Part Four - The Dudes. Despite everything, middle school wasn't entirely bad. It was just mostly bad. (And that may well be why I seem to have no pictures at all from this time in my life.) I still had a core group of people that I had grown up with, and while a number of them began to drift away I was also making a few new friends here and there. Overall, there were four guys who were the main influences on me through this time. Billy, who I have already introduced, Randy, Shawn, and Gary, my older brother. I will get to those first three in a while, but for now I need to spend some time explaining the situation with Gary. Gary is my half brother, the product of my father's short-lived first marriage. From what I understand, my father was able to gain custody of my brother when he was very young due to lifestyle choices made by Gary's mother that had put him into less than ideal circumstances. That is not my story to tell, so I will go no further except to say that whatever damage was done to him occurred in those first years before he was in the care of my father. Apparently it was enough to cause serious and lasting consequences, as his life has always seemed a swirling chaotic mass of drugs, sex, and violence. There was always an element of danger surrounding him which combined with a big, charming personality to make him attractive in one way or another to just about everyone. He was a rock 'n roll stoner with long, blonde, feathered hair, black-light posters on the wall, and tons of great music on cassette. He had cool friends and hot girlfriends. He carried weapons, switchblades and butterfly knives, just in case, because that was the kind of dramatic life he was living. He had throwing stars and cigarettes and porn stashed all around in his room, and he made me my very own pair of nunchucks. Needless to say, I adored him. Gary had a serious reputation, and one thing that was established early on was that you didn't mess with his little brother. He was six years ahead of me in school, and when I was in kindergarten he would be on the same school bus that I would ride home in the afternoon. At some point in the year there was an older kid, a fourth grader, who had decided that I would make a great target for persecution on the playground. Gary found out about this and dealt with it rather decisively on the bus one afternoon. He sat next to the kid and pointed me out as someone who was fun to pick on. When the kid agreed my brother informed him of our family affiliation and then put his head into the metal bar of the emergency door at a high rate of speed. It must have made quite an impression, because that kid never so much as looked at me again. For all the rest of my school experience the unseen presence of my older brother loomed as my protector. As we got older he got into a lot of trouble and his reputation got worse, and on more than one occasion I heard people being advised by their friends not to mess with me unless they wanted to have to deal with Gary. This spared me a large amount of hassle from people who clearly wanted to give me a hard time. The kind of "hard time" these degenerates liked to give kids like me often involved a combination of beating you up and/or stealing your stuff. I saw it happen to other kids all the time, but rarely did I have to deal with it personally. The trade off, unfortunately, was that Gary's lifestyle took a serious permanent toll on his health and safety and his relationship with his family. In retrospect, I would rather have taken the beatings. Outside of the armor that his chaos provided, the main influence that my brother had on me was the example he set. While I very much wanted to be like him physically and socially, I absolutely knew that I would never want to make the same mistakes that he had made; specifically when it came to drugs. I had way too much firsthand knowledge as to what the effects of a drug lifestyle could do to a family, and I wanted no part of it. In the time before he left to go live with my grandmother, I clearly remember crying myself to sleep night after night as my parents and him fought viciously in his bedroom over god knows what. One night in a rage he punched his hand through his wall into the closet of my room. It really sucked. My home life became much more peaceful after he finally moved out, but I was still devastated, and I always blamed drugs for taking my brother away from me. In reality he was only 15 at the time and I can't say with any real certainty that drugs were even a serious issue yet, but there is no disputing the fact that they quickly became one. Based on this I vowed early on that I would not in my life have anything to do with drugs, and I never have. Drugs killed my brother, even though as of this writing there is somewhere in this world a still-breathing remnant of his former self that hasn't figured that out yet. Enough about all that. It's depressing. And it is the other three guys who made the difference in my life that I want to talk about now. Billy, now asking to be called just Bill, was still a constant and still getting into trouble whenever possible. The problem now was that his stunts could no longer be considered cute or ingenious, or even tolerable for that matter, and he was finding himself increasingly at odds with just about everybody. He was used to getting himself into trouble, which was a skill that he was something of a master at, but unlike in our early days when he had the love and support of teachers who could see his brilliance despite his outrageous behavior, he was now finding no allies among the faculty. The trouble was becoming exponentially less fun, and the kinds of enemies he was making were of a far more serious caliber. Getting beaten up was a more frequent occurrence, and it is probably fair to say that he was actually hated by a