This is an important piece to me.
Firstly, it’s the first piece of nonfiction I ever wrote, back in early 2022.
Secondly, Drunk Monkeys picking it up gifted me my first notable publication credit. I mean, this was a magazine that used Submittable. It was that cool.
Thirdly, as you’ll quickly glean, this is a very personal story. It’s about the first time I stood up to a bully, an episode that, in many ways, made me the man I am today.
I cherish this story, and since I never published it on Practice Space and Drunk Monkeys is now defunct, I wanted to include it in the first few months of Ants’ life.
When I think about middle school, I picture it as its own pocket universe—a boxy, bleached white, Communist building that exists apart from everything around it. This otherworldly plane is encircled by a bubble, which I call the playground bubble, on account of the important lessons that the courtyard, rather than the classroom, taught me. I was a clear-eyed kid with hair as black as my obsidian irises, I chattered like a broken radio, and my ears perked up at any mention of the word superheroes. I was, on more than one occasion, the boy at the other end of a soccer ball.
I think most people felt isolated in school. But back then I didn’t know any better; I felt like a lone earthling on Mars.
In truth, I was not your typical middle schoolboy. In the late 2000s, other boys in Constanta, Romania were playing football in the mud all day, getting scrapes and bruises, and spitting at each other from a hundred meters, while I was very often deep in thought, exploring a mind palace of my own making—one of cartoons, video games, and comic books. Unfortunately for me, cartoons were a rarity, like television caviar, and comic books were almost impossible to find and very expensive. I stashed my few prized possessions, Romanian translations of Marvel comics, in a leather box under my bed. My classmates talked about reality TV, sports, and popular music. At the time, rap was beginning its ascent, and groups like Parazitii and B.U.G. Mafia were all the rage. That was the pop culture of the period. Spider-Man, the Justice League—my heroes—were immigrants, and nobody was interested in them.
Obviously, I imagined there was something inherently wrong with me. It was as if my classmates and I spoke a different language, and I was the one at fault for that. When you couple that with my suspiciously robotic, graceless movements, my two left feet, and my debilitating social anxiety, you’ve got a picture perfect nerd. I completed the look with a pair of round, thick Harry Potter-style glasses. My mother’s choice.
I realize now that I’ve been thinking about my early life as some kind of origin story. Memories of that school and that courtyard are so deeply ingrained within me, they possess a kind of immediacy, a timelessness, as if I could at once reach out and grab any of them. The time my music teacher called me an android might have happened yesterday, just as well as back then. The climax of this origin story, one I often come back to, is the moment I stood up to my first bully.
I have described myself as a social pariah, but I did have friends—two. These boys were outcasts like me, and we were drawn together by time and circumstance, like flies on a spider’s web. We had each other’s backs when it counted, or at least we suffered together. We created a game of make-believe in the courtyard, where we each assumed a fictional identity, whether a superhero, an anime character, a British wizard or a ninja turtle, and then we made like we were fighting; sometimes each other, sometimes the world around us. We imagined we had extraordinary strength, that we could fly or shoot lasers out of our belly buttons. Naturally, we kept these esoteric rituals to ourselves. I was grateful for that—that self-containment, which proved that my friends deemed our allegiance enough and had no wish to let strangers in.
There was another side to this coin, however. I often arrived at school early, owing to my father’s penchant for either delivering me at first light or dangerously late; there was no in-between. This meant that I had nobody to talk to in the early morning, and nobody to protect me from bullies, of which there were many. For the courtyard was a battlefield and, on any battlefield, there are lords who demand their dues.
he kings of the playground. Two of them are important to this story; they are those that left marks. I shall call them R and P.
R still gives me nightmares. But P was the one who served as my teacher, so it is he who deserves the place of honor in this story.
I tried to engage my classmates in conversation on those lonely mornings, and, although most of my efforts went uncrowned, I managed to befriend this classmate, David, a huge boy for 12-year-old standards. David was sweet and innocent; in fact, he had the kindest eyes I’d ever met, deep pools of benevolence and good intention. I liked him; sometimes I liked him a lot. The only trouble was that, on account of being so big, David received a free pass to hang out with R and P. So instead of gaining another protector, I had dragged myself further into the fangs of the wolf. To make matters worse, whenever my two best friends were late, fate played its tricks on me and made it so David, R and P arrived early. David would motion for me to come hang out. He didn’t realize I’d be a fawn hanging out with black bears.
