The playground was a battleground. There were the generals: the teachers, whom you’d glimpse once in a while as they hurried to and from mysteriously crucial errands. Then, the officers, of whom there were lots: the bullies. Last, and certainly least, came the common soldier, the conscript: runts like my friends and I, struggling to survive in a world not made for us. That was the simple truth of it. We did not consider the ones above us our enemies. The playground was theirs to command, our permission to spend time out there a fragile privilege, one we went through (sometimes literal) hoops to keep. Far from us the notion of stepping to our masters, of claiming by force what we believed we had no rights to in the first place.
Once, though, I forgot my place and almost stood up to a bully. This big Romani kid, who sported a full beard and was two heads taller than anyone else—whether because he’d been held back several grades, as was sadly common with people of his ethnicity, or because he didn’t even attend our school at all and was just a visiting officer, I never found out—started a show of belittling me in front of a crowd of my friends. He delivered his graceful blows, then sauntered away like a medieval thief. As he turned, I felt my cheeks flush, my fists clench. Hot, wet salt burned at the corners my eyes as I stared at his monolithic back and before I could rein myself in I spat: “Hey! Bushman!” A word we Romanians use to describe a particular brand of homeless person, the kind that shows no drive to improve his situation. I do not know what psychological effects my words had on the boy, but inside of a breath he was abreast of me again, his supersized torso conquering the noonday sun. His palm went up. Then it sliced down, karate chopping the brim of my hat so hard it dropped like a heavy curtain over my eyes.
Fucking loser, he said, words to which I bowed. His battlefield, his rules, and I’d just tried to break the most important one.
Don’t start battles you know you can’t win.
From the archives:
The Golden Boy - A true story of school, isolation and self-discovery.
The Lords of Summer - Childhood friends, green fields, and bygone summers.