sizeable number of people. This was, for me, a very important early lesson in how most people are just simply wrong. The kid was a genius, plain and simple, and in my mind anyone who had a problem with him was severely lacking. Unfortunately, the year that we spent in middle school together was a rough one for Bill. Books, movies, music, and especially video games were the things that made it somewhat tolerable for us, and it has been the influence of these very things that has bound our lives together for all of the years since. Bill's mother moved him away after that first year, to Ferndale originally and to Lynden, WA shortly thereafter. That could have been it for our friendship, but Bill was not willing to lose contact with me and over the next few years we talked on the phone whenever possible and hung out when we could get our parents to make the drive. During the short time that he lived in Ferndale Bill and I got to see each other fairy often as his new place was just about 3 miles away from mine. One day we had ridden our bicycles into town, most likely to play free video games on a sample Atari or Intellivision system at some department store, and for the first time found ourselves in a scary situation that may have been caused by Bill's social skills. We were peddling back towards my house, making our tortured way up the first steep hill, when a car blazed by us a little too fast and too close. I would normally have assumed that it was just some random, stupid driver, but the person leaning out the passenger side window screaming something at us, and the loud, last minute honking timed for maximum startling effect begged to differ. I was a little bummed on the whole deal, but Bill seemed downright shaken. He told me that he recognized the car and that it belonged to a guy who lived with his mother in the apartment building that Bill had lived in before the move to Ferndale. Apparently they had not been fans of Bill, and what was really strange was that the son appeared to be driving while the mother was the one hanging out the window and yelling. This was obviously a family with strong values. No sooner had we started back up the hill did the car reappear. It sat in the gravel on the opposite side of the road at the top of the hill, an evil looking gray firebird containing two apparently twisted individuals with nothing better to do than harass a couple of young kids on bikes on a sunny afternoon. I would like to think that as the driver slammed his foot down on the gas and the tires began to spin out in the gravel the mother in the passenger seat told her son to stop and that he was taking the joke too far. I would like to think that, but I cannot, because as the car accelerated diagonally across the road at us I could clearly see that evil witch laughing her head off. The car started off far enough away that I had time to see them through the windshield before they crossed the centerline and Bill and I were forced to dump our bikes into the ditch. We ended up lying in the grass in someone's front yard as the car's tires hit the gravel on our side of the road. They seriously could have killed us, and it was terrifying. I guess that was enough shenanigans for them however, as they did not return for a third go around. We made it the rest of the way back to my house without incident, although we did pull off of the road if any car was approaching. Faced with the prospect of having to ride the rest of the way home alone, Bill called his mother from my house and asked her to come pick him up. When she said no, Bill burst into tears and explained what had happened. He was rattled. We both were. In the end she came and got him. And I got revenge. About a week later I was staying at a friend's house that was a couple of houses down from Bill's old apartment. During the day I had verified that the evil gray firebird was indeed in the parking lot. Late that night I snuck out of my friend's house armed with a pocket full of roofing nails. It was the first time in my life that I had ever done anything like this, and while I was scared I was also excited and determined. I jammed a nail firmly up underneath the rear of each tire on the firebird, with the idea that the next time that car backed out it could very likely experience the joy of four flat tires. It wasn't much, but it felt like the first real victory in my life. I was still very young, and this was as bold a move as I could muster. I know that if I could go back today I would do it all very differently. I would light that car on fire. You get the idea. I don't know what happened with my little act of revenge. I never heard anything about it and I never did see that car again. I can only assume that the hardship caused by four flat tires was the catalyst for change in the hearts of two damaged individuals. Right. I first met Randy Clark at the infamous Alderwood vs. Silver Beach Elementary 5th Grade Track Meet Rumble. We didn't actually meet so much as fight on opposing sides. And we didn't actually fight so much as stand around with our friends yelling and giving hard looks at each other in the bleachers after some kid from one school got pushed by some kid from the other. And really it wasn't until we were already friends in our 6th grade class that we discovered that we had both been participants in that minor scuffle which was stopped by teachers before anything happened but had still been blown up in the minds of those involved as the first shots in a grade school gang war that threatened to destroy us all but was promptly forgotten once we hit middle school a few short months later. The funny thing is, our friendship started when Randy asked me if I wanted to fight him. We were in our sixth grade classroom early in the school year and someone must have told him that I had said something about him, probably