Hello, friends.
This is going to be a long newsletter because my essay, the final part of “Chased From the Park,” is nearly 3,000 words long. I could’ve broken up into two parts and have had that story be four parts in this newsletter, but I decided to go for it. I hope you don’t mind.
Welcome to the 123rd installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and an adventure that fizzes out at the end.
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***
I worked on Project: Moons this week. I wrote about 11 pages which brings the project up to 17 pages and 3,500 words. Right now it’s just about having fun.
I also wrote the essay for this week, which turned into a 3,600-word thing. So that’s significant.
I also worked on the Superman drawing on Clip Studio Paint.
***
Introduction
Two weeks ago I began telling a real story that happened to me. Last week I continued the story thinking that I would finish it. That did not happen. This week will see the conclusion. Here’s the story so far…
It’s early-spring 1988 and I’m at Brooklawn Park in the north end of New Bedford, Massachusetts. I’m with Scott and Eric, brothers who are a year older and a year younger than respectively. We were playing on a rocky hill that those in the area call the Mountain. I’m 10, Scott is 11, and Eric is 9. Or he may have just turned 10. Yeah, probably that.
Three boys have come from the other side of the park and their leader, the smallest of the three and wearing acid-washed jeans and an acid-washed denim jacket–the kind with a fluffy collar that were all the rage in the 1980s–had told us to “get off his mountain.” His light brown hair was a feathered-out mullet.
I’d tried to speak reasonably to him but then had dropped a dollar bill I’d been holding and quickly swiped it up from the amongst the broken glass that littered the otherwise cool hill.
He thought I was reaching for a shard of glass….
Chased from the Park, Part III: The Chase, the Toothless Lady, and the Plan
“Were you tryin’ to grab this.” The boy knelt and came up with a shard of broken glass. “You were gonna grab this and stab me, weren’t you?”
He held the shard of broken bottle inches from my face.
Everything stopped. Eric stopped bouncing from one foot to another, not sure whether to follow his best friend or his brother. Scott stopped looking for Superman/god/an answer in the sky. The boy’s two chattering, chuckling goons no longer looked like they were having fun. Everyone’s eyes were wide. The flunkies looked scared.
“N-no,” I managed.
“Yes you were,” the boy said. “You were gonna grab this piece of glass and cut me.”
Those feral blue eyes that were set too close to each other bore into me and the shard of glass grew closer, now only an inch or two away. The shard of glass was a clear halfmoon, it’s sharp edge pointing toward me.
I thought, He’s going to cut me!
Looking back, it was distinctly his flunkies looking frightened that unnerved me so. I was young enough to believe this boy–who I recognized from school–wouldn’t actually cut me with the glass. But the fear that came from his friends got me thinking that maybe I was wrong on that count.
And I did recognize the boy from school, I realized. He was always in trouble. Always being pulled out of the lunch line and standing against the wall until everyone else go their food. Teachers always yelled at him. And he was from the Special Class.
In those days of the mid-to-late-1980s, a kid who had serious behavioral problems and labeled Special Needs would be sent to another classroom. There’d be some integration at times but not always. They were never really a part of our classes. I didn’t know this boy from my classroom and believed him to be in sixth grade, a year ahead of me. But I recognized him from always getting in trouble and having to stand against the wall at lunch.
And now he held a shard of glass from a broken bottle an inch or two away from my face.
My heart raced and my mouth went dry. I decided I had three options:
- I could continue to try to reason and negotiate with him. I knew this wouldn’t work though because he’d already made it clear it wouldn’t. I also knew he wouldn’t just let me walk away now. Things had escalated too far. I would get my ass kicked.
- I could try to fight him. That wouldn’t work. The only two boys on Earth that could fight and win against were flanking me, terrified out of their ever-lovin’ minds. This kid looked like he’d wanted a fight. If I tried fighting, I would get my ass kicked.
- I could try running away. It was cowardly and I wasn’t proud of the thought but this motherfucker was holding a shard of glass close to my face and I believed he might try to use it. Maybe not to try to kill me but definitely to disfigure my not-yet-mole-covered face. I wasn’t even a particularly fast runner but it would beat getting my ass kicked on the rocky, glassy Mountain.
So I didn’t really have three options. I only really had one. And then it dawned on me.
As a kid who watched a lot of movies and suspected I wanted to be able to make up my own stories someday, I immediately remembered a scene from Back to the Future.
