Television: crap for jerks.

I don't watch much TV. When I lived in a house with cable TV, I didn't watch it much, because it seemed like the only thing that was ever on was terrible shows for idiots, advertisements, and advertisements disguised as terrible shows for idiots. I liked The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and a handful of cartoons, but for the most part I found almost everything else completely intolerable. When I moved into a house without even a regular antenna on any of the TVs, I didn't miss the tard-tube at all. Being a bit of a nerd helped, because I was able to get any of the shows I liked via the internet, often without having to see any ads at all. I set up my computer to automatically download whatever shows anybody in my house wanted to see to a shared folder that anybody could access over our WiFi network. I did this until I started running really low on hard drive space, and then phased it out. It was no big deal, as we had Netflix and TV shows on the internet were getting more and more accessible to non-geeks. I watched some TV over the internet at work, both to stick it to The Man and to entertain myself, but after I quit my job in July, I pretty much stopped watching any TV at all.

That is, until recently.

I don't know if TV has gotten stupider, or if I had just forgotten how stupid it was. It seems like almost everything is insultingly patronizing, treating the viewer like they absolutely must be a complete fucking idiot. Just turning on the TV makes me lose a little more faith in humanity. Are people so stupid that they're suckered in by the advertisements? Do people genuinely enjoy watching programming that not only doesn't require you to think, but actively requires you not to? Sadly, the answer to both questions appears to be yes, otherwise it wouldn't be the shit filling up the airwaves 24-hours a day. What can be said of a culture where the average person spends four hours a day sitting in front of a screen where the most intelligent thing they can watch is a cartoon about foul-mouthed children who do a lot of on-screen pooping?

Much has been said about the offensiveness of South Park, but I honestly believe it is one of the least offensive shows on TV. Below is just a brief catalog of some of the outrageously ridiculous shit I've seen during my recent adventures back into the world of television viewing.

The Jerry Springer Show / The Steve Wilkos Show
I had a professor in college who was a very active communist. He encouraged us to come to rallies and demonstrations, and he made a communist newspaper available for free to any students who were interested. He was a firm believer in overthrowing the government, and would talk about the rise of fascism ("It's just capitalism with the gloves off," he would tell us). One of the main signs of impending fascism, he told us, was a "culture of dehumanization." Each time he'd mention this, he'd cite The Jerry Springer Show as an example. Poor people go on TV, fight and cry and make fools of themselves, and we laugh at them because they are subhuman trailer dwellers, and we are better than them. Their misery is our entertainment. I remember finding the show mildly entertaining in high school, but always thinking, Jesus Christ, what a fucking circus!

I hadn't watched it in years, and when I finally did, I was shocked. They somehow managed to make it even more of a fucking circus. They now have sideshow freaks moving randomly around the set while the poor people fight and cry and make fools of themselves. They used to have a segment towards the end of the show where audience members could verbally abuse the guests, generally making fun of them for being poor and/or unattractive. They still have it, only now chicks in the audience randomly show their boobs, often taking the stage for this activity, in exchange for Mardi Gras beads.

Even more shocking was the revelation that one of the bouncers from the show, Steve, who I remember the audience chanting for in the old days, has actually been given his own show. I wondered how this could have happened, as it certainly wasn't because he's an articulate guy who can carry a show with his wit. I watched, fascinated, trying to figure it out, when it hit me: it's got the poor people for us to feel better than, AND it has a physically intimidating guy who throws chairs, denies guests the privilege of sitting down, and then yells in their face. Awesome.

Crazy knife-hunting guy
There's a network on cable that seems to be devoted exclusively to hunting and fishing shows. It seems like this would be a niche market, and the cable companies would opt to sell it as part of a fancy package with a million channels, but around here it comes with your standard basic crap cable that doesn't have any of the channels that have anything worth watching (Comedy Central and Cartoon Network). I didn't catch the guy's name, but one show was about a guy who was going to hunt a pig. With a knife. Viewers were treated to footage of the guy training by running around in the woods, stabbing a fake pig, and ranting about what it means to be a man. Very early in the show, he gave a speech that went basically like this: "Never before in history has there been a time when more men were acting like women and more women were acting like men. I'm not trying to attack you personally, but men are not doing man things. That's why I'm going to hunt a pig. With a knife." He told us that the last time he went on a hunting-a-pig-with-a-knife trip, four of his dogs ended up getting killed. I may have missed it, but I don't think he said whether or not he ended up killing a pig that time, which leads me to believe he didn't. It seems worth it, though, four dogs for one pig. Or no pig. Whatever, as long as he's a man. He said that "anti-dog" groups were against hunting with dogs, but I don't see how that could be true. If I hated dogs enough to join a group devoted to hating them, I'd wish jerks always went hunting pigs (with knives) with their dogs. He also ranted about how people don't like his show, because it's too brutal, but that's just how nature is, so it's OK. He cited the fact that wolves were, at that moment, tearing apart a deer as a reason why hunting a pig with a knife is alright, taking care to avoid mentioning that around the globe, animals are also eating their own feces and the feces of other animals. And then he stabbed a pig.

Public access
Holy crap, why did I only now start watching public access? Public access cable channels are a source of real, honest to god, genuine fucking comedy. Where else can you go for crap like this?

• A lone hippy on the screen with the colors all mixed up, noodling aimlessly on his guitar in a boring, masturbatory jam that goes on for half an hour.
• A talentless jackass reading terrible poetry for a room full of jerks so pretentious that they don't laugh him off the stage, even when he fills the gaps between his "poems" by playing "music" on one guitar string tied to some posts and hooked up to a string of distortion pedals.
• A "performance art" piece where a young woman rambles almost incoherently, yells at some invisible, nameless person, and then wraps herself in cellophane while continuing the crazy talk. Again, for a room of pretentious jerks who find value in her art.
• A show called Forbidden Knowledge where a paranoid conspiracy theorist speaks without details about the cops trying to shut him down for spreading "forbidden knowledge," and then answers phone calls where people ask questions like, "Where can I find a kit that turns a regular bike into a gas or electric bike?" and the he gives answers like, "I don't know, exactly, but you should look on the internet."
• An ultra-feminist college professor giving a presentation on sexism in advertising, and finding extreme oppression of women in the most innocuous of things. "In this ad, the shot of the woman is cut off at the feet, so they're trying to say that women shouldn't be allowed to move around, like men, who have feet. In this ad, the women appear playful and happy, which means that all women are stupid idiots who have fun."
  
• More than half an hour of a ridiculously-dressed girl walking very, very slowly, outlining her foot with chalk after each step, and being followed by a jerk who erases her chalk lines. That's fucking ART, man!

Yes, indeed, public access is the best thing that comes with basic shitty motel-cable.

