Sucker Slap

There comes a point in life when a person realizes that enough is enough. Deep in the misery of fifth grade, following years of taunts and ridicule, I reached that point.

Throughout elementary school, I endured an abundance of bullying. It varied in theme and tone, but never in intensity. Most of it was physical, but certainly not all of it. My bullies enjoyed messing with my head, too.

Some psychologists would say that emotional bullying is far worse than any form of physical, even if physical bullying included being tied to a tree, or having your face shoved in dogshit. I’m no psychologist, but I will tell you this: neither one is any fun.

The champion of my emotional bullying was a boy named Andy. Andy wasn’t the most popular kid in class, and he wasn’t that much bigger than me. Yet somehow, I became his main target. He was probably trying to gain a rung on the social ladder by constantly putting down someone just slightly beneath him in the pecking order.

Although Andy didn’t physically harm me like so many others of his ilk, his taunts still stung. So much for the old adage that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” Words did hurt me. A lot.

Andy also had the unique ability to say things to me under his breath when nobody else was listening or within earshot.  This way, he could slowly break me down, like verbal water torture. Drip by drip.

A sampling:

“Nobody likes you.”

“Nobody is ever going to want to kiss you/love you/marry you.”

“You have bad breath.” He always liked to comment on my bad breath. Whether or not my breath was actually bad, I never really knew for sure. But I took his word for it.

All his words.

In response, I consumed quite a lot of gum, mints, and breath spray, but the more mint he smelled on my breath, the more he seemed to tell me how badly my breath stunk. I was convinced there was no amount of mint in the world that could freshen my breath.

For some reason, the breath insults bothered me more than so many of the seemingly far worse things he told me. He single-handedly took my breath from me. And shattered my already pencil-thin social confidence.

Andy also had a propensity to remind me of the long list of embarrassing things I had done, or had been done to me over the years.

As though I would ever forget.

Sometimes, he preferred to mimic my speech impediments, even the ones that were long gone.

Though Andy never laid a hand on me, he loved to pretend to hit me, which in turn, made me flinch. This way, he never had to worry about getting in trouble for punching me, but he could get off on my consistent reaction, which was just shy of curling into a ball.

But then the day finally came for me to lay a hand on him.

Scene: elementary school cafeteria. I was sitting alone, despite being surrounded by peers at a packed table, chomping on my bologna sandwich. Oscar Meyer. On Wonder Bread. With a healthy spread of French’s yellow mustard. Andy decided to squeeze in right across from me, where he proceeded to make fun of the way I was chewing. Now,  I’ve always been a horrible chewer, and I knew it. Andy loved to remind me.

“Hey, Bugle Boy!” Andy said, in reference to my reuputation gained as a one-time Bugle Boy model. “Wat’cha got there?  Bologna? Aren’t your worried about  your breath?”

I ignored him, even though I was crying inside.

I couldn’t even swallow the bite of bologna in my mouth. Combined with the white, mushy bread, it had turned into more of a paste in my mouth. With a hint of mustard.

“Maybe I should call you Bugle Breath! Hey, Bugle Breath!”

I was losing my grip. I could feel everything I was holding in beginning to work its way out.

“Oh oh! Looks like Bugle Breath is about to cry. What are you going to do about it?”

I ignored him, but then he threw a figurative gut punch. “Better ask your mommy to call Lifeline!”

Them were fighting words.

My mom was not only a lunch lady a hundred feet away, but she worked for the emergency call system, Lifeline, leading to constant taunts mimicking the famous 80s commercial with the little old lady proclaiming, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

Looking back, something like that really shouldn’t have been embarrassing. But my classmates simply turned it into something embarrassing by incessantly teasing me about it. Perhaps if I never let on that it bothered me, it would have stopped. But that was my problem. I always let on.

As Andy kept taunting me and my mother, I felt something unfamiliar boiling deep beneath the surface. Something I could no longer contain.

Rage.

Up until that point, I had always found turning the other cheek to be a convenient way to cope. But not now. Not this time. Passive resistance can only work for so long. It was time to take to the streets. You don’t talk about a boy’s mama without a fight.

Maybe all it would take was one solid punch to rid myself of this bullying curse once and for all, just like the movies lead me to believe. If it worked for The Karate Kid, it could work for me. And if I went down, at least I would go down swinging. Just look at Rocky.

But this was no movie.

One thing was clear, I had reached the point of no return and gave it my best shot. Unfortunately, all of my suppressed, accumulated rage could muster up was one half-assed, weak slap across my bully’s cheek, filled with a bologna sandwich of his own.

Not a sucker a punch.

A sucker slap.

Andy’s immediate reaction was to laugh, then choked on his bite (a brief, moral victory). When he recovered, he continued eating his sandwich as though nothing had happened. Meanwhile, the dozen or so witnesses also laughed, then got back to their far more popular existence.

I was beneath notice. Even a slap from me was beneath notice.

Adding insult to injury, this incident prompted even more teasing by my bully.

I remained Bad Breath Bugle Boy.

And my bullies now knew that even if I tried to do something about it, they didn’t have to fear serious retribution.

But what may have been only a mild graze to Andy felt like a knockout punch to me. I had stood up. I had fought back. Me, Bobby Bugle Boy had actually taken a stand.

Maybe tomorrow, I wouldn’t. Maybe tomorrow, I would cry. Maybe tomorrow, I would run to my mother. But today, I had hit Andy back. Today, I was Rocky and the Karate Kid all rolled into one fifth grader who wore a Sea-Monkey necklace and went by the name Bugle Boy.

That’s Mr. Bugle Boy with minty-fresh breath to you.