Marty McFly is in the diner and Biff and his goons had him trapped. Marty knew things wouldn’t go well. Then he looked over Biff’s shoulder and says, “Look!” The bullies turn and he pushed them, knocking them over like dominoes, and runs off. There’s more to the scene but I’ll stop there. Him inventing the skateboard is part of it.
And Marty wasn’t the only hero who pulled shit like that, either. I think Indiana fuckin’ Jones pulled a stunt like that, too. And others in other movies.
Before I know I would, I did a double-take over the bully’s shoulder and looked down at Acushnet Avenue. I waved and called, “Hey, Dad!”
The boys turned and I pushed the leader.
He stumbled back and down a rocky outcropping but I didn’t see him recover because I was already gone.
“RUN!” I yelled and took off.
Eric and Scott were right behind me.
“Get them!” I heard from behind me.
I ran through the various rocky outcroppings and down toward the Wilks Branch Library, where the grass leveled out. I swear that as I ran, I heard John Williams’s Indiana Jones theme in my head just like when Harrison Ford was running away from natives, Nazis, or other nincompoops.
The thing was, I wasn’t a fast runner. My doctor had told my mother that my Achilles tendons were a little shorter and that affected my running. It didn’t help that I was a little husky as the Sears and JC Penney catalogues referred to it. Less so than Scott (though he never admitted it) but much more so than his twig of a brother Eric. Honestly, Scott and I were probably holding Eric back. I knew that we wouldn’t make it home.
But we might not have to. On the corner of Acushnet Avenue and Clifford Street was a small convenience store called Brooklawn Convenience. In our neighborhood, it was the Corner Store.
The corner store was a classic convenience store that sold all the odds and ends that might be needed in a pitch. It had a glass candy counter where it sold 5¢, 10¢, and 25¢ candies as well as candy bars. I literally saw a college boy’s mood change from pleasant to downtrodden when my sister, Tracy, would come into the store with a dollar. She would terrorize the poor man by laboriously choosing candies and filling a small brown paper bag with them, asking after every few candies, “How much do I have left?” Once the dollar was gone, so was she. I was easier and I had that dollar that might just have proven to be my undoing.
“Into the corner store!” I panted as we crossed Princeton Street approached Clifford Street, our neighborhood.
We ran into the store with a cacophony of panting and noise. I look out the door’s window, past the stickers and signs for the lottery and cigarettes (Newport. Alive with pleasure!). The boy and his flunkies came to a stop outside the door, their sneakers pounding the pavement as they skidded to a stop.
I faintly heard them trying to decide if they should follow us into the store.
“Hey!” came a voice from behind us.
A small woman with a tight, curly perm (the kind popular amongst a lot of teenage boys right now. As a teacher I have to stop myself from saying to a kid with that hair who’s giving my trouble, “Nice hairdo. My mother had the same one when I was a little boy. You’re bringing me happy memories”) stood behind the glass counter. If it’s been the tall college man, we would’ve been good. This woman, who’d always seemed so friendly, whose husband worked with my mother at a garage door company where she was a secretary, glared at me and my friends.
“If you’re not gonna buy nothin’ then get out,” she said from a mouth sans teeth. Well, maybe she had one or two brownish little nuggets left.
I must’ve been set to Negotiator Mode (Obi-Wan Kenobi would’ve been proud) because I came forward and said, still panting from being chased, “There are some boys trying to beat us up. We just came in to hide.”
“If you’re not gonna buy nothin’ then get out or I’ll call the cops,” she said again.
“Good!” I should’ve said. “The cops will protect us from those boys!”
But I was ten years old and the threat of “callin’ the cops” was frightening.
“You know my mother,” I said.
“I don’t care. Buy suttin’ or get out.”
“All right,” I said. I’d planned on stopping here on my way home to spend that dollar that I’d risked my life to save. For a ten-year-old in 1988, a dollar might’ve been a hundred dollars. I had plans for that dollar!
I turned to Scott and Eric. “We were going to come here anyway. Look around. Take your time. Maybe those kids will go away.”
They nodded, still looking frightened.
So we began walking around the store, looking at items, inspecting them, and replacing them on the shelves, racks, or displays.
The boys did not follow us in.
