Dissidents and Miscreants

Our baseball team was a good one, but there was discord. Our star pitcher was the tallest athlete in the county and had some peculiar talents. I mean, he wasn't particularly athletic, but because he had such a tremendous wingspan, he could throw a fast ball that most people couldn't touch. But he didn't like playing baseball, preferring basketball instead. During the baseball season, he had wanted to quit the team to play in a basketball league, but our coach talked to his parents and that was that. One day, though, he showed up with a broken finger he had gotten playing basketball. Coach was beside himself. Over the course of the next week, they fashioned a splint that would still allow him to throw the ball. Jon, the second tallest fellow on our team and the first baseman, was beside himself, and one day he fell apart in practice, crying and accusing the coach of all sorts of things including favoritism. I'd never seen anything like this before, a direct and confrontational challenge to hierarchical authority. It was true. It was cool. After that, though, there was much discord on the team. We were too talented to lose games, however, and we won the County Championship. It was a lesson well learned, I thought. Blind obedience did not necessarily make a champion.

Baseball season over, I had hours to fill. Some of the boys had started lifting weights and bodies began to harden. And this led new arrangements in the male chain of command. There were challenges and fights, and some of the outcomes were surprising. One of the scariest fellows was the shortest. Doug's father was a drunk who used to terrorize the family, and Doug was learning to fight hard on those awful nights. He wanted to be a Hell's Angel, he said, and indeed after quitting high school, he bought a Harley Davidson and got his wish. I associated with Doug and some other boys who one day decided to turn on me. It wasn't overt, just subtle jabs and jibes that were intended to put me at the end of the line. I didn't feel any real affection for these fellow who were mostly miscreants of one type or another, so it was simply a matter of not hanging with them any more. That, however, was a logic with an inherent flaw, for when I did see them at school, the taunting began to get worse. One day walking home from school, it got to be too much for me. For the first time in my life, my blood had risen hot and nasty. Sure, it was fear and frustration, but it was anger, too, and, perhaps, my own raging hormones.

"Let's go, asshole," I said to Doug since I knew it would be him I would have to fight anyway.

He was taken by surprise as bullies so often are, the shock of it suddenly showing in his normally sleepy eyes.

"Go where?" he laughed.

"Let's fight. I'm tired of you. You think you're tough, let's find out right now."

His buddies stood waiting, looking at him, waiting for their villain to step up. But there was only the pause that accompanies uncertainty. His eyes were searching.

"No, I don't want to fight you," he said. His friends were disappointed. Worse. But I was finished. I was gone.

A few weeks later, I heard a story that I'm certain was true. And it was the undoing of that little group and its brush with power. There was a short man with thick glasses who owned the house next to the Boy's Club of America. His house had a pool, and he would lounge about it watching the boys through the fence. He was what we knew then as "a queer." Everyone knew it, and it was a joke. But Doug and his consorts had somehow gotten to know him, and he would buy them beer. One night, they were at his house drinking and swimming and then everyone was naked. And something happened to Doug while he lay on the deck in a half sleep, pretending, the other fellows said, that he had passed out. And that news spread like wildfire through the school. How the the little man with the thick glasses survived all that, I don't have a clue. But Doug didn't so well, and with that, he became invisible, choosing some other life, I guess, further from the public eye.