Middle School Boys

I was in the eighth grade, and there were two problems I had never had:

1) I’d never had to fend off friends. While I wasn’t hugely unpopular, I had a few close friends, plenty of people I was friendly with, and the largest cluster of people who came across as indifferent to my existence.
2) I’d never been a physical fight.

This is the story of when both of these problems came perilously close to conjoining and coming to fruition.

I made a friend named Skip. It escapes me how we became friends, because there was so little to obviously bind us. He was a year younger than me, and a sportier, more rough-and-tumble kid. No two ways about it, I was a nerd, who despite my budding interest in basketball, was still most likely to be found at home or at my best friend Billy’s house, writing, reading, playing Super Nintendo.

But somehow or other, Skip did become my oddball friend, and in particular, I remember him joining me at my lunch table, where hardly anyone else seemed to know what to make of him, and thus things partitioned into me and Skip, and me and everyone else.

I went to Skip’s house on a Saturday. I didn’t have a bad time of it--I remember us trading basketball cards and watching TV. I remember his father coming home and Skip and I had a WCW wrestling show on. His father pointed at the screen and said, You know what I think’s gonna happen, is now the Horsemen are going to team up and they’re gonna take on the nWo. There was something about that moment that stuck with me. A certain sense of discomfort that I legitimately wasn’t sure where his father fell on the spectrum of believing wrestling was real and acting like he did for the benefit of us children.

By that age, I’d been to plenty of other boys’ houses for visits not so different from this one, and recalled more often than not having a good time, and wanting to come back again. Whether I was settling into a more hermit-y space, or just growing more comfortable with the more routine visits to Billy’s, I arrived at the conclusion that I didn’t want to visit Skip’s house again.

But the invitations kept coming.

Skip called the very next day to ask if I wanted to come back. I told him I was visiting my grandmother’s house (which was true) but we’d do it again another time.

Skip called again.

And again.

And again.

I told him I had too much homework, or that I wasn’t feeling well.

The calls became a daily occurrence, until I finally invited him to come to my house instead. The results were a similar perfectly fine but unspectacular afternoon. I remember being self-conscious because my father didn’t turn on the heat above forty in those winter months. Then I remember Skip saying he was hungry, so we snacked on cereal. My father always opened the bags within cereal boxes carefully, only two or three inches, wide enough to pour it into a bowl, but mostly sealed so that the cereal would stay fresh. Skip plunged his hand into a bag of Frosted Mini-Wheats, and when he found the hole too small, dug in deeper, ripping the bag all the way open.

The next day, he called again.

My father advised me. He said I ought to tell Skip that I already had another friend I hung out with after school, so I couldn’t go hang out with him. That sounded lame, besides which, I was already on my way to an ingrained discomfort with telling people bad news--that I was rejecting them, that they were in trouble, (much later in life) that we wouldn’t allow them to work for my organization again. So the calls went on, for what must have been a period of weeks, before I told him I’d been grounded because I did poorly on a test. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable lie, when I actually was doing pretty badly in Earth Science, and other guys got grounded all the time (even though it had never been a punishment in my house).

I consciously left off the time period of my supposed grounding, weary that he’d start calling again as soon as that time was up, preferring the idea that this break would get him out of the habit of inviting me over, and we could go back to just being friends at school.

But there was something new in his voice for that phone call. Not excitement about hanging out. Not anger or frustration at me continuing to say no. More like a quiet resignation. I remember feeling the distinct impression he didn’t believe one word about my grounding, but that he was accepting he shouldn’t call again. Lo and behold, that was the last time we talked on the phone. He stopped sitting at our lunch table soon after.

While all of this was going on, I had another new friend, Schwartzman. I’d met Schwartzman years before at a birthday party, but we were never in the same classes or lunch periods, so I mostly knew him as a friend of friends. But in the eighth grade, we all at once found ourselves with near-identical situations, and he happened to be seated directly behind me in math class.

In the early going, we were fast friends, trading jokes. He was a compulsive doodler and gave me some of these cartoon drawings on a recurring basis. Cartoons of our math teacher. Cartoons of me, some of the ball-busting variety, but all in good fun. Perhaps it was because of this easy friendship that I opened up to him about girls I had crushes on—in particular Dana Fremont, the girl who had made the questionable decision to say yes when I asked her to slow dance that fall, and whom I had obsessed over since.

