I had the pleasure this morning of being in close quarters with one of those very friendly, very talkative people who immediately engages everyone in the vicinity in conversation. Upon hearing that I had once upon a time many years ago lived on _____ street, he asked whether I knew [equivalent name to "John Smith"]. I told him I'd gone to first and second grade with a "John Smith" but had no idea if it was the same guy. Mid-forties? I asked. Yeah, he replied. Red-headed kid.
So, again, let me interrupt myself. It's a funny customary thing for guys from greater Boston, of a certain socioeconomic class, to refer to their contemporaries as "kid", even if those contemporaries are now in their forties, as long as they in fact knew them when they were actually kids. I find it quite charming.
Anyway, it turns out that "John Smith" who apparently did go to second grade with me, drives a dump truck and is a Hell's Angel now, though "he's a good guy, he just likes to ride." I find that...almost what I would expect.
"John Smith" was always in trouble when we were in second grade. In retrospect, I'd say he probably had ADHD. Circa 1970, he was just a bad kid. That was my impression of him, one of the bad boys, fooling around in class, always getting in trouble.
Well, every winter, the city froze the common, so people could skate on it. One cloudy Saturday the winter I was in second grade, my dad and I were skating there, and my dad fell. He fell and hit the back of his head on the ice on the way down. And was concussed there on the ice for at least a couple of minutes. I sure as hell didn't know what to do. I was seven. People, grownups and kids, skated past and around us, not paying any attention to the guy down on the ice and the little girl crouched next to him. "John Smith" was there, and *he* came over, and he waited with me till my dad came to and was able to sit up, then get up.
In my concrete seven year old brain, this didn't make much sense. "John Smith" was a bad kid, always in trouble, but he was the only one who helped me. He was *nice*.
I think he got kicked out of school the end of the year and went to public school, and I never ran into him again. But, seriously, I've thought about him and the skating incident on occasion. (My dad and I reminisce about it, haha.) I am so not surprised that he grew up to be a "nice" Hell's Angel, yo.
xoxo
3 comments:
This is one of those pieces that make me sit back in my chair and sigh... Tear up the scrap paper I was doodling on, hit the delete key on everything open on my desktop, and vow to start over, only try not to suck this time.
In my town there was this kid (I don't know from socioeconomic, but a kid's a kid, ya know?) who would have blown the chart on ADHD had they known to call it that, and he was always in trouble. Always in a fight. Always mouthing off to teachers and proving to the world there wasn't anything in him that was "good".
Except, years later, he happened to be at a party at a very "nice" local girls' school, that just happens to produce "good" girls like Hillary Rodham, if you'd consider girls like that "good", though that's not the point, when he explained to one particularly drunk and vulnerable one that she really didn't need to sell herself so cheaply. I was close enough to hear it, and doubly damned for being one of those being warned against, but dumbstruck by how tender and insightful his heart had always been. He wasn't trying to pick her up, or pick a fight, or pick on anyone, just the same way it occurred to me he never had while he was running afoul of every attempt to rein him in throughout his earlier years.
They held a runoff election for senior class president in my high school because it was reported that the leading candidate had only achieved a plurality. Nobody even bothered to check to see if that had been a condition in the student government by-laws. The run-off was duly completed, and the count handled by the administration, so no one could ever say...
But I am willing to bet you now that MM had won that election, BOTH times, and he had known all along, even from that time in third grade when he called Mrs. M fat to her face, that he was never going to get a fair shake at anything.
There was a moment, after a house party, while the police were searching for "persons unknown", when I had a chance to give MM a ride in the back seat of my car, crouching just a little bit low... As poorly as I feel about my writing right now, it warms my heart to know that I knew well enough to tell him to hop right on in.
And, yeah, he rides.
There's something about your story, and mine, that makes me wonder about nature over nuture. How do people like "John Smith" and MM keep that kind and basically decent nature, when they're told over and over, at least from the time they start school, that they're no good?
One of MM's better friends once told me of a rhyme that his grandmother used to sing to him: "Manny Manny is no good / Chop him up for firewood". I had no context in which to put anything like that. Was he lying? Could it be true?
I get in arguments all the time, at work and among "friends", about the essential goodness of humanity. Seems the world is Calvinist, and as convinced of original sin as they are the necessity to persecute and prosecute to the fullest extent of every law.
But I tell them that people aren't ever the way they're portrayed in the paper (just ask Marion Jones) and I've always found it's the white collar types and the ones most adept at making a show of following the rules and norms of society who make the most effective liars and thieves. I sincerely believe my children are more at risk of harm by Halliburton than they are the "terrorists" that they and Blackwater pursue with deadly martial glee.
My aunt rode until she was late into her seventies. When she was laid to rest, she was honored by an escort of 500 bikers to the military cemetary in Indiantown Gap. Many of the oldest had fought in Vietnam. Her husband had fought in Korea, and her forebears had in all the rest as far back as the Revolutionary. None of them were likely to have missed time in the principal's office. But I've never been confused about the kinds of people on which I might depend.
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