I was home on leave at my parents’ house in North Dakota before I headed to Korea. I had sold my Buick Wildcat that I had owned at Fort Benning to my brother Craig. I had some fond memories, well maybe not fond, with that Buick Wildcat. Like the one time that car got “lost” in the parking lot near my barracks at Fort Benning, Georgia. Perhaps a ‘better’ memory was when I discovered the Wildcat’s “magic radio”. Or the time where my Wildcat got broken into and my subsequent escapades with the Fort Benning military police. Now, while I was home on leave, I spent most of my time visiting old friends and tooling around on my old motorcycle. Hell, previously while on leave I was riding about on that motorcycle but ended up being in an accident. Perhaps you remember it like I do? Well, this story isn’t about any of that bull pucky. Nope it’s more about my high school’s politics and how those same politics were going to influence this particular day in my life. As I said at the beginning, I was home on PCS leave, enroute to Korea. Most of the time, when I headed out of the house, I walked, if I was just going around town. My hometown was only a mile across from one end to the other. If a person’s sole purpose were to walk across town with no particular destination in mind, that person could walk all the way across town in 15 minutes. Usually, I had a destination in mind when I headed out of the house. One day when I headed ‘downtown’ to Main Street. I had just turned off of South First Street behind the grain elevator after crossing over the railroad tracks. Then, I walked across the parking lot behind the police station. I circled around the police station and turned onto Main Street. I had no sooner turned onto Main Street when I heard somebody calling my name. I looked around but could see nobody walking anywhere on the street. However, parked diagonally across the street from me was a pickup. Two people sat inside the pickup. I did not immediately recognize them. When I came abreast of the pickup truck, on the other side of Main Street, I realized that the driver was Tommy Colson. His passenger was one of the Paulson boys. I wasn’t sure of his first name. I knew that Colson was cousins with the Paulson’s and that I had dated one of their other cousins back when I was in high school. But neither Colson nor the Paulson’s liked me worth shit when we were in high school. In fact, I avoided them like the plague. The reason I avoided them was because I didn’t feel like fighting every damn day of the week. You have to understand, there were several, I won’t call them gangs, more like cliques. And I had enemies in every damn one of them except the animals. “Gangs” seems like such a harsh word given its current usage. When you hear the word “gang” used in reference to society today, you think of gangs like the Bloods and the Crips. What I think of as gangs or cliques were groups like the jocks, the druggies or as we used to call them, the dopers, the losers, the wusses, the brains (these were guys who were really nerds before the word nerd became popular), and the animals. I happen to have been a member of the animals. Go figure. The animals are probably not what you’re thinking. I have no idea what you’re thinking, but whatever it is, it’s probably not that. The animals were simply a group of misfits that wasn’t really accepted by any other group. Take me for example. I should have been a charter member of the brain club or the brain gang. Why? I was number one in my class. Need I say more. People came to me for answers to anything and everything. Even the upperclassman came to me for answers. I could have been a member of the jocks as I was a decent athlete. However, in order to be a member of the jocks, you had to meet two requirements. One, you had to compete in multiple sports, meaning more than one. And two, you had to be accepted by the other jocks. Note, number one wasn’t very important. However, number two was a bitch. If you were not accepted by the other jocks, forget it. You were not a jock. Period. End of discussion. However, one time in the fifth grade, a teacher got totally frustrated with all of my classmates and told them they were all acting like a bunch of monkeys. She said they should behave more like me. Bad move. Some of the guys in that class were future jocks, some were losers, and a couple were future dopers. To them, I became the monkey. I was the charter member of the animals. My best friend had a foot problem that caused him to walk like a pigeon or a penguin. Since he ran with me, he became known as the pigeon. The owner of the local Chevrolet dealership had a son who was in our class. I have no idea where his nickname originated or why. I just know that he was afraid of pretty much everybody and that he became known as Bambi. It didn’t help that he ran with the monkey and the pigeon. The fourth and final member of the animals was a kid I met when I first moved into town off of the farm. He was an only child, and he was as big as me, actually bigger. His last name was Verke (pronounced Vur-kee). You guessed it. Verke rhymes with turkey. That’s the only reason he became known as the turkey. Well I’m sure it also had something to do with the fact that he ran with the rest of us animals. The wusses were an interesting bunch of people. These were the people who thought they were smart. They were not smart. They just thought they were. They formed a chess club and joined it so that they wouldn’t have to associate with other people and possibly get beat up by the jocks or the losers during breaks or at lunchtime. Here’s the thing, though. They constantly tried to get me to join their chess club. The problem was that I could beat everybody in the chess club at chess including their coach who was supposed to have been a college champion before he became a teacher. They did not offer any competition. Plus, my older brother, Tom was a member of that group. I didn’t want to have anything to do with a club to which he was a member. Besides, I could not see the need to join a group of wusses to hide from a bunch of punks that I would just have to beat up after school anyway. Yes. I got into a lot of fights. In fact, Tom’s girlfriend decided to pick a fight with me at a basketball game because of my choice of date for the ballgame. Remember that guy Colson. It was his cousin. But not only his cousin. It was his cousin, the girl I was dating plus two of the Paulson sisters. Yeah. Things were kind of funny that way. The guys in that family hated my guts. But the women, they all loved me. But as far as everybody else in town was concerned, they were from the wrong side of the tracks so to speak. So, I was drawing down my family’s good reputation by dating a girl I liked. Not to mention that I was also lowering the property values in town by being seen in public with them. Perish the thought! Well, excuse the hell out of me. Get over it. I’ll date who I want, and you can date my stupid ass brother. But no. My brother’s girlfriend wasn’t going to let that shit go. Oh, hell no. She just had to start some shit. So, she threw down with me right there in public at the basketball game. I had read some books on jiu jitsu in the library and I practiced that shit on her. My version of it worked like a charm. She went down for the count. As soon as that bitch reached out to slap me, I grabbed her arm and flipped her like a ragdoll. Boom! Onto the floor, she went. Unfortunately, the high school newspaper photographer happened to be ‘Johnny on the Spot’. The front-page headline for the school paper read, “Kung Fu Fighting.” And that photographer was good. He caught that bitch right in mid flip. You may remember that headline from a popular song with the same title that came out from the same year. I did not live that shit down very quickly. And I had to duck Colson and the Paulson boys for days due to that shit for ‘embarrassing’ their family. As if their family could be embarrassed. Please! They already had the rap of being from the wrong side of the tracks. How in the hell was I going to embarrass their family? More likely, I was adding to their notoriety, if not adding a touch of class to their family. Fast-forward a few years, and Colson is calling out to me like we’re old pals. What’s up with that? So, I crossed the street to say hello. They asked if I wanted to get a beer. Shit. That was a dumb question. Does a fish swim? Does a bird fly? Of course, I wanted to get a beer. Everything depended upon the cost. When they said get in, I figured the cost was pretty damn cheap. We spent the whole day, and most of the night, drinking and catching up. It surprised the hell out of me that I could sit peacefully and have a meaningful conversation with former enemies. But then I remembered that our government had done similar things around the world. Was I really forging new friendships or was I really just experiencing another exercise in futility? Only time would tell.
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