Cops 2.0 / G4
Ah, G4, the network for dweebs: people who are socially retarded and desperately want to be nerds, but simply aren't very smart. The programming that is exclusive to this network relies heavily on average-looking chicks pretending to like video games (average looking chicks + appreciation for video games = really super hot chick), and caters to viewers who like to imagine they're tech savvy, but who don't really know how to use the internet. Seriously, any time I've watched Attack of the Show!, it's just a rehash of what I read and saw on the internet the day before (although sometimes I find myself transfixed; if the female co-host had a show about making toast, I'd probably tune in occasionally).

Another show on G4, Cops 2.0, is clearly geared towards dweebs. It's exactly like Cops, except a good third of the screen is taken up by a box that makes the screen look like a website. It has tabs that look like you'd be able to click on them if it were the internet, but since it's TV, you wait for them to click themselves. The box lists random factoids of little to no value, and quizzes about what you've seen within the last 30 seconds. One of the tabs, when it reaches its rotation, displays a question like "What would you do if you got attacked with a knife?" followed by a scrolling list of answers entered by dweebs who bothered to log on to the website to answer it. They're always very bad attempts at being funny. I'm entirely convinced that the big stupid box on the bottom of the screen appeals exclusively to these jerks, because it excites them to see their internet handle displayed on a TV. Yeah, HaLo_n1nJa14, you're a famous fucking awesome guy now.

Late night TV preachers who give away free stuff
I really dig the late night TV preachers who give out free stuff. It's never particularly good stuff, and the preachers themselves are clearly unscrupulous douchebags praying upon the stupid (unlike anybody else who advertises on TV), but still, it's free stuff, and it's weird, creepy voodoo stuff. I got a green prosperity cloth that came with very specific instructions on how to put it in my wallet, FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!!!, in all caps with exclamation points so I knew it was serious business, and then send it back to the preacher with my monetary seed that will surely grow. When I didn't send it back, I started getting phone calls from the pre-recorded preacher saying, in a very concerned tone, "I sent you the green prosperity cloth, and I haven't received it back from you. Are you OK?" He ended up sending me another one, this one cut into a weird hand shape instead of a square like the previous piece of felt. I also got a sample of holy water from none other than Leroy Jenkins. It came in a little plastic packet that looked like a sample of sexual lubricant, and also had the name "Leroy Jenkins" written on it. Awesome.

Late night TV preachers who don't give away free stuff (specifically, Jack Van Impe)
Jack Van Impe is a crazy televangelist who preaches about the coming end times, repeatedly saying things like "As seen on the history channel" when giving specific end time dates. He's crazy as hell, and entertaining on his own, but the real draw of the show is his wife: Rexella.

Rexella wears a look of constant surprise on her face, reacts with great concern to everything Jack says, and is also in charge of delivering world news. The news bits are the best part of the show. They simply display different articles, both from the web and print, and Rexella reads the headline of each without any context at all and sort of connects them with a few words in between. If you watch closely you can see how the dates of the articles are all over the place, and what she is saying doesn't make any fucking sense at all. It's something that really needs to be seen to be believed, so it's fortunate that you can catch the most recent episode at their web site.

Infomercials
I know that airtime in the middle of the night when people are asleep is the cheapest, but I always have to wonder if people get stupider during these hours. Regular commercials are bad enough, but it seems like only the stupidest of stupids would buy the crap they're peddling. It's always some basic item that has been around forever and is available everywhere, like a blender, minus much of the functionality of the original product, but plus one extra function that you will use 3 times before realizing you're a fucking idiot and you wasted your money on a grossly overpriced product, shoddily crafted from only the cheapest of shitty materials. I think they rely on people being half asleep, because they make outrageous claims that nobody in their right mind would fall for. "Are you worried this knife won't be sharp enough to filet a fish? Well watch what it does to a tomato!" Last night, I saw one that claimed you should buy from them, rather than from a store, because stores pay for advertising, and therefore have a higher overhead and have to charge you more. They always ask how much you'd pay for an item, and then have somebody give a grossly inflated price that absolutely nobody would ever consider even thinking about paying, and then they tell you it's much less than that, so it is clearly a deal.

I saw one infomercial that claimed you would pay "less than a fraction" of the original price they give. I briefly thought that nobody would ever fall for that, but after thinking about all the other shit on TV, I'm guessing that the average television viewer thinks "less than a fraction" actually means something.

So there you go, folks, a big wad of anecdotal evidence that TV is crap. For jerks. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Another racist tough guy.

In 4th grade, I took a 6th grade math class and a 6th grade science class. I spent most of the rest of the day in a room full of social retards who required extra supervision, lest we destroy something or cause a scene. As a class, supervised by our teacher, we also attended a 7th grade gym class, and also ate lunch with the seventh graders. We had to get our food and then sit with the rest of the class at a table with our teacher, who would shoo away the normal kids who tried to sit too close. It was during our lunch periods that I first noticed the racist tough guy.

I encountered lots of racist tough guys when I lived in Indiana. This guy was notable only in the fact that he was the first of his variety of people I ever encountered. I never had any direct interactions with him, but I learned through casual observation that he was, in fact, a racist tough guy.

When I'd sit at our guarded table in the cafeteria, I'd sometimes notice the racist tough guy. He had a mullet, and looked bigger and older than most of the other kids. He acted like a loud, obnoxious jerk, and the ladies seemed to love him. They giggled as he made fun of smaller students. I feared him, but I also got the feeling that he was cool as hell. He seemed awesome, and he commanded respect.

In 5th grade, our class got a different teacher, one who would let us go to lunch by ourselves. We still ate with the seventh graders. My friend Mike and I relished the freedom, though we never really interacted with any of the normal kids. I noticed that the racist tough guy was still in seventh grade, and I tried to stay away from him while I was in the cafeteria, because though I would have loved to be his friend due to his level of coolness, I was also pretty sure that, given the chance, he would fuck with me.

One day there was a loud rumor that a fight was taking place outside. We went outside, where most of the seventh graders had congregated, somehow without attracting the attention of any authority figures. There was an island of grass and two trees, surrounded by an easily-overstepped chain and pillar fence, in the middle of the sidewalk leading out to the parking lot. Kids circled the island and whispered about the two kids inside of the chain fence, who were moments away from extremely brutal 7th grade violence. One of the kids on the island was the racist tough guy.

Supposedly, at least one punch had been thrown before Mike and I arrived. Supposedly, it was a very loud punch. All we could see, though, were two kids standing around and not fighting. They weren't even doing the standard adolescent boy fighting dance, where two participants puff up their chests and try to intimidate each other by looking tough. Instead, one nerdy looking guy with glasses stood spitting on the ground, while the racist tough guy gestured wildly and swore loudly to his friends on the sidelines.

"Fucking motherfucker wants to fucking fuck some shit! Who does this motherfucker fucking think he is? I'm going to fucking kick his motherfucking ass!"

