People I still hate - #1 Perry Simone (Part II)

A big part of the problem with being a loner or a loser is that you literally lose touch with what other people think and how they act. By the time I got to high school I was living in my third state in 14 years, had suffered occasional abuse at the hands of my red-haired mother, and had been consistently counseled that I was a directionless dolt with little upside. Perhaps because of that emotional concoction, I had developed coping mechanisms that veered between jumping up and down in search of attention and love, and crawling inside my own head looking for something positive to hang onto. Anything, really. I'd created my own little reality, an island where you could tell people to go fuck themselves and there were no consequences. You could just walk away and everything would be just swell in the morning, as if it never happened.

How was I to know that Perry Simone didn't live on my island? How was I to know that on the other side of that door that afternoon was not only a skinny little Italian kid with a Napoleonic complex, but two huge Simone sycophants as well who happened to double as his high school bodyguards?

I didn't know, but I found out. It started the very next day in the Immaculate High School cafeteria when my new best friend approached as I sat at a table with some other freshmen. Perry pushed through some nearby doors, leaned over and told me come in the hall. That's when I met his goons, two oversized upperclassmen with their ties slightly loosened. One had thick blonde hair and red, red lips. The other was black-haired with a hint of a five o'clock shadow on his sharp jaw. I never learned their names, but I saw them both up-close because one or the other immediately grabbed me by my tie the moment I entered the hallway and jacked me up against the industrial painted cement block wall.

"Think you're tough freshmen? We're gonna kill you. We're going to rip your balls off and feed them to you . We're gonna torture you." Perry Simone stood behind them sneering, pressing his fist into his little dark palm. They pushed me. They tightened their tie grip to choking capacity. They breathed on me.

I said nothing. What was there to say? I'd spoken so eloquently the day before.

The routine went on for months, mostly in hallways, sometimes outside, whenever they saw me they bullied me. I lived in constant fear, knowing always precisely where I was and whether Perry and his boys were anywhere in the vicinity. I would sit in class and constantly glance out the doorway. Were they waiting?

You'd think they'd tire of it after awhile. It took some time. I suppose they had nothing better to do and I was such an easy mark. Only once did I speak, stand up as much as I could with my tie snug against my windpipe. As the gorillas roughed me up in the hall by the cafeteria one morning I squeaked to Perry Simone that I knew I could kick his ass, and if I ever saw him alone I would do just that to the little bastard. Some big stand I made.

The worst part of all this was that there was no one to share it with. Oh, to have had a friend, another wimpy loser I could at least have shared my misery with, someone who could have said "yeah that happened to me once, I hate those people," and we would devise creative ways to make them suffer. But there was not a soul. I certainly wasn't going to the school administrators or teachers, it just wasn't done. As low as my self-esteem and self-worth were, it could only plummet more if I crawled to some adult whining about being mistreated by several of the fine young Catholic students of Immaculate. I couldn't tell my parents for a number of reasons. Mainly I figured they wouldn't care and would find a way to blame it on me (well, it kind of was my fault, after all). More so, I was afraid they would; that they, my father especially, would feel embarrassed that his foul-mouthed son had caused his family name to be disrespected. I was afraid he'd make a big deal and I would end up in the Principal's office, a priest probably, fingering Perry Simone and his posse, and the next day I would be alone again in the hallway pressed against cement blocks with my tie embedded in my Adam's apple. No thanks. No thanks at all.

So I tolerated it. I stumbled through much of my freshman year at Immaculate in fear and loathing and quiet desperation. Always, no matter where I was, there were three constants in my head - failure, Perry Simone, and two goons with a penchant for ties.

It was not a stellar year. One of the highlights was that I met a kid I actually liked who treated me like a human. His name was Ralph Scozzafava, another Italian, dark skinned and gangly. Ralph was a bit of a jock, a basketball player who had played on the middle school team and had plans to do the same on the freshman team at Immacullate. Ralph was actually a pretty good ballplayer and pretty serious about it. In fact long after I left, he became an all-state player at Immaculate. Ralph's seriousness convinced me that I too should try out for the freshman basketball team because that's what you do as a high school freshman, you get involved, you try out for teams, as if everyone is equal and you just pick and choose what activites you want to get involved with. Let's see, I'll do basketball and prom court. I suppose that I didn't tell Ralph that I had little to no experience and less talent as a basketball player, and he must have been cool or kind enough not to mention the fact that I was not tall and not gangly and not really much of anything.

As a way to get in in shape for basketball, Ralph decided to run on the cross country team and I decided to join him. Big mistake. ven then I was smoking cigarettes pretty regularly and I hated to run, still do. I ended running in two races, finished 21st once and in the other someone stepped on the back of my foot in the first hundred yards and my running shoe came off. I had to stop and put it back on - a deficit that only added to my glaring deficit. I finished somewhere near dead last. It didn't matter, really. I sucked at cross country and knew it. I quit after a few weeks, turned in my tank top.

Later I actually did try out for the freshman basketball team. Despite my failure at cross country, Ralph and worked out several times at the local YMCA in advance. Ralph, by the way had stuck with cross country for the entire season. For the tryouts my mother bought me three pairs of new cool tall white athletic socks with colored rings near the knees. I think she wanted me to look good. I recall that actually thought I had a shot at making the team. I was not then a good judge of my own abilities. During a scrimmage in the second practice I hit an outside jumper, pure luck, but I thought maybe it would draw some attention, raise an eyebrow, cause a spark. In the end, Ralph made the team. I was cut the end of that second day, and was left with a new pair of unused socks for gym class.

