The Fading Light

Adolescence seems in retrospect a series of conflicts and avoidances that punctuated long periods of anxiety. I was shocked, for instance, one day in the sixth grade by a boy I had been in school with for years. Timmy was a good looking kid of slightly higher than average intelligence and a sweet demeanor. One day, though, out of the blue, he came up to me and wanted to fight.

"Why?" I asked.

His older brother told him that he had to fight everyone in the sixth grade and that he had already fought. . . he named a list. I didn't want to fight Timmy. Indeed, it broke my heart. I'd always liked him in a casual way. He was part of my safe and pleasant landscape. Now this.

I told him that if we fought, I would beat him up badly, but then I would do it again, for it would be my turn. Other boys were standing around in a circle, waiting. Timmy said he didn't care. "C'mon, lets fight," he insisted.

I couldn't do it. "Nope," I said, "you win. Tell your brother you beat me up." I never liked Timmy after that and we really never spoke again even though we graduated from high school together.

I walked home from school with a group of boys from my neighborhood. One day, we saw some kids crowded around a drainage pipe that ran off into a pond, so we went over to see what was going on. The crowd was standing on a cement retainer looking down at some moccasins. There were two. I walked up to the wall to look and an older boy I barely knew pushed me in. I guess the snakes swam away in a panic. I only aware of my own and the miracle that I wasn't bitten. I scrambled out of the water covered in scum and algae. The older boys were laughing with derision. My friends said nothing, but we were all shocked by that breach of trust.

The boy who pushed me in was really bad. He lived across from the Boy's Club and used to fight with boxing gloves every day in his driveway. He and another older boy from my neighborhood used to really go at it until somebody got a bloody nose. He was a smaller kid, smaller than I though he was older and already at the junior high school. He scared me and I wanted nothing to do with him, but he had it out for me for some reason. I think it was my hair. I had gotten an new Schwinn bicycle for Christmas that year. It was too cool for the times, a two toned classic with a spring shock absorber for the front wheel. And it had black and white streamers hanging from the grips of the handle bars that would blow in the wind the quicker I rode. I guess they were a bit girly, but I hadn't thought about it. I mean, they came with the bicycle and in my house we didn't voluntarily destroy anything we bought. One day, the little tough guy, the creep, stopped my bicycle dead. He stood right in front of it so that I couldn't move and began tearing off the streamers one by one. I knew I couldn't stop him and tears welled up into my eyes, but he continued pulling them off one by one, taking his time. I told him to stop it, I think, told him that he couldn't do that. In my life, I'd never seen anything like this done to someone. When he had tortured me enough, I guess, he stepped aside and as quick as I could, I rode away, but not before he took a swing at me that grazed my shoulder. I hadn't escaped, though. I knew then that there were terrifyingly violent acts that could change who you were or thought you were in a moment.

Not long after that, the fellow he boxed with threatened to beat me up in the street in front of my house where we were playing ball. He was bigger than I and I was scared. In front of my own house.

In the eighth grade, there was a bad kid with a limp from a mild case of polio (there were several kids who suffered from this at my school), but he compensated for it by being a fighter and was a horrible bully. He was strong and thick and, for the most part, awful. One day before school, he came up to me and told me that he was going to fight me after school, to meet him right there, and that if I didn't show up, he was going to beat me worse. I was scared all day. I couldn't concentrate on my work, and I couldn't eat my lunch. But by fifth period, I had made up my mind to go ahead and fight him, to hit him as hard as I could and just get it over with rather than having the whole school think I was a chicken. It was a sea change, this deciding to fight. And so after my last class, people asked me if I was going to fight, and I said yes. There was a group of boys following me to the designated spot eager to see someone get a beating, and another already gathered around the other kid. I think he was surprised that I showed up because he looked and said, "You want to fight?" and I said," Yea, lets go." There was a clump of woods next to the school where everyone went to fight out of sight of the teachers. He looked at me and said, "Do you really want to fight?" in a different tone. There sounded a way out of this, so I said, "No, but I will." Then he began dancing up and down, waving his arms in the air saying he won, he won. It didn't make any sense, but I didn't care. "Yea, you won," I said as I walked away. After that, he wanted to be friends.

I played football on the Boy's Club league with the older boys team. Most of the kids in my class played on a junior league under us. I didn't know most of the boys on my team, but they knew each other, so I became a target. In practice, every hit on me was a little harder. Some of the boys were two years older, and I have to say it really hurt, but as always, it was the emotional pain that really got to me. Why were they doing this? I hadn't done anything.

When I started seeing My Own True Love, one of the older boys on the team lived across the street from her. Every day that I went to see her, he would stand in the yard and call me out to fight. When I would walk home, he and his friends would crowd around me close, threatening me. The kid was an all-star athlete and considered a stellar kid by the school, but around me he was no more than a thug.

Again, at school, an older boy who I'd never seen before started making fun of me, of my hair and clothing. I was dressing like Carnaby Street and looking like a Beatle amid some really poor and violent people. He wouldn't quit it but just kept going on in front of a peanut gallery of friends. I didn't know what to do, and in my first violent act, I swung at him. He was quick and moved aside and I ended up punching the wall. Everybody laughed. I told him to meet me after school.

He was there, alright, with a group of his friends. People had heard about the fight and so there was a crowd following us as we left the school. He was a bigger kid than me, as always, but my father had been a boxer and had taught me the skills, and I danced around him throwing straight, hard jab after straight, hard jab. I'd never hit anyone before, and the sound of the crunching of bone and cartilage went straight up my arm. It made me sick. I never through anything but a jab, so nothing knocked him down. It just went on and on and on, his face getting puffy and bruised, blood trickling from his nose. And after too long a time of that, I just quit. I told him I was done, that I didn't want to keep hitting him any more, but he said he wasn't quitting and caught me with a roundhouse under my eye. I was surprised how much it hurt and I really did want to quit then.

He didn't come to school for a couple of days, but the next time I saw him, he said he was going to fight me again. I told him that next time I would really give him a beating rather than just poking jabs into his face, but I had no stomach for it at all. Then he was gone. I don't know what happened to him. Maybe he moved. Whatever happened, I was glad.

Once I started going around the high school at night, to basketball and football games, a dark violence really began that I couldn't very well escape. It was a violence born of poverty and ignorance and some ancient ideals of manhood. But that is not what I am telling today. No, I'll only tell these silly, first, heartbreaking experiences that dragged me from the sweetness of innocence and light. Darker days, though, lay ahead.