The swearing and the standing went on for a few minutes while we waited for violence, and then whispers of authority figures spread through the crowd and everybody dispersed.

There was a public pool in the same town where they bussed me to school. It was half an hour away, but it was the only public place to swim that we knew about, so my mom took my siblings and I there a few times. The racist tough guy was there one time.

I never saw the racist tough guy swim. He sat on the side of the pool, stretched out on a beach chair and surrounded by girls, and ranted loudly about the Mexicans who were at the pool that day.

"Fucking spicks! They need to put up fucking barricades to keep these fucking spicks out of here! I'm sick of the fucking spicks coming in here and fucking getting everything fucking dirty! Where are my motherfucking barricades?"

The girls surrounding him laughed at his racist tirade. At some point, they looked at my mom, who is Filipino, and the racist tough guy whispered something to the girls. They snickered, not really trying to hide the fact that they were obviously making some ignorant joke at her expense.

When we went home, my mom couldn't stop telling my dad about how horrible it was, and how she had never experienced anything like that in her life. It's not something that happens in California, where my mom had spent her entire life until moving to Indiana about a year before the incident. My dad just told her that people are ignorant assholes, and not to worry so much about those kind of people.

We saw the racist tough guy in public one more time, when I was in 6th or 7th grade. Our car had broken down at a gas station, and we were sitting in it and waiting for my dad. While we waited, the racist tough guy pulled up in his car. He was with a girl I recognized, and who I always thought seemed like a nice girl. The racist tough guy got out of the car and made a phone call on the payphone. He was loud enough that we could hear him in our car.

"I don't fucking give a fuck!" he yelled into the phone. "Motherfucking cocksuckers need to fucking learn what the fuck they're fucking doing!"

"Oh my god," my mom said, "What an absolute creep!"

"Don't you remember him?" I asked. "That's the racist guy from the pool."

My mom didn't remember his face, but it was definitely him. When he was done yelling obscenities at whoever he was talking to, he smashed the receiver on the phone a few times, and walked back to his car, where he continued to yell obscenities at the girl as he pulled away. She looked really passive, just blankly staring forward as he yelled. I felt bad for her.

The Smiths.

Beginning in fourth grade, I rode the short bus with retarded kids and crazy kids to another school district, where the high school had special programs to meet our needs. I was classified as "emotionally handicapped" because I was uncontrollable and my parents wouldn't let them drug me into submission, and I spent my days in a classroom with kids who lied compulsively, set fires, or just completely refused to do anything but make fun of darkies. They began integrating me into classes with normal kids, and by 7th grade, I wasn't in the crazy-kid class at all, but they still bussed me out there to go to school for some reason or another. On the bus in 7th grade is where I first met Jolene Smith.

I had heard of Jolene's brother, Aaron Smith, years before I met Jolene or even knew she existed. Aaron was in my sister's 5th grade class. Supposedly, he was older than I was (my sister was one grade below me), but incredibly tiny and spoke in a high-pitched squeak. He also wanted to fight almost everybody. My sister showed me a picture of him in her yearbook, and his head was huge, making his photo stand out among the rest of them. Maybe the photographer overcompensated for his small stature and zoomed in too much, which made him way too big instead of just right.

Jolene was weird. She was a couple years older than I was, and had a chin like a caricature of Jay Leno. She would tell stories of imaginary happenings, like weird Satanic rituals that happened late at night in the woods near her house. She told me I was too young to know about that stuff.

I don't know that her name really was Jolene, because sometimes she went by Renee. Maybe both names were hers, or maybe she just stole the name Jolene from the only other girl I've ever known with that name, who happened to ride our bus. Maybe it was kind of like the time that she stole my birthday.

Jolene found out that my birthday was coming up, and acted surprised and excited, and said that her birthday was on the same day. She told me she was making me a Ninja Turtles shirt, and I dreaded her giving it to me. I imagined wearing it on the bus, and changing it or covering it up immediately after arriving at school, so that nobody would see me wearing it. Fortunately, on my birthday, she just gave me a balloon. I didn't ask about the shirt.

Later, I found out that some other day was her birthday, too.

I started going to the school in my area in eighth grade. I never saw Jolene again, but there were rumors. Supposedly, she was seen in her front yard humping the guy who had been hired to paint their house. Another time, she was rumored to have done the same thing with a dog. Once, their house burnt down and everybody said that they had done it on purpose so that they could afford to send Jolene to a mental hospital.

Also, in eighth grade, on my first day of school, I finally met her brother, Aaron. He had the locker right next to mine. I recognized him from his giant-headed photo, and I knew it had to be him because he was tiny even compared to myself, and I had always been a really little guy.

This other guy who used to ride the crazy bus, Ron, started attending normal kid school that year, too. I ran into him, and he told me that Aaron wanted to fight me. Since my locker was right next to his, I asked him.

"Don't listen to him," Aaron squeaked at me. "Ron is full of shit!"

At some point in eighth grade, I heard somebody making fun of Aaron by saying, "Something smells like ketchup." I didn't get the joke, if there was one, but I started saying it every time I saw Aaron. For a couple weeks, he didn't react in any way to my taunts. One day by our lockers, I said it, and he punched me in the eye and ran away. It didn't hurt, and I was more shocked than anything. I started laughing, both because it was a surprise and because I didn't want anybody to think the kid had hurt me.

"You should have kicked his ass," a kid told me.

"Shit, man," I said, "I was so surprised, I had no time to react. That shit was funny. It didn't hurt."

The rumor about the Smiths was that they were all completely inbred and, as a result, they were all deformed and crazy. Their mom was said to be a huge fat lady, too big to even leave the house. A kid in my health class told me a story that he probably made up about visiting their house. He said there was dog shit all over the place, and while he was there, a dog shat on the floor again. They told him not to worry about it, and put a paper towel on top of it, and then sprinkled baking soda on top of the paper towel. He said they had a bunch of top of the line computers, too.

In 9th grade, Aaron was in my gym class, and had changed his name to Dan. My friend and I always called him Danly Smythe. He and I had a weird, adversarial quasi-friendship. Sometimes we would talk about the internet, because he was one of the few people at that point who was on it, and sometimes I would chase him around and try to stick him in the big net-bag they kept all the basketballs in.

Aaron spent a lot of gym periods on the bleachers instead of dressing for class. One day, after we did our daily calisthenics, I looked up and saw Aaron aggressively humping the bleachers. I pointed and laughed, and he yelled at me to shut up, and kept going as if nobody knew what he was doing.

Another day we had some sort of argument about something, and since gym was our last class of the day, Aaron ended up attacking me outside after school. I was standing with a few friends, casually talking, when Aaron appeared out of nowhere with some sort of crazy jump-kick-punch. I reflexively punched him in the face, and he ran off.

