I don’t know where I got my ideas about the Russians being our enemies. I don’t recall a first moment when I knew that they were the arch nemesis of the United States. Did I walk through the living room and ask who Rock Hudson (I’m sure I would have thought it was John Wayne) was shooting at in Ice Station Zebra. My dad would have said, “The Russians,” and things like that would have built up to fill me in on who was going to kill us in World War III. I definitely recall seeing parts of Howard Hughes favorite movie, Ice Station Zebra. It shows a submarine breaking through arctic ice. That’s such a cool thing that there are countless videos nuclear subs from several navies doing just that on YouTube.

            My brother and I watched the US Olympic hockey team beat the Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics – 4 to 3. It’s probably the only hockey game I’ve ever watched more than three minutes of. I was only interested in it because we had to defeat the godless Soviets – not that I called them godless. And since we weren’t allowed to swear, I’m not sure what we did call them. Bret may have called them “the damn Russians.” I don’t remember, and that’s not typical for me. So many memories come with bits of dialogue.

            A good example: in the winter of 1980, when I was in fifth grade, right after deer season, I started wearing an orange stocking cap my dad had bought that year. We were always buying new stocking hats every winter. They would get lost, torn up by a dog, whatever. This particular hat had the virtue of being really really thick. It was by far the thickest warmest stocking hat I’d ever worn. But one day at school, I was out on the playground – which had very little to play on because that was the first year fifth-graders were housed in the Middle School – and a jet flew high overhead. I don’t know how all of the dialogue went that led up to my comment. I think it was something like:

            “Hey, is that a bomber?” asked some kid.

            “Yeah, a Russian bomber. It’s gonna bomb your mom’s ass,” another kid.

            “Russians?” I said, and I remember this part very clearly, “I wear this bright hat so they can’t miss me.” Looking up at the sky, I shook a fist in mock anger, “Come and get me, you creeps!”

            My brother’s best friend, Big Dave Cooper, said, “You’re a crazy little bastard, ain’t ya!”

            That was a good day. I wouldn’t get beaten up that day.

            Not that I ever got beaten up. But I did worry about it. Some of the boys in this rural public school could get rough. In a small town in Eaton County, like just about anywhere in America, there was always the possibility of violence. One time I was riding my bike through town – this was when I was there for driver’s training – and two angry-looking guys with long greasy blond hair in a rusted-out truck went slowly past me, flipping me the bird. I hadn’t been in their way. I was presenting no problem for them. My very existence was provoking.       

            That, however, was well after the winter of 1980 when the whole world got the news that John Lennon had been shot to death. The TV reports were shocking. I don’t recall having any special feelings about the Beatles. At one time my favorite song was “Yellow Submarine,” but at that point I was probably a bigger fan of Kenny Rogers. Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” was also a favorite. Hell, Blondie or Styx played at the roller rink – that was an event. My brother Bret was more into Molly Hatchet and ACDC – now that he was expanding on from his collection of KISS albums. The Beatles were not in the forefront of our mind.

            On the TV they showed a picture of Lennon. He was the one with the Jesus beard and little round glasses. I remember clearly in one of the reports there was a photo of Lennon in a trench coat outside the Dakota building where he lived. I could swear I saw an image flash on the screen of a bloodstain on the sidewalk.

            It wasn’t an outrage to me that mentally unstable person murdered in cold blood one of the Beatles. To me the horror was that it was just a guy on his way home, murdered getting out of his car. As far as fame went, I was shocked that a celebrity could be gunned down in broad daylight. The world became a little more random, a little more dangerous, a little sadder, because John Lennon was killed.

            Between the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident and the demise of Skylab, science didn’t just take a hit in 1979, the idea of guaranteed progress was slipping. We were still hearing from our teachers that by the year 2000 we would have flying cars and hotels on the Moon. But there were fractures in our collective optimism. Add into the mix the hostages in Iran, talk on the news of international flights being hijacked, and now a celebrity murdered by a madman, and there were certainly flashes through our minds that all was not well. That not everything was going to be new and improved for ever and ever. The sky wasn’t the limit; it was falling in dangerous and ugly chunks of debris.

            It was a similar thing when a few months later president Ronald Reagan was shot. At the time, none of us knew how close Reagan had come to death. When it was first announced at school that the president had been shot, we all thought of what we had heard about Kennedy. Everybody’s parents could tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard that JFK was dead. On the evening news we heard that Press Secretary James Brady had been killed. There was a moment of silence on the air. Then at some point in the same broadcast we were told that Mr. Brady was not dead. That seemed to sum up the confusion and welter of emotions many of us were experiencing. For much of the day we weren’t sure if the president would survive.

