The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My teachers and my parents and the TV shows of my youth kept telling us kids that the way to deal with bullies was to confront them, they’re actually, deep down, nothing but cowards. My family moved north from Georgia to Milwaukee when I was 13, a radical transition from semi-rural living to urban discomfort. My junior high school had the usual mix of cliques with one exception, the hoods, guyz who dressed up as gangsters to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the Massacre. Nice bunch, kept switchblade knives on themselves and guns in their lockers. Welcome to the city, Farm Boy!

At recess we played a game new to me called Foursquare, bounced a volleyball around from the four corners, nothing I remember about it 60 years later other than a couple of the hoods used to blatantly cheat at it and no one had the courage to call them out for it. One of my teachers who’d heard our complaints said it was up to us to put a stop to these guys’ cheating, not his problem, and anyway, the best way to end their bullying of the rest of us was to stand up to them, show them we weren’t afraid and more than likely they’d back down. Because … well, you know why. These thugs were basically cowards, that’s why.

So I decided to put an end to this cheating. Kind of ruined the game and we were required to play the stupid game. This, dear reader, is probably as good an allegory for life in these partisan times as you’re gonna want. Needless to say, the cheaters, once confronted, feigned courage. “Who’s gonna make us?” one of the gang said, and I said, well … you know what I said. Me. And then we ‘rumbled’ as they say in Milwaukee. I took the first punch to the stomach. I took the second punch to the face. After that I don’t remember what body part I slammed against my opponent’s fist, but I do remember the teacher who advised us to handle this ourselves, breaking up the slaughter and dragging us both to the principal’s office. Where we were given verbal lashings and detentions, both of which my coward bully laughed off in the principal’s face.

What I learned from this and a few other similar confrontations, bullies aren’t necessarily cowards, they’re just bullies. Creeps and sadists, brutes and users, I don’t know where my teachers and my folks got their psychology degrees, but from personal experience I have to say they should ask for a refund on their tuition.

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