The Bully

Sometimes the passing of years can heighten memories rather than dim them. And the sweet nostalgia for our youth and memories of childhood summers become tinted with rose-coloured bifocals. Waking up mornings to the smell of freshly cut grass, hopping fences, sticky fingers from home made popsicles, peeling noses and scraped knees and baseball …always baseball. We’d line up to pick teams before the sun had gotten hot enough to burn the moisture out of the clumps of discarded grass. If we were lucky we could get two games in before our mothers called us all for lunch, then, on scorching hot afternoons we’d be at the local public pool, if not, more baseball.

A great deal of those games were played a stone’s throw from my house near a straggly willow and a dried out patch of dirt shoe- trampled from countless scrambles for third base and home.

Teams were picked hastily with no concern for or sparing of feelings of those with less than the desired athletic prowess.

If a captain thought a kid was less than team material, this consensus was usually shared by all but the weak player himself.

One particularly hot morning I was picked by the captain of one team and a loud protest erupted from a heavy set (or just plain “fat” in those pre-P.C. days) kid named Wally. It seems Wally objected to my playing on “his” team, but due to the fact that the bat and ball were mine he was quickly vetoed by the other kids. That didn’t stop Wally from stomping over and demanding that I not play “or else” which I stubbornly chose to ignore. I misguidedly assumed my teammates would charge to my rescue and throw him out of the game. He was on top of me in an instant and since he was probably almost double my weight he was an immovable force. He was also brandishing my bat which he proceeded to lower towards my throat with both his hands. I was panicky in most situations like this, more so against a psycho with a formidable weapon. I struggled to no avail to topple this enraged giant but only succeeded in choking myself more with the bat and I envisioned a Louisville Slugger tattoo permanently burned into my neck.

Wally’s anger-reddened face suddenly became a spastic mask of wounded surprise and as his arms shot up to his head, I quickly squirmed out from under him and dashed for my house. After bolting the door shut I ran upstairs with my brother close behind me and we ran into our shared room where we could see from the window to the ball field below. I noticed the bully, Wally was holding a red stained tissue of some sort to his head and screaming up towards my brother and me. My now incoherent brother was screaming back at Wally and waving a steak knife in his direction.

It appears that while Wally had been straddling me, my brother, fearing for my life, had snuck up from behind and cracked down on Wally’s cranium with a fair sized field rock. A small crowd had started to gather in front of our house and a lot of them were elbowing for sitting room on a low brick wall bordering a kid’s sandbox area about 15 feet from our door. The easily swayed crowd were now firmly on Wally’s “team” as they jeered up at us from their secure perch behind the bleeding giant. As the crowd seemed to need a sacrifice and blood had already been spilt, my baseball bat was deemed to be the logical choice. Clearing a space on the wall by gesturing with the bat, Wally titillated the giddy crowd by starting to smash the bat against the concrete capped bricks.

The bat was quickly halved and splintered with Wally in mid swing when my mom turned the corner and noticed the commotion. Her frugal and alert eye noticed what was left of the bat, which she had just purchased at Woolco the previous week. Irish blood being what it is, my mom soon pumped herself up to a suitable state of maternal rage. Although she seemed quicker to anger over wasted wood than wounds that day, she couldn’t help but notice the blood stained Kleenex and t-shirt Wally sported. That didn’t stop her from bellowing a frightful litany of the bully’s shortcomings as she ran after him while he shakily tried to manoeuver his bike out onto the street. She used the handle end of the shattered bat to repeatedly bash his rear fender as he sped away bleating. On her way back to the house and still gripping the stunted slugger, she glowered at the riff-raff assembled on the wall and the peanut gallery dispersed like feathers in a hurricane. Later we all got a serious lecture when my mom found out about the rock, but at the same time I could tell she was secretly proud that my brother came to my rescue.

A few months later we found out that Wally’s dad beat him daily and Wally had trouble keeping the few friends he happened to make. I never found out what happened to that kid as we grew up and moved on with our lives. I tried Facebook and Google but I’m secretly glad I never found him, only because if he’d turned out as I’d expected, some angry fat guy in a trailer park, I guess I would have been disappointed. I hope things turned around for old Wally

later in life.

Odds and Ends

While I'm editing some of my job stories I thought I'd post some other work I've had hanging around. These are just a random selection of writings I've been working on in the last few years.

Tales From the Box Factory

I thought about this blog for a while. I'm going to post stories about different jobs I've had in the last couple of years. I have worked in a variety of different fields in the last two years and thought that they'd be good fodder for writing. This first one is based on a construction job I held for about three days in the middle of July.

