TriumphAnt

A couple days back, I was watching the CTV News Network with Closed Captioning and the news reader introduced a story about a new StatsCan survey suggesting that baby boomers are poised to become even more populous than the workforce. But what really made me laugh was when the Closed Captioning grabbed “baby boomers”, it was spit out onscreen as “Barack Obamers”. A left wing plot if ever there were one.

Which made me wonder if there’s a Canadian version. Oh wait, there is... it describes those people who are furiously complaining – constantly carping on and on without a let-up – about Conservative Party policies these days. You must have heard of the steaming carpers.

Let’s see if Closed Captioning handles that one accurately!

= = =

Teddy, where were you when I needed you?

Recently I watched one from the wave of anti-bullying TV commercials that seem to be appearing with ever-increasing frequency. I’m really glad to see this. I do respect their message, and I respect the frequency with which they are being repeated. I’ve also noticed that they almost all seem to carry some variation of the same simple advice – tell someone. That’s where the solution, they say, begins.

Makes sense to me.

So... 44 years after the fact, GW, this one’s for you.

In the Fall of 1968, my family had just relocated to Perth after Dad finished out his 20-year hitch in the Royal Canadian Air Force. My last high school class that spring had been at the South Shore Catholic High School (SSCHS) in Longueuil, Québec, just south of Montreal, because the base school only went to Grade 9 and so high school-aged base brats were bused to SSCHS.

It was a combined English / French school, but combined in a way that only a psycho with no kids could have dreamed up. French kids attended from 7 am to noon; English kids went from 1 pm to 7 pm. I remember I was in class M3D – “M” for “Mixed” – male and female (and yes, there were also “B” and “G” classes – I’ll let you figure out what those letters mean); “3” to designate the third year of the system supported by the school, in my case Grade 10, and D, along with several other letters of the alphabet, to distinguish one class from the other. I think they must have had a hell of a lot of Grade 10s. One of my friends from the base was in class M3T.

That description was just to let you know what I was coming from.

What I was coming to was Grade 11 at the Perth and District Collegiate Institute (PDCI). The summer before starting, I wasn’t really bothered by the thought of settling into a new school... again. The thing about being an armed forces brat is that you are likely to have been transferred not only to several different schools, but several different communities, perhaps even several different countries, by the time your father (or mother) has completed his or her armed forces career. It lends a certain resiliency to your ability to make a transition without feeling too unsettled. Or so I thought, anyway.

It was during my first few weeks at PDCI that Fall that I started to discover something of what the opposite of “resiliency” was. Pretty much every one of my classmates had shared classes right from kindergarten. For the first time in my life, I found myself among classmates with whom I shared no experience whatsoever. In no time flat, I was made to feel clearly that I was a rank outsider.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. But I kept running into a variation of an unspoken, “Who the hell are you?” theme whenever I tried to get to know a group or even an individual. (There were exceptions, I hasten to add, and one of them remains a close friend to this day. But by far the majority of PDCI social groups were sculpted fully into shape by Grade 11 and clearly none were accepting new members.)

So being a geek (and Oh Lord! was I a geek, complete with black-framed eyeglasses with densely thick lenses), it didn’t help that I had no athletic abilities whatsoever and like all small-town Ontario schools, PDCI tended to lionize its sports stars. We had, for example, a provincial champion cross-country runner; we had a guy who could toss a shotput farther than a lot of people could toss a tennis ball; and we had a pretty damned good football team. And GREAT! cheerleaders. Why when those girls rolled off a line of cartwheels, every guy in the stands would... (Or... urm... perhaps I’ve said too much.) Where was I going with this? Oh yes...

One day, my Grade 11 class and another class were on a field trip. It wasn’t a happy marriage. The class was geography and the other class was one of those collectives known as “shop”, in which kids were following a stream either of electrical shop, woodworking shop, mechanical (auto-repair) shop, or “commercial”, which consisted mostly of girls who were there to learn what were then called “secretarial skills”. Obviously, this was long before managers had computers and keyboards on their own desks and still dictated their letters to someone from the typing pool. (Yes friends, early in my working life, I lived “Mad Men”. Just not the good parts. But I digress.)

