Seeking Magic

Some fifty years ago, when I attended Mount Vernon Junior High school, I was just a gentle, poetry-reading pot-bellied little four-eyed nerd.   And Rudy, the toughest bully in the school decided that I had narked on him, and that he would beat the hell out of me after school.

 

Rudy, his brother Oliver and two or three of his friends followed me home, punching and spitting on me as I hunched over my books, praying that one of the cars driving past would stop, that a driver would see what was...