I got to the back of the store where the refrigerator cases were and inspected the sodas and other drinks. Eventually I made my way to Sprite and took it. The whole time, the toothless woman watched us through her thick glasses that darkened when she looked out the windows into the daylight. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she hissed when she saw sunlight.
Eventually, we’d been in there for what felt like a long time and I could tell the lady was getting angry. She hadn’t said anything yet but I’d been in trouble enough as a kid to be able to read when the adult was reaching the end of their patience.
I went to the counter. It didn’t help when I noticed that neither Scott nor Eric were getting anything. Our salvation was resting on my dollar bill. Good thing I didn’t let it go!
I grabbed two pretzel sticks from the jar on the counter and placed them with my Sprite. The woman rang them up.
“One dollar,” she said like a threat.
I slid over the dollar bill that had gone through so much today and Eric, Scott, and I walked out of the Corner Store.
As we hit the sidewalk and walked the six feet to the corner of the street we lived on, I saw the three boys down a bit on Acushnet Avenue. As we rounded the corner, I saw one of the flunkies turn and shake their leader’s arm, pointing in our direction.
They were too far away, though. They wouldn’t come back after us. And besides, we were almost home. We could literally see our tenement houses up the block.
So we walked home.
I mean, we started walking home because we hadn’t gone very far before we heard the footfalls of six sneakered feet running toward us.
I honestly can’t remember if we tried running or now. My memory is that we didn’t, but I don’t know why we wouldn’t have run. Unless we were just that lazy. Or maybe we just thought that nothing would actually happen. Eric and Scott lived in a kind of Pollyana world where their mother tried having everything like The Brady Bunch (a show I despised in its endless reruns).
Anyway, the boy and his flunkies raced back and surrounded me.
That’s not a typo. They didn’t surround us. They surrounded me. Behind me was a car. Behind them was an eight- (or ten-?) foot hedge. The bully stood in front of me. One flunky to the left, the other to the right. Behind the flunky on the right stood Scott and Eric. Eric bounced from one foot to the other, not sure whether to try to help me fight. Scott’s hands were behind his back and he looked to the sky waiting for help from god, Superman, or a paratrooper.
Things were dire. I had my two pretzel sticks in my left hand and my Sprite in my right.
The bully fell into a karate pose. This was 1988 and The Karate Kid had been a big deal. When that movie came on HBO, fuckin’ everybody wanted to take karate lessons. Eric had briefly, not that he seemed ready to use that now. So had, apparently, the bully. He was obviously Cobra Kai.
He did a roundhouse kick.
Whap!
There went my two pretzels sticks, flying in broken pieces through the air.
“C’mon!” he shouted. “Let’s go!”
Without the shard of glass in his hand, his goons were no longer scared and looked excited. They’d sized Eric and Scott up and saw they were no threat.
I had to get out of this and I knew I couldn’t fight this kid. There was no way. I would have to resort to my wits, which had saved me from trouble in the past. Mostly in my daydreams, but whatever.
And then I got an idea.
I had the unopen can of Sprite in my hand. I could use it to help me.
An intelligent person would’ve have swung the unopen can of soda, top toward the enemy so that it was a kind of hammer. Hit the kid in the head. He’d be dazed and I could push my way out and then escape.
And while I am an intelligent person (I’m told), I’m also a dreamer and quite imaginative (I think that’s why you’re a subscriber) and didn’t always go to the easier plan. I had a good plan.
The plan: Shake the can of Sprite as much as I could. I would need to stall a little so responding, “Oh, yeah?” and following that with a wiseass comment in the same way every 1980s action star did before they took out the bad guy would do the trick. It’d buy me time to get the soda nice and shaken. Then I’d whip both hands around from either side, grab the tab, and pull. The shaken soda would erupt out right into the bully’s eyes. He’d shout out, grabbing at his eyes, and Scott, Eric, and I would race off. I was not concerned with the flunkies. Maybe I thought they’d be so surprised to have such a clever adversary that they’d be too scared to come after us. More likely, I just didn’t think about them. It’s almost been 40 years and I just don’t remember.
“C’mon, pussy!” he shouted. “I’m gonna kick your ass.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said and positioned myself so that my right hand was behind my back. I began shaking the soda. “Oh, yeah?! How about a cool refreshment!”
I swung my right arm with the soda around at the same time I swung my left arm around. My fingers found the tab perfectly.
I pulled.
