The Assemblagist

The topic? Bul­lies. Been think­ing about grade school through high school, try­ing to remem­ber who pushed peo­ple around at Echols Grade School, Kim­mons Junior High or North­side. It’s odd to recall cliques 40 years later, hell, who am I kid­ding… 50 years later. Don’t groups begin to form around first grade? Friends come and go, few rela­tion­ships remain con­stant through­out ado­les­cence. Less than a hand­ful of peo­ple who were the cen­ter of my exis­tence dur­ing the 1960s still remain in my life. You know who you are.

Grade School Bully

I bul­lied Mary Ler­aris dur­ing my ado­les­cent nasty years. Kicked her front bike tire while she careened out of con­trol down a fast stretch of empty road, remarked about per­sonal top­ics I swore to keep to myself and embar­rassed her in front of her friends. Oh yes, I remem­ber. Last time I spoke to a mutual friend, Lugene, was way back in the 1980s and she told me Mary lived in Italy, her hus­band in the Air Force. Sorry, Mary.

I often won­der if Carol Ann Cross hadn’t died, maybe I’d have been a bet­ter friend to girls like Mary. Carol’s death changed me pro­foundly and it shad­owed my ado­les­cent years. By the time she died, all my grand­par­ents were dead and my cousins lived hun­dreds of miles away. Lonely before I knew what lonely was. *Hey Car­o­line. You are my trib­ute to her.

David remem­bers me in the third grade dur­ing Vaca­tion Bible School when I bitch-​slapped him with some pop-​beads. How ironic is it that he is now on the Vestry of that church and I’m out here in God’s Waste­land with­out a decent par­son­age in sight?

Dur­ing junior high and high school, the respec­tive Dean of Girls at each insti­tu­tion found me rebel­lious and con­trary (one called me a “real come­dian”) while at the same time nom­i­nat­ing me for Girl’s State and other hon­ors. My aca­d­e­mic and social state of flux spi­raled from one sit­u­a­tion to another as my par­ents sat back and watched in dis­turbed silence. Delta Beta Sigma soror­ity. I became a mem­ber sim­ply because my sis­ter told me to join. She entered the South from the Chicago sub­urbs late in her teenage years — as a high school senior. This cre­ated a social iden­tity back­ground abyss for her as she was denied all the proper accou­ter­ments of an upper-​middle class white girl in the South pre-​desegregation because my par­ents refused to join Hard­scrab­ble Coun­try Club and other remain­ing bas­tions of Decay­ing South­ern Aris­toc­racy on the Arkansas/​Oklahoma bor­der. Ann believed my admit­tance into DBS would vin­di­cate her and give her South­ern cred­i­bil­ity when dis­cussing my wan­ton dis­re­gard for aca­d­e­mics and hairspray.

“She is absolutely hor­rid,” she’d say to her friends, “but she’s in a high school soror­ity now and I know those girls will straighten her out.” It broke Ann’s heart to see me eschew Madras and embrace Levi Strauss but she saw a bright bea­con of hope when I dis­re­garded the kind atten­tion of DAD and instead chose DBS. That is one huge can of worms, my friends. High school soror­i­ties and fra­ter­ni­ties 1960s-​1970s. There’s a big old oppor­tu­nity for com­ment here, for psy­cho­log­i­cal soci­o­log­i­cal scat­o­log­i­cal study of racism in the South in the days just before and after Johnson’s Great Soci­ety hit the shores of the Arkansas River. Think I’ll pass on the oppor­tu­nity and get back to per­sonal revelations.

Amaz­ing what I recall, isn’t it?

I will never for­get my sister’s ded­i­ca­tion to deplet­ing the ozone layer single-​handedly with can after can of Aqua Net. Or how Ann would hiss under her breath for me to “shh­h­h­h­hut up now” when­ever I spoke to one of her friends.

Bul­lies, the topic is Bul­lies. Some­how I’ve strayed into famil­ial relationships.

I sup­pose Ann bul­lied me. Both her hus­bands were/​are bul­lies. Mean-​spirited men who pick on women in order to feel bet­ter about them­selves. Gos­sips who spread tawdry mal­truths around town. They no longer influ­ence my self-​image and for that I am thank­ful. But Ann, God bless her, she cer­tainly tried to trans­form my squir­rely self into her ver­sion of a South­ern Belle. Sadly, I became the truth incar­nate — a liv­ing breath­ing tru­ism — you really can­not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. No mat­ter how hard she tried, Ann could not civ­i­lize me. When she died last year– 64 years old — she’d not spo­ken to me in almost a decade. Her dis­ap­point­ment fol­lowed her to the grave. I walk past her house every day with Roxie or one of the Jacks and I pon­der whether or not it would have been bet­ter to just acqui­esce and be her vision of me rather than myself… nah… I like me.

Most of my trans­gres­sions truly stemmed from the fact, the unde­ni­able truth, that I’m a big goober. I was a grade­school doo­fus try­ing to get a laugh. To this day, I speak before I think and leap before I look.

The bul­lies of North­side High School? Phys­i­cal name-​calling, finger-​pointing nasty act­ing bulles? I don’t recall them. Maybe they existed and I denied them access to my day. I sin­cerely do not remem­ber a group of stu­dents taunt­ing another group, it seemed every­one “had” a group, a clique, a place to belong. Where? Band. Jocks. Journalism/​Yearbook staff, stu­dent gov­ern­ment, shop class, cho­rus (Edna Earle Massey, for­ever in my 10^th grade mem­ory files along with Earl Farnsworth, her pur­ported lover ha-​squared), art class (the cool kids), cheer­lead­ers (She­lagh loved Col­lier, Lynn and Jim, yes, I remem­ber the “Couples”) — a place for every­one and every­one in place. Then Mrs. Head decided there should be a Black Miss North­side, a Black Bruin Beauty — that might very well be when some bul­ly­ing began. She meant well, but she drove us apart, God bless (lit­er­ally) Mrs. Head. I adored her.

Wow, I can go from one thought to another. The amount of junk stored away in this brain amazes me. Maybe I’ll go on the road, do a tour as “The Mem­ory Savant”. What I will do instead is write an hon­est blog, filled with how I remem­ber it — truth to me — maybe fic­tion to you.

Com­ing soon, I’ll write up a list, sans out­side influ­ences, of what peo­ple I remem­ber and how they behaved 1962 – 1972. Fort Smith, Arkansas. Look out. You might be on here. Brent. Hal. Mary Pat. David. Lugene. Chris. Kitty. Rhonda. Mar­garet. Jayne… Paula. She­lagh. Col­lier. Jim. Leslie. Sarah. Mike. Tom. Walt. Joel. Time to stop… talk to you again soon.

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