There are three other incidents from those middle school days that haunt me.
The first I’ll discuss was in an arcade. A creepy looking guy, about twenty-something, with bulging brown bug-eyes and a Nightstalker look to him, appeared from nowhere, as if a specter, a shadow, and he was standing closely behind me as I played a video game.
A small crowd of people were mobbed around the video game machine, and I distinctly remember something brushed up against my ass, maybe a hand or dick and I turned around to see the creepy fuck standing even more uncomfortably close to me.
At the time, too, I was carrying a hunting knife. A large one, with a serrated blade.
There’d been much violence in those days, so I wanted to be prepared for anything. This was obviously a situation where the knife would have been handy.
However, to this day, it’s fuzzy. I do believe he touched me. But I’m not 100%
sure. He was far too old to be hanging out in a kids’ arcade. It’s likely he was doing something insidious. My friend Taylor was next to me, and I wonder if he had been touched or noticed anything. We never spoke of it.
What would have happened if I withdrew the knife, stabbed the creeper in the stomach? Would I have been blamed? Put in juvenile hall? If he did touch me, would I not have been punished? Did he have a prior record? Did he attack someone later? Is he rotting in jail now? Would stabbing him have prevented a future incident?
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent These are questions that dance like zombies in my head. They’re like zombies because they’re dead and can’t be answered. They’re like zombies because, in a way, they’ll be alive until my brain dies.
In the next two incidents, I was on the offensive.
The first was with this kid, Manny, a child magician, who was tanned bronze as the metal and had short, slicked back blond hair like a Wall Street stockbroker.
He’d moved in from Fort Lauderdale, by way of NYC, I think.
For some reason, I fucking hated him, and enjoyed picking on him. It was probably me filled with the negative energy from my stepbrother beating on me and channeling that onto him.
After school, Taylor and I followed the magician home. I wanted to fight him. I was punching him, lightly, in the face, shoving him, and he was crying, in streaming hot tears, begging me to stop.
An old Jamaican gardener nearby, who’d been tending to a lawn, broke up our quarrel.
I’ll never forget the gardener, in his heavy Jamaican accent, asking me why I wanted to fight.
The gardener, pointing at the crying, whimpering magician, said, in all sincerity,
“Look at him. He is crying woman!”
Taylor and I then looked at each other. And instantly burst into laughter. It was easily one of the funniest things we’d ever heard. It wasn’t just what the gardener said, but how he said it, with his serious, contorted face and his accent that had made it so uproariously hilarious.
To the magician, though, it had to compound his suffering to an unimaginable degree.
Taylor and I left, faces red as tomatoes, hyperventilating in laughter at the poor magician, who remained in utter dismay, tears running down his cheeks, snot pouring from his nose.
Later, I saw the same kid, the magician, at a karate class that my parents begrudgingly allowed me to join, but only for a few lessons.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I’m sure I was the reason he’d taken up karate, and how fucked is that, to see your tormentor there at the karate class you’re taking to learn to defend yourself…
But after the “crying woman” quip, I couldn’t bring myself to fuck with him anymore. Even then, I knew better.
I ran into him, later in life, five or six years after high school, in a strip mall parking lot.
We shared a smoke, talked, and, like with David, I realized he was a chill guy and I felt like an asshole for fucking with him. I even apologized to him.
Last I heard of him, he’d been a successful CEO for a time, but got into trouble, financial and legal hot water, for shady business practices...
The last incident from middle school that resonates, haunts me, is one that a friend, an accomplice, said he’ll never tell anyone of and will take to his grave.
I, however, in keeping with the theme of exorcising demons, will share it. And I warn the reader, it is graphic, and it is not a tale I am proud of. But it is a demon.
My demon. A true demon that must be exorcised…
Taylor’s older brother’s friend, Cam, who I later befriended and became tight with, was the first of us to have a car, this little old puke green VW Beetle.
The way he’d rag on this jaunt, too! Grinding the gears, spinning the wheels! He drove that fucker like Formula One!
Being mischievous bastards, we decided to pull a nasty prank. It wasn’t my idea, though since I participated, I admit to sharing responsibility for the blame… I believe it was Cam’s friend’s idea, this weird German guy, Dieter (whose mother was a victim of a random nighttime rape, pulled under a car in a parking lot, raped at knifepoint, and then a few months afterwards the lady jumped off a building).
Dieter hatched a plan to fill huge super-soaker water-guns, cannons, essentially, with bleach, in a couple, and piss, in a couple.
Riding in Cam’s car, we rode around in rich areas, around West Palm Beach, and pulled brazen drive-by shootings. First blasting the bleach at ladies wearing expensive clothes, especially fur, if we saw it. And we did. None of the women
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent seemed cognizant, when we shot the bleach at them, but I’m sure they noticed later.
The piss we were to shoot into people’s faces. And we did that too. Zapping a few random people, mostly those standing at intersections. Spraying the victims right in the face with our urine, the piss canisters we’d all contributed to.
I remember one I shot, distinctly making eye contact with him before I opened fire. He was a middle-aged, probably fortyish, Black man in a blue-collar style work uniform. I aimed the water pistol and shoot him directly in his face, angling into his mouth, with a steady yellow stream of lukewarm piss.
The man stopped in his tracks, squinted, scrunched his face as the piss seeped into his oral, nasal orifices, and he smacked his lips, made a tasting type of sound, and his expression turned to one of rage as he realized it was urine streaming into his mouth.
He yelled, “FUCK YOU!” and threw a brown paper bag of McDonald’s food at our car, and chased after the old VW Beetle, which, fortunately for us, didn’t break down. And in the car, as we sped off, the car’s tiny engine squealing, we cackled like villains, and watched the enraged man’s hurtling figure vanish into the patina of night.
I wonder what he did afterwards. Did he vomit? Did he beat the shit out of the next White person he saw? Did he go home and beat his wife? Or did he do nothing and walk it off, stoically…
A hard-working, blue-collar man, walking home, ready to eat his McDonald’s food, watch TV, go to bed after a long day, and he gets that.
The world can be a cruel, cold place.
And yes, I am sorry for this demon. I am sorry for this iniquity. I’m ashamed that I’ve done this. And I’m sure, as adults, every guilty party in that car would not just apologize but repent in contrition...