB gun, though.
The kid was still arrested, put in a cop car (I saw him led out in handcuffs as I stole a smoke in the woods behind school), and he was later suspended and expelled from our school.
Tony and I had seen Aaron’s beatdown and had heard other tales of John and his posse’s brutality. And we didn’t have any BB guns or real guns, at the time, unfortunately.
Being vulnerable to being “jumped,” getting a gang beating, Tony and I took off and ran away after lunch, literally running, like prisoners escaping jail, and tearing through the woods next to the school, knowing John and posse would be waiting for us after school to beat us or shoot us or whatever.
And a friend confirmed, later, that they were in fact waiting for us, after school, stalking the bus stop, five of them, asking around, trying to hunt us down so they could whoop our asses.
Somehow, in all this, Tony and I were suspended from school for skipping class.
Which was ironic. Nothing happened to John or his friends. Tony and I were also given additional administrative punishments, ordered to undergo psychological testing, and often sequestered, separated from classmates, made to sit alone in empty rooms, away from the other kids.
I guess we could have told the school what had happened, that John and his posse wanted to beat us down, but we weren’t into snitching. Not like the school didn’t know, I imagine, after the vice principal saw what nearly happened in that bathroom and how rumors, drama in that school spread like forest fires…
Fortunately, I had a friend, a girl, who was friends with John and vouched for me, let him know I had nothing to do with it.
(Another GREAT friend to whom I must be eternally thankful!)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent One of John’s friends, also a violent crack dealer, still hated me, though, and, a couple weeks later, punched me in the neck, hard, in the hallway. He was slightly skinny and not much bigger than me and while I’m sure he could have probably fucked me up, I was willing to fight him. However, I backed down, knowing that if I had fought back, he and his posse would have given me a gang-beating later. I’d seen it happen to others… I bet something of the sort had happened with Aaron…
Then a week or so later, the same skinny prick cornered me in the locker room, grabbed a fistful of my hair, and raised his arm, as if to punch me.
An African kid standing nearby, broke it up. Held John’s friend back and shook his head and said “no.”
John’s friend backed off. The African kid, a super nice and friendly fellow, as are most Africans, was also, like many Africans, tough and rugged.
By this time, I’d had enough. I stood up to John’s friend. Although he was bigger and rougher than me, I didn’t care. I didn’t care anymore if his friends would fuck me up. I was ready to go out swinging. After everything I’d been through in my short life, I wasn’t ready to be a victim, and I stalked after him and simply asked what I ever did to him, why he had a problem with me.
I figured we’d duke it out, throw hands, settle it. I’d get a thrashing, but I had to fight back. End the cycle of abuse. Prove my worth. In that way, our school was like a prison. Those who showed weakness got it the worst. But those who fought back or were tough were left alone.
(Not long before that, there was a time I backed down, when a rat-tailed kid picked a fight with me, shoved me a couple times in the locker room, challenged me to a fight, said he’d “beat my ass.” He was a tough character, this kid, a swaggering ruffian, who was always starting fights. Word had it his sister, who was in the Army, would kick the shit out of him with her steel-toe boots. That was her thing, just fucking kicking him. And his dad would beat him, too.) ((I wasn’t looking for any fight with this kid, especially since I’d stopped the martial arts and my stepbrother had moved out by then, so I wasn’t in fighting shape. If he’d swung at me, I’d have defended myself, but I calmly walked away from that one, turned down his invitation to fight, and he just looked at me
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent curiously, then walked away, didn’t bother me again… Ironically, walking away from unnecessary fights is a virtue many dojos preach, and rightfully so…)) (((Years later, I came to discover, reading the local paper online, during a trip through Europe, that the rat-tail kid’s dad, who’d been a janitor at another school, was arrested for producing, distributing child pornography… And after seeing that story online, I felt even better about not fighting the kid…))) Back to John’s friend, amazingly, the kid backed off, walked away from me, cowered, and said how his older brother, this massively bigger high school linebacker was going to beat the shit out of me.
Pretty pathetic, the whole thing. I guess he was too much of a wimp to fight anyone who stood up to him.
I didn’t know the kid’s linebacker brother, personally, but I’d heard of him, and when he said his name, I knew someone who did know him. He, Rick, “Slick Rick,”
was friends with my stepsister and one of her ex-boyfriends.
Not wanting Slick Rick to come kill me, I told my stepsister about it, and she wasn’t having any of it. She had a word with Slick Rick and cleared everything up.
(My stepsister’s crack dealer boyfriend at the time was scarier than Slick Rick or John, probably supplied John or knew who did. Thinking back on it, my stepsister was probably scarier than Slick Rick, too, and thank GOD for her, my stepsister, saving my ass. I’m blessed to have had such friends and family on my side then…) And shortly after this time, I had a falling out with Tony. He’d pissed me off royally by nearly getting me killed by those assholes. And the more weed we smoked and drugs we did, the stupider he got.