            In the decades since then, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about St. Ronny. For me, as a ten-year-old, there was something larger than life about Reagan. He had freed the hostages that had been held in Iran. Obviously, I know better now. But I didn’t at ten.

            It wouldn’t be shocking if I had elevated Reagan above the rest of us in my mind at that time. What is interesting to me is just how suspicious I was of the man. In one sense, I should have revered him. I’m glad that I didn’t, but I don’t really know why. Was it because of his clownish make-up and plastic hair? I don’t think so. Was it because his name sounded like he belonged in a comic book next to Peter Parker, Bruce Banner or Clark Kent?

            My parents didn’t vote for him the first time around. They voted for Carter. I honestly can’t remember how I felt about the election the year Reagan won. I do know that the Sunday before Super Tuesday we were walking into church and we were met by Pastor Beck. He was handing out fliers, asking people to vote for Reagan. My dad awkwardly told him that he was planning on voting for Carter because the man was a Christian. Much to our surprise, Pastor Beck disagreed and said that Carter was not a real Christian. That “born again” stuff was phony. This shocked me. Pastor Beck had preached on the passage in the Gospel of John that says, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” What was wrong with being a born-again Christian?

            Carter was the president who asked us to stop wasting energy. I had put a “Conserve Energy” sticker on my bedroom light switch. My mom had said that Reagan was a Hollywood actor and a cowboy who would get America sucked into another war. I wasn’t going to switch to Reagan’s team just because Pastor Beck was plumping for him – yes, I had only just become a baptized Christian, but that only gave Beck so much authority. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that my parents hadn’t voted for Reagan. They had stuck with Carter.

            I’m sure my parents being skeptical of Mr. Reagan played a role in my own perceptions of and reactions to the new president. But they didn’t keep me from becoming emotionally pulled into his orbit when the nut tried to assassinate him. And why did he want to kill the president? Because it would impress a celebrity – Jodie Foster. When I learned about the would-be-assassin’s rational, I’m not sure what I felt. I knew something about Jodie Foster. She had been on the cover of People magazine, which I saw in the dentist’s office. I remember it distinctly. I saw that photo and thought, God, I have to marry someone as beautiful as Jodie Foster.

            And this was my world. Or some of it. A world that leaked radiation and promised protection from a new kind of MX missile that would hide inside railroad cars – my dad worked at Grand Trunk Railroad.

Was my personal fate entangled with the fate of the whole planet? Fame, trains, and radiation. What could be more American? Didn’t the teachers say we could all grow up to be president?

Bully For You

I wasn’t very happy in fifth grade. I didn’t like switching classes. I didn’t have any classes with my buddy Heath. I had trouble getting my social bearings. I did like being in band. I played cornet and generally got first chair. The kid next to me was Matt. Sometimes he was first chair. I literally have no recollection of who the other kids were in the cornet section. Dennis Crowfoot played trombone. Todd Dunby played drums. And that’s all I remember about the other kids in band. I find that strange.

One thing that sticks out in my mind is how my brother said it was embarrassing that I was even in band. “Only sissies are in band.” If there was anything I wanted to make clear to Bret, it was that I was no sissy. That was a challenge since I was always the smallest and shortest kind in my grade, let alone classroom. Girls included. Having asthma kept me from meeting those growth-chart benchmarks.

Not looking like a wuss or sissy was a pretty big deal. It wasn’t just macho crap. I mean, it certainly was macho crap, but above and beyond that, it was a matter of survival. The halls, the bathrooms, the lunchroom, the playground – all of these were under monitored. And that’s not just paranoia spawned from living in the nuclear age with Lennon murdered and an assassination attempt on a president – did I mention how scary the Atlanta Child Murders were? At least twenty-two children and six young adults were kidnapped and murdered in the Atlanta area by May of 1981. (It was never mentioned by my parents or anyone at school but I was passively following the reports on the national evening news.)

A little bit of violence was everywhere. I mentioned Dennis Crowfoot. He was the youngest boy in big family. His mother had married the Crowfoot man and had three of four kids with him. I was never clear on just how many of them there were. She had been previously married to a man by the name of Bowers and had had three or four children with him. Now, the oldest of them was Byron Bowers. He was tall – nearly six-three by the time he hit high school. Byron was in special ed. He was mentally slow and socially awkward. He also had anger issues.