The can popped.
And a bunch of fizzy Sprite fell from the spout with splat. Like a sad bloke experiencing premature ejaculation, everything was over too soon and no one felt anything.
The sonofabitch of it was…I still could’ve escaped!
Whether it was my audacity, the catchphrase, or the thankfulness to still have his sight, the bully had stopped. He still stood in his martial arts pose but he looked at the puddle of fizzy soda in front of me with shock.
His two flunkies stood, their goon faces wide-eyed as they, too, looked at the fizzy puddle of lemon-lime sweetness at my feet, shocked.
Eric had stopped his indecisive dance and looked with round blue eyes in shock at the dribbling soda.
Scott was no longer looking for Superman/god/King Kong and his hands had fallen from behind his back to his sides. His hound dog eyes wide in surprise.
There was silence.
Nobody moved.
I could have escaped.
But I stood, still holding the can of soda, staring in shock at the fizzing puddle in front of me, not understanding how it hadn’t worked. Looking back, I think I should’ve pulled the tab slower so the soda would’ve sprayed more and I could’ve focused. I think.
After that momentary pause of shock, everything happened real fast.
All eyes came back on me, three sets of eyes with mocking hilarity and Cobra Kai did another roundhouse kick and there went my trusty weapon, my can of Sprite flew to the sidewalk. Then he punched me in the face, pushed me to the ground, and kicked me. I think. I don’t remember. I just remember that after my plan failed, he punched me in the face and then kicked my ass.
Then he and his friends walked away. I think they were laughing. I don’t remember.
I got up, sad and angry. I remember yelling at Scott and Eric that they didn’t even try to help me. They said their mother had told them not to get involved in other people’s fights. Of course she had.
I went back home with hurt pride. Hurt everything, really. And without my dollar.
Epilogue
Later that week I was in the lunch line and there he was, standing against the wall. He’d gotten in trouble again. I hoped he wouldn’t see me and that if he saw me he wouldn’t remember me. The thought had barely left my head when he turned and those feral, too-close blue eyes fell on me. He smiled.
He looked at the teacher who was presiding over us and her back was turned. He took two large steps and stood right behind me.
My heart pounded.
He leaned in and whispered, “I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill you dead.”
“Hey!” The teacher came over. “Get back against the wall.”
“I’m just sayin’ hi to my buddy here,” he said, clamping my shoulder.
The teacher looked at me and I think knew that wasn’t the case. “Get back over there now.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, and began strutting away. “See ya later, buddy.”
The next time I saw him, if he saw me, he didn’t remember me. He’d moved on to other prey. I never had a run-in with him again.
Coda
In 2013, I was at the end of a year-and-a-half of teaching some of my favorite students. I didn’t know then that I’d actually be working with them one more year. I’d assigned a project that could’ve been an essay or whatever they wanted asking them what they’d learned from me. I was looking for Photoshop lessons or projects that they’d enjoyed. It ended up being a little different.
One of the students, a super intelligent, talented, and funny young woman wrote the following:
[T]he biggest lesson I learned from you was one you may not have realized you were teaching. So far this lesson has actually made me an incredibly happy person and I have been able to look at things in a much more positive way than before. After you told the class the story about your vicious beating and most likely extremely embarrassing one liner, (“Looks like you need…a cool refreshment!) I realized that I can’t let anything get me down, because no matter how awful or humiliating something may seem, it will almost always make a good story afterwards.
I actually made this realization about a week or so later, when I told some of my friends about the incident. (You’re somewhat of a legend now). I recognized the previously stated concept when friend loudly exclaimed, “Wow! That must have sucked!” At that moment it really occurred to me that it must have been a terrible experience at the time, but after the shame and mortification, you had a good laugh because of it. And of course, I had had this thought before she said this, but it only became really apparent when she shouted it out for world to hear. That night I actually took the time tome to evaluate my life and my situation, and I looked back on all the times where I may have been sad or upset, and thought about the personal growth those events granted me. All those situations that I thought I could never get through had made me stronger and I never realized it until you told us your story.
Everything can be a story if you can tell it well. And I hope that’s what I’ve done here. Thanks for taking this journey with me. Now, get up and stretch. Go get yourself something to drink.
It looks like you could use a nice refreshment.
***
Well, that’s the end of the tale and of this week’s newsletter. Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, and for your support.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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