Why We Suck_ A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid - Denis Leary [32]
We suck. We suck really really bad.
By the way-if the tits don't kill our kids, the bullies will.
Let me tell you something about bullies-we need them. They teach your kid how to survive. How to plan a trip to school that includes every available navigational option so he doesn't have to run into the kid who wants to kick his ass.
Mean girls teach your daughter what it will be like in any workplace full of women she ends up dealing with later in life-the jealousy and envy and catfighting and backbiting. It is an early education. Why? Because that's the way girls are.
Boys? Boys will beat the living crap out of each other for one reason and one reason only-because they are awake.
CHAPTER 5 - Bullies R Us
Let me tell you a couple of bully stories.
When I was a kid, there was a bully in our neighborhood named Bobby Burns. He used to walk around in the summertime wearing a denim jacket with no shirt on underneath-like a discount Roger Daltrey. (In those days, everyone thought Roger Daltrey was cool. Tanned, long blond curly locks, no shirts, open denim jackets, sometimes with fringe, lead singer of the Who-who could be cooler? Just to put some perspective on the shelf life of cool, years later-in the nineties my son Jack-age nine-saw a video of Daltrey sporting that look and said "Wow. What a dork." So good luck with the ultra-baggy jeans, giant T-shirts and baseball hats cocked sideways, kids. Take plenty of pictures.)
Anyways-Bobby Burns was short and muscle-bound and for some reason hated my guts. Probably because I was taller than him. I was taller than most of the kids my age by the time I was fourteen. Also, I could actually put several words together and form a sentence-which Bobby had some trouble with, which led to his grunting and giving the finger a lot, which led to his repeating the fifth grade three times. He wasn't bright, Bobby. He was shaving before he took algebra. He drove himself to eighth grade. He was old enough to join the navy during his freshman year in high school. (Me and my friends came up with a million of these, by the way.)
Long story short-Bobby kept taunting me whenever he would walk by and my friends and I were playing street hockey or football on my block-grunting and giving me the finger and at least once challenging me to a fight because I was "bigger" than him. Needless to say, I was basically scared shitless of Bobby-as were all the kids in the neighborhood.
Rumors flew, of course, that Bobby was thirty-seven, that he had been in jail, that he had killed a guy and-the scariest rumor of all-that Bobby knew Kung Fu. Keep in mind that this was in the early seventies, when Kung Fu was considered a secret form of the martial arts that meant you could fly through the air and kill a guy with a karate chop. There was a show on TV about Kung Fu, a special G.I. Joe with a Kung Fu grip and a number one hit song called "Kung Fu Fighting." Kids being kids-reality had been massively displaced by a monster dose of gossip and fear until we all believed Bobby was a vicious, insurmountable superhuman force.
One day he walked right up to me and my friends and said-to me-"Hey Faggot-tomorrow if I see you on the street-I'm gonna kick your ass."
And then he swaggered away.
My friends were quick to back me up.
You better move, Dave Minor said.
Canada, Barry Gay said. They got plenty a hockey up there.
Yeah, John Dourville added, or you could live in the basement in my house-no one ever goes down there.
We should call the cops, Mark Zambini said. Kung Fu is against the law.
Andy Zambini cut a huge, smelly fart.
These were my advisers.
We spent the rest of the day throwing rocks and discussing why-with a kid actually named Gay on the block-Bobby Burns felt the need to