One night, my other friends and I (including Tori, the half-Asian girl who’d been smacked in the lunchroom) were at a house-party and were high and drunk as fuck. Tony was there, being an idiot, as usual. I remember one of my friends, this spastic Mexican kid, who was a lovable psycho, was screaming, in a fake British accent, “SLAY THE BEAST!!!” and lashing Tony with a flyswatter.
Finally, it reached a crescendo. We’d had enough of Tony’s shit and we swarmed on him, pummeled him, half-playfully, half-seriously, with kicks and slaps, my friend still yelling “SLAY THE BEAST!” in this funny British accent, the whole time,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent and the beating ended when I picked up a shoe, meaning to hit him on the arm with it, but I accidentally whapped him square on the nose, drawing a nasty stream of blood.
I can still remember my friend, whose house we were at, castigating Tony not to bleed on the floor because he didn’t want to catch AIDS.
Tony, his hands clasped over his bloody face, ran to the bathroom. He locked himself in there, but let in this skinny girl, Tori’s friend, and they made out some.
After she left, he left too, not wanting further abuse, but instead of sleeping with her somewhere (this was eighth grade and all) he wound up sleeping that night on a park bench.
Following that incident, we were no longer friends, and John and his crew and I became friendly again. I smoked weed together with a couple of them, at a house-party. Not John, though. I’d never have smoked weed with that fucking rapist.
(Not long after my friendship with Tony ceased, a pissed off movie usher, a bigger, older kid, a junior in high school, a football player, with tons of acne and a greasy beard smeared across his cheeks, cornered me in the movie theater bathroom.
The football player was saying he heard Tony called his sister a “bitch.” The dude was raging, face blood red. I sighed, thinking, fuck, here we go again, another jerkoff wanting to kick my ass over Tony’s stupid mouth. I shook my head, exasperated, told him I wasn’t friends with Tony anymore, and that I didn’t care for him either. Then the usher, in his usher uniform, bow tie and all, mind you, yells at me, “Well, if you see him, tell him I’m gonna CAP his ass!”) ((I don’t think he did cap his ass, and if he did, he only capped him in the ass, like Suge Knight, and it wasn’t a fatal wound, because Tony was still alive for at least a few years following that. And I’m guessing his ass was intact.)) (((I heard the usher had claimed to his friends that he’d pinned me up against a wall as he told me this, which was untrue. He never laid a finger on me, fortunately.)))
Tony, after getting smacked in the face with the shoe, became friends with this kid named Elliot, who’d been banished from his crew of jocks.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Elliot, at a sleepover, had wet his bed, at a jock’s house, and that wasn’t a thing he’d ever live down. He had to transfer schools later, the teasing over the bedwetting was so severe. His reputation could never be salvaged...
That same crew of jocks were total assholes. Far worse assholes than me or any of my friends. Later, five on one, they attacked Tony, at a party, not playfully either, not an accidental face slap with a shoe (not to minimize my infraction, I’m still an asshole for it) but these guys jumped and beat the ever-living shit out of Tony, beat him so badly that he had to be hospitalized.
Tony’s mom called the cops on them and had them arrested and their families were forced to pay Tony’s medical bills. One of them did a short bid in juvenile hall, for beating Tony, and he allegedly raped another boy there, at knifepoint.
(Last I ever heard of Tony was that he’d stolen a person’s identity, was claiming to actually be that person. This is before the digital age, online identity theft. He’d just been using the person’s name, story, background.) It didn’t surprise me those jocks were cowards and shitheads and ganged up and mauled Tony, who I’m sure had said or done some dumb shit, but certainly didn’t deserve that...
I’d been friends with those jocks, too, for a little while in seventh grade. We’d played in a short-lived, shitty garage band together.
We never were that tight, but I liked them, and thought we were friends. Until one night one of them called me, the drummer, and started asking questions about the guitarist.
I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But then the guitarist came on the phone (unbeknownst to me, he’d been on silently, on three-way calling) and he told me he thought I was a loser and a faggot and that I should stay the fuck out of his face. Then he hung up.
That was the end of that band, friendship, and we never spoke again.
It was the first time I’d had someone, a friend, or someone I thought to be a friend, do such a weaselly, backstabbing type of thing to me.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I was in shock about it, honestly. That ugly, sinking stomach type feeling ran through me, like when my fifth-grade crush rejected me. It was brutal.
I remember my stepsister coming home from her lockup school for fuckups and stopping by my room to say hello and being perplexed, asking what was wrong, but I didn’t want to say, kept my lips sealed. I never talked to anyone about it.
The next day I had a Spanish class with those kids, and fuck if that wasn’t the most uncomfortable class.
I could have played sick. I could have transferred out of the class. But I dressed up in a nice sweater, pants, and faced it. They didn’t say shit to me, or me to them, except for one of their friends, this short little Black kid, Mike, whose dad was a pastor, and who whispered to me a few times, “What’s with the sweater?” to which I didn’t reply.
In recollection, same as with John’s crew, I think of them now as wimps. They had to pull something like that over the phone. Gang up on me, others. They were the losers. But, hell, we were all just kids, and I don’t hold much contempt or lasting hatred or any feelings towards them, aside from the rapists. That shit is unforgivable. I’d want to spit in those slimy rapists’ faces, if I saw them, even today…
That same crew, the last contact I had with them, though, I’ll never forget. One of them, the drummer from our shitty band, had beef with a kid in our crew.
