The Road to Hell

Part I: Snot and Blood

I was a good kid. This is something I have to remind my parents of constantly. Still, they keep bringing up "stories" and "facts," somehow proving I may not have been. I tell them that I never got into drugs or the wrong crowd or got some girl pregnant. I didn't do any irreparable damage to myself or my family's reputation. To be fair though, I wasn't easy either. I was moody. Passive-aggressive. Committed to computers, I abhorred anything that required me to be in the sunlight for longer than it took to walk from the building I was leaving to my car. So while I may not have been arrested or flunked out of high school, there are still a fair amount of "problem child" stories.

I had this friend, Gus, a kid one year younger than I — which equates to a life-time when you're under 10 years old. His lips were framed by a perpetual runny nose, nostrils accented with the crusty remains of day-old snot. He had an aggressive lisp that must have been the inspiration behind the term "Say it, don't spray it." And he pouted a lot. When things didn't go his way, his response was to cry or mope or throw himself on the ground and kick his feet. He lived right down the street from me; this was a neighborhood friendship, the kind you didn't choose, but rather accepted. We spent a lot of time together, he and I. He went to a private Catholic school, while I attended Stafford Elementary and most afternoons we spent either playing outside, or in each other's homes, playing our favorite video game, Dune which was just a reskinned version of our other favorite game, Command & Conquer. OPB was the only channel he was allowed to watch, so we went through a lot of Bill Nye the Science Guy and Reading Rainbow.

Before we could go outside, he'd have to change out of his school clothes and don his "Play Clothes." The type of disposable clothing one would wear if one were going to paint an outhouse that's seen a lot of traffic.

His love for pouting was only outmatched by his love for Micromachines, Matchbox style toys with a military flair. M1A1 Abrams tanks, BMP1 Amphibious Transport vehicles, F-14 Tomcats, A10 Warthogs, Humvees, T-80 Main Battle Tanks, M3 Bradleys; miniature toys to get your little colonel addicted to the military before the age of 10. We'd set up massive battles in the ravined area behind his house, punctuating the scene with our explosive sounds — "Kerpow! Blamo! KKrrrrsshhhht! ssssssSSSSS-Prrgooooshhh!" — tossing dirt into the air when a Hellfire missile hit something and even going as far as burying the destroyed vehicles in rubble. Gus, of course, meticulously removed and cleaned the toys the second they were done being dead. He didn't have the same commitment to the morose as I did.

Gus was a rule follower, too. If we were at my house and a TV show came one that wasn't OPB-funded, he'd simply leave the room. He'd take off his shoes when he entered any home. He'd look both ways before crossing our deserted neighborhood road. When his mom said, "Come home before 7pm," that didn't mean "Race home at 6:59pm." It meant "leaving at 6:30pm to give himself 30 minutes to walk 150 feet."

Even worse, Gus wasn't very athletic. You throw a ball at him and he'd be more likely to curl into a ball and wait for it to hit the ground than to actually catch it. This often made him the target of what could be lovingly described as the Playground Crucible. A prime example of Darwin's theory regarding physical strength and personal longevity. A kid showing even a mild form of weakness would be like placing a crosshair on their back.

I, being a benevolent and kind neighbor that I was, decided he needed to toughen up. I was playing the part of rich philanthropist, helping others due to equal parts kindness and boredom, donating $100 here and there to build a well in some impoverished state in a no-name country partly to make the world a better place, sure, but mostly for the tax write-off. So we played catch. Only without baseball gloves.

"The pain will be good for you," I said, when he shook his hand out after catching my first throw. "It'll make you tough. You want to be tough, right?" He was the target for ridicule because he was too easy to poke at. This is the first law of the Playground Crucible.