Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [22]
All this drove Sammy into a dark place. The phenomenal hate toward him did not, in turn, make him want to love others. And so he took it out on us little ones. We weren’t quite sure at our age why the older boys were so mean to him, but we soon learned that Sammy saw us as just shorter versions of his tormentors—and he never missed a chance to give any of us a good vicious slapping.
Anything could set him off—seeing us chew gum, mismatched pants and shirts, forbidden attempts to sing along with the songs on the 45 rpm records—and he grew more violent toward us with his punches and throwdowns. One day he tied little Pete Kowalski to a chair for “being bad,” and his mother had to come over and get him released (after giving Sammy a good whack across his face). We quickly stopped going over to the Afternoon Dance Party, but that didn’t stop Sammy when he saw one of us on the street. He’d push us down on the ground. Whenever passing by, he’d give us a good slug. After a while, we did our best to steer clear of him. We were kids; we didn’t understand the hurt he was carrying and how he needed to act it out. Even the adults seemed incapable of grasping such a concept in 1965.
One Saturday afternoon, I was riding my bike down the sidewalk on Lapeer Street and Sammy was walking toward me. I tried to cross on the patch of lawn between his sidewalk and the street, but when I did he screamed at me to “get off my lawn!” He then took the stick he had in his hand and threw it into the spokes of my front wheel—which caused it to stop suddenly, throwing me into the street. He just stood there screaming at me to “never, ever, even look at our lawn” and “don’t give me any lip!” Then he started laughing wildly as I brushed myself off and went running home with my bike.
When I got to our house, my Aunt Cindy and her husband, Uncle Jimmy, were there with their sons paying a visit. They were the relatives known as the Mulrooneys, and their brood consisted of three very tough sons, all much older than me. They lived on the east side of Flint, and I am certain these three boys were much feared in their own neighborhood. I myself was scared to death of them—and I was related to them!
I came up the front steps of our house and went inside, my elbows scraped and bleeding, and tears streaming down my cheeks. The cousin-thugs wanted to know what happened. I told them and they said, “Point him out.” I looked out our picture window and there he was, still standing down the street. “That’s him,” I said, knowing full well what was going to happen next. Unfortunately, I felt no remorse, only a sense of justice. That is, until I saw how justice was being meted out.
There in the street, the three Mulrooney boys were beating the holy crap out of Sammy Good. They first formed a circle around him. I knew that Sammy’s trapped-animal instincts would instantly kick in. He threw the first slap, and with that I couldn’t see any more of Sammy. The Mulrooneys pounced on him like piranhas on raw meat. Let’s just say the Mulrooneys weren’t “slappers,” and the velocity and ferocity of their fists going up in the air and then slamming down on him was a fierce sight to watch, something akin to a National Geographic special. You could hear Sammy’s screams