The drummer had challenged our friend, Lenny, to a fistfight. I have no idea what precipitated it, but the challenge was made, and the fight was set.
They were set to meet, on a Friday night, outside the movie theater nearby our neighborhood. Before their showdown, in anticipation, my crew and I had smoked a shit-ton of skunk weed at the old abandoned building we’d hang at and got high as the heavens. I remember us then marching up to the movie theater, as a platoon, and one of us singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and slapping on his chest. It was our best attempt at drums of war.
Reaching the movie theater, the jocks lay in wait. The contrast between our groups was stark. They all had crewcuts. We had long hair. They all wore athletic
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent gear, Duke shirts and FUBU brand clothes, Nike shoes. We wore weed leaf T-shirts, tie-dye shirts, and baggy jeans and ripped shorts and flip flops.
The guitarist, the one who’d told me on the phone to stay the fuck out of his face, stood at the front of the pack. With a wan smile, he scoffed at us and called us a bunch of pussies. To which I replied, sternly, that this was an issue between an isolated two and there wouldn’t be any other problems.
I expected to have a fight with him, after saying what I did, especially with the tone of voice I employed, but, like John’s friend, he, too, was a coward. He didn’t even reply, turned his cheek, and walked away. It was the last time we ever spoke to one another.
Lenny and the drummer squared off. Stood face to face like boxers before the bell rings.
The drummer was tall, but was a skinny fuck, not exactly imposing. He had a ruddy, freckly face and a bulky, shiny set of braces, a real metal mouth, and I was thinking he probably shouldn’t be fighting anyone, with those braces in his mouth. One punch to the kisser and his face would’ve been an ugly, bloody car wreck.
Lenny, on the other hand, was no skinny braceface fuck. He was taller, too, than the drummer, and far bigger. He was stout, that Germanic, northern European type of big, a cross between chubby and muscular.
If I were a gambler, I’d certainly place my bets on Lenny. Lenny, with his tensile strength, could have probably picked up and snapped the drummer’s bitch-ass, cracked him in two, over his hulking knee, like a twig snapping over a tree trunk.
But Lenny, in the face of the drummer’s aggression, completely shut down.
Perhaps it was the weed. Weed doesn’t exactly make people violent. I bet if we were drinking or on meth or PCP it’d been a different story. (The drummer should be thankful we weren’t, or he’d have wound up maimed or dead, for real…) We weren’t on such testosterone summoning, rage enhancing substances, though. We were stoned, fucking blitzed on the kind buds. And Lenny wanted no fight, as the drummer shoved him, peacocking and posturing, in front of everyone, playing Mr. Tough Guy.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Lenny stood stoically, ten toes on the ground. Though he stood firm, his voice was choking, as he pled for peace, almost begging, saying again and again that he didn’t want to fight.
But the drummer wouldn’t back off. Finally, the drummer, tired of being spurned in his invitation to brawl, curled his metal mouth into a sneer and said that he’d let Lenny go only if Lenny kissed his shoe.
Incredibly, Lenny dropped to his knees, like he was about to pray, and then got on all fours, like an animal, and kissed the drummer’s shoe.
The drummer was disgusted, groaned, swatted his hand at Lenny like he was shooing away a fly and he and his crew, who were in a mixed state of laughter and disbelief, walked off, hooting and jeering.
None of my crew knew how to react. We didn’t say anything about it to Lenny.
Lenny rose to his feet, his face pale and red but otherwise expressionless. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the first time I can remember feeling embarrassed and dejected for someone else.
We walked off, wordlessly, went over to my friend Taylor’s house, where we usually smoked, and we hit the bong, mostly in silence, listening to Cypress Hill and classic rock. We didn’t speak much at all the rest of the night. I remember Lenny just sitting there in the corner, the pale elephant in the room, and not long after he went back home, I guess. I’m not sure. I remember, after he split, one of us asking another why it was he chickened out and the other replying that Lenny was like Gandhi. This was before I even really knew who that was.
The rest of the evening, even though we had the funk, the stink buds, I couldn’t get high, though, after that. It had been such a buzzkill. Seeing a friend act like such a coward. I went home early that night and read “Cujo” in an attempt to take my mind off it.
I don’t know why Lenny cowered like that. Not that he was really like Gandhi, a pacifist or anything. The next week, in the locker room after gym class, a skinny little rat-faced kid with these pointy ears started teasing Lenny about it, and Lenny began strangling the kid, pinned him up to a locker. If I hadn’t intervened, stopped it, it might have been a murder.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Lenny, like the bedwetter, transferred schools shortly thereafter. We never hung out with him again, either, after that night. I have no idea who he became or where he is now. Hopefully, for his sake, he doesn’t dwell on it.
I did hear of the guitarist and drummer, though, through a high school alumni newsletter. Both became bigshot stockbrokers, opened financial services firms, got married, had kids, built McMansions, were living the American Dream. Who says nice guys finish last?