Bully for you

A story from my book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny /Le temps passé avec vous fut bref mais tordant

Part One: Bully for you, Georgetown Ontario, 1959-1964

When I was about seven years old and attending Chapel Street Public School in Georgetown, Ontario, I routinely began to throw my four-year-old sister down the stairs to our basement. The act was committed ruthlessly, arbitrarily, and mechanically, a rote gesture commanded by a nebulous demon with a sadistic urge to hurt.

My poor sister was an easy and convenient mark for my brutality, not only finding herself careening down the cellar steps at any moment of the day or night, but also the target of strangely cruel songs that I invented whole cloth in a senseless language, where the words served as bombs and shrapnel in our household dominated by viciousness and war. To the tune of “A Shepherdess was Watching,” I would sing “Vicki Little Coomus/Ding dong ding ding and a Hoola Reins/ Vicki Little Coomus/ Ding dong ding and a Hoola Reins/ Ding dong ding ding and a Hoola Reins.” Then using my legs as scissors, I would capture her in “The Vice,” squeezing her mercilessly while chanting “Wouldn’t it be nice/To stay in my vice.”

(When our older son began to brutalize his brother, he adopted this tactic, adding “Liberate yourself from my vice-like grip,” a line from The Catcher in the Rye. I never should have told family stories or encouraged him to read Salinger’s novel.)

In our small-town household riddled by anxiety, my sister already had an onerous burden to contend with. For a number of years, she remained convinced that George Washington was living in her bedroom closet. Now most members of our extended family were Americans, and in Georgetown, as in the rest of southern Ontario, we were bombarded with inane American tv, so she could be forgiven for a lack of closeted Canadian content, but I’m still bewildered by what George shared during his nocturnal ramblings. Did he repeat ad nauseum his 1783 Newburgh Address? Proffer an apology for owning slaves? Or threaten her with the hatchet that he used to cut down the proverbial cherry tree?

Closeted George Washington was clearly a spook of an intense, proximate, and esoteric order.

The sadistically creative torment that I inflicted on my sister stemmed from that typical witches brew of sibling rivalry and greater physical strength that has impelled older siblings to crush or attempt to crush kid sisters (and brothers) since time immemorial; but there was another undeniable root to my brutality: I was the target of ferocious mockery and abuse in the world outside the home, so my callous barbarity with Vicki constituted classic displacement, the proverbial “kicking of the dog.”

What made me so vulnerable in the rough and tumble world of childhood was my weight, or more precisely my over…weight; in short, I was “tubby” “lard-ass” “butterball” “fatso” ”chub”…you get the picture. I was also “fat four eyes” since I was unlucky enough to wear “specs” before such accessories became acceptable or cool. When I played sports, the opposition players (and sometimes their parents) would begin the chant: “Fat, fat, water rat/ Fifty bullets in his hat.”

Every time such hazing became more intense, my sister would be hurled down the stairs with increasing ferocity and regularity.

My poor mother tried her best to soften all blows. She was a true pioneer in the use of euphemism, referring to her bulbous offspring [me] as “big boned,” “husky, and “fleshy” (the latter borrowed from the colorful lexicon of our relatives in Vermont). She also counselled patience. ”Just wait,” she would plead, asserting that the perpetrators of such abuse would “never amount to a hill of beans” and that I would “run rings around them” in some vaguely defined future. And she provided me with the classic – and erroneous – bromide: “Sticks and stones may break my bones/but names will never hurt me.”

My father tended to remain above the fray, only commenting when he was in the throes of one of his not infrequent black moods; he would then contribute “his two cent’s worth:” “You’re ugly and fat {and when I was reaching adolescence}…your face is a mess.”

There were probably dark days when, as a child, my dad would have thrown his own kid sister down an elevator shaft.

My mom’s euphemisms and platitudes didn’t cut the mustard of course, but my own carefully honed verbal cruelty sometimes won the day: I became a wizard at retorts and invented all sorts of creative or nasty nicknames for friend and foe alike, thus temporarily fending off abuse simply by doling it out.

Part Two: Bully for You, London, Ontario 1966-1967

Our family moved from Georgetown to London, Ontario in the summer of 1964. Thrust into a brave new world, with no friends and no sports activity, I began to devour junk food with an implacable fury bordering on the compulsive.

In 1964 I was teetering on the brink of the abyss of adolescence, and a chance visit to the new family doctor changed the course of my personal odyssey. Dr. Orchard, our fierce-faced physician, with his bald pate and startling eruptions of hair from every bodily orifice and cavity, was a ghoulish sight for a child to behold and his every pronouncement instilled trepidation. In a merciless declaration that would be unlikely to pass muster at any medical board hearing today, he intoned, “You’re far too porky. I’m putting you on a diet.”

So it was that in the summer and early fall of 1964, I lost 25 pounds…while ingesting copious quantities of cottage cheese.

The bullying that went with being overweight receded of course; but in Georgetown it had never really been consistent or sustained. In early 1966, another nightmarish episode of Kafkaesque punishment began with a continuity and a ferocity that made mere chants of “tub of lard” seem, so to speak, a cakewalk.