"Holy shit, that was fucking awesome!" said my friend, also named Aaron. He started telling people who missed it about how I had punched Aaron in the face, and how it was one of the best things he had seen. I wished he would shut up, and not tell anybody about it, but I didn't want to say anything and sound like a pussy. Even as a stupid 9th grader, I didn't see anything good about punching a tiny, possibly retarded kid in the face.

That was the last year that Aaron was in school. I never saw any of his family again, but I heard more stories. In driver's ed, my teacher told me that Aaron was in his class the year before. He said the kid drove like he had a death wish, and that he was the only kid who ever scared him with his driving. In 11th grade, my speech teacher said that her husband had once let their family take some fallen trees from their property for firewood, and that they kept coming back. She said they didn't really know how to say no to them, and would pretend they weren't home when they showed up. Jolene would peer into their windows, puffing hard on a cigarette.

My friend says he saw Aaron a couple years after high school. He wasn't sure if it was him, because instead of being really short, he was really tall, but he had the same face.

Eric Candleass.

I first encountered Eric Candleass when I was in eighth grade. I was talking to a friend during a passing period before class, in the classroom where his next class was about to take place. Suddenly, somebody kicked me in the ass. I turned around and saw a tall, skinny kid leering down at me. I laughed nervously, hoping the assault was in jest. I had never seen the kid before, and thus had no reason to believe that he'd have a problem with me.

"Ha ha ha!" he said, mocking my laughter with a sneer. He shoved me, saying, "You fucking faggot!"

"Whoa, Eric, what's the problem, man?" asked another student.

"I fucking hate that little fucking faggot," he said, as I made my way to the door. "Yeah, get the fuck out of here!" he said.

I didn't know why he hated me, but he was bigger than I was and I learned to avoid him. I didn't have any more encounters with him that year, except for an occasional shout of "Hey, faggot!" as I walked down the hall.

Our school was both a junior and a senior high school. For the most part, the two groups of students were segregated for the majority of the day. In 9th grade, we began to share hallways with the older kids. Some of the older kids, mostly racist burnouts who I referred to as the Nazi stoners, made a sport out of shoving each other into smaller students or knocking the books out of their hands. One day, I was the pin in one of their human bowling games, and ended up being slammed into Eric. He started shoving my violently as the Nazi stoners laughed.

"I was pushed!" I pleaded.

"I don't care!" he shouted in my face, shoving me again, much to the delight of my tormentors. I scurried away as quickly as I could.

That same year, I started getting into zines, small photocopied magazines produced mostly by individuals and traded through the mail. Many of the zines I was receiving had poetry in them, so my friends and I somehow ended up starting a short lived routine of 'Poetry Minute' in the locker room after gym class. We would stand on a bench, read a couple poems, and then move on to our next class. I never noticed Eric at Poetry Minute, but one day after Poetry Minute he noticed me, dialing in the combination to my locker with a stack of zines in my other hand.

"What you got there?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, knowing he wasn't being friendly.

"Doesn't look like nothing," he said, and tried to grab my zines. I resisted, and he grabbed me by the throat. My friend Aaron pulled him away from, saying, "Leave him alone."

"Fucking faggot!" Eric said as he walked away.

Every Friday in gym class we swam. One Friday, I was one of the last people to finish getting dressed, but my friend Sean was slower still and standing at his locker. The only other person in the part of the locker room we were in was Eric, who was in the other gym class that occurred at the same time as ours.

"Come on, Sean," I said as I walked towards the exit to the pool area. "What's taking you so long? Are you shaving your legs or something?"

I don't know what possessed me to say that, but it was a subtle jab at Eric. Rumor had it that he shaved his legs, because they were always really smooth. More likely it was because, despite being really tall, he hadn't fully hit puberty.

I walked to the exit to the pool area, where everybody was congregated and waiting for the teacher to unlock the door. I started talking to one of my friends, and then was shoved hard from behind. I slammed into my friend, and we both went crashing into the soda machine and then down to the floor.

"What the fuck did you say?" Eric yelled in my face as I got up from the floor. He towered over me, and I stood there, half-naked and scared, completely unsure of what to do. Fortunately, a big kid named Jeremy grabbed Eric from behind and carried him, squirming, out of that part of the locker room. "I'm going to kill that fucking faggot!" he yelled on the way out.

My friend Rick decided to fight Eric when we were in 10th grade. I don't remember exactly what his motivation was, but I think Eric had stolen something from him. When I heard about his intentions, I was jubilant, and followed the crowd down the hall as Rick attempted to start a fight. The kids who walked with us hated Eric, too, which surprised me because I thought I was the only one that had had problems with the guy. Rick would periodically shove Eric as we walked, and Eric would turn around and look at him, and then continue walking. Rick wasn't a particularly big guy, but he was a wrestler, and not nearly as skinny as I was. Apparently Eric wasn't that tough when it came to people closer to his own size.

At some point a bald kid named Jamie said, "Man, I would never shave my legs!" Eric turned around and pushed Jamie. Jamie was unfazed, saying, "Get the fuck off me!" Eric continued on his way, and we followed him, with Rick still periodically shoving him.

A short guy name Jason gently nudged Eric with his shoulder, quietly saying, "Come on, Eric." This time, Eric stopped. He grabbed Jason and put him in a headlock, and then Rick started punching Eric in the face. Before I even had time to know what was going on, Eric was on the ground, and a couple of kids were kicking him. For some reason I was carrying a plastic banana on a plastic string that I had found in the gym, and I began swinging it at him. Eric got up, and the fight went crashing into a classroom, where a bewildered teacher gasped and stood in shock for a moment before breaking up the scuffle. I noticed an older student, one of the tough-guy Nazi stoners, holding Rick by his shirt collar and telling him if he ever jumped in on a fight again, he would beat his ass.

When I walked to lunch later that day, Eric and a bunch of his big, tough-guy friends were standing outside of the cafeteria. They puffed out their chests and snickered at my friends and I as we walked by, but they didn't do anything.

Almost everybody involved in the fight was suspended for a week, including at least one kid who they claimed had encouraged the fight, even though all I remember him doing was following the crowd and waiting for something to happen. The only person who was there but wasn't kicked out was myself, and I had been physically involved, though just barely. I wondered later why I had chosen to hit him with a plastic banana, which weighed less than a pound and which he almost definitely did not feel at all. Perhaps, despite my intense hatred of the kid, I was still reluctant to actually hurt somebody. Maybe the fact that he was outnumbered and on the ground made me momentarily pity him. I don't know.

I was able to avoid Eric for the rest of the year, and then again for the next. His distaste for me no doubt never subsided, and my contempt for him never went away. I once overheard him in 11th grade bragging about how he had "fuckin' stomped a fuckin' bird" to death before school, and showing his buddies the gore leftover on his shoes.

