One Down
A while back I saw a Facebook post by a former friend of mine from junior high school, letting everyone know that his father had died in his sleep the night before. Below the post were various heartfelt condolences, most from strangers but a few from people I’d known when I was growing up.
I didn’t write anything; I’d hated my friend’s father. But perhaps that’s oversimplifying things; I hated many things back then, including myself.
By the time we finally moved back to Florida from Texas in 1982, I was damaged and insecure, paranoid and closed off in my efforts to cope with a lack a friends and an abundance of bullies, a far cry from the happy, optimistic boy who had moved out to Texas halfway through first grade after my father lost his job. I’d thought at the time that in returning to Florida I was returning to society, a place where I could once again function normally, but I failed to realize that not only was I bringing the effects of the toxicity I’d nurtured in the greater Houston area with me, other factors would soon be throwing things even further out of whack.
I made friends at the mostly white Maitland Junior High School after my return just in time to start 7th grade, other kids my age, including Michael, who lived down the street, and Ben and Bill, who became my best friends, because we were 12 and that’s what one does when one is 12. We hung out together in class and between classes, at lunch, after school, talking D&D and movies and trading jokes, designing supercars on the backs of our folders and founding a secret ninja death squad. I was a quick wit for my age and didn’t hold back, something that endeared me to some and annoyed others. Ben and Bill seemed to be the former.
Ben’s father Jack was the scoutmaster of the local Boy Scout troop, which was also overwhelmingly white. I joined and was made part of the Viking Patrol. The Viking and Panther patrols were comprised of most of my friends from school and band, and for a while, things were good. I was appointed Troop Scribe, I made first chair trumpet in band, I enjoyed my classes as well as a 12-year-old boy can, and I had friends to share adventures with in camping, sleepovers, and D&D. No more were the miserable days of running taunts and constant fighting I’d endured in Texas.
It ended one day in 8th grade. Ben, Bill and I were talking in the corridor between school buildings, when Ben told me, shrugging almost but not quite apologetically, that they wanted nothing to do with me anymore. Bill, looking everywhere but at me, nodded his agreement.
That was it. We were no longer friends.
I was stunned. I hadn’t done anything; we hadn’t argued; I literally had no idea why this had happened. What had changed? What could they possibly have found out about me? It must have been something I didn’t know myself, as I couldn’t think of a single thing that would cause them to react that way. But they weren’t talking. As both my parents worked, I once again began coming home to an empty house instead of hanging out with my friends.
As I should have expected, things in scouts began to go downhill as well; I had hoped I could salvage something there, but instead I was exiled from the Vikings and sent to the Mongoose Patrol, an unlikable group who mocked me for seemingly no reason. They gave me the nickname “MD” which they said stood for “Manic Depressive” and it seemed I could do nothing right. Again, there didn’t seem to be any reason to anything that I could see. These baffling slights just kept occurring. I considered quitting, but I’d just convinced my parents to buy me a new tent (my old one was basically a large orange sleeping bag, and my plastic hiking boots had melted when one of the camp organizers had, thinking they were leather like everyone else’s, tried to brand them), and I was reluctant to give up on scouts after such a promising start and the good times I’d had.
One morning on the last day of a three-day camping trip, Jack the scoutmaster called me over the leaders’ tent as everyone was packing up. Standing next to him was a tall Eagle Scout named Grant, and the other troop leaders. Jack gave me a calculating look.
“TC,” he said, “Grant here is going to try and make you angry.” Grant, twice my size, nodded.
“Why?” I asked. The leaders looked uneasily at each other.
“Oh, we just want to see how you react.” But had they never, in the two years I’d been a scout, ever seen me angry? I knew they had. I had no idea why they’d want to do that to me on purpose. I’d never seen anyone else receive such treatment. I wondered why I wasn’t asking more about it, demanding answers, but it seemed to me at the time that this was probably just something they did, a test of sorts that I had to pass, and I was desperate to get back into their good graces. I wanted to have friends again, to be liked. I didn’t want to go back to the way things had been in Texas.