just to see what they could instigate. So I'm sitting there reading a book and suddenly I hear my name being spoken by a voice I don't recognize. I look over and there's Randy a few seats up, turned around in his desk chair and glaring at me with a number of other guys sitting nearby watching intently. "You wanna' fight me?" He says. Now, the main thing I remember feeling at this moment is confusion. What exactly did I miss here, and who the hell is this guy? It didn't occur to me at the time that we might be honor bound to do battle in the names of our former schools, so I just said: "Fight you? I don't even know you." And for whatever reason that logic seemed to be good enough for even the eager onlookers. Stranger still, from that point on Randy and I were close friends. Randy was a good friend. We liked a lot of the same things and we rarely disagreed about anything important. We didn't seem to get tired of hanging out together and as a result I ended up staying over at his place all the time. His parents seemed to like me and I think that they were pretty much just happy that there was someone around to keep him occupied. We would ride bikes out to buy comic books if we had money or to go fishing, and we would stay up all night in his basement rec room drinking RC Cola and watching movies on HBO or music videos on Night Tracks. Sometimes we would make relentless prank phone calls to 1-800 numbers from television ads asking to order made up items like a "Baka Carver." Operators were indeed standing by, and they provided us much entertainment. It was the good life, and these were the times when I was most truly happy at this point in my life. Randy and I got onto all sorts of new things together over the years, and we were natural partners. We appreciated the other's strengths, we always had each other's back, and there was almost zero rivalry between us. Usually when one of us would get a girlfriend the other would as well. I have no idea why this would be the case, but it held true up through our high school years. In middle school the major ones were Trista and Debbie, and it was great to have a buddy to compare notes with since we really had no clue what we were doing yet. We were too young to date these girls in any traditional sense, so our relationships consisted of many hours on the telephone at night, the rare weekend movie or roller skating night when we could get a ride, and figuring out some place out of sight to make out on our lunch breaks. The best spot was a large tree that grew at the furthest point out that was still on school property. People usually wouldn't go out that far at lunch, so the four of us would head out there most days and if there was no one else around it would become French kissing central. The best spot on the tree was the side facing away from the school, which had the dual benefit of being harder to observe from the school and being technically off of school grounds therefore providing the excitement of additional rule breaking. We would alternate who got which side, Randy and Debbie on one with Trista and myself on the other. Somehow, this went on for weeks and weeks without anyone ever seeming to notice or saying anything about it. We could have gotten away with a whole lot more had we been so inclined. As was so often the case the trouble that we did or didn't get into was based much more on our own choices than any level of supervision by teachers or other adults in our lives. Regardless, it never went all that far at that tree as the girls seemed to have conferred and agreed on certain boundaries that we were not cross whatever our efforts. And that was just fine, because whatever we might have thought of ourselves, we were still just little kids. For a short while longer, at least. Then, there was Shawn. It is probably safe to say that Shawn Day was one of the only kids that I truly hated when I was little. He was one of the bullies that I mentioned having a problem with in elementary school, and he tormented me whenever he had the chance. We were the same age, and often in the same class, so he managed to always fly under my brother's radar. He didn't beat me up, but there was always a threat of violence from him. He was the kind of guy who would trip you on the playground and then ask what you were going to do about it, as if he felt the need to constantly assert his dominance. I tried to avoid him whenever possible, and I usually did a pretty good job of it. One place where it was hard to avoid Shawn was the school bus. We took the same bus to Shuksan, and the line for it in the afternoon was a favorite place for Shawn to hunt for trouble. Therefore, trouble was just what I was expecting the day early in my eighth grade year when my old neighborhood friend Kelly tapped me on the shoulder in line and I turned to find him standing there with a deviously smiling Shawn. I figured that I probably wasn't going to be in for too much of a hassle with Kelly there, as he and Shawn seemed to get along well (Kelly was a tough kid) and he and I had always been tight also. Still, I couldn't imagine that this was going to be a good thing. Shawn asked if I was going to go out for wrestling this year, and seemed quite pleased with himself when I answered that I was planning on it. "Good. So am I." He said, and his evil little smile grew larger. A sense of near panic set in as my mind quickly began assembling my options. Was it too late to get out of wrestling? What would I tell my parents, who had already paid for the insurance and athletic fees? Could I possibly just change schools? How could I survive the next few months with this lifelong enemy now targeting me on my own turf? It was bad, and it must have been showing very clearly on my face just how unhappy I was to receive this apparent threat. Shawn seemed to be enjoying