Bullies

Read on your own, or push the play button above and listen to me narrate.

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This is the start of a poem I once wrote about my childhood experience of living next door to a bona fide bully:

As cliché as this may be,
the neighborhood bully lived next door to me;
a more mean-spirited boy there never was.

The poem needs a lot of work, so I won’t share the rest of it at this point, but I will share many of the events that are in it.

We moved to Norfolk a few days before Christmas during my first-grade year of school, and I lived in the same house until I graduated from high school, so I was there for eleven years. Overall, I loved the neighborhood that we lived in because it was full of kids my own age, so I had lots of playmates when I wanted to play. The one and only drawback to where we lived was that our house was right next door to a boy named Richie who was very mean.

He was the epitome of an attention-seeking bully. He was a very late arrival — an “oops” as we often say — and his older siblings had long graduated and left the house before he was even born or shortly thereafter because they weren’t living with him by the time we moved in next door. His parents were elderly in comparison to all the other parents on the street where we lived, and his father had a heart condition that kept him from being the kind of father he most likely was for his older children.

Thus, Richie was largely left to his own devices. He devised a lot of cruel ways to pick on all the neighbor kids, including me and my younger brother, and he especially loved to torment our Pomeranian, Peppy.

There was a plum tree in the front yard when we moved in. Richie would take the fallen plums and throw them with full force at my little dog as well as at our house and at me and my brother. Eventually, my dad simply cut the tree down and claimed it was a nuisance because of the plums that dropped to the ground and had to be picked up. While that was true, the main reason for cutting the tree down was the little demon who lived next door and who used those plums as ammo.

For some inexplicable reason, his parents had a burn barrel in their backyard. My bedroom window looked into their backyard, and many the morning I’d wake to see flames shooting skyward as he tossed who-knows-what into the barrel. Occasionally, there would be a minor explosion emanate from the barrel, and his mother would finally put an end to his shenanigans — for that day at least. I lived in constant fear that Richie would blow the barrel to smithereens and start my bedroom on fire.

Since he was a pyromaniac at heart, he really loved the 4th of July, and his favorite firework of destruction was the bottle rocket. He’d place one in a bottle and aim it at my little dog every time Peppy went into our fenced back yard to relieve himself. Needless to say, Peppy became terrified of the 4th of July and spent the bulk of the time leading up to it, from the very first firework explosion he heard in our neighborhood, cowering under my bed. I’d have to drag him out from time to time and force him outside to do his business, all while providing cover from Richie’s attempts to hit Peppy with some sort of firework.

Yes, my parents talked to his parents, at least as far as I can recall, but they knew and understood what I couldn’t yet understand as a child — Richie acted out because he craved attention from the parent who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give him the attention he needed.

To me, Richie was just a brat who made many of my childhood days miserable even while living on a street that I loved.

My mother did tire of Richie’s ways, though, and took things in her own hands a time or two with him. The one that sticks out to me was the day he decided to window peek on me while I was in the bathroom.

Our bathroom window faced the front of the house and was right next to the small front porch. In retrospect, that’s a weird place to have a bathroom window, but that’s where it was. I was in the bathroom — using the “facilities” — when a face appeared at the window. The only way Richie’s face could be at the window was if he was standing on something, which he was — the porch’s iron railing!

I yelled or screamed or both. My mom went running to the front door, threw it open, and made a wild swat at Richie’s rear end. He jumped and went flying past the window, scrambled to his feet, and scurried home. I don’t know if there was any sort of follow-up meeting between his mom and my mom or not, but Richie never attempted to window peek in our bathroom again.

Like most bullies, Richie could be charming when it suited his game, and there were times he was even likeable, but I mostly steered clear of him because his charm was just a veneer for his meanness.

My little brother, though, wanted to be included — for a while — in the older boys’ play. One day, Richie and a boy named Craig who lived in the house on the other side of Richie’s house were playing catch with a baseball in the space between Richie’s and my house. My brother got duped into believing that the other two boys wanted him to play with them as well, and once he approached them, they unleashed their evil torments upon him.

