6/27/00
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TORMENT
3 PAGES

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

This is a quote from the movie "Stand By Me," based on Stephen King's novella, "The Body." The quote is in the book too, slightly altered, "Jesus, did you?" But man, is it ever a true statement. Especially if you've seen the movie, you know what he means. When you're twelve, right on the threshold of childhood and adolescence, that is when your friends are true and pure. You've been friends for 6 years or so at this point. You haven't yet reached junior high which is hands down the cliqueiest time of your life. At least it was for me. Junior high was natural selection at it harshest form. All of a sudden, you have 5 schools of kids all put into one building, all vying for the seats at the limited popular table. And in this desperate time when your horomones are making you uglier and more moody and vulnerable than ever, you would stab a former best friend in the back to be accepted amongst the cool kids.

But in sixth grade, it's different. Sure,you're still divided up into groups. At my school, it was usually determined by your reading and math groups. There were usually 3 or so groups for each subject. And everybody knew who the smart kids were and who the dumb kids were by what group they were in. Ironically, it was the smart kids who were the popular ones. Funny when you think that it's usually the other way around. In highschool, the smart kids were the nerds. But in elementary school, before the whole quest for finding somebody of the opposite sex really began in full force, the only way to measure who the best was, was in these groups. That was the initial filter.

After that, you'd weed out the fat kids, the kids who smelled, the kids who had weird habits. Luckily I was one of the smart kids. I was in the top math and reading groups. So my friends in elementary school were the popular kids on this plane. So of course, I joined them in tormenting the stupid kids. God, we must have traumatized some of those kids for life. Little kids are the most vicious, heartless people when it comes to dealing with people who are different. A lot of people will say that prejudice is learned. That you'll never meet a prejudiced kid. That it's something they learn from their parents. That may be true when it comes to racial prejudice, but don't tell me that little kids don't know how to discriminate. That's a bunch of idealistic bleeding heart bullshit. When you're as young 3 years old, you zero in on retarded kids, kids with birthmarks, kids who still suck on pacifiers, kids who cry a lot, kids who smell bad, kids who are different from everyone else. By the time we are in Junior High, before our parents have even had a chance to really affect us that way, we are already pros at discrimination.

But, even though we are rat bastards to the other kids those days, the friends that you do have, it is a pure friendship. They are your BEST friends. And that actually meant something. We actually had a list. Best friend, second best friend, third best friend. And depending on how your friends were acting, they were shuffled around on the list. During the course of elementary, my good friends were Wyatt, Lewis, Bruce and Aaron. I remember in second grade, my best friend was Aaron. He was in the top reading and math groups with me. And together we would pick on the kids who weren't as smart. Aaron was probably the smartest kid in class, and so everybody wanted to be his best friend. Everybody wanted to spend the night at his house on Friday nights. And being in that kind of power position, Aaron was able to pick and choose and you were at his mercy whether or not you were his best friend or god save you the week you dropped below his fourth best friend. I don't know why so much creedence was given to this kid, especially when I think about the change that happened a year or two later.

I remember the day it all happened. Generally when you think of people no longer being friends, you get in your head a gradual thing, where you realize you've grown apart or you just don't like each other anymore. I can't remember if it was third or fourth grade that this all happened, but I remember one day, me, Wyatt, Lewis and Bruce just decided that we were going to make fun of Aaron. We all made fun of each other at one point or another and those were the days that you were only sombody's fourth best friend. Except for Wyatt. Wyatt was undisputedly the leader amongst us all mostly because he was the one who could beat all of us up. So he was never really made fun of. But this one day, we just all of a sudden decided to make Aaron feel stupid. We all talked baby talk or just in weird voices when we were trying to be funny, but Aaron did it a little more than the rest of us. So based on that , we decided, literally in 30 seconds one recess that we were going to make him feel stupid about it. We were just going to laugh at whatever he said and make him feel stupid for saying it.

To be funny Aaron always said "Hi," in this really dumb voice that sounded like "Ha-eee.." And it was never something that bugged us before. But we were 10 and we were shits. Today, when he said "Ha-eee," we all just started laughing like it was the funniest thing we'd ever heard. Aaron got that look on his face where he didn't get what the joke was but he was laughing along with it just to make like he got it. God I can't believe how cruel that was. At that age, to just suddenly do that to a kid. And I'm sure it must have taken him a few days to realize just what was happening. Here were these 3 guys who had all been vying for the spot as his best friend for the last couple years, guys who had been at the mercy of his list. Now all of a sudden, they had all collectively turned on him. This couldn't be happening. I wonder how long it took him to realize in his head definitively, that he was not our friend anymore.

You know, as I've just thought about what I've just written. I wonder how much bullshit I was spewing when I said that in elementary school, your friends are pure. Are they? I remember personally tormenting the hell out of the fat kid Mike every day. The group of us would circle around him and yell things at him, push him down, kick dirt on him, and break his stuff. We'd keep at him until he was crying. God, what a horrible thing that is. To break down crying in front of a group of people. Sometimes we did all this tormenting in front of other people. So it was just us 4 guys that he was crying in front of. It was probably 20 or more people from all grades that he was now bawling in front of, letting everyone know that we had won. He had lost. We had broken him, and let him know definitively that he was not good enough to be one of us.

I remember on one particularly bad tormenting session, we had knocked him down and this kid, Jeremy stood on Mike's back and started dancing. And there is Mike in front of 20 kids, boys and girls, crying his eyes out, and I remember for the first time, feeling really bad for the kid. I remember thinking, this kid must dread coming into school every day. In retrospect over 10 years later, I get sick to my stomach thinking how much he must have dreaded coming into school. I can remember when I was working 2 waiter jobs during the summer after my junior year of college. 7 days a week, I waited tables and I really didn't like my job. I got sick to my stomach every day when that alarm went off because I didn't want to go to work. To this kid it must have been a hundred times worse. To know that the best thing that would happen to you all day is that maybe you wouldn't get picked on. What kind of an existence it that.

To this day I wonder what ever became of Mike. Last time I saw him was about a year after I'd graduated highschool. He had grown his hair out to this greasy nappy mess. He was still a big guy and I guess he spent a lot of time fooling around on the computer. I remember in school, he was actaully a smart kid. He was in the higher reading and math groups with us. And yet I remember in highschool, he dropped down into the lower tracks of classes. I remember somebody, a teacher telling a few of us that Mike was actually IQ-wise probably smarter than any of us, but he just never tried very hard. I wonder if we had a hand in that. Constantly making him feel inferior to the point that he figured "What's the use." What does he do now? Did he ever make it out of that town? Did he ever find a group of friends that treated him with respect? Did he ever truly heal from the scars of childhood that we inflicted on him? Aaron was strong. He knew he was better than the petty teasing. He went to college to study robotix engineering. I heard from Jesse that Aaron had a girlfriend and was getting along fine with a group of people of his own caliber. He had survived. I wonder if Mike was as lucky?

Apparently my nostalgia turned to cynicism between last night and today.