On the first day of our senior year, I was walking around the cafeteria with a friend of mine. He stopped briefly to talk to somebody who was sitting at the same table as Eric.

"Look at this fucking faggot!" Eric said when he noticed me. I was a huge Misfits fan at the time, and wore my hair in their trademark devilock style, with my bangs combed to a point in front of my face. Eric, ever the opportunist, began making fun of my hair, saying, "You think that's fucking cool or something? It looks like you have a wad of fucking chud hanging off of your fucking face!" I stood there with my friend and didn't say anything. Eric threw some food at me, and then we walked away. For the rest of the week, I daydreamed of breaking his face with a food tray. In retrospect, I probably should have assaulted somebody who fucked with me at some point during school. Even if I had ended up getting my ass kicked, in the long run I probably would have had to endure less of that sort of bullshit.

Apparently Eric had beaten up some kid during the summer before school started, and now he felt like a huge badass. Not that huge of a badass, though, because his new target was still a scrawny kid named me. He started messing with me regularly, calling me a faggot and a spick, tripping me in the hallway, and claiming he was going to come to "Spick Town" to beat my ass. The thing is, I'm half-Filipino and half-white, not Hispanic, and I never lived in the area he referred to as "Spick Town," which didn't even really have any Hispanic people living in it, anyway. Furthermore, he was friends with a couple Mexican kids, and his skin was darker than mine. I had always assumed he was mixed himself, despite his white supremacy and pasty siblings.

Taking a cue from The Kids in the Hall movie Brain Candy, my friend Pat and I had begun a campaign of shouting, " I'm gay!" at random people, both to befuddle them and to enrage the homophobes, of which there were many.

"Hey, I'm gay!" Pat shouted at Eric one day as he walked by.

"Hey, I'll kick you!" Eric told him.

"I'll kick you in the nuts!" said Pat.

Eric turned around. He got in Pat's face. More accurately, he put his chest in Pat's face, as Pat was a small, short kid, and Eric still towered over everybody. I stepped closer, indicating that I had Pat's back if things escalated to physical violence.

"I'll kick your fucking ass!" he said, "You and your fucking little spick friend here!"

"Paul's not even Mexican," Pat said, "He's Filipino, and he doesn't live in Sumava, either."

"Oh, he's a fucking spick, alright, and I'll come to fucking spick town and I'll fucking kill all you little fuckers!" His face was contorted in rage, and little beads of white spit were forming at the corners of his mouth. He looked so ridiculous, I couldn't help laughing a little. A few people were watching to see what would happen, among them my brother, a seventh grader only recently introduced to our friendly school.

"You wear that Insane Clown Posse shirt everyday," Pat said, "and they rap about killing racist people."

"Do you see me wearing it now, you little fucking faggot? I'll fucking kill all of you little faggots!"

My friend Jeff turned to me and asked, "Did he just call you a faggot?"

"I believe he did," I told him. What happened next surprised the hell out of me, because I didn't realize that we were close enough friends for him to stick up for me the way he did. He got in Eric's face.

"Who the fuck do you think you are, fucking with people like this?" he asked, inches from Eric. Jeff wasn't a particularly big guy, but he was bigger than either Pat or myself. Eric was still taller, though.

"I'll fucking take all of you!" Eric growled through clenched teeth, his body literally shaking with rage and anticipation.

Throughout the entire confrontation, I was ready for things to get violent. I wasn't sure of the outcome, but I knew that if it came to blows Eric would be facing at least three of us. Somehow, though, the situation diffused itself and we went on to our next class. Eric continued to call me a spick and make threats, and I feared being caught by him alone, as I probably would have been doomed.

He disappeared a couple months into the school year. I think he got sent to the "alternative school," though I was never really sure of the purpose of the place. Maybe it was for assholes who couldn't behave like civilized humans, or maybe it was for kids who couldn't do their homework. Either way, I was glad never to have to see that guy again.

The trail of blood.

In the morning before school began, myself and all of my sixth grade classmates would crowd the edge of the hallway where our lockers and classes were. We weren't allowed to enter the hallway until the bell rang, so until it did, the area would become more and more crowded.

One morning I was having a conversation with some friends, when one of them pointed out some blood on the floor. A lot of blood. There was a trail of large splatters of bright red blood, and we followed it.

The trail led to the bathroom, where a stoner with a Playboy bunny earring was making a feeble attempt to stop the blood from gushing out of his nose. The floor was covered in blood, and he stood at the sink, which was also covered in blood.

Moments after we walked into the bathroom, a teacher walked in. He had probably followed the trail, too.

"I fell!" the stoner said as soon as he saw the teacher.

"Alright, let's go," the teacher said, escorting him out of the bathroom.

"I fell!" he repeated.

Apparently, he wasn't in much of a fight, but there was one blow thrown, and it turned out to be pretty effective. He was a big guy with plenty of blood to spill all over the place, and to this day I don't think I've seen more human blood in one place.

The eighteen year old eighth grader.

Jeremy came to my school when I was in twelfth grade and he was in eighth. I was 18 at the time, and so was he. He was a tall, skinny kid who the loud racists would always harass for being "too black", despite the fact that he was a pasty white kid. I never talked to him, but he seemed like an alright guy.

Dave was a guy from my grade, who I had never gotten along with. I met him in eighth grade, when he had told me that seventy five percent of all black people were in jail. Another time, for no reason, he had grabbed me by the shirt and yelled in my face that he was going to kick my ass. Dave was among the most vocal critics of Jeremy, and had apparently been trying to start a fight with him since he began attending our school. Jeremy always declined.

One morning while waiting for school to begin, I saw a huge crowd of people run towards the cafeteria. Very few things can make teenagers swarm in such a manner, so I assumed somebody must be fighting. I got up and ran, following the crowd.

The cafeteria was silent except for the packing sounds of Jeremy pounding Dave's face. The fight, as far as I could tell, was entirely one sided, with Dave covered in his own blood and trying to block Jeremy's blows. The fight was very brief, and was broken up by the principal. I later heard some students claim that Jeremy had punched the principal, but I certainly didn't see anything like that.

Dave was hustled off somewhere to be cleaned up, and Jeremy was being lead to the office.

"You fucking racist people. You fucking racist people. I never wanted any of this shit," he said, walking slowly, his hands dripping with Dave's blood. He looked genuinely saddened by what had happened. I felt bad for him because the Nazi stoners used to mess with me, too, but I was never big enough to smash one of their faces in. He was going to get kicked out of school basically because of their constant harassment.

"Come on, Jeremy, let's go," said one of the teachers who had shown up. He spoke very softly in a manner that made me wonder if he was sympathetic to Jeremy's plight.