“Ok,” I said uneasily, trying very hard to pretend that this wasn’t a surprise, or bizarre in any way, that I could surely handle someone who had told me that they were going to purposely try and make me angry. It was an assignment, a mission, and I wouldn’t fail.
But I did. Miserably.
At first it wasn’t a problem, even as Grant harassed me, giving me blatantly impossible tasks and yelling at me, telling me how worthless I was, as the other scouts looked on. Had they been informed of this? My face grew hot in embarrassment, and my movements became less coordinated under the pressure. Grant did not relent, hurling insults and calling me pathetic. Surely this is going too far, I felt, anger rising in me when I realized that this was no test, it was only meant to look like a test; they wanted to humiliate me in front of everyone. But why would they want to do that?
Now Grant began to shove me around, knocking me off balance and pulling my belongings out of my hands, throwing them on the ground and breaking some of them. I glared at him, realizing that he didn’t seem reluctant at all to be doing this, and I wondered if he’d made any kind of protest when he’d been asked. Or had this all been his idea?
The sounds coming from the rest of the camp died down as everyone watched. I was never going to get my tent stowed or anything packed if this kept up, but if I stopped going through the useless motions Grant would swoop in and badger me, pushing and pulling me around. I was sore where I’d hit the ground after Grant shoved me once particularly hard. Just how far is he going to take this, I wondered wildly. As I tried once again to gather my tent up, grabbing an aluminum tent stake, Grant pounced, grabbing me and wresting the stake painfully from my hands. I howled in anger and tried to get away, but he just picked me up by the waist and carried me across the camp upside-down, throwing me into the bushes at the edge. I lay on the ground, stunned at what had just occurred, listening to Jack tell everyone the show was over, that they should get back to packing up.
My scouting career never recovered. I had proved, after all, that I wasn’t worthy. That had been the point, I suppose. Eventually Jack called an emergency troop meeting on the same day as a band parade. I couldn’t go, but I kept getting calls the night before that everyone had to go, no matter what. My protests that I’d made prior commitments fell on deaf ears. What, a boy scout be trustworthy? Apparently not. At the next meeting, I heard that Jack had basically thrown a tantrum of his own, throwing three of the four patrols out of the troop, at least symbolically, for some perceived slight.
I didn’t particularly care, but my absence didn’t escape Jack’s notice. He called me and another scout in to the side room of the hall where we met, and gave us a dressing down. I interrupted and defended myself as well as I could, but it was no good. He took away my rank, my Leadership Corps status, and my office as troop scribe. After he’d said his piece, I walked out of the room, out of the hall, out of the scouts.
There was no going back after that. In fact, looking back I’m surprised that I stayed as long as I did. The next week, my neighbor Michael, who had apparently been appointed the new troop scribe, knocked on my door. “I need all of the troop records,” he said.
I looked at him for a moment, thinking how dare you, motherfucker, before saying, “They’re gone.”
“What?”
“Gone.”
“How?”
“Down the toilet. GONE” And fuck you, I added silently.
Michael wasn’t pleased, but I was done with them. All of them.
But I see some of them these days online, decades later-a kind of morbid curiosity on my part I suppose. They show up on my Facebook feed sometimes, yelling at my ridicule of the U.S.’s absurd gun culture, my contempt for the toxic, hateful dudebro culture that extends to the highest levels of government there. “If you had any convictions, you’d renounce your U.S. citizenship!” one of them spat at me, if one could spit through Facebook, after I criticized Brett Kavanaugh.
“I renounced my U.S. citizenship in 1994,” I replied.
In hindsight, it seemed they had all known things about me that I didn’t even know at the time, and they didn’t like what they were seeing. I was, they had somehow discovered, the kind of person they were raised to abhor and fear. In their eyes, not only was it my choice, it was my fault. How dare I impersonate a “normal” person, insinuate myself into their lives, pretend to be their friend? Something had to be done.
And something was.
So I can honestly say I had mixed feelings upon hearing of my former scoutmaster’s death. One the one hand, he had a long, productive, at least outwardly successful life, raised and provided for a large family. He was a model American, straight and white and proud of both.
On the other hand, he’s dead. So there’s that.