But every shop class also had one or two academic classes they were expected to take to provide a wider education experience, and it was one of those classes with whom we were sharing the bus. The field trip was in geography and we were specifically going to several local examples of glaciation-related landforms. I remember sitting in my seat, happily jotting down notes while our teacher gave a running commentary that added to the how and why of something we either had just seen, or were about to see.

And it was around about the time he was describing the classic whale-back shape of a drumlin, and while I was furiously sketching the same in my notebook, that I heard from one of the seats behind me, “Hey G... that guy sure is taking a lot of notes.” That rather obvious observation was followed by a second voice, “Yeah? Well he’d better not.”

Pardon? “He’d better not”... take notes? I thought I’d heard wrong so I went right on with my jottings. I was seated on the left side of the aisle with my right elbow on the armrest and suddenly my right arm was bashed from behind, driving a magnificent blue ballpoint ink line straight across my newly-sketched drumlin.

(Photo: a classic drumlin, good enough to be a template and you have to admit it really does look like a breaching whale. Slash a blue ink line right across the photo from right to left and you’ve got my sketch. Source: University of Maryland Department of Geology / online)

After several repetitions, I remember turning around and saying, “Look, kid... cut it out.”

I think it was the “kid” that did it. As I turned around, I realized I was looking at someone who, if possible, looked even more geeky than me. Big lenses, large nose, black Buddy Holly-style eyeglass frames, and with a facial blood flow peculiarity that gave him a permanent rosy circular patch on each of his otherwise pale cheeks.

(It was several years later, when I saw the Stephen King movie, “Christine”, that I realized he looked a lot like the pre-cool Arnie Cunningham.) But from the neck down, this guy clearly was bigger and stronger than me. So for the rest of the field trip, whenever I got back on the bus, I sat at a window seat where my elbow was unreachable. And that, I thought, was that.

About a week later, during a class change while the halls were just filled with kids flowing from one class to the next, I was thumping up the staircase not really paying much attention to anything other than where I was going when from out of nowhere, a hand reached down from the next level of the staircase passing me on the way up and delivered just a vicious slap across the side of my face.

You’ve heard of a “stinging slap”? This was the mother of all stings. Christ, it hurt! I looked up through eyes filled with pain-induced tears to see the aforementioned GW looking down at me and laughing.

And so it went. On and off for a few weeks like that. I worked at avoiding him as much as possible, even going so far as to find out what specific class he was in and visiting the office where a schedule was posted for every single class. Finding his gave me a way to map out my own between-class travels through the school that would reduce the frequency with which our paths crossed.

The final episode came a couple weeks after yet another hard contact.

Like any high school, the PDCI had its share of car drivers and even kids who actually owned their own cars. I had already discovered that his was a purply-blue big old ton-and-a-half model of some kind of Detroit iron – a mid-1950s Pontiac Chieftain. It actually was not a bad looking, if boxy, car and even then a borderline collector’s item. Its distinctiveness also helped make it easy to avoid. (And yes, I would cross the street to avoid having to walk past it whenever I spotted it parked along the road leading to the school’s front door.)

Photo: A 1956 Pontiac Chieftain.., give it a coat of purple-blue paint and you’re looking at my real-world version of Stephen King’s “Christine”.

On this day, it was parked literally at the last space before the door so there was no avoiding it. As I walked quickly by, and was heading for the door thinking I’d got into the clear, from behind me I heard, “Hey kid...” I turned around and there came GW, striding purposefully straight towards me. And I still remember this as clear as I remember yesterday’s dinner. I turned, spread my arms as much as a load of books and binder would permit, and got about two words into asking him, “Just what is your problem?” when he drove his fist fully into my face just below my right eye. He followed it with two more quick, hard punches, the last one connecting so solidly with my chin that it registered in my skull as a pattern of flashing lights.

