Another Old Memory

I wrote about this for an English assignment in 2008. But I didn't like getting up at 6ish, and that crusty old asshole teacher kept giving me shit grades so I stopped attending, and so I didn't pass English until 2009.

This isn't what I wrote back then, I still have that story, but it was truncated. I want to talk about the time I defeated an old enemy.

When I was in kindergarten I was the happiest most social fucking kid in the world. I literally personally knew every human who lived on my street, and many elsewhere. My parents gave only 1 shit about my whereabouts at most times, and so I was usually free to just ride around on my bike meeting people. I would also get to know kids in the vicinity of relatives. I ended up good friends with the next door neighbor to my grandparents. He was 1 year younger than me, but 1 grade ahead of me. Little did I know by 1st grade my world would come crashing down.

In first grade my parents sent me to live with my grandparents. They lived in the same town, so it wasn't too far, but I was 6 fucking years old. The reasoning was that living with my grandparents would enable me to attend a better school. As it was now I only knew one person, the kid next door. However a family moved in across from me the day before 1st grade started, and I became fast friends with the new kid on the block. My old friend next door didn't like him. He told me his family didn't like the new family because they were Mormons. For this my old friend beat up my new friend. And I made a choice. I left my old friend.

I suppose looking in the third person it's kind of cute imagining a 6 year old chosing between a couple 5 year olds who to be friends with. But that was a pivot point in my life. As my personal life fell apart, I withdrew. the new friend became my only friend for, well, most of my life. And my old friend became my rival.

He was a bully, and he would still beat up my new friend. I was a fighter back then, but I never had an illusion of playing fair. He was a year younger than me, but he had always been bigger and stronger than me. I remember the last fight we had, I broke a clipboard over his head. It wasn't a solid wood one, it was plastic lined with cardboard inside, but it was a gift to me and I broke it over his head all the same. It wasn't the worst fight I'd had with him. He and his other friends would taunt me from time to time, but I guess that one stuck with him, because almost 10 years later he tried to get some kid to beat me up for it, when I told the kid that the clipboard incident ocured when we were children, he laughed and told my old friend turned rival he wouldn't fight me for some old shit like that.

I suppose it took a lot of ego crushing for him to find someone to beat me up, because as I said, he was bigger than me, until I hit puberty in 1995. We had both joined the same local swim team The Belmont Bullets for years. He had always been bigger, he had always been faster. But when I was 12 my body changed we were finally, and briefly, on the same physical level, I was as big and strong as him. However I showed up to practice twice a day, and he didn't show up at all. At the first swim meet, he finally came. We had a race together. For the first time in 5 seasons of swimming, I won. I beat him in pure physical capacity and skill. I knew immediately how important that was. He did too, I overheard his friends saying "dude you got beat by..." and him just looking pissed. He never showed up again. That's no joke. The motherfucker quit the team after I beat him in a race. He remained my neighbor, quietly hating me until I left for San Francisco 12 years after first meeting him. That's a long time for bad blood.