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Your bullies

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Batman, Jun 27, 2008.

  1. And there wasn't a day I didn't think about clocking this chick, but moms was fanatical about not hitting girls. Turns out I was more afraid of my mom's wrath than the bully's.
     
  2. ArnoldBabar

    ArnoldBabar Active Member

    Batman, the bully in my class was also named "Pickle." And it doesn't sound like it's the same guy. What are the odds? I guess being named Pickle just gives a kid a bad attitude.
     
  3. BYH

    BYH Active Member

    Did his sister end up selling knives?
     
  4. JakeandElwood

    JakeandElwood Well-Known Member

    Nice.
     
  5. deskslave

    deskslave Active Member

    That's amazing!!!!!

    EDIT: Fuckers.
     
  6. ArnoldBabar

    ArnoldBabar Active Member

    No, she covers the Dolphins.
     
  7. writing irish

    writing irish Active Member

    I was very shy as a little kid, mainly because I spent the first few years of my life almost exclusively around adults, with nearly no contact with other children. Only child, no other kids in the extended family, too little to play unsupervised with neighborhood munchkins. So kindergarten was like arriving on a different planet. It freaked me out, so the kindergarten referred my parents to a child psychologist.

    This was the mid 70s, when the "gifted" label was all the rage. Fucking liberals with their touchy-feely childhood development theories. ;) So the psych run tests and tells my folks, "He's gifted, I say! No wonder he hides inside the big concrete cylinders on the playground and doesn't know how to talk to the other kids. He's bored and needs to be where his genius can run free! Put him in first grade, stat!" Never mind that I had no social skills and found other children to be barbaric and incomprehensible. Apparently, my real problem was that the curriculum was too slow for me. ::)

    So I went through school a year young- the whole way- graduated from high school at 17. The annual President's Physical Fitness Test during P.E. broadcasted to all my peers that I was physically inferior to them, just in case they'd forgotten. I was also vulnerable to bullying because of my personality- I was naive, unassuming, good natured- in short, a pussy. Things started to turn sour in 6th grade and reached their absolute nadir in 7th grade. In 9th grade, I discovered punk rock, developed a bad attitude and a burst of testosterone tuned my body from soft and androgynous to skinny and wiry. Never had significant problems after that.

    Nothing really extraordinary about the hellish junior high years. I never really had my ass kicked- the bullying was mostly just psychological. For a while, I probably heard "Hey, faggot" about as often as I heard my actual name. I heard from a friend a few years ago that the one kid who fucked with me the most went to prison for a while- cops pulled him off a guy in a bar's parking lot as he was grinding some other guy's face into glass from a broken beer bottle.

    Looking back, I'm struck by a couple of things. One, putting me in school a year early was a very bad idea. The other thing? I'm still stunned to this day by how badly the schools handled bullying back then. The problem was obvious, OBVIOUS. I was in the next-to-lowest tier of nerd-dom. The kids lowest in the pecking order were the obese, the very effeminate, the badly dressed and the handicapped. They went through a daily gauntlet that made my trials look like nothing. In full view of, as they say, God and everybody.

    At my school, the bullies weren't the "tough kids." The tough kids snuck cinnamon toothpicks and later, cigarettes to school. They listened to Led Zep and AC/DC and they fought with each other, but they rarely fucked with nerds. The bullies were the little preppies- student council, football players, the popular kids who always cleaned up at the annual awards ceremonies. Perfect, smiling little polo-shirt Eddie Haskells...whose idea of fun was to steal a fat kid's underwear from the locker room or throw an effeminate kid's lunch into the trash. They were the ones who picked on the weak with impunity- their favored status with the teachers and administrators was a tacit endorsement of their behavior.

    The one kid who ended up in prison for a while- his pathology was blatant. In retrospect, it's clear to me that he was abused at home. Certainly emotionally, probably physically and maybe sexually. That kind of fury has to come from somewhere. I'm not quite spiritually advanced enough to feel sorry for the guy, but I think it's pure negligence that his problems, which were very easy to see, were ignored.
     
  8. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    We didn't have the major cliques in my H.S. that a lot of my friends did, and somehow everyone sort of got along.

    I had nothing traumatic, but I had two sort of bully incidents in high school that sort of come to mind. One was a kid 2 or 3 years older than me who I played on a sports team with. He tried to make life hell for me for a season. I was a sophomore playing with a bunch of seniors, and this kid hated the fact that I was on the team. It was mostly hazing, getting made fun of sort of stuff. There was one guy his age who was sort of the Jake Long of my H.S., who, for some reason would stick up for me and became my friend, so it wasn't too bad. He could drive and we used to go off school grounds every day for lunch and I got to look cool because I was hanging out with the much cooler older guy with the girlfriend I secretly lusted after, but who looked right through me.

    Another was the only physical beating I took in H.S. I had an ill-advised wise-ass streak that I could mostly get away with. But I'd sometimes antagonize he dirtbags, who smoked and played handball all day behind the school at the "the wall." They were the exception to my "everyone got along" statement, and I suppose they'd laugh at my perceptions of my high school. But in any case, there were some bad-ass kids among them -- one with a full Merlon Olson beard and a Hell's Angels demeanor, for example, who I believe had repeated the 10th grade 42 times. The dirtbags all hated me, because while most people would avoid them, I'd walk right through the handball games and antagonize them. I'd walk past and make comments. The worst was when I would end up in detention surrounded by a bunch of them. I wasn't bad enough to be a real bad kid--just had a knack of doing stupid things that I thought were funny, but teachers didn't--so I was stuck: not one of them, but still lumped in, and they just wanted to kick the shit out of me mostly, although they never did.

    There was one kid --named Bobby [/would love to add his last name] -- who wasn't 100 percent dirtbag, but he leaned that way. He absolutely hated my guts. And he was a bully in nature. He'd sometimes start shit with me, but we'd just insult each other occasionally. Given that he was constantly fighting, and he could have wiped the floor with me, I am not quite sure why he never threatened me seriously or anything. Until one day he was picking on this kid I had grown up with. The kid was from my immediate neighborhood, and when I was really little I was friends with him because your mom basically chooses your friends. As I got older, I chose my own friends, and I wasn't really close with this kid anymore. He was kind of annoying. But seeing Bobby pick on him for no reason, and he was going to beat him up, really pissed me off, so I stepped in and tried to be a tough guy -- the last act I should ever be trying to pull off. I couldn't fight worth a lick, especially with a kid who threw fists like it was a bodily function, and I ended up taking one of the ugliest beatings ever handed out after the final bell at a high school. Blood running down my face, bruised ribs, etc. I made the mistake of not just going down and staying down. I kept trying to get my shots in.

    He never messed with the other kid again, at least. To this day, I am not sure if it was worth it, though.
     
  9. I always stood up to bullies - going back to elementary school - and I still do. It's the only way they go away. Sure, they may still say something, but they stand further away when they do.
     
  10. 2muchcoffeeman

    2muchcoffeeman Well-Known Member

    Agreed with w_b: stand up to them and they go away. Knock one nose out of joint in public and they all go away.
     
  11. markvid

    markvid Guest

    One of the best days of my life was when I got an email from someone I went to school with and he was one of the bigger instigators of me getting picked on, and I took a lot for whatever reason.
    His email said he was looking to break into TV, and could I help him.
    I sent back that I wasn't worthy of common decency then from you, you aren't from me now.
     
  12. ArnoldBabar

    ArnoldBabar Active Member

    Beautiful. If only everyone could get a chance to have that kind of revenge.
     
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