Bullies

Posted on April 4, 2004 in Adolescence

I was out on a summer’s morning, while the tule fog still socked in the San Bernardino Valley, trying to get the lawn mowed before it burned off. My parents had to have grass and they felt that even with my asthma and my allergies, I should not allow myself to become “a cripple” by avoiding the work that “all boys did”.

I was pushing the mower through the detached section of our lawn — everyone else on the block put flowers or concrete or brick in the section that met the street, but my father wanted grass grass grass to the very edge of the property. It was the classic stupidity of Southern California living: waste water by planting thirsty foilage and pollute the pristine chaparral air by introducing thousands of foreign species that spewed pollen.

I was pushing the mower through the detached section of our lawn — which was doubly divided by a big magnolia tree right in the middle of it — when I looked up the street. Every one of my junior high school enemies was walking down Garden Drive towards me. Seven of them, thinking in all their slinky pettiness that they rode like the gunfighters of the film. I could see their yokel grins half a block away.

I know what I should have done — the should being that of my mother, my brother, and my father. I should have stood my ground and let them surround me, taunt me, maybe provoke me to a fight. But I did the coward’s thing: I walked into the house, left the lawnmower running there. From my room, I watched as they surrounded the still chugging lawnmower, sputtering away. They passed it like a comb passes a small knot in the hair and went on down 25th Street. I came out and finished doing the lawn.

I told no one about this. To have done the smart thing in my house was to be branded as a coward. If they’d beaten me up, my mother would not have done a thing. She didn’t like the idea of social workers getting involved in our life.

I do not doubt that if I ever run into that crowd, they will laugh at me. San Bernardino rednecks harbor no shame. They end up in prisons or buried in the backyard like one fellow that I knew.