it, that was certain, and there was something else going on that I was oblivious to as well. After letting me suffer for a few agonizing seconds, Shawn informed me that Kelly, he, and I would all be going out for wrestling that year, and that in fact we were all going to be friends now. What that really meant was that Shawn and I were to be friends now, as the other combinations already existed. In my mind there could be nothing possible but for this to be anything more than another way for Shawn to try to get under my skin with the side benefit for him of being able to beat on me in a school sanctioned way on a daily basis. All I could say was "No." I was then informed that this wasn't really a choice that I was being given. Shawn had just wanted me to know how things were going to be from now on. At some point he mentioned that we were going to be wrestling partners. With that I was certain that my suspicions were valid and that he was just trying to set me up for a fall, or more likely a body slam. I remember saying things to the effect that I did not like him and that he had been mean to me for my whole entire life. His response was about the last thing that I would have expected to hear. "I've always wanted to be your friend." That messed me up pretty well. I was confused. I could not remember a time when I had made the choice to not be someone's friend, but given our past I had to do some pretty serious soul searching on how to deal with this one. As it turned out it didn't really matter what my thoughts on the matter were because Shawn was determined to bully me into friendship if need be. He just started showing up in my world from that point on and wouldn't go away, even if I asked. I was wary of him at first, assuming that he would turn on me like a snake, but he really was serious. Within a few months Shawn had integrated himself into my life pretty much completely, and it wasn't as weird as I thought it would be. Shawn was turning into a cool guy. He had lost weight, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that much of his prior weight had turned from fat to muscle. He also had really good hair, and knew it, and spent a fair amount of time in a mirror that he had put up in his locker making sure that it looked just right. This did seem to be time well spent, as the ladies were definitely starting to take an interest in him. Shawn seemed to have a plan that he was following and I never was really sure how I was supposed to fit into it exactly. He seemed to require at least one guy around who followed his lead, and that was generally my role. We would walk around at lunch checking out girls and trying to look cool in our Levi's jean jackets, which he was pulling off much better than I. He had also convinced me that we needed to chew tobacco, because of the whole weight control aspect of wrestling, and so most days we did that as well. Shawn was able to get us cans of Copenhagen through a friend, so we would walk around the field spitting out disgusting tobacco juice and on a number of occasions narrowly avoided getting busted for it. He was also able to get alcohol, so it was in my eighth grade year that I got drunk for the first time. I did not yet view drinking in the same light that I viewed drugs, so when Shawn informed me that he had gotten a number of "torps" and that Kelly and I would be staying at his place and drinking one weekend I was not overly concerned. A "torp" ended up being a large bottle of Old English 800, and he did indeed have many of them. He lived in an apartment with his mother, and while I have no idea where she was that night I do remember that her whereabouts was not an issue. That's about all I remember clearly. Much of that night is lost or obscured in a drunken haze. I remember that Shawn had constructed a "beer bong" for the occasion that consisted of a funnel with a long piece of tubing attached. A person would hold a thumb over the open end of the tube while another would pour in the alcohol. With a little careful thumb work the tube could be emptied of all air to allow for maximum liquid content. Once the funnel was full to the brim it was held aloft while the drinker would stick the tube end in their mouth and quickly remove their thumb so as to allow gravity to take over. As could be expected, this process became messier and more difficult as the night wore on. Other than that, I remember Shawn hacking his thumb open with a huge knife while trying to cut a potato to make fries. I remember a lot of laughing, and I remember lying on the floor in Shawn's room looking up at his collection of women in bathing suit posters while listening to Ozzy Osborne and Twisted Sister. Most of everything else from that night is lost, but I know it was a great time, and I was glad that I was there. Shawn did end up being my wrestling partner that year despite the fact that he outweighed me by at least 20 pounds. Once again, I was not given a choice in the matter. The result of always practicing with an opponent so far out of my league ended up being that when it came time to go against someone in my actual weight class I usually won. I wrestled varsity that year and won most of my matches, ending off the season by capturing 1st in my weight class in the all-city meet. This was, and remains, my life's single organized sports related victory. I was very proud of it. I had worked harder than I had ever worked at anything before, starving myself constantly to make weight and busting my ass at practice coming up with ways to hold my own against my clearly larger and stronger (prior life's worst enemy) opponent. It paid off. And I couldn't know it at the time, but it was another important piece of a puzzle that I was going to solve, in large part thanks to Shawn, in about a year.

Click here for: Part Five - For the Sake of Completion.