Being the big sister who was also sick of Richie’s shit, I wasn’t about to allow him to pick on my little brother, so I stepped in and ended up punching Craig. I did this for a few reasons. One: Craig was a year or so younger than me, so he was smaller and easier for me to make an impression on while Richie was bigger than me (he was a year older but a grade behind me in school) and had a proven track record of being vicious when attacked. Two: I wanted Craig to learn a lesson and stop being manipulated by Richie because Craig was usually a nice kid. Three: I had simply had it with the constant bullying nonsense, and I snapped.

However, that evening at supper, my brother felt the need to announce, “Tammy hit Craig.” All motion ceased. Conversation stopped. My parents looked at me, and I looked at my stupid little brother in disbelief. The fink! I’d come to his rescue only to have him rat me out at supper. Things quickly turned to my favor, though, when my parents learned WHY I had hit Craig. No punishment for me, and I let my brother deal with his own problems after that.

We were not alone in receiving attacks from Richie. On the other side of Craig’s house was Kim’s house. Kim was one of my best friends when I was growing up. She and I hung out a lot, but to do that, one of us would have to pass in front of Richie’s house. Most of the time, nothing would happen, especially if we managed to sneak past while he wasn’t outside, but other times, he would come after us with whatever was handy.

One day, Kim was leaving my house to head home, and Richie was outside messing around with some pieces of wood. For some reason, he decided to be extra vile that day, and he walked up behind Kim and attempted to break a board over her head. Yes, he tried to break a board over her head. Naturally, she started crying and ran for home, and I saw red.

I charged at Richie and pushed him, yelling at him to leave her alone and things of that nature. My push only incited him. He turned on me, and I foolishly headed for the safety of my garage. I ran through the open side door, slammed it shut, and was attempting to lock it when Richie threw his weight upon it.

This was summertime, and I rarely ever wore shoes in the summertime, even outside. (I’m still that way, actually.) When he threw his weight onto the door, it came open and scraped across my bare foot, taking my big toenail with it.

If you thought Kim screamed when he tried to break a board over her head, you can only imagine the screams that came out of me as my toenail was ripped off. That brought my mom running from inside the house and sent Richie fleeing — I do believe that the only person in the neighborhood that Richie actually feared was my mom.

Another person who enjoyed Richie’s constant barrage of bullying was a mentally handicapped man who lived with his elderly parents toward the end of the block. This man would ride his bike around town whenever possible, and he would pass by our houses often. One of the few words he could clearly say was “Hi,” so Richie would stand on the curb and mock the man’s slow slur of a word.

I doubt that man ever understood that he was being mocked and bullied, but I did. The older I got, the more I stood up to Richie, so I told him off a time or two for his insensitivity toward that man. I don’t know if it ever did any good, but I tried.

Richie and I were never friends, even as teenagers. I learned to tolerate him, and he eventually became more tolerable as he matured. I truly don’t know what became of him after he graduated, nor do I really care. I heard once that he’d married and had a child or two and then divorced. I hope he tried to be the father he always wanted to have, and I really hope his own kids didn’t end up being bullies like he was.

While I hated having Richie as a neighbor, dealing with him taught me many useful life skills. I learned tolerance, as I mentioned, and I learned to empathize as I came to understand the real reasons for his meanness. I learned to negotiate at times, to avoid a bad situation when I could, to recognize the signs of impending danger, to outsmart and outwit at times, and to use humor to diffuse and confuse.

People throw around the word “bullying” far too often now, in my opinion. Yes, some of the situations being described are true bullying, but many of them aren’t that at all. Until you’ve been subjected to daily or weekly meanness for eleven years of your formative life, I don’t want to hear that some kid is being a bully because he took your spot in the lunch line one day last September.

And if you really are the victim of a bully, then do what I did to Craig and punch him in the face.

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The following is a short story for which I won a small writing award and received honorable mention in a large writing contest sponsored by the magazine “Writer’s Digest.” It’s a story I wrote a very long time ago, and you’ll recognize the characters of me, my brother, Richie, and the mentally handicapped man in it. The events of the story are completely fictional, though, and the characters are different in many respects from the real people who inspired them.

This short story is included in my second book, State of Georgia . . . and Other Writings, which is a story collection. I hope you enjoy it. If you can’t access it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to get all my content. Thank you.