Once, Bret and I were riding home on the bus. Byron was beating on some kid. Our bus driver, Mrs. Cass, pulled up beside them and stopped. She opened the door and shouted at Byron, who paused in mid-swing of a fist. The other boy jumped up into the bus to get away from Byron, who then took one and half of his giant strides and was half inside the bus. Mrs. Cass was having none of it.

“Byron, you better get control of yourself or I’ll see to it you’re in the principal’s office tomorrow morning.”

You didn’t pull crap with Mrs. Cass.  

Byron came to his senses. Besides, there wasn’t a lot he could do. We were practically at his front door. The Bowers-Crowfoot house was directly across the street from the elementary.

Bret said to me, “You make sure you stay away from Byron. He’s not just a retard. The kid is dangerous.” I could tell from his face and his tone of voice he wasn’t fooling around. If Bret said someone dangerous, I needed to heed the warning.

“You could beat him up, though,” I said, hopeful.

“Could? I have beaten him up. He thought he could push me around like he does a lot of people. He’s freaky strong for such a beanpole.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Then, as an afterthought, he added, “They say he raped his sister.”

It was a fact that his sister was pregnant. And it was a fact that her family was making her have the baby. She was in special ed as well. Rape was not anything I liked to think about. But neither was getting beaten up by a guy taller than Abe Lincoln.

Recently, I’ve contacted some of the former students from our public school. I asked them if they remembered Byron. “Oh, yes!” How could anyone forget the Bowers family? One woman told me she had been terrified of Byron. He would come up to her and say, “Hi, Shannon! I love you. I wanna fuck you!” Thirty years later and she could still hear his voice, she told me.

Another woman said she didn’t think Byron was the father of his sister’s child. She had always assumed the step-father was.

What happened to Dennis Crowfoot in 1986 or so always colors my memories of his stepbrother Byron and the Bowers-Crowfoot family. I can’t get past it. My mom used to subscribe to one of the bigger Michigan newspapers. They carried a story that the local gazette passed by in silence.

Dennis Crowfoot had somehow encountered a pair of men in their mid to late twenties. They asked him if he wanted to tag along with them and do some drinking. He was game. They were out well after dark on some lonely country roads, having a good time. Alcohol was drunk, pot was smoked. And then suddenly the pair beat Dennis and tied him up. They then took turns raping him. This continued for hours. When they’d had as much fun as they figured they would with the boy, they beat him some more and dumped his body in a ditch, probably figuring he was dead. He had been found the next day by a passing driver.

I don’t know if the pair was ever apprehended or tried. I did however get to know Dennis’s younger sister Dawn after I was out of high school. When I was over to her house, Dennis showed up. He had several noticeable scars on his head, near the hairline, one cheekbone was bumpy, uneven. The skin beneath one eye seemed droopy. This was more than a year after the beating. I told Dawn that I had heard something about her brother being attacked. I asked if he was still recovering. I was really only trying to be polite. Saying nothing seemed unkind. I’ve often wanted to be thought of as kind. That was important to me.

Dawn said that he was still improving. He would probably never be back to how he had been before the attack. His speech did seem off to me, but I hadn’t seen him since fifth grade. She said he was lucky to be alive. At first, the doctors hadn’t been hopeful that he’d ever regain consciousness. Dawn didn’t say how long Dennis had spent in the hospital and I didn’t want to pry, it being such a delicate topic.

When my mom had originally told me about Dennis being attacked, I thought of the goofy kid that played the trombone, sure. And of how he wouldn’t hurt a fly. But there was a part of me that felt justified. I had gotten out of that rural public school because of the toughs and their macho posturing, people picking on me, picking on anyone smaller than them in the whole warped pecking order. I was sick of the charley-horses, the attempted wedgies – you couldn’t step up to a urinal without at least thinking about someone threatening you with a swirly.

In one day I was kicked in the balls by two different boys for allegedly violating some code or other of boyhood.

My brother Bret had negotiated the whole bully code the way that’s always suggested in prison movies: he got in with the toughest, meanest boys and impressed them with feats of strength and pain-tolerance that would’ve gained him entrance into the ranks of Vikings, I think. One “game” they liked to “play” was called “arms.” This is where you let a boy punch you in the meaty part of your shoulder – the upper arm’s deltoid muscle. He hits you as hard as he can. Then it’s your turn. You keep going until one of you begs to quit. The other declared himself the victor.

