Benny and Resets
New Kid In School
We moved to Lawrence, Kansas from
Wichita when my Dad was accepted into the University of Kansas doctoral
program, so I was the new kid as an eighth grader in Lawrence Central Junior
High
, just like I
would be the new kid as a sophomore when we moved to Olathe, and just like I
had been the new kid to my school district – knowing no one – in seventh grade,
at Hadley Junior high school. In Lawrence
and Olathe it was sports and drama that saved me, and gave me access to
relationships and status that I lost each time I moved. Sports – the accepted,
the conventional, the popular. Drama and
forensics – the different, where the weird students made their home, the
strange, the ones clearly proud of their intellectuality and creativity. Sports
were how I came to have cheerleaders as girlfriends and become class
vice-president. Drama, along with
debate, was what opened my mind up to the world intellectually and
inter-personally.
During my first year in Lawrence my friend base was pretty much a guy named Mark. He lived down the alley a couple of blocks, and when I went to his house it was like going to an old person’s house – like my Great Grandma B’s house. There were old things, really nice things, all around that you didn’t disturb, and it was only when we went to his basement that we had space to talk. Unlike our whirlwind-both-parents-are-students-four kids-house, his seemed like a museum. I think his parents were very well educated, but Mark was definitely smart. He didn’t have a lot of friends in school either and he, like I, walked around hoping no one would try to get us into a fight.
Because I didn’t know how to fight. Not at all. My dad hadn’t taught me – fighting was a very bad word in our family - and, coming from a small elementary school in a safe little neighborhood in Wichita, I’d had not cause to learn. I was painfully shy, so shy that I’d almost been held back from third grade and had to take summer school before they would let me advance. So I walked through Central Junior High School most days frightened by older or bigger, or older and bigger, kids who had a lot of friends, and too timid to make friends on my own. In both Lawrence and Olathe, especially Olathe, everyone seemed to have known everyone else all their lives. I was the new kid in town – a new eighth grader in the middle of seventh and ninth graders, and to me it seemed like everyone was sizing me up, judging me, every day.
But I only had one real mano-a-mano challenge in junior high school. A kid, his name was Benny Borem, kept calling me, the new kid, out to fight. He wasn’t older or bigger, but he was part of a larger group of boys, and he looked experienced. Small, with short blond crew cut hair like most of us had in those days, he was prickly, feisty, combative. Today, I think of an eighth grade Jimmy Cagney when I picture him. To this day I don’t know why he didn’t like me, perhaps it was because I was hanging out with Mark, who was a real brain, perhaps it was because I was soft, out of shape, not popular, new, easy-prey, who knows, but he wanted to fight me for some imagined slight. Or maybe it was just because it was easy to pick on me, I don’t know. I went to bed each night screaming inside my head because I had no idea what I’d done or what to do. I did not want to fight. My folks would have been appalled, to start with. They had taught us that fighting was not what one did in school.
“C’mon, you wanna fight?”
“C’mon, meet me after school.”
“C’mon, let’s go.”
The little banty rooster, puffed up, huffed and puffed. “C’mon!”
“I don’t want to fight you”, is not an acceptable answer in junior high school. Behind him cackled all his henster friends, rooster buddies. Girls and boys a’clucking and a’clucking. I was in the chicken coop, I was a chicken, without an idea of how to get out.
I tried the “I don’t want to fight you” strategy for as long as I could – this was a moment of no return. It was either put ‘em up or total humiliation, without a punch thrown, leaving a permanent stain on my school career. I had to man up. Really, to boy up. I agreed to meet after school. I took him up on that gauntlet he had thrown down, with no hope that I could win. We were all living low-income lives, no one I talked to seemed to any money. My folks were poor college students, the kids I saw in class with few exceptions seemed to be just as poor as we were. They all looked like they’d grown up brawling.
“So you made it.”
And there we were, amazingly by ourselves. Me and Benny. No one brooding or clucking. No clacking and scratching. Just us. After school. In the school-barnyard.
“We’d better not do it here, someone will see us,” he said. “C’mon I know a place.” So we started walking. And walking.
And walking. And after a while started talking. And I got the feeling that Benny didn’t want to fight either. That he was all bluster. He took us into a pool hall. He knew somebody there who howdied him. After an hour or so it was dark, and we agreed it was too dark and we had to get home. And that was that. He turned out to be a pretty nice kid.
Just like Jim Cumley turned out to be one of my best friends after he knocked me out with one punch, putting my tooth through my upper lip in the gym, by the stands, just weeks into my sophomore year after we’d moved to Olathe, this time following a job Dad got after he completed his doctorate. As it turned out, I was glad Jim popped me because he was really a nice guy, very bright (became be a high school vice principal with a doctorate from Kansas University), and thoughtful and sensitive, and ever after that I had a tough friend who I knew would defend me, even after I got sweet on his girlfriend later, Julie Jackson.
But this is a different story.
Sometimes, sometimes, just sometimes we get to reset our relationships. Our work. Our lives. Even if it takes a a push from a banty rooster.