In the spring I tried out for baseball. I was cut. I couldn't hit worth a damn. Not much of a fielder, either. Somewhere in there I also got myself in trouble with another kid, this one a cool jock, a basketball stud named Bob Bollinger. He was a senior and perhaps the coolest guy in a school of pretty uncool people. To balance the catholic uniform he would shed his blue jacket with the Immaculate crest on the breast pocket. He would undo the buttons at the wrists of his dress shirt and jam his hands into the pockets of his fitted grey dress pants. He had moderately long brown hair parted in the middle and would walk with a long bouncy step so the sleeves and the hair would bounce along with him as he walked the school hallways. Cool. Because he was at the opposite end of my spectrum I noticed him, and to get attention I would sometimes undo the buttons on my sleeves, jam my hands in my pockets and walk around Spanish class doing Bob Bollinger imitations. Who the hell I was to be mocking a popular jock I don't know, but I do know word apparently got back to him. His sister Laurie, a buck-toothed but attractive freshman was in one of my classes. At some point I got word that Bob Bollinger was "after me," wanted to kick my ass for my mocking his cool. He never did and I never actually spoke any words to or with him, but the threat was there, and my own need for attention and acceptance had once again turned on me.

I also fall madly in love with a girl named Margaret Tihman, she too of Italian descent who wore her black hair parted down the middle with two long pieces from either side of the front wrapped tautly around her temples and were held together in back with a barrette. She had the locker next to mine at school and I would hint at my passion but she never bit. In reality, Margaret was equally in love with Danny Fitzgerald, who had been the star of the junior high basketball team and would go on to star on the freshman hoops squad at Immaculate, the one I was cut from. Margaret and I never amounted to anything. I called her once on the phone and had a brief, awkward freshman conversation, one of those that what's not said speaks louder than what it is.

I also got drunk that year for the first time. I met a guy at Immaculate named Brian Rowe, who became my personal hero for a short time. He was an athletic kid but not a jock, good looking, tight curled brown hair, funny, charismatic, the kind of guy who could easily float through any of the tight-knit high school groups and be accepted. The best part was that he didn't really give a shit whether anyone liked him or not. Unlike me, he was supremely confident.

We got drunk one night at his house where I spent the night. He got into his parent's liquor cabinet and we drank deep swigs of gin from a clear bottle. I did somersaults on his parent's wall-to-wall carpeting and loved the dizzy, loose unfettered feeling it gave me. Brian thought I was funny. I loved him for it.

As for Perry Simone, he and the goons did eventually fade away, their hallway harassments growing fewer and fewer as the year marched on.

Late in the spring of my freshman year I was caught smoking in the bathroom at Immaculate, another uncalculated risk that did not pay off. I had taken to going to a first floor john at the school where the majority of the smokers hung out; a bathroom that was always thick with blue smoke and toughs in blue blazers. Instead of stepping into a stall, I stood out in the open by the urinals puffing away. That day a door opened, a teacher appeared from a cloud and I was dead to rights despite my late lame attempt at discretion, which included turning my back to the urinal, my hands and smoking cigarette behind me. I backed up and dropped the offending smoke into the ceramic piss pot. It hissed but continued to smoulder. Of all the smokers that morning only two were sent to the office. Busted.

So I did end up in the Principal's office. He was not a priest, but he was a prick. At my father's request I was suspended from school for three days AND given an in-school suspension which included the humiliating job of cutting the school's grass after classes were over in the afternoon. My dad felt I needed to be taught a lesson I would not forget. He was right. Between dad and the prick of a principal, they also collectively decided I was not Immaculate material, and when the school year ended we permanently parted ways, Immaculate back to its Immaculate conception of itself, me back to my futile attempts at finding something that would set me apart.

That summer before I started at my next school - Danbury High School, home of the Hatters (Danbury was a former hat manufacturing town), I had one last glimpse of my past, or perhaps my future.

I was alone, as always, riding my white ten-speed Iverson bicycle. I had crested the hill on Birch Road and turned right onto Middle River Road. I noticed another bike was there riding slowly along the side of the road which was marked like a river with a shore of loose brown dirt on the sides. The kid was about my age, thin, wiry, riding an expensive green ten-speed, an Italian job, not like mine which my parents had bought at the Gold Circle discount store.

I recognized him right away. Who could forget? I'd know him now, the black hair thrust to his eyebrows, the small tight mouth, tiny teeth, the dark skin, the snarl. Simone, fucking Simone, alone and in my neighborhood.

Yeah, I thought about it for a moment, about kicking over his bike, about confronting him, about doing something tough and awful and redeeming, something that would balance the scale for just one bloody moment of a terrible year that had done nothing but reaffirm my uselessness, my immaturity, my nothing. This was the moment when the music was supposed to swell and the bad guy gets pushed out the window and glass shards scatter in slow motion and the crowd, all of whom have been bullied at some time too, gasps and applauds.

I rode toward him slowly, briefly, then turned away, back down middle River to Birch, home. I was aware of it, the moment, the opportunity.

"Fuck it," I told myself. "What good now? What does it achieve? What does it change?"

Nothing then, nothing at all. I can still see him pedaling slowly, the front tire of his bike coiling one way like a snake readying itself for a quick movement. Fight or flight. I wonder if he knew it was me, if he knew I saw him, if he knew I was scared to death, as always.

That moment I would like to have back. That moment, of all of them that have slipped through my fingers, that I have lost, that I have damaged, I would like to have back. I would like, just once, just once, to have hurt someone back.