This memory about being bullied resurfaced while I was trying to understand why I fear MRI machines
Image generated in Adobe Firefly by prompts from Scooter Smith. I have photographs of my elementary classes that would work very nicely here but they are in a box that I can only describe as somewhere.
Examine class photographs of children. Can you pick out the bully? Sometimes. Can you pick out the bullied? Almost always.
All of my class pictures from elementary school had one thing in common: I was always in the front row, the smallest boy in the group. That did not change in junior high. There, as if this were ordained by God, my place in the school’s social order was to be a target for bullies.
For most of my youngest life, however, I was unaffected by my size. I ran with the neighborhood kids. We played ball games and imagination games based on what we read or saw on 1950s TV. We built wet-season rafts and battled in the creek. We climbed trees and constructed rickety treehouses.
We even made a substantial clubhouse out of bricks and other scrounged construction materials behind the huge garage my father built. An old braided rug served as a floor, and an abandoned jeep seat became a sofa. However, the addition of a fireplace and chimney led to me getting into plenty of trouble.
Still, I was pretty soft compared to some boys. I read voraciously and drew cartoons. Musical, I became a band nerd. My parents just supported my interests and did not try to mold me into a stereotypical Texas kid.
As far as I was concerned, I lived an idyllic childhood.
But the idyll ended with junior high and hormones. I was small and among the youngest in my grade. I barely made the age cutoff for first grade, so my hormonal debut lagged behind the other kids. That was expected with the girls, but the boys got their growth spurts ahead of me, too.
Outside of the occasional bump-and-run by a crazy dude in the halls that sent my books flying, the bullying did not happen in the school building. The girls I grew up with liked me, and I spoke with them as friends. Since some of them were the school’s highest-status girls, if a bully attracted their wrath, it was enforced by a sizable athlete boyfriend.
But on the streets, I was on my own. There, and in the all-boy world of gym class.
Enter my nemesis, Jimmy. He started harassing me in seventh-grade gym periods like a walking, talking thesaurus dedicated to synonyms for the word small. The name-calling soon escalated to shoving, tripping, and throwing balls at my head and face while I wasn’t looking.
In the first semester of eighth grade, popping me in gym class no longer satisfied him. Jimmy decided to torture me.
He ambushed me from different points along the route to my home. I tried to escape when I saw him; however, I rarely outran him. When he caught me, he twisted my arm way up behind my back. While doing this, he jerked my body around, saying, “Look at that bush,” or asking, “Why are you looking at that?” or he just forced me to look up or down. Every question and motion was accompanied by increasingly painful yanks on my arm.
The abuse lasted all the way to his house, which was two blocks past my home. At the end of the trail, he pushed me as hard as he could into a tree, a wall, or down to the ground.
When he left, I picked myself up, gathered my strewn school materials, and trudged home where I didn’t mention what had happened.
Did I keep silent out of embarrassment? Did I just accept my fate? I don’t know. However, not stopping the abuse in one way or another left a shameful mark on my forehead that, although invisible to parents and teachers, was easily seen by my fellow students.
That mark proclaimed me a victim.
Once a designated target, knocking books out of my hands in the halls increased from a single wag to a wider array of boys now emboldened enough to take a shot at me.
Even a friend from my very young days felt free to bully me. He harassed me physically by throwing an elbow at me whenever we passed in the hall, and his girlfriend got in on the fun by digging me with suggestive, insulting comments.
Then came the burrito.
Toward the end of the school year, Jimmy and a couple of cohorts isolated me in the gym just before lunch. They knocked me down and rolled me up in a thick floor mat. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, and nobody was around to hear my muffled cries for help.
After more than an hour of terrifying immobility, a coach found me and unrolled me. He laughed at the boys-will-be-boys prank, but I was traumatized, very angry, and late for my first class after a lunch I didn’t get to eat.
That afternoon when school let out, Jimmy jumped me just outside the school door. He called me “burrito boy” and wrenched my arm harder than ever.
Spying some sports equipment in the grass, I executed a painful, desperation-fueled spin and broke his grip. I leaped onto a baseball bat and jumped back to my feet, threatening him with it.
Jimmy laughed at me, of course, but he had the good sense to start running. I took aim and threw the bat at him as hard as I could. It landed, blunt end first, in the middle of his back.
He went down hard.
Then, in front of dozens of students, he scampered away, crying and threatening to tell on me as he ran.
Watching him flee from my takedown felt good. Calmly, I picked up my stuff and walked home undisturbed.
That evening, my parents got a call from Jimmy’s parents. Following the call, they talked in hushed tones before confronting me about the incident. I told them how every afternoon after school became a torture session at the hands of my nemesis. I also proudly owned up to flattening the jerk.
They did not lecture me for tagging Jimmy with a bat. Instead, my father, a combat Marine veteran from World War II, immediately began training me in self-defense. Away from my mother’s eyes, he taught me some moves that would quickly disable a person, possibly permanently.
I practiced with Dad and grew more confident. Even so, we agreed that I was not destined to be a pugilist of any kind.
Word about my confrontation with Jimmy spread through the school like a kindergarten cold. A few guys started calling me Batman, and to my amazement, all hazing ceased. I suspected there was some embellishment to the story.
Over the next school year, ninth grade, I began to develop my father’s physique. By the end of the year, I was strong and agile.
In high school, life was good. More physical, I ran three miles almost every day, did ranch work in the summer, and played in an independent football league in the fall and winter. I progressed from being the friend of high-status girls to dating them.
I also quit school band, took up guitar, and formed a pop rock group with two friends. Initially composed of two guitarists and a percussionist, the combo needed a bass player.
Rick, our drummer, invited a prospect to an early rehearsal. I didn’t know it was Jimmy.
He was nothing more than a peripheral presence during our final year in junior high. Up until forming the band, I never saw him in high school at all. So it was a shock when he appeared at Rick’s front door.
Jimmy stepped inside, saw me, and stopped cold. I froze, too, not knowing how I’d react.
He spoke up first. He said he regretted being a bully and treating me so poorly. It sounded sincere. I thought that was big of him, but I needed to let this situation sit in my mind for a moment. I wasn’t sure I had extracted enough revenge.
Keith, the other guitarist, knew my history with Jimmy, unlike Rick. His already big eyes opened wider as possible scenarios played out in his mind.
For a long minute, I said nothing. Rick was confused by the strange vibes. Eventually, Keith broke the tension with a nervous laugh.
I looked at my bandmates and shrugged my shoulders.
“Let’s see what he can do,” I said.
And that was that. Although I felt very good about turning on and defeating my oppressor, it felt just as good to let bygones be bygones.
But, because I could have very seriously injured him with the bat, I apologized to him, too.
Then life went on and, as it does, buried my junior high trauma under an avalanche of memorable experiences.
It was not until decades later, when medical conditions demanded I undergo MRI and PET scans, that I realized the mere thought of squeezing my body into those tubes scared the bejeebers out of me.
Even though I learned that I could control this fear with .25 mg of Xanax, I wondered why I developed it in the first place. At long last, what you are reading, this memoir-as-self-psychoanalysis, answered that question: Burrito Boy Claustrophobia.
So, thanks no thanks, Jimmy, for the emotional scar. I still forgive you.
P.S. Do not beat someone with a baseball bat, kids! Instead, talk to your parents, teachers, or anyone in authority who could help you. Violence is almost never the answer, not even as a response to violence.