It’s as close as I’ve ever come to being knocked out cold by anything that wasn’t delivered by an anaesthesiologist. The force of that last punch sent me backwards so hard, I slammed into the large plate glass window beside the front door, hitting it with a boom that I’m sure echoed through the school’s halls for 50 yards in all directions. My armload of books and binder flew one direction; my brownbag lunch the other.

And I suspect it was that collision with the plate glass that probably saved me from being punched a few more times. It brought several other students swiftly to the door from inside the school. Rather than have to deal with a whole bunch of “What happened?” questions, just as fast as I could I swept my books and binder up off the ground, yanked open the door and just before bustling into the school, turned in time to see GW walking back to his car, laughing.

For my part, I went to the nearest boys’ bathroom to check to see that I wasn’t bleeding. I wasn’t – at least not from my face. But already I definitely had the makings of a dandy big black-and-blue patch below my right eye. However, I also had a really good scrape – which was bleeding quite freely – across the back of one hand where I’d bounced sideways onto the concrete front step after hitting the plate glass.

Later, around about lunchtime, I realized that in the rush to gather up everything that his punches had caused me to send flying, I had missed picking up my brownbag.

= = =

That was my last physical contact with GW. I did meet him again a couple years later when I was working as a volunteer for a local summer festival and I was one of several drivers who would be chauffeuring a convertible in the festival’s opening parade, each of us with some minor local celebrity. (Sadly, it wasn’t Miss Eastern Ontario, who was a real babe that year and who was the hoped-for celeb that I think every last one of us hormone-driven volunteer drivers was wishing to find perched up on his convertible’s back seat backrest.)

GW was another of those drivers and as we all stood around getting a few final instructions before the parade, I stood in the group, but as far away from him as I could stand while still remaining in the group. The guy still terrified me and all the memories of those multiple hits and slaps and that final trio of full-face sucker punches came flooding back.

But he gave zero sign that he even recognized me.

So that’s my fulfillment of present-day anti-bullying campaigners’ directives to “tell someone”. (Probably they are hoping for more than a 44-year time lag between the event and the tell, but better late than never.)

To this day, I have never understood why my simply taking notes provoked that reaction and the following weeks of bullying. But more likely than not, it probably wasn’t so much what I was doing – that was simply the trigger. I’ve since come to think that I might well have been the only other person in the entire school that GW could beat up, and it’s possible that he himself was routinely pummelled by his own bully before finding someone he could pass it on to.

But GW... you owe me a lunch.

You bastard.

(My Perth high school experience greatly improved after Grade 11. GW did not return and I guess I gave off signs of starting to enjoy life in Perth, because I found my way into several activities including a student council parliament of which I was Head Boy by the end of Grade 13 – admittedly because the fellow to whom I had finished second in the election had to leave school abruptly early in the year when he and his girlfriend were... uh... somewhat careless about birth control and he was made to “do the honourable thing”. That too was Perth in the late 1960s. But hey, we wannabe-popular-in-high-school types have to grab our rewards where we can.)

So why “GW” instead of calling him out by name? When I was writing this story, I Googled him and there is someone by that name still living in Perth, not far from my parents’ house, in fact. I know my memories are (no pun intended) painfully accurate. But 44 years, while leaving me with crystal clear memories, have long since eliminated any chance of proving any of it if I were to be asked to do so.

Why didn’t I tell anyone at the time? A small-town Ontario high school in 1968-69 was not the most conducive of environments for accusing anyone of “bullying”. You would pretty much have to be attacked while a teacher was watching. And peer pressure. Admitting you were hurt by something as mundane as a punch in the face would likely get your friends telling you, first, to suck it up and, second, to go hit him back.

Plus they’d probably lay side bets on the outcome.

Anti-bullying groups today are formed around the slogan, “It gets better”. For the sake of kids who travel in their own unique orbits, I for one sure as hell hope so!

À la next time.

Next: Officially, I’m retired. Now what? The first of what may be many, many musings on that theme.