Hollowed Eggs

In my years immediately prior to and throughout Junior High, an older boy on the block used to threaten me every time I rode my bike past his house on the way to my friend’s house, but my friend did not know that, and so one day my friend suggested we walk (!) the 12 lots back to his house. It was close to the 4^th of July. As we passed the Older Bully’s house, OB and his chief backup little fucker came sneaking and laughing around the corner of his garage and threw a lit firecracker at us with such good timing that it exploded almost instantly between my right foot and my friend’s left foot and my friend goes, “Hey, watch it!” like he’s big man and OB comes walking fast towards us and kicks at my groin and, when I bend forward with my hands down, hits me square on the nose with his left fist, which in immediate retrospect was a foolishly ineffective defense but I get him in a bear hug and he gets me in a headlock and gets his arm out of my grasp and starts punching at my nose again so I just push out of the headlock and he seems to go more easily than I thought he would and I turned away and started walking in the direction I had been heading*. Behind me, I hear chief backup little fucker say “Wow! For a minute there I thought he was going to fight you!” and my friend trying to keep pace with me says, “Wow! He went right for your nuts!” but I’m thinking I won that one; I’m not dead.

Another time, we were too old to be Trick or Treatin’, but we dressed up anyway because my friend wanted to be Mr. Spock, so I turned out as a space monster with hollowed-out eggs and marshmallows stuck on the ends of a coat hanger poking through the ventilation holes of my high school football helmet that wasn’t even supposed to be off campus, and we were farther from my house than I remember ever being without parental-type supervision when that teenaged neighborhood girl in the shotgun seat of the Chevy parked at the curb asked if we aren’t a little old to be Trick or Treatin’ and my friend whirls and I can see he’s going to say something that’s gonna get me another beating, so I quickly devise the most clever plan I can think of to avoid a beating,

“Here. You want an egg?”

I grabbed the eggsmallow off the right antenna and underhanded it gently to the girl in the shotgun seat of that Chevy, but she missed it and it hit the guy’s car and that was the very moment that it first occurred to me that there would be a driving-aged teenage male in the driver’s seat of that darkened Chevy and that little fucker was out of his seat and around that Chevy so damned fast that he had me by the back of the neck with his cocked left fist in front of the lineman’s face mask on the helmet I was just anal enough to snap the chinstrap on, and it was then I knew that that summer of football conditioning and weightlifting had worked to my advantage in more ways than promised as I pushed my attacker away much more easily than I had thought I could and said, “Wait! They’re hollow eggs!” and picked it up and held it palm up in my hand and repeated, “It’s hollow!” and squeezed it into dry fragments ‘cause my Mom had had the foresight to learn in high school how to hollow out an egg in support of her old-enough-to-know-better son’s inability to see that bad things happen when I go along with my friend’s wacky dumb ideas, and it was then I saw that Teenaged Male was gonna let me go ‘cause he didn’t hear me say, “Dumb fuck!” ‘cause those was “inside words” a quarter century before we agreed on a name for it., but first he gave me a friendly-older-brother lecture like nowadays you’ll see on cable shows like “Stranger Things,” stuff like “You gotta think about how what your** doing is gonna invoke an action you can’t control in the person you’re doin’ it to. Y’unnerstan?”

As he turned the corner around the driver’s side rear fender, he wagged his finger back at me and said, “Don’t be stupid.”

“I won’t,” I stupidly responded while thinking, “Wow! He didn’t really want to fight either.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” I said to the teenaged girl in the shotgun seat.

“You’re a little old to be Trick or Treatin’,” she said.

I don’t remember what my friend said after that, but I never threw an egg at a car again and I never went Trick or Treatin’ with him again.

*Later, when my friend’s Dad came to pick him up, he saw the blood on my shirt and asked from the driver’s seat through the passenger window, “What happened to Billy?” I didn’t hear my friend’s answer, but his Dad immediately barked, “You beat him up?” and I remember being happy that Dad seemed to be taking my side.

I also didn’t hear my friend’s next answer, but his Dad looked around and said, “Which kid?” and I didn’t hear my friend’s answer again, but his Dad said, “Are you OK, Billy? Don’t let nobody push you around,” and I felt happy that my friend’s Dad was ready to stand up for me.

**Don’t! Just. Don’t!   Nowadays, if you correct someone’s homophone usage, you’d be “homophoneobic.” Too much name calling. Too much blaming. It’s gotten so I measure who’s winning the journalistic/political wars these days by watching which side is blaming the other more – that’s the side that’s falling behind.  Except for Trump.  Trump uses blame like a bully kicking you a little when he thinks he’s got you down, but hey you spent all summer sweating in the wet heat of the mown grass smell or the dank of the weight room towels and if you just realize that you’re not “ashamed” of the evil [sin?] he’s trying to lay on you, instead you feel proud and you realize if you just stand up to bullies and dumb fucks they’ll usually back down, and just be diligent about staying ready for the dumb fuck who doesn’t back down.