During these encounters, R was always silent. He was a short, burly boy with incredible physical strength. Rumors circled around about his prowess in combat, and he was surrounded by an aura of dominant self-possession. I remember he once lifted a much bigger boy by the throat and held him up for so long it seemed ridiculous. If R talked to you, it was bad news. P, by contrast, was much more liberal; he talked to anyone, because he liked to make fun of everyone. I was his almost daily punching bag. He made fun of the way I walked, of the way I dressed. I used to wear baseball caps (I still do) which P loved to snatch and hit me in the face with. He also spat on me, a couple of times.
Sometimes, when I truly wanted to avoid encounters, I paced around the school, in circles, trying to will time to pass until my Dynamic Duo™ arrived to save the scene; P had a field day whenever that happened, and would watch me from a distance and mimic having a controller in his hands, shouting after me, “his remote controlled robot.”
At the time, these events rarely bothered me. I had my head in the clouds and distractions aplenty. Also, for all my capacity for fantasy, I found it impossible to imagine a different world, a world in which I had a “normal” amount of friends, a world in which I could comfortably talk to people.
At the the edges of my vision, my classmates talked among themselves, shared jokes that I was not privy to. But those were only peculiar Martian behaviors, I thought—something to observe, not imitate. It did not occur to me to link my social anxiety with the way they treated me. For this reason I kept most of my thoughts to myself. Most times I was even sure that it was normal. Other times, I was confused, and wondered why the world had handed everyone else an instruction manual, but not me.
I believe that moments in life are possessed of inherent significance; that turning points exist, and that they are not random. But I will also grant that the day that changes everything might not appear special, except in retrospect.
On a day that began like any other, I saw my first crack in the bubble. I got to school early and exited the car to meet the rushing autumn wind, clad in a pair of synthetic dress pants, a cheap shirt and a vest, and a two-ton backpack that made a preteen Atlas out of me. My father always left me by the school’s back entrance, which meant two things: I passed two huge, dripping garbage bins every morning, and I was in danger of encountering the various starving and, in my mind, rabid dogs that paced the area. That day no dogs were there, but the rancid smell coming from the garbage made me gag and sparked my imagination. I thought of corpses, broken down, infested, decaying human and animal carcasses that, why not, people in the neighborhood killed for sport and dumped there. When I stepped into the gap in the rusted iron fence, as ever, morbid thoughts were replaced with anxiety.
P usually reserved his teasing ways for courtyard scuffles, but on that day someone called him up to our classroom to hang out. He was in our year, but in a different class. In my country, students, from primary school up to high school, are divided into years of study, but also into “classes”, groups of roughly 30 students that occupy a single classroom for the duration of their studies. My school had four such classes, as was the custom at the time, from A to D. We were class 6D, and he, as I recall, was class 6C, meaning we had different homeroom teachers. P started making fun of me as usual, and I took it in my stride. He and David, my Brutus, made fun of my new glasses, which were gold with a pink hue, tantamount to social seppuku. Then, P said something about my sister. Something cruel, unforgivable. It’s been eleven years, and all I remember is the word “whore.” My sister was four years old at the time and a stranger to my classmates. I erupted like Mount Vesuvius, in a way I’d never have thought I was capable of. I was a pretty big boy for my age, the second or third tallest in the class, and I was decently strong, though back then I was capable of no such self-assessment; I just saw red. I stepped towards P slowly and stuck my hand into his throat so hard he clucked. P was on the shorter side, so my elbow went slack as my fingers wrapped around his neck. Thus gripping him, I began to walk, pushing him toward the front wall. I slammed him into the blackboard, rattling it, and I yelled that if he ever talked that way about my sister, or any of my family, again, I would kill him. I probably meant it, too. I had never been that furious, and I don’t believe it has happened on many occasions since. Gone was the anxiety, the self-consciousness. Gone were the dreamy thoughts. Pushing him had been so easy that, thinking back on it after a few days, I was baffled. A classmate told me that, in my anger, I had bashed his head against the wall. I’m not sure that was right.
I bumped into P in a nightclub in college and we shook hands like old pals. By that time, we had made up. I had earned his respect. Not R’s, however; R did not respect anyone. But it was enough for me. I had learned something about myself. I had learned that I, too, could be a fighter. That I, a stereotypical nerd, a weirdo, an outcast, an-oven-with-four-burners (national idiom for people wearing glasses), could stand up for my beliefs, for my family. Also, my current dog loves me, so I suppose I’m all right.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I am a knight, fighting to save my princess from dragons and evil wizards, or a superhero locked in an intergalactic struggle for the salvation of Earth. Those are dreams, of course, and I am only human. But I have since learned that this is quite enough.
From the archives:
Wrong Battles - The playground was a battleground.
Carsick - Turning your trauma into effective small talk.
You might enjoy reading Chang Rae Lee's newest novel, "A Tender Age".
Thank you for sharing your story...who among us hasn't wondered where the instruction manual is??