That Time a Bully Asked Me for Forgiveness

Inside the heart of a bully

Bullies have been around forever. So have I, but that’s not the same. Anyway, this story from my high school days during the 1970s still resonates because bullies are timeless.

Photo by Evilicio inc. on Unsplash

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It all started when I began to innocently walk across the street during a high school open period.

I have no idea how high schools work these days, but in the mid-1970s, mine had an open campus policy that allowed us to leave school grounds for lunch.

Normally, I would have been driving my mom’s car, a 1967 Pontiac LeMans, trying to see through the cloud of smoke puffed out by my passengers, who were students of the bong and the kind of fat joint that could be easily shared by five kids in a hurry to get high before they arrived at the nearby McDonald’s.

Image of 1967 LeMans with a GTO grill by Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sidebar: My mom was a full-blown pill addict, so, lucky me, I drove her car to school almost every day like it was my own. I didn’t disavow the kids in my inner, outer, and middle circles of the notion that it was mine. This made my car a popular destination for many kinds of adolescent outings.

I don’t recall, but my mom may have needed the car that day and was somehow alert enough to drive it. I say this because, for some reason, I was walking. There was only one destination for someone like me in those days if I wasn’t in a car full of smoke.

The nearest place to eat was McDonald’s, but you couldn’t get there and back in time during the open period if you walked.

This means I was probably walking to smoke a joint in the fields across from the gymnasium. Joints were often in session during the lunch hour among my friends. As you can guess, I, like other regulars on the joint-smoking circuit, wasn’t planning on graduating top of my class.

The lane on the road exiting the school grounds was crowded, as it usually was during lunchtime.

The line of cars wasn’t moving faster than a crawl, so it seemed safe to cross. I was near the stop sign leading to the main road, too, which slowed things down even more. I checked for traffic in the other lane leading to the school (my mom was lucid enough when I was a kid to teach me to look both ways). All clear.

When I returned my gaze to the crowded lane of slow-moving cars, I found myself slamming my open palms against an oncoming hood. Somebody had decided to skip the long wait and drive on the wrong side of the road to the stop sign leading to the main thoroughfare.

How he was planning to sneak back into the line to avoid oncoming traffic entering from the main road after that was a subject that never came up.

The guy who hit me told me later that my maneuver against his hood was one of the coolest things he had ever seen. “Dude, you like, used my hood to like, vault off my car and roll your ass onto the lawn.” I remember the use of the word “like” two times in the sentence even today, after all these years, probably because the guy saying it terrified me.

The guy who hit me was famous for beating the crap out of people. He was the alpha of the school bullies. He was the guy the other bullies were afraid of.

In my high school, school bullies often expressed themselves with their fists as much as they did their mouths. He was considered enough of a threat that if he walked against traffic in a crowded hallway, the crowd parted like riot police were blasting them with a fire hose.

So it was a really weird feeling to drift back into consciousness with his hands shaking and wiping the blood off my brow in a gas station restroom.

I was a little concerned upon seeing all this while coming to. I had no memory of his car hitting me. My first thought was that I was cornered. My second thought was that he had pounded the crap out of me and was cleaning me up because he had some really weird mental thing where he thought he was a boxer and he was fantasizing about the guys in my corner prepping me for a second round.

I wanted to say to the guy, “Hey, dude, I am down for the count. Back off.” But luckily, before I could speak, I suddenly remembered the thing about the car.

For a tough guy, he sure was scared. There he was — the bully of the school bullies, the general and dictator of the mean crowd, wiping my face, his hands shaking so badly he could barely hold the gas station paper towel he was using.

I was a sophomore at the time, skinnier than a Dixon Ticonderoga pencil (number 2, the only kind that mattered).

Image by Dbooko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t want to say anything to him, because I’d seen enough TV shows with bad guys to know that anything I said could be used against me. If I played nice, I’d be weak. If I sassed him, he’d pop me. He was a big guy. I didn’t want him to pop me.

So I kept quiet. Finally, I could see him getting ready to say something. I braced my hands against the sink to prepare for the onslaught.

“You ever need anything, you let me know,” he said as his hands continued to tremble while dabbing another minor wound on my face.

Finally, I mustered some manly courage. “What happened?” I asked weakly.

“You don’t remember? I hit you with my car. I’m sorry, man, I was just pissed about the traffic and wanted to get going. Got you pretty good, I thought, but it coulda been worse. That was a neat gymnastics trick you did.”

I don’t think he used the word neat. It was more of a colorful collection of expletives describing the art of gymnastics.

He went into some detail about how I used my hands to push myself to the gravel on the driver’s side of the road as he plowed into me.

“I mean, check out your legs. Are they hurt? Just your face I think. You rolled in the gravel and I think your head kinda bounced when you landed. It was pretty slick how you did that.”

In today’s world, this would call for a concussion protocol, but in those days, everything was just fine.

Then he reiterated his prior declaration: “You ever need anything, you let me know. Anybody fucks with you, they’re fucking with me.” I nodded at that and may have said thanks. I have no idea. All I knew was that boy rules forbid running to the local help for such things, so I knew I could never cash in the favor.

Even though I was of slight build, I didn’t have a bullying problem in high school, so I was never able to determine if his protective services had any impact. I did notice a couple of his friends occasionally nodding to me in the hallways, perhaps because he had shared the story of my vaulting prowess with them.

I was on the football team, too, which, in my school, acted as an added ring of protection. It also probably helped me with the vault, because we were taught “how to fall.”

Still, there was comfort in knowing that I, one of the skinniest dudes in school, had no worries about anybody messing with me for at least two years. Hey, the way I figured it, maybe three because I doubted he’d graduate in time.

I learned an important lesson on that day. I discovered that at least one person who relied on intimidation to manage his personal affairs was led by a heart bigger than he knew.

One consideration was likely that he’d get into some kind of trouble. But his behavior in the bathroom on that day didn’t remind me so much of a kid worried about trouble from the authorities. He seemed genuinely concerned about me.

I detected, dare I say it? Tenderness.

Why wasn’t he concerned when he pummeled a kid? I never figured that out. I never asked him. I later learned that his mother was a violent alcoholic who beat up her kids enough to draw the police into their living room a few times.

The experience changed my outlook toward people who try to push others around. I discovered that their engines often run on the fires of fears that stay hidden from the view of others.

It’s also a reminder that when people are young, they are almost always salvageable. A good teacher here, a kind counselor or priest there, could have turned him around. And who knows? Maybe someone did. Because he had a heart. I saw it on that day in the dingy bathroom of a gas station.

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