"I didn't want any trouble...all you fucking racist people..." he said, walking into the office.

Jeremy was 18, so the police came to school and arrested him. I never saw him again, but Dave was back in school the next week.

A few years ago, Jeremy was charged with bludgeoning two people to death with a hammer during a robbery. He was found not guilty. He has three tear drops tattooed on his face that people say represent three lives that he has taken.

Brett Flat-face.

"The Klan is going to burn down your house."

These are the words that Brett spoke to my sister shortly before threatening to kick my ass. I don't know exactly what lead up to this statement, nor did I hear it with my own ears. My sister had a class with him, though, and it was there that he said it.

Brett was an excessively tall, goony-looking kid who was in 7th grade, as was my sister, when I was in 8th grade. His face looked smashed flat, like somebody had hit him cartoon-style with a shovel. Given his facial deformities, he had the most tragically ironic name I've ever encountered. His last name was Flat.

My sister was a big Tupac fan in 7th grade, which was one of the reasons she and Brett didn't get along. He had just died, and Brett said he was in Hell, getting whipped and picking cotton. The fact that my siblings and I are white and Filipino half-breeds probably didn't help make Brett like us, either.

The day he threatened my sister, I approached him in the lunch line. He towered over me, but I wasn't scared of him. He seemed vaguely retarded, and thus unintimidating.

"What the fuck are you saying to my sister?" I asked him.

"Tupac is dead!"

"So the Klan is going to burn down our house?"

"Yeah. You little Fill-a-peen. You should be out in the fields, picking beans."

"Fuck you, you fucking retard hillbilly. Don't talk to my sister."

I wandered off to find my friends. I told them what happened, and then looked for Brett to show them who he was. We found him sitting by himself, eating his lunch.

"This is the guy," I said, "The fucking hillbilly who is saying the Klan will burn down our house. Hey, fuck you, inbreeder."

Brett lifted a leg into the air, exposing a cowboy boot.

"You see these boots?" he asked.

"Yeah, so?"

"I'll kick your ass!" he told me.

"No," I said, "I'll kick your ass."

It was a pretty empty threat. Brett was much bigger than I was, and I didn't really imagine we'd ever come to blows. As soon as I said it, though, Brett got up and walked out of the cafeteria. The rest of us got some food and sat down to eat.

A few minutes later, the vice principal appeared at our table.

"Are you Paul?" he asked me.

"Yeah."

"Come to my office when you're done eating."

I finished my lunch and walked to his office. Brett was sitting in there.

"What's this about you threatening Brett? You're going to kick his ass?"

"No. Brett has been harassing my little sister, saying that the KKK is going to burn down our house. He told me I should be in the field picking beans, and then he showed me his cowboy boots and said he was going to kick my ass."

I never referred to my sister as my little sister. I knew in this case it would probably add sympathy to my side, though, so I used it. I also conveniently left out the part where I said, "No, I'll kick your ass."

The vice principal turned to Brett and started yelling at him.

"Don't you ever make threats against people, and especially don't ever make racial threats or use racial slurs!"

"But...but..." Brett tried to say something, but just broke down in tears. I was excused from the office, and suffered no repercussions from the incident.

Brett never said anything like that to my sister again. He vanished from school a couple years later, but from what I understand, stayed in the area.

Roger.

There was a kid in my 8th grade gym class named Roger. On the first day of class, I tried to say something to him, but other students quickly informed that I shouldn't be talking to him. He was the lowest of the low, the variety of scumbag that no decent person would ever allow themselves to be seen socializing with.

Roger was a masturbator.

My friend Lew claims to have actually seen Roger doing the deed, while another guy I knew in junior high claims to have made it up just for the sheer hell of it. In truth, I think most of the anti-Roger stigma was related to his status as a really poor kid, rather than his supposed indecent proclivities. He always gave off an awful stench, and I used to believe it was because he was so poor he couldn't shower, which I now think is fairly unlikely. People called him a "dirty" and he had no friends, so his uncleanliness was probably the result of a sad case of self-fulfilling prophecy. People called him "Roger Doger, dick massager," but they probably wouldn't have been his friend even if he hadn't been caught getting the job done in the restroom.

There was this other kid in my gym class named Matt. He dressed, in the mid 90s, like he had stepped out of an after school special from the late 70s. It was intentional, though, and everybody thought he was cool as hell. Kids would gather around this guy in the locker room after class, listening to him tell these drug stories, always looking really bored so everybody would know just how awesome he was. One time we listened with rapt admiration as he told us about his VW bug, the trunk of which was stuffed with "one hundred kilos of rock cocaine, bro."

One day our class went outside, and the teacher left all the boys in a field, unsupervised, to play flag football while the girls ran around in circles. Roger, not wanting to bother, decided to sit the game out. Matt immediately went up to Roger and started yelling and cussing, inches from his face, telling him he had to play. He was doing the fighting dance that so many adolescent boys do, puffing up his chest and trying to look intimidating. Roger just stood there, quiet and uncertain, but unwilling to play football with a bunch of people who didn't like him. Everybody cheered Matt on, hoping the fighting dance would bear fruit. When he was finished verbally abusing Roger, he punched him the face and walked away. Roger stood there, his face a mixture of anger and humiliation, while the rest of the boys congratulated Matt on a job well done.

"I get vicious when I do shit like that!" he bragged, beaming.

After class, Roger made the mistake of leaving the padlock on his locker unlocked while he took a shower. One of the vultures took it and put it on top of a paper towel dispenser. When he got back to his locker, he asked where it was. Everybody just made fun of him and pretended they didn't know where it was.

When the bell rang and it was time to move to the next class, I gathered my things slowly. Everybody scurried out, leaving just Roger and myself.

"It's on top of the paper towel dispenser," I told him.

"What?"

"Your lock. They put it on the paper towel dispenser."

Not wanting to risk my name any more than I already was, I left as quickly as I could. The act I had committed was probably enough to get me blacklisted.

Matt disappeared that year. I later heard he had had a drug overdose and was almost dead, or was in jail. Neither story would be a surprise. Roger dropped out of school as soon as he could and was never heard from again.

UPDATE: Lew just wrote up his story, and apparently Roger is now a convicted child molester.

Jimmy Harrison kicks a toad, a girl's head.

In 7th grade, there was this kid I didn't like named Jimmy Harrison. He was a grade A jackass, prone to making cruel jokes and just generally being mean to everyone. Unfortunately for me, he was also in a few of my classes, and I had to bear his antics on numerous occasions. It was no surprise to me to find out, years later, that he was involved in the brutal beating of a girl.

Jimmy sat behind me in health class. When the teacher was telling us about the effects of AIDS, he referenced me as a random example.

"If Paul got AIDS, he would eventually die from it."

"He's probably already got it," whispered Jimmy. I didn't respond, so he said it a few more times. I didn't figure out until later that his implication was that I was gay.

