It was 2002, and the school year had only recently begun. The cool Autumn air blew leaves from the trees, and the sun glowed a warm yellow over the campus of Hanford High School, where I was enrolled. As you’ll read elsewhere in this memoir, I did not have a happy childhood. My elementary and middle school years were a special kind of hell that I had to literally claw, fight, and dissociate my way out of. I was hoping, after a relatively calm eighth grade year, that the tumultuous times were behind me. Maybe high schoolers weren’t bullies? Maybe the teachers wouldn’t gang up with the bullies and castigate me for being weak? Maybe I wouldn’t get thrown in a closet for not doing my homework. Nah! Turns out that High School was just as cutthroat and brutal as the rest of my fucked up youth. But by this point, I knew how to play the game better than anyone. I, too, was out for blood, and ready to prove that I’d tear someone to pieces if they so much as looked at me the wrong way. And I would enjoy every moment of it.
Against this backdrop, I started off my year. I did well in most of my courses, especially the AP Computer Engineering course I was taking that year (more on that elsewhere). But there was one course that I didn’t even pretend to try in. My Freshman Year algebra teacher was phoning it in. He was ninety-something years old, and clearly just did not care anymore. He should have been dead, and I believe did die before I graduated. The guy could not teach to save his life, and within the first week, me and my two friends in his class were totally lost. We started showing up to be counted for attendance, and then bailing five minutes into class. He went along with it, because again, he just did not give a fuck. And neither did we, so the situation was agreeable to all parties. The school didn’t have to know we were truant, the teacher wouldn’t have us goofing around in his sham of a class, and we didn’t have to be bored for an hour every day.
We’d go out to the grass and chat, or play Magic: the Gathering on benches behind the library, where no one was likely to find us. Or sometimes we’d hang out in the library itself, playing games on the computers and coming up with reasons we weren’t in class to tell the gullible librarians. We rarely made mischief though, beyond playing hooky, as we didn’t want to risk ruining our fun. I was not so thoroughly traumatized by this point that I couldn’t stand having fun. It was close, but I managed to hold on to a tiny piece of childlike glee somewhere in the dark recesses of my heart. It wouldn’t last through High School.
A month or two into classes, it was getting cold outside. There was rarely any snow on the ground in the Tri-Cities, even back then before the climate changed, but it was certainly a bit nippy on one early Winter day when the bell rang to go check-in and hop straight outta that algebra class. I got there on time, as usual to be counted like cattle and processed, eager to get on with whatever shenanigans we’d find ourselves up to. Unfortunately, before the count was even complete, the fire alarms went off — the first god-forsaken fire drill of the year. So we all stood up, and shuffled out the back door of the classroom leading to the outdoors (this was back when you didn’t need to go through eleven layers of security to walk in and out of a school).
This story should end here. But that would be boring as fuck, and my life has never been boring — monotonous, tragic, morose, maybe — but never boring. Instead, my friends and I found ourselves chatting in a gravel parking lot behind the high school with everyone else enrolled, all spaced out in little clusters representing the different cliques which made up the student body. While our high school took all of the students from the attached middle school, we also took kids from a couple of other middle schools nearby, and obviously also accepted kids new to the area. And this, my dear daughter, is the point in the story where one of those juicy pieces of fresh meat committed a terrible, terrible error.
You see, by this point pretty much everyone at the school knew who I was. They had gotten to know me over the past nine years, and knew I was a crazy motherfucker. They’d seen me kick the principal in the shin and trow a desk phone at him. They watched as two teachers dragged me away — kicking and screaming — when I absolutely refused to let them throw me into a utility closet one more fucking time. They’d seen me bash kids’ heads into monkey bars, get into full-on fistfights, and threaten to bring a gun to murder another student. Now, hearing that, I assume you’d think that I was some sort of maligned, antisocial monster. That wasn’t the case, though. Every one of those incidents was prefaced by someone, either a student or a teacher, harassing, bullying, or assaulting me. I *never* threw the first punch. But I always swung back at least twice as hard as they had.
Why would I do this? Because that’s prison rules. And public education is a thirteen year sentence. You’re compelled to go, to be bullied, to be harassed, to be hated and despised for your entire childhood. You have no rights, no recourse, no justice. My school district had a “zero tolerance for violence” policy, which meant that if someone threw a punch at someone else, both kids got detention, suspension, or whatever. From a systems theory perspective, this was an obviously idiotic policy, because it incentivized victims of bullying to do exactly what I did. If someone picks a fight with you, and you know you’re getting in trouble no matter what, why not knock the kid’s fucking teeth out? If you don’t do it, you’ll be perceived as weak, and that’ll invite other kids to join in on the bullying. If you fight back, you show everyone you’re a crazy person who they need to give a lot of space to. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be perceived as crazy rather than weak. It’s a simple formula that you don’t need any algebra to solve. Weakness invites trouble, ferocity earns respect. And as Machiavelli says, “It is better to be feared than loved, if you must be lacking in one or the other.”
So when some new kid whose name I can no longer recall started throwing pebbles at my friends and I during that fire drill, I sprung into action. The first few pebbles I let slide, figuring it may have been inadvertent, or absent-minded kicking of rocks in the doldrums of a meaningless safety exercise. Hell, I didn’t want to be there either, so I kept my power dry. But after the third or fourth pebble directly hit us, I decided I had to take action. I picked up the largest rock that would fit in my hand, and marched the fifteen feet over to this kid with red eyes and a purpose. I swiftly threw my weight into him, bringing us both to the ground in a melee brawl. I hit that stupid son of a bitch as hard as I could with that rock, probably giving him a concussion. Immediately thereafter, the school cop broke up the fight and dragged us both to the principal’s office. I probably got detention or something, I don’t recall.
When I returned to algebra class the next day to be counted and to leave, the teacher remarked to me, “I’ve been teaching High School for over sixty years, and I have never seen anyone do something as stereotypical as getting into a fight during a fire drill.” I retorted that there’s a first time for everything, and left to go do my own thing. Absolutely nobody ever tried to bully me or my friends for the remaining four years of high school. I’d like to think that my strategy for dealing with bullies is what made me a fierce and effective advocate and litigator. I didn’t take shit from anyone, and if an attorney wanted to play games, I knew how to play, and I’d tear them to pieces in open court. The only difference, I discovered, between schoolyard brawling and trial practice is that sometimes words can hurt people more than taking a rock to the orbital.