Betrayal

As it turned out, being liked by Olive was considered a good thing. She had been a popular girl in her old school. But she had scared me with those adult titties and those strange shapes and foreign smells, and I could not overcome it. The moron who had driven us in the car turned out to be just that. He liked to take the cotton out of Vicks inhalers and put them into coffee to extract the codeine. He also liked sniffing glue. He was big and dumb, but I couldn't get rid of him. In a year he would go into the high school, but for now, I was cursed.

Carol Dann was another thing. I didn't know who she was, but I learned that she was older by a year. She was in the eighth grade and from a better family. In elementary school, we all came from the same neighborhood and were of the same class, but the junior high school was a catch all for many schools. There were kids much better off and much worse off than we were.

After winning the talent show, I was a hotter commodity. By now, my parents had gotten me a complete drum set with cymbals and a high hat, a bass drum and two tom-toms. I even had a tambourine. It didn't take long for other bands to invite me to play with them. I started playing with two older boys who were really good. One of them was the ringer in the band that beat us in the elementary school competition. These two fellows were both good musicians, but they were pretty bad characters. The bass player's name was Steve. He had a Hoffner violin bass just like the one Paul McCartney played. Wayne was two years older and had a Rickenbacker guitar and he could play anything he heard. Both of them had big, black Vox amplifiers and were both considered good looking, something they both chose to believe. They were very, very vain.

One night after band practice, I asked Steve, "Do you know who Carol Dann is?"

"Sure," he said.

"I keep hearing she likes me."

"Ho, ho, ho," he laughed. "You are full of shit. She's in my grade. She doesn't like you." His derision was harsh.

"Well, that's what I heard," I said just before he hit me as hard as he could with his fist on the fat part of my shoulder. For some reason, he was insanely angry.

"I SAID YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT!"

I hurt bad, not as much from the punch as from the wrongness of it, from the betrayal. How could you hit someone for something like that? I didn't do anything, I thought. But this was to be only the first in a litany of betrayals I would learn to endure.