Another time, our gym class went out to the football field to play soccer. On the way out there, I heard Jimmy say, "Hey, a frog," and then saw him pick something up. He held it in an outstretched arm and drop-kicked it. It went flying, and he chased it, only to do it again. He repeated this a few times, and then walked away. I walked over to object to see what it was.

It was a limp, bloody toad.

After 7th grade, I went to a different school. I never heard anything about Jimmy again until senior year of high school. A girl who had gone to school with Jimmy and I filled me in on recent events in his life.

Jimmy had humped some girl. Generally, one would consider that a good thing. In this case, however, Jimmy's girlfriend thought it was a bad thing, and Jimmy would have to make amends for his actions.

To set things right, Jimmy and his girlfriend severely beat the girl, slamming her head repeatedly in a car door. The victim had to be hospitalized, and the other two upstanding citizens had to be jailed.

The Fighting Mullets

When I was in high school, there was a trio of brothers who had a reputation as being some really bad motherfuckers. Their hobbies were well known, as they were vocal about their endeavors: they liked to get really trashed, and they also liked to fight. All three of them had mullets, and would walk the halls with their hands in their pockets and their chests puffed out, terrorizing the small and the weak.

My experience with them was limited, but noteworthy in the fact that I feared them. After high school, I never saw any of them, and I heard very little. This is a documentation of what I knew about the brothers, ending with the last thing I ever heard regarding them, which was that one of them ended up dying of a gunshot wound to the head.

The oldest brother was the meanest. He was a few years older than I was, but only one grade ahead. When I started school, there was a hallway my friends and I would avoid because if we went that way, old mullet and his buddies would either knock the books out of our hands, or shove us into lockers. Technically, they'd never really shove us so much as they would shove one of their huge friends into one of us smaller guys, and it would be our bodies that went crashing against the lockers.

I once had in-school suspension and had to spend the entire day in the corner of a math teacher's class. At some point, old mullet had that teachers class. When he saw me in the corner, unable to even get up without permission, he picked up two chalkboard erasers and started hitting me with them, covering my clothes and hair with chalk dust. Being a tiny little guy, I couldn't do shit about it.

The middle brother was quiet, and by any measure the least mean. He was in the same grade as his older brother, and was once in my biology class. He hung out with the same group as old mullet, but as far as I can recall, he never did any of the shoving or book-knocking. In fact, I only ever heard him speak one time. Standing in a lunch line, I once heard him to remark, "Crack some fuckin' skulls."

There was another violent redneck in my homeroom named Derrick who liked to regale us with tales of horrific animal abuse. He was also good friends with the mullet brothers, and once told us a story illustrating a day in the life of these loving characters.

In the rural area where we lived, there were this things called sandburs. They were like tiny balls of vegetation velcro whose barbed hooks made them attach easily to skin, and were painful to remove. They grew on stalks so that passing animals would inadvertently pick them up and deposit the seeds elsewhere.

Derrick, laughing so hard he could barely speak, told us how the brothers would hanging out, shirtless in the summer heat, when the oldest mullet had taken a stalk of sandburs and smashed it into his unsuspecting youngest brother, embedding lots of them deep within his back. A good laugh was enjoyed by all, save the guy with hundreds of tiny barbed thorns buried in his flesh.

The youngest mullet was few years younger than I was. By the time he arrived on the scene at my school, the oldest one had dropped out, but the new one was ready to take his place as the meanest mullet around.

Young mullet hung out with a crowd I generally identified as the Nazi stoners. They were basically the same crowd the older mullets rolled with, only younger. They were loud, they liked getting trashed, and they were total assholes.

On the way out to the bus one day, the Nazi stoners were spitting into the wind. Young mullet spat and it came dangerously close to me, prompting a laugh from the whole group. One of them yelled, "You fucking faggot!"

"Faggot!" echoed young mullet.

"Yes," I told him, figuring I might get my ass kicked but wanting to piss them off, "I'm gay!"

His smile dissolved into a sneer. He curled one hand into a fist, and then punched his other hand, growling.

Needless to say, I was very impressed.

I don't know what ever became of old mullet or young mullet, but I do know what happened to middle mullet after high school.

Middle mullet graduated and joined the army. The war in Iraq was still a couple years away, so they cleaned him up and sent him home.

He was a changed man. He once lived for no reason other than to get fucked up. Now he didn't do any drugs.

One day he got into a huge fight with old mullet. They fought like they had never fought before, trying to break each other's faces as if they were strangers.

When it was over, middle mullet cleaned the kitchen floor with a toothbrush.

And then he went to his room and shot himself in the head.

Ray Gay is NOT a musical genre.

"Hey, Ray, do you like reggae music?"

"Shut up!"

"I'm serious, like Bob Marley. You like Bob Marley? That's reggae."

"Shut up!"

"Dude, I'm just talking about reggae, I want to know if you like Bob Marley. You know, reggae."

"Miss Sharon! He's calling me gay!"

Sharon, my bus driver in 6th grade, told me to shut up.

"There's no such thing as reggae music," she told me, "I know you just made that up to make fun of Ray. If you keep talking about it, I'm going to write you up and you'll get kicked off the bus."

This was the same bus driver who also knew, for a fact, that I was a Christian and not a Buddhist, as I had claimed when she tried to alter my disruptive behavior by playing the Jesus Card. She knew this to be fact because "Buddhas have dots on their heads." The truth was that I was neither.

Ray was this guy who was older and bigger than I was, and had a mullet. He once puked on the bus, on a day when the driver made me sit with him for lack of seats, prompting me to jump over our shared seat. It smelled like dog food, so I'm pretty sure it must have been corned beef hash. I was friends with this guy for a while, but then he got caught fondling a retarded girl, and I didn't like him anymore. It wasn't that I really cared whether or not he liked Bob Marley, it's just that I thought it was a way I could push his buttons and not get in trouble for it. I wasn't calling him gay, I was just asking a simple question about his musical preferences.

After I was told I couldn't speak of this imaginary music form, I went to a teacher to write me a note to give my bus driver. She did, and I gave it to Sharon that afternoon.

Sharon, Reggae is a real style of music, originating in Jamaica. You can hear it on the show Northern Exposure. Mrs. McKinney

"That doesn't say ray gay! That says re-jay! And you're still not allowed to talk about it!"

In the cafeteria the next day I was discussing my defeat with my friends, telling them about how Ray and the bus driver don't believe that reggae is a sort of music.

"What'd you say about Ray?" asked some random kid walking by. I explained the story to him.

"You better not be talking about Ray Milhouse!" he said.

"No, I'm talking about Ray Watson, who rides my bus and doesn't believe reggae is a kind of music."

"Oh, man, you're calling Ray Millhouse a fag? He's gonna kick your ass!"

