Yesterday, Slate.com was kind enough to publish an essay I wrote in response to prompts for pieces about bullying episodes from middle school and high school. However, since they chopped about two thirds off what I wrote, I figured I’d post the full thing here. For the curious and for those who want to compare, you can read the short version over on Slate’s website.
One-Time Bully
In sixth grade, I met Ben in choir class when we were assigned to the same small group. Neither of us could sing well so we stuck together and mumbled as the others would carry the tune, and we wouldn’t make fun if asked to sing solo for the class when our teacher said something like, “Uh, Mr. O’Leary, I couldn’t hear you that time. Could you sing those last four of lines for me again?” The other kids would invariably snigger at our singing voices in such a situation, but Ben did not tease me, nor I him. He’d pat me on the shoulder and wink, and so we began to develop a friendship.
He was shy but funny, goofy in unguarded moments, and when I’d visit his house, we’d spend time in the basement with his BB gun taking shots at his action figures and childhood toys. We recorded some of those times on cassette and would listen again and again and chuckle at our jokes, and then Ben fired a BB right into G.I. Joe’s privates one day. It was the funniest thing ever. “He’ll never have a sex life!” Ben shouted into the recorder, and we could hardly breathe for our laughter. We went upstairs afterward and listened in the kitchen while eating apples, “He’ll never have a sex life!” Ben’s father frowned and made us turn it off. “You boys should go outside.” He said that often, but always we’d just go up to Ben’s room where he would goad me into calling a girl I liked, Mimi, my first crush, the first girl I ever thought of as beautiful. I’d dial her number and lose all nerve as soon as anyone would answer. Click. Ben wouldn’t laugh or call me a loser or a pussy or a fag though, and to think about it these days, all these years later, I see that he was simply trying to help me. He wanted me to talk to her. He wanted for me what I wanted for me.
Ben didn’t have many other friends because of how quiet he typically was, and there was his awful singing. Mine was awful too, but I also played sports and mingled in other groups. I had basketball friends and football friends. Baseball was my favorite though, and two of my best friends, Kevin and Steve, were friends from Little League and from the pick-up games on weekends in the school lot. Steve was a bit like me, a little quiet, somewhat easy going but not one who would lead a group. That was Kevin. He was the loud one, big and bold, he’d wear a purple baseball hat with a single horn sticking out from the front center, and this made him seem a big lumbering oaf to look at, but he was athletic, the home run hitter who also snagged fly balls and threw out runners tagging for home. He wasn’t a bully though. None of us were. We didn’t pick on smaller kids or kids who didn’t fit in, or kids who couldn’t play sports well.
For a long time, I kept Ben as a separate friend. Kevin and Steve knew who he was from school, but I did different things with him. We had a connection based more on who we were rather than what common sports we played, and so we hung out on our own until he spent the night once. He came over on a Friday evening, and since I didn’t have a BB gun, the two of us watched movies on TV while playing Life and then Clue, and when my parents were out, we burned holes in my model battleships with matches and then watched them sink in the bathtub as we recreated some combination of the battles we’d seen in World War II movies. Inevitably, one of the plastic soldiers got burned in the privates. “He’ll have no sex life!” It was a fun night, and the next morning, I got a call from Steve.
“Hey, we’re going to the school to play baseball. Wanna come?”
“Sure,” I answered without even thinking to ask Ben if he wanted to play.
“We’ll be over in a bit.”
“Great. See you soon.”
When Kevin and Steve arrived, the four of us attempted to play catch in my backyard, but it didn’t go well. Kevin threw the ball to Ben, and it bounced off the edge of his mitt and then ricocheted off his left ear and into the bushes. He winced, and his ear turned red, “Ouch!” Kevin thought that hilarious. So did Steve. I didn’t, but I didn’t say anything either, and I didn’t ask if he was okay. I just ran over and got the ball and threw it to Steve, and the game continued except that every subsequent throw by Steve and Kevin to Ben was either very fast or just out of reach. He tried his best, but he missed most of them and received only laughter for his efforts. He stuck with it though and would retrieve the errant balls and throw them to me.
“Ha! You throw like a girl,” Kevin said more than once mimicking Ben’s throwing action which made Steve mimic the action which made Ben look away. And me, I never defended him, not even when he tripped and did a nose-dive into the grass while dodging a particularly fast throw from Steve. He stained his shirt, a short sleeve collared thing with three buttons at the neck that was far from cool, and got a scratch on his arm. Steve and Kevin doubled over in their laughter and went into a few dancing choruses of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” which was popular at the time. No one helped Ben get up, and even I sang along with the second chorus, me and my terrible singing voice finally succumbing to the cruelty of the moment and participating.
“Another one bites the dust … Another one bites the dust … and another one’s gone and another one’s gone, another one bites the dust.”
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Ben said.
He went inside then, and the rest of us waited and waited.
“What the hell’s he doing in there?”
“Playing with himself.”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t.
“Let’s head to the schoolyard,” Kevin suggested, “The game should start soon.”
“Okay.”
And we left. Ben was in my house somewhere, maybe in the bathroom, maybe in the bedroom, maybe in the family room looking out at us from behind the curtains, but we left him there and went to play baseball.
When I got back a couple hours later, Ben was gone, and my mom was waiting for me.
“David, why did you leave Ben here all alone? He was crying? What did you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You call him and apologize this instant. You can’t just leave your friends here alone. How would you like it if he did that to you?”
I dialed Ben’s number, and when he got on the phone, I asked, “Why did you go home?”
“You guys were making fun of me.”
“No, we weren’t.”
“Yeah, you were. I’ll see you Monday at school.” He hung up the phone, and I got grounded for two weeks.
That was pretty much the end of our friendship. I never went back to his house. He never came back to mine. And I wasn’t smart enough to understand why it worked out that way. We still talked some in school, but I never really apologized, and he never seemed to make any other friends. When our groups were changed in choir class, he had to sing those parts alone sometimes with no one to support him, not even the teacher when students openly laughed at his singing.
“No laughing,” was all Mr. Dunn would say.
Six months later, my family moved out of state, and Ben faded into my past. It took time and distance, and a lot of both of those, to make me realize what I did to him. It was a moment when three boys crossed a line from fun teasing to bullying and open derision. The dynamic of that afternoon got turned on its head, and none of us did anything to right it even though it would have been an easy thing, “Hey, you okay? Sorry about that throw.”
We hear lots of stories in the media about kids who are repeatedly bullied, and though that wasn’t us, though Kevin, Steve, and I weren’t bullies in the sense that we did such things often, it didn’t matter then. It doesn’t now. Once, that one time, was all it took, and so all I can say is that I am sorry for that day, for the weakness I displayed, for the tears, the laughs, the singing, the stains on Ben’s shirt, for the general ugliness we showed him. He deserved better, and really, of those four boys in my backyard that afternoon, he was the best of us silently making his way through some terrible moments. I hope he found it all these years later, a life with better friends than I.
And I hope that wherever he is, he would be glad to know that I remember him more fondly than I remember Kevin or Steve. It’s from regret of course, but not completely. He made me laugh then, and I still laugh now to think of him taking aim, the smile on his face before he pulled the trigger, the joy, the exclamation.
“He’ll have no sex life!”