The Spanish Diggers

I woke up late for my first day, must have slept through the alarm. I groggily made my way to the kitchen and got the coffee started. Later I pulled on an old pair of jean shorts and looked at myself in the mirror. My stomach looked like an overflowing vanilla pudding cup. Oh well, a couple of weeks at the new job would tighten up those abs. I bolted a bowl of bran cereal and banana and rushed out before I had the chance to detect a bowel movement. “I’ll pay for that later”, I thought. The man I was supposed to meet was also late so I called him on his cell and he told me he was on his way. Geppetto or something was his name. All the best construction guys were Italian and I bluffed my way into the job earlier over the phone. Two years experience, the ad said and I wondered how difficult it could be, I mean, c’mon we’re not talking brain surgery here. He arrived and we made our introductions then I parked my car and jumped into his truck and we drove to the site of my first days work. We made small talk in the car about where we lived and family shit, he pulled into a Tim Horton and bought a coffee, I declined one.

The job was pretty straightforward, dig out an old driveway and fill the slope with gravel. There were also some old cement stairs in the backyard to bust up and dump. The owner of the house was a retired engineer who compulsively snapped digital shots of the whole procedure as if he was working on the world’s most boring documentary. Nice enough guy although a little on the pompous side. These clients always talk about some home renovation project they started and took three years or something to finish and inevitably want you to see it. This is how they bond with the common, salt of the earth type labourer and they generally throw in the odd mangled French word. I see the look of surprise on his face when I speak, as if he expected the monosyllabic grunt of some stereotypical fantasies. “Perhaps we’ll find a Spanish galleon under all this”, I say gesturing at the gnarled dirt path that was a driveway earlier that day. “If there’s doubloons we split the booty.” says I. “One would most certainly find those only on the east coast” he replies, oblivious to my stab at humour.

I’d taken this job because there was a lull in work in my chosen field of animation. I sometimes find myself wondering what the hell I’m doing, or not doing with my life. A long time ago I used to watch those people with the washed out faces, the bags underneath their eyes looking like an accumulation of melted candle wax. You just knew that they’d either given up on life or given in to reality, in other words “conformed”.

I smirked as retired guy took another picture for his scrapbook, he was lucky, I thought, all his battles were behind him, except maybe a fight with cancer or slowly succumbing to dementia. Mine were still looming largely in front of me, taunting me. Once in a while you can look back on a life filled with accomplishments and admire the way you took hold of certain opportunities that arrived your way. I felt that the last few years had left only bitterness in my mouth and resentfully watched the years and debts build up exponentially as I took lesser paying jobs that I cared nothing about.

All this was a shock for me. I know I was dwelling in the past and that to move on you have to let go, but I couldn’t help thinking that life had gypped me out of something. I was worth more than this wasn’t I? Just standing over the piles of gravel with a shovel made my stomach tighten with anxiety, so great was my feeling that my talents were being buried in this pointless task. It didn’t help that Geppetto was barking out his opinion of my shoveling technique every two minutes. Geppetto yelled a lot. Surely this was all a misunderstanding and when I get home tonight the message on my answering machine will reassure me with the offer of a lucrative contract. thus renewing my career.

The gravel pounding machine roared to life as one of my work mates started smoothing the crushed rock base. The other guy was digging behind me and sweating profusely. Christ it was already stinking hot and it was just nine fifteen, going to be a scorcher. The two guys working on this job were Portuguese and barely spoke English as I found out later on one of our breaks. They’d been more or less working for Geppetto since they’d migrated to Canada five years ago. They were stuck with this job and they knew it and were just trying to make the best of it. I couldn’t understand how they let Geppetto treat them like dog shit for five years without taking a shovel to his head. I’d only been there for an hour and I was ready to do it myself. “We just stopped listening to him.” One of the Portuguese guys (George) told me. “He no big deal.” They had learned to tune him out, I guess, something I could never imagine being there long enough to acquire as a skill. The worst of it was that they’d sometimes have to shut off their machines in order to listen to Geppetto’s tirades about not working fast enough. I suppose a person can get used to anything in life and should just take life as it comes, good or bad, but if you let yourself settle for less, when does it end, how far away from your goals do you end up?

My First Blog

Well here it is, my very first Blog.

I thought I would try this as an exercise in writing.

I've read quite a few blogs that start off as diaries and end up in personal rants about all that's wrong in the world, society, family, work, the last blockbuster movie someone saw, etc..

Any fool can write a diary, what I'm after here is a form of creative writing that will ,with any luck, evolve through the sheer process of "doing".

Hopefully I won't end up posting the same sort of drivel I detest reading.

I may bore readers sometimes but I will try to be as entertaining and thought provoking as possible. I tend to write and re-write what I have in mind so my words don't come out looking like stream of consciousness verbal regurgitation. Although it would be great if we could just stick a USB plug in our heads, attach it the computer and have reams of thought instantly transcribe themselves into our Word program, leaving us only the job of editing the mountains of brain babble.

I promise I will respect the intelligence of anyone who reads this blog by carefully spell checking my words before posting. If I happen to miss anything or get repetitive, shame on me. If you don't like what I write or disagree with what's written then I've at least stirred something in the mind of you, the reader.

Artboy

Wayne Millett