This definitely happened after Camp Stevens. I’d had such a great summer. I had the growth spurt. My voice stopped doing it’s own thing. The volcano of pimples settled down. Life was good.
Back in class the bully from the year before started harassing my nerd friend, a little guy I just liked to play chess with. He had the same little twirp gang around him, his 2 or 3 ‘little me’ buddies. The bright kid was just hunkering down, playing turtle his principle defensive strategy.” Protect my head. “ I saw him thinking. He had this super amazing brain. I loved playing chess with him and hearing him talk about prisms and light waves. I think that’s why I intervened. The stupid kid punched my friend in the head.
“Stop that.” I said. I’d be twisted round in my seat looking back. Now I stood upend walked back.
That’s when I noticed what was weird. This bully kid was 4 to 6 inches shorter than me. I’d also filled out like a little teen Schwartzenagger. At Camp Stevens we had the job of carrying the milk from the boat and dock to the kitchen. 150 kids drink a lot of milk. I carried these jugs two at a time, heavy stainless steel 4 foot tall milk jugs. Uphill each week till all of them were in the big camp freezer. Then there were the bags of potatoes. We worked hard in camp and ate well. So I sprouted vertical and lateral with a gymnast and swimmer’s shoulders. I began swimming across lakes that summer for fun too. Weird shit.
“What are you going to do about it?” Bullies don’t get training in creative dialogue. Maybe today with the internet and you tube they might get better education in intimidation and language. Back then they were writing their own script and it sounded all the same. “What are you going to do about it.?”
But the kid hadn’t realized something was seriously different. He was a shrimp. I wasn’t the only one to have grown. He peaked that year. I made 6 feet and he stayed around 5’4” - 5’5”. I don’t know what possessed me but I took him by the shirt collar and lifted him up the wall so I could talk to him face to face.
“This,” I said. The class cheered and all the big people who’d been liliputian the year before seemed to get it. They came and stood around me. The guy was ‘small’. Our nerd friend was small but he was more skinny and malnourished and brainy. This kid was small in a physical and spiritual way. With the other kids who’d had the growth spurt standing with me, he was scared. I let him down.
Life continued. I always figured this guy who liked to cause pain with people smaller or weaker than him eventually find a place in an institutions where he could have the institution behind them. Institutions are where a lot of people play out their sick fantasies.
I’m probably still rescuing nerds and this guy is some stupid bureaucrat or police guy picking on nerds. Communist socialist systems give power to these sorts. My favorite depiction of the ‘type’ was in Dr. Zhivago. For me lifting that kid up by the shirt collar was one of the moments that moulded me. I understand vigilantism. I respect the law and authority but it’s way too commonly not there when the bullies come out from under their rocks to play. The police invariably arrive minutes late when seconds count. Their agenda isn’t to stop crime happening but to stop crime happening again. They celebrate serial murderer captures but don’t get that the dozens of victims reflect the failure of the ‘system’. System studies began in the 70’s and all my career I’ve been faced with authorities who want to play like everything is not connected. There were laws and teachers and my friend still got punched in the head too many times.
Normally the ‘gang’ would overcome the deficit of one of their members. But too many of us had growth spurts. The whole balance of power shifted. This poor bully guy became like Danny de Vito without Danny’s big brain or profound sense of humor.
Another nodal point for me had been the gang show down in Kenora. My cookie friends and I were making our way back to the boat on a Friday evening. There was the North Winnipeg competent smart kid and the little silly skinny weasel. “I grew up with the Ruffles. All the brothers went to jail. We had to walk around them and get along or get killed. North Winnipeg was like that. Lots of violence. Wasn’t your neighborhood like that too?”
“A bit.” I said. Fort Garry was even at the time the best neighborhood. Pretty decent. Ironically one of our classmates became a serial rapist who used the date rape drug with his lawyer friend to rape dozens of girls till he and his friend were caught a couple of years into their professional careers. It was pretty hushed up. I’d hear these things later as a psychiatrist but I’d also become savvy to the stories that ‘flashed’. Things that remained were never as interesting as the story that came and went in a day like these two professionals who used the date rape drug to rape girls and went to jail. One of the South Drive crowd with money enough to hush the media. I knew the kid but didn’t like him. A creepy guy even then. My sister in law would later be asked out by him and say know. She was a smart girl. God was looking out for her.
The gang of mixed Kenora thugs, teens and older, mostly aboriginal, stopped us as we were trying to get to the dock where our boat would be taking us back to Camp Stevens. They were the locals. We were the outsiders. If it had just been me and the weasel we’d have been hospitalized. There was a dozen of them and they carried chains and knives and crow bars. If we didn’t get back to the dock we’d miss our ride and we didn’t want to get caught in that town after we met them.
“Hey Steven’s boys, we are going to cut you. Make you less pretty for your little girl friends.”
I actually had a girlfriend in Kenora. Fast work. Met this incredible blond scandanavian daugther of a Viking fisherman and spent the whole summer on my days off trying to get her clothes off. To her we were going for walks on the beach. I was reciting poetry. I was getting her ice cream. I was looking like I was normal but my whole being was focused on seeing her naked. She had other plans and enjoyed the ice cream.
I certainly didn’t need my face slashed up by the local gang. I did’t like the sound of chains being smashed on the ground.
This was nothing to my new friend.
“You got a knife, Bill?” He asked.
“Yea,
“What about you, weasel?
“Yea.’
“Follow my lead and I’ll get us out of this. If you run weasel I’ll come after you and hurt you worse than these guys would. We’re going to act tough , Bill. These guys don’t want to get hurt any more than we do but they’d like to hurt someone Look as mean as you can. When I say , pull out your knives.’
I had a new six inch Bowie.
With that he marched us ,three abreast, straight up to these guys bigger and better armed than us.
