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| The Bottom of the Food Chain (Two) | |
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| Topic Started: Sep 14 2009, 12:22 AM (289 Views) | |
| Post #1 Sep 14 2009, 12:22 AM | Joe E. Holman |
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The Bottom of the Food Chain (Two of Four) The cream-of-the-crop losers that I once called friends will never leave my memory. Of that I am sure. This article takes off at the beginning of the 1993 school year, my last year of high school. After Chris Kennedy, there was Brian Kieford. Brian, like Chris, was sloooooow as the dripping of molasses. But unlike Chris, Brian wasn’t a booz hound. Heck, he probably never had a drink in his life. He seemed to be a good kid at heart. He was part Jewish and part African American. He had quite a cool look to him aside from the oh-so-plain clothes he always wore. He had the sweetest smile stretching across his face most days and a set of engagingly bright puppy dog eyes. My parents loved him for being such a quiet kid who always said “yes sir“ and “yes ma’am” when he came over. He had such a good aura about him. Brian was a sharp-looking, whitish black guy and he looked like he was destined to be the life of every party. And Brian was the life of the party, but not for the reasons you might think. You would think a handsome guy who wore a small “fro” with good muscular definition and low profile preppy clothes would get along with most everybody. You would think wrong! Brian would get in fight after fight all through the two years I knew him. Fight he did--and fight he could! The boy was tough as fucking nails. He had a mild muscular build, resembling a breakdancer from the early 1980s, but he wasn’t big. He was still rather small. Of the fights he got into, some of them were not his fault and some of them were totally his fault. I’d seen him fight a big, zit-faced cowboy who clobbered him and should have had him whipped, but Brian kept getting back up and eventually took down his bigger opponent. With very little provocation, Brian once took a fork out of a kid’s hand as he ate lunch and threw the kid against a plate glass window at MacArthur High School. He was always in fights. The only fight he ever lost was against five guys, football players who jumped him after school one day to get him back for kicking one of their butts in the gym. He was so damn tough! I once remember him getting slammed headfirst onto the concrete in the hallway by a gang member named Donald who had tackled him. You could hear his head hit the pavement like a home run. Like before, the guy should have won, but he didn‘t. A police officer who stood guard at the school happened to be present and jumped in the way and broke up the fight. But even after the hit, Brian stood right up and would have fought again had the officer not been there. He just stood up and put his hands in his pockets with a blank expression on his face as though waiting in a checkout line. He was like a damn robot (some would say like a robot while others would say he was too stupid to know any better!) Thing about Brian was, he was so shifting. To some, he was the kindest, sweetest, most soft spoken heart-of-gold kid there was. With others, he was a troublemaker who said the wrong things at the wrong times. He had the habit of pointing at whomever he was mad at while he stared them down and told them what he was about to do to them. And yet, he had such respect for authority...weird! I remember seeing a yearbook of one girl. Brian’s picture had written above it: “duhhhhhhh.” Brian and I got to be best friends. I’m not sure how or why we got to be friends. I guess he made me feel like I had something to say. If I went on about parallel dimensions or Stonehendge or some other mystical shit that I only thought I understood, he would listen and soak up everything I said. As was to be the case in my ministerial days, I was a big bullshitter as a kid and I loved to hear myself talk. Brian was a good sparring partner too. He would come over to my house and we’d work out and watch Bruce Lee movies when we were done. When not doing that, we tried roleplaying games with the rest of my friends. Yes, my cousin and friends’ dorkdom had us fervently campaigning in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, that home of the soul for every dateless, self-esteem-less wonder the world over. But we could never play roleplaying games with Brian because that demanded strategizing and thinking--two things that were anathema to him. Brian didn’t learn normally and was in special classes at school, but Brian could once in a while argue and use some surprisingly eloquent strings of wording that had us in awe. It was like, once a month, he would impress the hell out of us! Most hilariously, every Dungeons and Dragons campaign we ever played resulted in conduct like “I’m taking out my sword and sticking it in his chest!” on sight of every town’s guard we came to. He just didn’t have the brains to play in a virtual world, but our campaign got tons of laughs at his expense (and he never picked up on it). Aww, poor Brian! Don’t pick on him. So what? Thinking games are not his thing! Is that what you’re thinking? Well, not so fast. There was something else that wasn’t his thing, and that was staying out of trouble with the law. Unbeknownst to everyone except his immediate family, Brian was insane--very insane. I found out soon enough that he was a peeping tom who got caught in the act of looking into a window where a woman was showering. This happened more than once, and then it started happening a lot. Brian definitely wasn’t gay, but he never talked or looked at women around any of us, his friends, which (looking back) appeared to be a sign of sociopath behavior. The police only cited him the first time he got caught, though they could have taken him to jail had they wanted to. But I never will forget the day Brian took a crow bar and split his dad’s head open on an ordinary Saturday afternoon...http://joeholmansblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/bottom-of-food-chain-part-two.html Edited by Joe E. Holman, Sep 14 2009, 12:23 AM.
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| Post #2 Sep 17 2009, 11:44 PM | Carmel1110 |
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Great writing, Joe. Your stories almost read like fiction, but the fact that they're true makes them all the more interesting. I like your style of writing. It's straightforward, very readable, yet succeeds in painting an image in my head...but most importantly, your stories are...revealing. |
 
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| Post #3 Sep 17 2009, 11:56 PM | Joe E. Holman |
I appreciate the compliments. They made an otherwise shitty day great! |
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