{"id":546,"date":"2009-09-17T01:30:24","date_gmt":"2009-09-17T06:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/?p=546"},"modified":"2009-09-17T07:13:37","modified_gmt":"2009-09-17T12:13:37","slug":"the-day-i-punched-buck-blalock-in-the-stomach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/?p=546","title":{"rendered":"The day I punched Buck Blalock in the stomach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Seventh grade isn&#8217;t tough for everybody&#8211;just the geeks.\u00a0 Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.\u00a0 I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know.<\/p>\n<p>Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.\u00a0 It was tougher for Buck Blalock.\u00a0 He was a big, doughy kid in my class, way too mature and sensitive to live in the world with the rest of us on the island&#8211;the <a id=\"x.ol\" title=\"Lord of the Flies\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lord_of_the_Flies\">Lord of the Flies<\/a> island we all inhabited back then.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Fine likeness, actually\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp-img\/memoir\/piggy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" height=\"227\" align=\"right\" \/>He was &#8220;Piggy,&#8221; all right, and I might have been Ralph or Simon and been his friend, but it seems I didn&#8217;t have the nuts for it.\u00a0 I had just moved back to Atlanta the year before, and I didn&#8217;t want to be &#8220;the new kid&#8221; forever.\u00a0 A lot didn&#8217;t depend on what I wanted, though, and that became clearer and clearer as time went along.\u00a0 Several of the boys were just as happy to keep me &#8220;the new kid&#8221; forever if they could manage it.<\/p>\n<p>So, here I was, kinda big and doughy and sensitive myself, and the teachers must have thought Buck and I were a match made in Heaven.\u00a0 They kept arranging for us to be partners in this and buddies in that.\u00a0 Maybe that plan was working out fine for Buck, but I started looking down the road, and I didn&#8217;t see any promising forks.\u00a0 It wasn&#8217;t that I disliked Buck and liked the other boys&#8211;Buck was fine, and some of the other boys were jerks of extravagant proportions.\u00a0 It&#8217;s just that the choice, at least in my mind, became a matter of throwing in with Buck and being a social outcast for life, or putting up with the annoyances of trying to be &#8220;one of the guys.&#8221;\u00a0 Even a seventh grader can do a simple deduction like that, and hey, some of the guys were all right.\u00a0 Some of the girls, too, but I could see that wouldn&#8217;t be happening for any friend of Buck&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>All of this came to a critical point one morning when the teachers assigned Buck and me to a job or errand involving close confinement in some sort of book room or supply closet&#8211;I forget which.\u00a0 Anyway, here came Buck, all sincere and mature, bearing in, suggesting we become best chums or suchlike as that.<\/p>\n<p>I fell apart.\u00a0 This mindless aggression welled up in me&#8211;horror and revulsion, not at Buck, but at the specter of what I thought being friends with him meant.\u00a0 I punched him once in the gut, which he hardly felt since he was pretty well padded there and I hadn&#8217;t followed through very much.\u00a0 I let him have another with a little more force behind it and started yelling something at him, something about staying away from me unless there were some reason he had to be around.<\/p>\n<p>Well, his chubby face fell as only chubby faces can fall.\u00a0 The poor guy was sort of devastated&#8211;predictably, I guess.\u00a0 I could see that things had not worked out as he had planned, not at all.\u00a0 Normally, I had a soft heart for people in pain, but not this time.\u00a0 In my callow mind, he meant to do me harm somehow, and it was really more a matter of self-defense, the way I saw things.\u00a0 That drained all the empathy from me mighty quick.<\/p>\n<p>So, I wasn&#8217;t Ralph or Simon, though I certainly wasn&#8217;t Jack on our little island.\u00a0 I admit I was one of the cast of nameless boys; still, I have trouble seeing this as an allegory about the <a id=\"terk\" title=\"banality of evil\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Banality_of_evil\">banality of evil<\/a>.\u00a0 It was a learning experience, for sure, and though Buck paid a price for my further education, I&#8217;m pretty sure he rebounded in whatever way he was able.\u00a0 I can&#8217;t help feeling bad about the experience, though&#8211;a fact which shows in that I prefer to think of it in rhetorical terms, terms beginning with, &#8220;If harm was done&#8230;.&#8221;\u00a0 The <a id=\"cb43\" title=\"subjunctive mood\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Subjunctive_mood\">subjunctive<\/a> <a id=\"put5\" title=\"passive voice\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Passive_voice\">passive voice<\/a>, <sup>[<a id=\"rvfw\" title=\"Weasel Words\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Weasel_word\">1<\/a>]<\/sup> if there is such a thing, gives one some hard-won intellectual distance and comfort.<\/p>\n<p>Historical notes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The movie version of <a id=\"oc:x\" title=\"Lord of the Flies\" href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0057261\/\">Lord of the Flies<\/a> came out in 1963, my seventh grade year.\u00a0 Many of the boys in the movie were just my age.<\/li>\n<li>That same year, <em><a title=\"Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem:_A_Report_on_the_Banality_of_Evil\">Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil<\/a><\/em> by <a title=\"Hannah Arendt\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hannah_Arendt\">Hannah Arendt<\/a> was published.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seventh grade isn&#8217;t tough for everybody&#8211;just the geeks.\u00a0 Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.\u00a0 I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know. Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.\u00a0 It was tougher for Buck Blalock.\u00a0 He was a big, doughy kid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs","category-philosophical","tag-life-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":575,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}