Decked by Evil
By S.E. Schaible
Elementary school in the 1970s had few systems in place to address bullying and other transgressions. Going to the teacher or principal yielded excuses and little else. “Boys will be boys,” they’d declare, as though powerless to get involved. Occasional beatdowns represented the price of admission to the jungle. Parents contacting parents was equally pointless; the public humiliation of being called out for having your mom intervene was worse than the trouble that preceded it. I grew up in northern New Jersey but this was not a regional phenomenon.
I trended small for my age starting around 10 years old, and with rare exceptions I stopped fighting after 4th grade – particularly against older boys. Instead, I learned other ways to get back at kids who could pound me in a straight confrontation, or grownups who could use their word against mine. One day after school I was minding my own business catching frogs in the brook near the Shop Rite supermarket. Out of nowhere there was a bombardment of loud splashes around me. I was stunned for a moment and soon heard the telltale sound of laughter from up the steep embankment. A couple of 6th grade boys thought it was great fun to assail the brook with rocks, scaring off the large green frogs I was approaching on a shady berm of mud and ferns. I didn’t know their names, but I had seen the taller one around and I knew he was a douchebag. He wore flood pants with patches and always looked filthy. “Cut it out,” I said. I stumbled on a slimy green rock, and he noticed my leg braces. He pointed and let out a moronic-sounding fake laugh. “Jesus Christ. We knew you were retarded but now you’re crippled? Lordy, what a sight!” The last thing I needed was to receive an open air swirly, so I ignored his insults and after a few minutes he left.
I spotted him riding his bike to school the following week – racing up on kids and screaming at the last second, bellowing that sad phony laughter as his victims dropped their lunch bags and jumped off the sidewalk. The next day I waited and watched him lock his blue Schwinn Stingray to the rack. The piercing morning bell sent the entire student body sprinting to the doors, and I took out the lock I brought from home and looped it around his wheel – forcing him to leave it at school and sort it out the next day. I walked a mile back to school after dinner to retrieve my lock and smeared the banana saddle, handgrips, pedals and shifter with a stick of margarine swiped from the refrigerator, rendering it unrideable. I was nervous applying the grease, but I broke out in belly laughs several times on the way home, picturing that he wouldn’t notice the sabotage and hop right on the bike after school. This was standard operating procedure for me, a textbook example of payback; I didn’t get caught because I never told a soul.
In May of 1974 near the end of 4th grade, a new 5th grader arrived at Roosevelt School. His name was Alex, and the rumor was he had moved to our town from one of the rough municipalities that filled the gap between there and New York City. He wasn’t particularly large or imposing, but he seemed to already have some chin whiskers and man-muscles, and he didn’t abide the unwritten code of recess football or king of the mountain. There was a large mound of red infield dirt behind the baseball backstop and under normal conditions a smaller kid like me could occasionally trip up a king and defend the hill for a minute until someone politely shoved me off.
A chaotic buzz filled the humid air one day as Alex spent what felt like an entire recess as the king. Kids of all sizes stormed the hill, and he tossed them viciously, kicking some in the chest or the balls as they scrambled to confront him. Ripped shirts and bloody elbows surrounded the menacing boy on the hill. Despite the carnage there was no shortage of takers, boys approaching like a school of bluefish racing toward chummed waters. I became caught up in the cartoonish frenzy and stormed the hill in my shorts and leg braces. He lifted something from the mound as I summited, turned and smashed the side of my head with a red clay dirt bomb the size of a grapefruit. I don’t remember tumbling down the mound, but I recall the dead look in his eyes – like a shark – and then a persistent ringing sound drowned everything out. I picked myself up, sensing clay caked into my left ear as if troweled by a mason. Just then my teacher, Mr. Falchetta, ran up waving his arms to signal the end of the spectacle, shouting words I couldn’t discern. Tears ran down my cheeks from the sting of the headshot. I was in bad shape.
Normally, I would have spent the next few days planning how to get back at this miscreant, but there was something so reckless and scary about the new kid that I relented. The bruises on my face and the red grime on the Q-tips after each shower faded after a week. I sensed a palpable evil around this boy and for the remaining weeks of school, I avoided any contact with him. Roosevelt was a sagging, peeling mess and was condemned that year; all the students were reassigned to other elementary schools. I was sent to Collins School, and Alex ended up at another school. I didn’t see or hear anything about him again until the first day of 9th grade. There had been a party for rising high school sophomores the night before. Around midnight the party broke up, and some words were exchanged between several kids walking in the dark toward the town center. Things escalated and a boy was stabbed in the chest, collapsing on the front lawn of the police station. He was unresponsive when the paramedics arrived and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Before it was the cover story of the West Essex Tribune the news spread from landline to landline. An arrest was made just hours after the incident, and the knife the assailant had used was recovered. This tragedy rocked our community; for me it came as no surprise to learn who was arrested in connection with the crime.