Grades 6 – 8 are called junior high where I was raised. Thankfully, the school was fed by more than one grade school so I had another chance to be accepted by some of my peers. However, the dream quickly ended in religious school. It was a normal, boring day of after school historical references, preaching, and so forth at religious school but this day would be my last in attendance. For the life of me, I cannot remember the insult verbatim, but a classmate made a cardinal sin by saying something nasty under his breath about my younger sister. My classmates should have known better. While I was too small to be a bully, I did beat the crap out of the neighborhood nerd outside our grade school in the fifth grade for weeks of bad-mouthing my family. Whatever this other guy said about my sister in religious school threw me into another rage. I jumped from my desk like a man possessed, toppling an entire filing cabinet on top of my hapless victim. The filing cabinet pinned him to his desk. Needless to say, the sudden crash got the attention it deserved and I was unceremoniously dispatched, permanently. My parents were less than pleased to say the least and I am quite confident the story followed me into public school. So, it seems the unrelenting mental anguish from my early childhood was meant to continue.
I tried to redeem myself. My family was what I will call upper middle class, so at the time, we could afford a tutor to substitute for my having been expelled from religious school. I continued to get good grades. I tried football, wrestling, and running track. Yet, the wild side of me could not be quashed. I got into a couple more fights in school. I smashed a drink box over another guy’s head one day after we started verbally sparring. I got caught choking the same guy I pinned down with a filing cabinet in the hallway of the public school by a math teacher. I was banned from riding the school bus for 10 days for igniting fireworks on board the bus. The were only jumping jacks, but the sparks had other kids freaking out, jumping from seat to seat trying to avoid these little instruments of terror. The principal went nuts when the driver returned all of us to school trying to get a confession out of us before continuing the route. I also participated in no less than 2 food fights on the bus.
My next door neighbors hated children, and me, in particular. I took pleasure in putting a rock throw one of their basement windows as revenge. A few of the neighborhood kids and I also delighted in punking them one day with M-80 white smoke bombs. A little ding-dong ditch after lighting them on the porch resulted in the old man calling 911 to report someone was trying to blow up his house. We nearly laughed ourselves to death, watching the fire trucks, cop cars, and commotion from underneath a giant pine tree across the street. I also got drunk for the first time in my life when a friend spent the night and we scarfed down a bunch of my father’s Cutty Sark whiskey in the basement bar. Despite any attempts to be good, it seemed I was destined to develop as a train wreck in slow motion. Unbelievably, this was only the beginning of the trouble to come.