“Are you girls going to get out our way or are we going to have to us a path through you,” he said, Clint Eastwood /Bruce Willis cool. He pulled out his Bowie knife and began passing it hand to hand. I did the same looking as tough as I could. Weasel had his knife out but I smelt urine. He’d pissed himself. He hadn’t run.
The guys talked some more street talk tough guy talk. Weasel and I kept mum. It was good thing weasel was wearing dark jeans.
The boat came in behind them. They parted. We walked through then like Moses and the waves. All the while I thought I was going to feel a chain smash the back of my head. Nothing happened. (One of my favorite was stories is this Scottish regiment in the Korean War surrounded 10 to 1 by Chinese. They just played the bagpipes , shot their guns in the air and marched out of the death trap they were in. The enemy parted and let them go.)
We got on the boat and laughed as we headed back to Camp Stevens. Weasel despite his urine soaked pants kept saying, “Did you see how I scared them.?!”
I had a lot more respect for my new friend. He’d talk a lot about growing up with the Ruffles and gang violence and police and just trying to avoid it all so he could finish his school. His family was poor and he wanted to get somewhere else. He wanted to go to university and get a degree. I’d not even thought about this. He had plans and I was just muddling along not even knowing if I planned to go to university that early in my education. Kids did but I wasn’t thinking about it and surprised at my friend having plans and feeling real intense about getting out of his neighborhood. Everyone heard about the Ruffles but I was glad I never met them.
Conversations like that made me aware how fortunate I was to have my family, my mom,my Dad and older brother, the neighborhood, the mostly really good teachers, the great YMCA ,the good church. This kid had less opportunity but that didn’t stop him. He was going to make something for himself .
That night he probably saved our lives.
It was in grade 9 shops that the teacher threw the wooden mallet at me. It ricocheted off the table and hit me in the forehead. I went down on my knees but wasn’t knocked out. I’d been concentrating on the circular saw and wearing hearing protection so hadn’t heard that he was wanting us to shut down and gather round. I worked on my dad’s tools and loved wood work. I almost became a carpenter. When years later I’d be expelled from school I’d get a job in a wood store and planned to be a carpenter. I loved Herman Hesse’s book “Narcissus and Goldmund”. He compared the spiritual life of the Bishop with the carver who made the wood pews.
I always felt good and peaceful working on wood. When I was disturbed I’d get wood and make boxes in my kitchen. I still have some of those boxes. Wood work always made me feel good. I wasn’t being a bad kid and truthfully I wasn’t ignoring him. I have an autistic streak. A singled minded focus when I’m doing something with my hands. It would help me in surgery and later sailing. Here that tunnel vision wasn’t appreciated. I also don’t think he meant more than to get my attention. Through the years I’d wear that as the ‘time the teacher through hammer and hit me in the forehead.’ The kids certainly spread that rumor. He didn’t apologize or anything. Just went on to say how important it was to pay attention and stop what we were doing when he told us.
I had a huge goose egg. That’s what got my mom. I tell the story that she’d slap me and she did but she did’t leave marks. Parents disciplined kids in those days but it was wrong to leave evidence. I’m glad the gangster movies with the mob rolling up newspapers in prison and beating each other so there were no marks hadn’t come out sooner. My Irish mother would have been rolling newspaper for sure. The fact is she never hurt me just slapped to emphasize her authority except for once when I was older.
I think it was the idea too that people might think she’d whacked me. Not that anyone at that time would have blamed her. Teens are a bad lot.I’ve never understood how any of my friends who became junior high teachers did it. I ‘d rather be in charge of a dangerously insane ward in the jail than have to have a classroom of little Billy Hay’s figuring out how to plant stink bombs and what new trouble he could get up too. I convinced a class to act retarded and told a substitute teacher we were the gifted class. Kids were rolling around the floor, girls shrieking and the teacher just left never to return. The principal took the class till we could get another substitute.
My mom was livid. She complained to the principal and to the school board .Me, any thing but innocent, in general, but on this one occasion, yes, I was innoscent. That one day of 352 when the teacher whacked me I had been without sin. It was enough for my mom. She rarely went mother bear but it was a site to behold. Poor little smiling victim Billy. She hugged me to her bosom.
I think the teachers at the school shuddered. I was wearing this goose egg and looking otherwise angelic. Even the worst lawyer could get me a few million today. She showed me off to the principal and school board. They all tut tutted. Everyone treated my mother with the respect this incredibly beautiful angel deserved. However they als all know knew though they couldn’t prove it, that I was the kid behind the stink bombs, the kid behind setting the teacher’s chemistry desk on fire, the kid who dropped books on teachers heads,the kid who soaped “fuck fuck fuck’ all over the windows. I’m was that kid. Very bright. Very smart. Bad to the bone. My beautiful mother was enraged.
They called a meeting of all my teachers.
The consensus was that “ Billy Hay deserved anything he got.” The shops teacher hadn’t meant to hit him. It was an accident but Billy was a trouble maker.
My Mom and Dad accepted that. She was glad they’d had a meeting. She’d been glad to go to their offices dragging me along side her. She figured now for sure everyone knew I got the goose egg at school, not at home.
Life went on. Some other drama took the stage after that. I just remember this when I consider how this would have played out today. I’d have been in hospital for days, in the intensive care unit, MRI”s Ctscans. I ‘d have months of trauma counseling. A go fund me account would make me rich, the poor teacher would have been sentenced to years in jail, even a stupid lawyer would get me a million from the school, my mother would have been on the cover of Huffington Post. I’d be eating ice cream with the dog and taking selfies of the egg on my forehead. Sweet.
That wasn’t the way things were when I was growing up.
Both my father and my brother when they saw me just said, “Good Egg” That was that.
Eventually my high forehead returned to normal. Life carried on.
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