"No...whatever."

A week later, during gym class, the boys and girls were segregated. The girls had to go do some girly exercises or something, and the boys had to play dodge ball, shirts vs. skins. Ray Millhouse and I were both put on the skins team.

During the first game, I was hit by a ball pretty quickly and I had to wait on the sidelines. Moments later, a shirtless, mulletted Ray Millhouse appeared at my side, along with the kid from the cafeteria who told me Ray would kick my ass.

"I heard you called me a faggot."

"No," I told him, trying to explain the situation about Ray Watson and Bob Marley. Halfway through a sentence, he punched me in my bony chest. I groaned. The other kid laughed.

"You're sorry, aren't you?" he asked me, pushing me against the wall.

"Yeah," I said, and got punched in the chest again, his knuckles bouncing off my sternum.

"Ok...now...we're...settled..." he said, punctuating each word with another punch.

Then the two of them walked away. I never spoke to either one of them again. I did find a paperback book about monsters with RAY MILLHOUSE written on the inside cover, though, and I kept it, 'cause fuck that guy.

After high school, Ray Millhouse had a job working at local campground. He parked a company pickup truck at the top of a hill, and left it in neutral. He got fired when it rolled into the lake at the bottom of the hill.

The last time I heard Ray Watson even mentioned was towards the end of high school. Apparently he had a mean pitbull, and rode a Harley around harrassing people until they wanted to kick his ass, at which point his mom would call the cops.

Matt, his Nintendo, and my rage.

In the beginning of third grade, my best friend was this kid on my bus named Matthew Woods. I don't actually remember talking to him about anything other than the most important thing in the world at the time: the Nintendo Entertainment System. I only had a few games, and my mom limited the amount of time I could spend playing to basically nothing, but Matt, man, Matt was the guy who was so completely awesome because he was so enviable. He had every single game for the Nintendo ever (or at least claimed to have all the cool ones I could think of), and his mom let him play whenever he wanted, sometimes eating up entire days numbing his fingers on the sweaty plastic edges of his controller. Matt had my dream life, and thus I considered him my best and most awesome friend.

Until the bus broke down in front of his house.

There was another kid on the bus, Mike, who was a pretty cool guy, but not nearly as cool as Matt. We'd talk to him about Nintendo occasionally, but he didn't seem as interested, and certainly hadn't
played or owned as many of the games as Matt, so he was obviously inferior. Matt was friends with him, but I always assumed that I was Matt's better friend because we were the ones who were always hanging out and talking on the bus and at school. One key difference about the Mike and I surfaced when the bus broke down and we had to wait at Matt's house for a while. It turned out that while I had never seen Matt's house from anywhere but the bus window, Mike had actually been inside before. This fact played a critical role in what turned out to be the downfall of our friendship.

There were only a small handful of kids on the bus when it broke down, so it was decided that we would wait inside Matt's house while the adults involved took care of the bus situation. Matt immediately ran through a door at the end of the living room, into a smaller room where he had his Nintendo. Mike followed, and I tried to follow, but Matt's mom stopped me.

"I know Mike. I don't know you. You have to sit on the couch."

Mike seemed to feel bad for me being in such a predicament, but not Matt. Matt found it absolutely fucking hilarious that his mom was a crazy bitch. His chair was situated near the door to his Nintendo room, and while I sat there, he would periodically turn around, controller in hand, and point and laugh at me for not being allowed to play. I didn't understand how my best friend could be such a dickhead.

At some point I tried to get up and make a move for the Nintendo room, but his mom grabbed me by the arm. I tried to tell her she couldn't tell me what to do, but she raised her other hand like she was going to slap me. I cringed, she didn't slap me, and I spent the rest of the time waiting on the living room couch, enduring Matt's laughter while my rage grew.

By the time we were able to leave, I absolutely despised Matt.

Following this incident, I would harass Matt whenever possible. I learned that while I was friends with him, a crucial fact about his personality had escaped me: the child was prone to angry outbursts and temper tantrums for damn near no reason. I soon began to delight in tormenting him, as the slightest insult would send him into a violent rage. He was bigger than me, but he was never able to hurt me when he'd attack. He fought like a girl, and would scratch me and try to pull my hair.

I had always known that he had a huge crush on this girl at our school who had downs syndrome. Even as a third grader, I found that completely bizarre. I tried to tease him about it on the playground, calling out in a taunting voice, "Yoooooouuu'rreee iiinnn looooovveee wwiiitthh Saaaarrraaahhhh!!"

"Yes, I am!" he proudly confirmed, foiling my plan to provoke a temper tantrum.

So I punched him in the neck.

His face immediately turned bright red and he started screaming that he was going to kill me. He flailed his arms and kicked the air while I ran from him, laughing maniacally. Some teachers saw what was going on and took us both inside to miss the rest of recess.

While I sat at my desk while the rest of my classmates played outside, I fumed. Why should I be in trouble? All I did was make fun of some jerk and then punched him in the neck to make him go crazy. I racked my brain trying to think of the best way to get back at him.

And then it hit me.

The next day I came to school prepared for delivering the ultimate payback. I waited all day for the right moment, and I was excited as hell at the end of the day when I asked my teacher if I could go to the bathroom. She escorted me down the hall, but not before letting me get my coat from it's cubby-hole. I had told her I was cold.

I went into the bathroom stall and reached into my jacket pocket for my weapon of choice: a thick, green magic marker. I went to work and scrawled by revenge in foot-high letters on the wall of the stall.

MATTHEW WOODS IS A FUCKING ASSHOLE!

I pocketed my marker and left the bathroom, satisfied about my job well done. School let out shortly afterwards, and I went home, happy enough that I didn't even have to try to get Matt to throw a screaming fit on the bus.

The next day, when I got to school but before it was time to go to class, I brought my friend Jeremy into the bathroom.

"Check this out," I told him, leading him to the stall where I had left my bulletin to the world.

I was shocked to see that somebody had cleaned my message from the wall, but luckily I was still prepared. I took out my marker and left another one. This was a message that had to be heard.

MATT WOODS EATS FUCKING SHIT!

"Cool," Jeremy told me, and we went to class.

As soon as I sat down in my desk, my teacher came up to me.

"Paul, we have a problem. A message was found in the bathroom."

"How do you know it was me?" I asked, trying to seem incredulous but not realizing that I was admitting I knew what she was talking about.

"Well, we know you and Matt don't get along, and you put your jacket on before going to the bathroom yesterday afternoon."

"It wasn't me."

At that moment, another teacher came in and said that I had done it again.

They made me clean up the bathroom as punishment for my behavior. I maintained my innocence, even as I was scrubbing the walls down with a sponge. I don't even know if Matt ever heard about my attempt to defame his character, rendering the whole thing a failure.