Neighborhood Nemesis: I stand up to the bully

My parents lived on a main thoroughfare – Ridge Road—between two side streets -- Hi View Drive and Julia Drive. Julia at that time, the 50s and 60s, was relatively undeveloped. After a few homes tucked away in woods, it dead ended in a forest that was perfect for childhood exploration and adventure. Hi View was more developed. It also dead ended, but in a circle of homes. My aunt and uncle lived down that drive, but as young kids, my brother and I seldom ventured down there, except for the occasional familial visit. Our focus was on the house behind us, the first house on the right when you drove down Hi View. The Nickles lived there and had six sons.

Our half acre property abutted theirs, and it was an easy walk through our backyard and up our garden path to their place. In nice weather, you might find my father had strolled up and was sitting behind their house, shooting the breeze with Mr. Nickle. My mother might be inside, sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Nickle, the two of them sharing their womanly woes. Curt was the oldest boy, already an adult when I was a kid. My only recollection of him is an image of him attired for work in a dress shirt and tie. Bernard was next in age. All I can remember of him is that when he saw you, he’d say, “Hi, pinhead.” Bobby was the next oldest. I can remember him playing football with us in their backyard: strong, fast, and all sharp elbows. But it wasn’t long before he was too old to bother with us younger kids, and he disappeared from my life, only to exist in my mother’s gossip about his marital life. Then, listing them from oldest to youngest, there was Johnny, Quentin, and Allan. They would play football and baseball with me and my brothers.

Quentin and Allan were younger than me. “Just kids,” from my viewpoint. All I can recall now is that Quentin used to like standing with his hands bent at the wrist and tucked into his armpits. Allan was the little one. As a teen, I enjoyed telling him scary stories.

Johnny was older than me, but for a long time was still willing to play with me. In his living room, we would set our green plastic army men against each other while he played albums of an instrumental group called The Ventures or told me about his favorite movie, a film starring the cool and tough Robert Mitchum as a fast-driving moonshiner, a 1958 film titled Thunder Road.

It was through Johnny that I learned what gambling and profanity were. One day, I was trimming around our trees when the trimmer jammed, and, repeating a word that I had heard Johnny use, I said, “This goddamn thing!” Unfortunately, I was in the hearing of my father who dragged me up by my T shirt and spanked me while he yelled, “I never want you to use profanity!” So that’s what profanity is, I thought to myself. Another time, I took my big stacks of baseball cards up to Johnny’ house, and he showed me these great games. You flipped cards with someone and if your card came up photo side and the other kid’s card didn’t, you won that kid’s card. Before long I had lost one of my big stacks of cards and was a little discouraged, so Johnny suggested that we switch to another game where you pitched your cards against a wall. The kid with the card closest to the wall won the card of the other kid. My streak of bad luck continued, and the fat piles of rubberbanded cards I had arrived with were reduced to what could easily fit in a T shirt pocket. I trudged home dejected, looking forward to mom’s comforting words of sympathy. My father was also there, though, and he took a less than sympathetic view of my misfortune. Hearing my story, his face grew angry. “Gambling!” he shouted. Grabbing me by the arm, he spun me around. “I” he yelled, swatting my behind. “Never!” SWAT. “Want!” SWAT. “To!” SWAT. “Hear!” SWAT. “Again!” SWAT. “That you’re gambling!” SWAT. So that’s what I’d been doing with Johnny. Gambling.

As Johnny got older, his life became less connected to mine own. He learned to drive and began lifting weights. Soon his biceps bulged and looked to my childish perspective to resemble Popeye’s arms, post spinach consumption. He could not only climb the robe in gym class; he could climb it upside down all the way to the rafters. He made wilder friends who liked to drink and to drive to downtown Cleveland, cruising the streets, looking for other gangs of kids to taut into fighting.

Still, he was Johnny. Ready with a smile and a laugh if you talked to him.

I got along with all the kids in the neighborhood. Until it was time to start high school. During my Catholic middle school years, I walked to school. Now I was attending public school, twice the distance away, and my parents expected me to ride the bus. That meant waiting for the bus at the stop on the corner of Hi View and Ridge. And it meant acquainting myself with unfamiliar kids from further on down Hi View. These kids coalesced around a tall boy who I will call John Badson. During this time period, everyone knew Jimmy Dean’s popular song “Big Bad John,” and Badson’s gang of kids referred to him as Big John. Big John didn’t know me, but he knew my aunt who lived near him. For reasons that I never could quite understand, he hated her, and so, because I shared the same last name, he hated me and could spit out my last name like it was gall in his mouth. As we waited for the bus to arrive, he might turn to me and say, “Hey, Palof. How’s your bitch of an aunt?” Words such as these fell harshly on my then virgin ears, more so that it sent his crew into peals of derisive laughter.

Every school day, I dreaded that morning wait for the bus. Even when nothing was said directly to me, I could hear Big John provoking the other kids’ snickering, feel their mocking eyes on me. I endured months of this treatment until the last school day before Christmas break arrived. I don’t recall what he said, what the last straw was, but I had reached my breaking point. I walked up to him, frustration, fear, and anger swirling within me. I stood opposite him as he towered above me. At eye level, I saw the zipper on his coat. Not thinking, in an absurd gesture of retaliation, I grabbed the zipper and furiously jerked it up and down its slider in his coat. When I had regained control of myself and stopped, I just stood there, watching his face darken with anger.

Before he could say or do anything, though, I heard a voice boom out over my shoulder: “Badson!” It was Johnny Nickle. He too rode the bus and waited there, apart from all the rest of us, and, as far as I knew, detached from all that went on. But now he stepped forward and faced Badson and said, simply, “Fight or walk.”

Badson hesitated. But he didn’t hesitate for long. Silently, Big Bad John turned away and began walking up the incline of the road, followed noiselessly by his crestfallen coterie of sycophants. Johnny had turned to watch them. When they neared the top of the incline, the place where you got the “high view” before the drive went into its descent, he turned to follow them, to walk back to his house. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t say anything. I said nothing to him about what had happened. Neither of us ever did.

All Christmas break, I lay at night worrying about what revenge Badson would exact on me when school resumed. But when I returned to the bus stop, Badson did nothing, said nothing to me. If his gang said something about me, they whispered. Whenever I saw Badson in the hallway, he would only look at me out of the corner of his eyes, eyes that burned with unquenched hatred.

Later in the school year, I would make the acquaintance of two other boys who lived down Hi View Drive, boys who became my best friends. Another Dale, Dale Limp, and Bruce Simon. Dale had a mother who would make you a hamburger at ten o’clock at night, and Bruce’s father had an unlocked liquor cabinet. Badson, for some reason, hated Bruce too, so the two us began walking to high school. As we liked to say later in our lives, rain or shine, we made the bullies ride the bus.

The last that I heard of Badson he was serving time in a penitentiary for killing his girlfriend’s baby by throwing it down in a bathtub.

I guess it was 1969 when Johnny got his draft notice. He wasn’t going to college and so wasn’t eligible for a deferment. Before his scheduled induction, he was determined to live it up, buying lots of loud clothes and partying. One night, drunk, he was driving up Royalton Road, swerved into the opposing lane, and hit a driver head on, killing himself and leaving the other driver severely injured.

After that, my father complained that his father, Mr. Nickles, wasn’t as talkative anymore. His wife told my mother that he made regular trips to the cemetery to weep at Johnny’s gravesite.

THE END