The eighth-grade boys Bret hung out with for this pragmatic reason (he said) were a pair of brothers: Angus and Cecil Weir. Angus should have been in ninth grade but he had flunked in late elementary. He was also the second tallest kid in school – only Byron was taller. Angus was held back mainly because he had missed too much instructional time due to being out on suspensions for fighting or being caught smoking on school property. Cecil was only a few inches shorter than his brother. They looked nothing alike but they were both muscular in a rangy sort of way.

Bret was closest to Big Mike Madry, an eighth-grader who was already bench pressing over two hundred pounds. Mike had several brothers. Rodney was in my grade. He was the fastest sprinter in the elementary. His friends called him Hot Rod. It was a moniker that fit his quick temper. I was afraid of the boy and avoided him. But when I got to the middle school, Rodney stopped bothering me since his brother and mine were friends.

At lunch recess when there was a lot of snow, some smart aleck thought it would be cool to stick my face in the snow. That was a favorite pastime among these cretins. Then suddenly that kid was ripped off me and had his head shoved into a snowbank. It was Danny Madry, Rodney and Mike’s brother. He was in seventh grade.

“You can’t lay a hand on him, punk,” Danny said.  “That’s Bret’s little brother. You like livin’?” He asked me, “You OK, kid?”

I was.

But spring would come. Summer. Then the next year Bret would be in the high school. Would anyone remember that I was Bret’s little brother? Or would I say the wrong thing to some fat girl and get pummeled? Saying the wrong thing was really easy to do. Reminding people that you were a free agent and didn’t owe them any special consideration – in so many words – was more than some could tolerate. Anthropologists must have words to describe honor societies like this, ones with hair-triggers for disrespect. They say dueling is outlawed but doesn’t mean you can’t get your face broken by someone how outweighs you by a hundred pounds.

Sometime that winter my mom came home with a student handbook for the school that our church ran. Oak Hill Bible Church’s Crusaders. There was a knight on a horse. That was pretty cool, right? Crusaders and knights were good guys, weren’t they? When I rode my pony, well, I was like a knight.

And the boys got to wear a uniform with a tie. That seemed very civilized. A kid in a tie probably wasn’t going to punch anyone in the face. Besides, the code of conduct had a strict rule about being polite at all times. Fighting and cursing were strictly forbidden. Students who broke the rules could be paddled.

I didn’t think much about the school at first. It just sat in the back of my mind. My mom didn’t tell me why she had brought the handbook home. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to change schools. I had never heard of anyone changing to a private school. I must have had some dim awareness of private schools, but I didn’t spend any time thinking about them.

Nothing happened that made me suddenly want to try a different school. No one thing happened. But for some reason I got to thinking that a uniform and a small group of kids might be something worth exploring. I built up a warm, soothing fantasy of how dignified and happy I would be in dress shoes and a tie. I got my mom to let me buy some British Sterling deodorant. I started to think that going to a private school might make me a little like James Bond: suave, cool, well-dressed, smart.

It would get me away from the brutes.

Maybe it would even keep me from becoming a brute myself. Was there not a darker potential in my own heart?

Had I not been walking through an alfalfa field with Neil when we saw a snake? And didn’t I pick it up? It was a hog-nosed snake. I’d never seen one before. The thing wasted no time in hitting my thumb with its fangs. I dropped the snake and two drops of blood rose up.

Neil chuckled.

My eye caught a baseball-sized rock near my feet. It was very uncommon to see a rock that size in an alfalfa field.

I grabbed the rock and bent over the snake that was making its escape. I smashed the rock down on the snake three or four times.

“Why’dja do that?” Neil asked. “It was only defending itself!”

It’s possible to feel more than one thing at a time. This was Neil! The kid who would tell me stories about his dad tying cats up by their tails, slinging two of them over a tree branch and making them fight to death.

Why didn’t he think it was great that I wasn’t taking any shit from a stupid snake? Why were these rules so hard?

And why had I lost control of my temper?

I’d murdered the snake.

There was something wrong with me. I was as bad as the thugs I wanted to escape. I would sometimes get a willow switch when I was taking Ricky out for a ride. A willow switch makes a nasty slashing rip as it goes through the air. You didn’t have to hit a horse with it to make one tremble in fear. The fact that I could make Ricky tremble thrilled one part of me. There was also another part of my soul telling me it was wrong to enjoy that power.