Things took a turn. The shift wasn’t simultaneous with telling him about my crush. I don’t know that there was any one moment of departure, but I do recall a quiet escalation as the cartoon drawings got a little more consistently antagonistic and progressively more mean, more often than not targeting Dana or my infatuation with her. Then he got in the habit of kicking the back of my chair in math class. A distraction. A nuisance. The kind of teasing I probably could have defused had I not turned around, glared at him, and told him to quit it. Had I not been the one, at least as often as him, to get a quick reprimand from our teacher before she went on with her lesson.

I remember us trading slugs in the arm. In retrospect, little more than normal rough housing for boys our age, but that I didn’t have much history of roughhousing and that I grew angrier with each punch. Each kick to the back of my chair. Each cartoon about Dana. That he had started prank calling the house in a falsetto voice, pretending to be Dana, until finally my father, annoyed at the phone’s constant ringing, answered the phone and asked to speak to his parents (at which point he promptly hung up and stopped calling for the day).

There were fights at school. Nothing particularly brutal, but a part of the background noise. Boys trading punches before teachers pulled them apart. A cry of fight down a hallway, and kids scurrying to get a look.

I started to imagine fighting Schwartzman.

I brought it up to him a couple times. That if he didn’t quit it I was going to fight him. He mostly laughed it off, saying he’d kick my ass, which was probably true. I was taller than him, but he had about thirty-to-forty pounds on me and was a better athlete. All I’d really have to rely on was my mounting anger with him, and that it would carry me through hitting him as hard as I could a few times before he realized the fight was really on and reacted accordingly.

This went on for weeks.

Finally, a confrontation at our lockers--within one or two feet of each other, in a hallway outside our shared homeroom. I’m not sure what he did or said that day to make me especially mad, or if it were a straw-that-broke-camel’s-back situation, but I told him to shut the fuck up particularly loudly, particularly harshly, and without even taking the time to look at who was around to hear me.

And Skip was there.

Shorter than me. Shorter than Schwartzman. Not visibly muscled, but with a certain brand of crazy in his eyes, and a certain sharpness to his voice. Clad in a worn Buffalo Bills jersey, he was everything that Schwartzman and I were not. First and foremost, clearly willing to fight.

He stepped into the narrow space between me and Schwartzman, back to me, staring down Schwartzman from a distance that could not have been greater than two inches. You got a problem?

When Schwartzman tried to laugh off Skip, Skip moved with him, keeping eye contact, keeping close, asking again what the problem was.

Finally, I said, “It’s all right.”

Skip looked back at me. I nodded. He stepped away.

I don’t know that everything was resolved in that one moment--when is it ever? But I remember that that was the last time I thought about fighting Schwartzman, and I’m fairly certain that a part of that was because he stopped antagonizing me quite so much.

It was a year or two later when Schwartzman’s family moved. When AOL Instant Messenger came into vogue, we chatted a little there. I have vague memories of seeing him again at some birthday party and maybe once in college--we went to school about a half hour from one another. By then, it was mostly pleasantries. Catching up a little then going our separate ways. We’d never be close again, but we’d also never again come close to trading blows.

I remember saying hi to Skip in the hallways. A stint of him showing up outside of my Earth Science class, where my assigned seat was especially close to the door, and waving, or stopping to a do advance move. He had to have gotten a hall pass at that same time of day, day after day to do it. To extend that modicum of friendship. We’d talked every now and in passing, but he didn’t make any grand return to my lunch table. He never invited me to his house again. At some point in early high school--maybe before--he switched districts or moved or dropped out, in any case vanishing from my every social circle once and for all.

Neither of them are in my life today, though I’m Facebook friends with Schwartzman. He’s married and has a kid and by all outward indications has settled down in Upstate New York. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him again someday when I’m visiting home, and I think our last set of interactions would be a good testament to how it would be now. Pleasant, polite--friendly, even. But we don’t really know each other anymore.

And Skip? We’re not friends on Facebook. I can’t remember his last name, or even if Skip were his actual first name, or just a nickname? A cursory look, and I couldn’t find him at all in my old yearbooks.

I like to think he’s still out there somewhere, though. That he found plenty of his own friends, and maybe he’s settled down with a family, too. I hope that he might tell his son not to get too hung up on people who aren’t good friends to them. And that maybe he’ll tell the story of the time he stood up for one of those friends, though he never threw a punch. How that made all the difference.