It all started when I was in Grade 9 at Oakridge Secondary School in London, Ontario. For some reason, I decided to get what we called back then a brush cut, and my classmates, including some erstwhile close friends, seized upon this shearing of the locks to begin chanting “cue ball” at every conceivable opportunity. Soon the chant reverberated in all classrooms before, after, and even during our lessons. A group composed mainly of boys, with girls tittering on the fringes, would wait predatorily after class and the cry of “cue ball…cue-bee…cue-bert” would resound and reach a crescendo. This became an unbearably excruciating daily ritual. Never-ending cries. In the cafeteria, in the corridors, and at its worst in the changing room before and after phys ed. Morphing into incessant shouts of “cue ball…apple head…chrome dome…egg head…”

The hazing became increasingly elastic, lasting the entire school day. Kids from other classes would hear the toll and join in the fun. Groups of ten or more chanters would follow me home from school. The ritual was all the more devastating for being absurdly random. Clearly the pleasure derived from the attacks was based on the blows dealt by the sound and rhythm of words detached from meaning. I became the targeted beast from Lord of the Flies, a scapegoat that had to be slayed. But to what end?

Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”

 

As time went by, the attacks became an end in themselves, the trigger incident for the lambasting long forgotten. (In fact, the trigger had, as it were, disappeared: my hair had long grown out.) Only seething derision and a pressing need to hurt, to deliver a fatal psychological blow, remained:
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. (Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”)

After two or so months of abject misery, experienced alone, for I had clearly been diagnosed with cooties and no schoolmate dared be seen at my side, rarely sleeping at night and contemplating suicide at every turn during the day, without a school psychologist or counsellor to turn to, I finally broke down and told my parents. This was a last resort as I knew my mother would suffer wretchedly and helplessly and that my father was capable of joining the attackers…or of slaying them in cold blood.

As it happened my father took the bull (or in fact the bullies) by the horns, threatening the school with newspaper exposure and a lawsuit, if immediate action was not taken. The hapless principal carried out a perfunctory inquiry, pried from me the names of the main perpetrators – I was terrified that his interrogation of them would only exacerbate my suffering – and used threats and wiles to put a damper on, if not quell, the debilitating hazing campaign.

One solution that the principal proposed was switching me to a new homeroom as of the following school year, where a friend from elementary school had been primed to provide companionship and moral support. So it was that I entered class 10D, another boiling cauldron of amorphous atavism and animosity.

This motley crew included guys who looked about 40 years old, sporting all manner of Elvis-like pompadours and facial hair, having failed several grades, and collected what seemed to be wives, children, and extremely loud and flatulent motor vehicles. They didn’t need me as a quarry for their bloodlust since an embarrassment of riches was already at hand in the person of the English teacher Mrs. Brandon, the sub teacher Mrs. Sheldrick (known as “Ma”), and a fellow who today would be dubbed a resident nerd, Teddy Schrecker.

English classes, during which we were supposed to be studying The Pearl or The Merchant of Venice, were scenes of utter mayhem and ear-splitting din. The rowdiest characters in the class called the English teacher “Granny” to her face; they heaved paper airplanes at her in an attempt to lodge their flying fortresses in her fossilized ringlets; they climbed out the classroom windows when her back was turned; they chanted and hummed obscene tunes; they used fake coughs and sneezes to bark out “fu-doo” and “ah-whore”; and they rained spitballs upon the hapless pedagogue and one another in a liquidly hissing blitzkrieg.

About halfway through the first semester, we learned that Mrs. Brandon had suffered a nervous breakdown, and that “Ma” Sheldrick would take over our lessons. Now everybody knows that the fate of the substitute teacher in practically any school is to suffer untold indignities in the form of insults, lies, uncontrollable rumpus, and pranks. Eventually the principal took it upon himself to attend as many of our classes as possible to protect “Ma” from the barbarian hordes.

But he wasn’t able to protect Teddy Schrecker, who was physically and psychologically harassed by a bloodthirsty mob in every class, for being tiny (he skipped two grades because he was so academically brilliant), for having a “funny accent,” and more generally for being suspiciously foreign, articulate, and different.

Did I speak up to defend the beleaguered teachers? Did I befriend Teddy Schrecker? Did I even report the remorseless treatment inflicted upon these abject sacrificial victims? No, I did not. Instead I kept my head down, below the parapet, knowing that these tormented doormats served as a tenuous cordon of protection…and as a Clark Kent without a phone booth I was surely next in line to be mercilessly bloodied once again.

Postscript:
In the years following my season of infernal torment, I would often cross paths with the erstwhile ringleaders of the 1966 hazing brigade. Two or three years is an eternity in the life of an adolescent, and it wasn’t long before I would be exchanging cordial salutations, even pleasantries and wisecracks, with many of the heaviest hitters from the dark days of Grade 9. I highly doubt that they received their “just deserts” as my mother had promised they would; their ranks no doubt include now happily retired CEOs and lawyers in larger numbers than convicted felons. And I’m far from sure that they deserved any more retribution than I did myself, an anguished soul who didn’t take a stand when others were suffering and took such malicious pleasure in throwing my tiny sister down the cellar stairs.

Your friend,
Robert

Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com