But I did enjoy it. Ricky’s eyes would get wide in fear and I felt like a tough little man.

Still, under those memories was another. It was cowering in my own darkness, like a sick animal that crawls inside a log or culvert to die.

Toward the end of fourth grade, I had two girlfriends at the same time. They both knew about the other. They were friends. Kim and Shawn. I’m not sure what made them my girlfriends. I think they wrote me a note together that said something like, “We both lick you and think your cute. Wull you go with us? Yes or no?”

Spelling wasn’t a big concern for us.

The three of us wanted to be on the swings at the same time. But a boy named Chad was in the middle swing. He had to go. He was only a lousy third-grader, anyway. In the caste system of the elementary schoolyard, making a younger kid give up a swing was a cherished display of brutality.

At first we asked Chad to leave. But then we remembered our rank.

“Got outta the swing, kid.”

It only got worse from there. The girls were egging me on. Let the pissing-match commence!

“Knock him off the swing!” the girls urged me. This was not typical of them. Thinking back, I should have been surprised at them. But I probably thought it wouldn’t lead to anything.

Chad was a kid who rode my bus. I had watched him and his sister Missy, who was in my grade, run from the bus into their tidy ranch house with its well-kept yard. It was set beside a hilly field with Hereford beef cows. That farm was the one next to the Bernard farm. That’s where we bought our heifers when I was twelve. Mrs. Bernard was an aide at the school. They had a daughter who was a tall blonde. Her name was Katie.

I didn’t know anything else about Chad. I’d never been in a class with Missy. But I can’t say these were strangers, either. They both had thick black hair. That’s about all I could say about them at the time. Chad was taller than me and heavier.

I shoved him hard. He didn’t get out of the swing.

This went on for a few minutes. Then he jumped out of the swing and turned on me and shoved me back. He didn’t say anything. Was that when it occurred to me that maybe I’d never heard him speak?

The girls told me that I couldn’t let a third-grader push me around.

I agreed with them by doubling up my fists.

“Do you wanna fight?” I taunted him.

“I don’t wanna fight,” Chad mumbled.

I punched him in the stomach.

The girls laughed and yelled that I should beat him up.

It was like that movie where the neighbor kids tell the brother and sister to make their bird fly. But they know the bird can’t fly. The whole reason they have the bird is that they’re nursing its broken wing. They join in yelling at the bird to fly anyway. And then they pick up little stones with the other two and throw stones at the bird, chanting, “Fly, bird, fly!”

When their mom comes out and tells them to stop, the bird is dead. They’ve killed it with the rocks.

I don’t know how many times I punched Chad in the stomach – three?

He started crying and hollering like a wounded dog.

“C’mon, I didn’t hit you that hard! C’mon and fight, you sissy!”

Chad started making a weird sound and proceeded to puke. I expected him to hurl his lunch. To my shock his puke was red.

He was vomiting blood.

The playground lady was rushing up, frantically asking him what was wrong.

“He hit me!” Chad said with a mouthful of bloody bile.

She made me stand next to the school building, “Until I get back.” But she never came back. The lunch recess bell rang and we went back to class.

I never heard anything more about it. I anxiously waited all the rest of that day, expecting to be hauled down to the principal’s office. That never happened. I don’t remember seeing Chad again that year. And I don’t know what they did about him throwing up what looked like a lot of blood. This was very near the end of the schoolyear. Eventually, I more or less put it out of my mind, never forgetting what I’d seen, what I’d done.

The next year I was partners with his sister Missy for a classroom assignment. I’m pretty sure it was my afternoon social studies class. Missy and I chatted about silly kid things. I don’t remember what. Finally, I asked if her brother had some kind of medical condition. I’m certain I didn’t use that term. Or maybe I did. I had a wide vocabulary. Still, it seems like I would have said, “Is there anything the matter with your brother? Does he go to the doctor for anything?”

I don’t remember her exact answer. I just recall that she said he had something. I didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t understand how whatever it was that she was talking about could make a person hurl blood. There was no way I was going to ask her. I wasn’t about to confess.

Not only did I not confess to Missy, I never confessed to anyone.

When I was kneeling at the altar, as serious as I was about the whole ritual, I never thought to ask Jesus to forgive me for making Chad throw up blood that day on the playground. I didn’t think of the snake I’d murdered or making my pony shiver in wide-eyed fear.

Being born again wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about being sorry. Sorry wouldn’t save you from hell or death. And that was what we wanted – to be saved. We didn’t want to be sorry.