Finding New Enemies (a Ginn Basic Reader)

I got taught how to fight at Oxford School. I mean, I didn’t really learn how, I just got taught to. Kids need to be taught how to fight. They don’t all need to learn how – it’ll suffice if a good number do. But all kids need to be taught about it. Some kids need to be taught to fight more, others to fight less. And the best situation occurs when they teach each other.

I was a kid who needed to fight more. It was either that, or learn to keep my mouth shut around the kids who needed to fight less. I was often a real smart aleck, and smart alecks don’t like each other. A bigger more aggressive one will typically pound on a weaker one, unless that one is short and funny, in which case he will become the bigger ones sidekick. That wasn’t me.

All this fighting business started around the second grade in Mrs. Rattigan’s class. I don’t remember exactly how I got on Sam’s bad side, though I remember the first time he shoved me down and dared me to do anything about it. Sam was a thick boy in both senses of the word. Some of my worst days at Oxford were those days when I knew I’d have to fight Sam. I always lost. But each punch stayed with me and made me long for that day when I would, in my dad’s words, defend myself. Eventually I did. I didn’t win every fight, but I won some good ones, including my last one, on a dark Georgetown side street at the age of 33.

More about that later. I didn’t mean to dwell on the fighting business.

Mrs. Rattigan was a nice lady, probably in her late 20s or early 30s. But second grade boys see all their female teachers as old women, maybe because second grade boys bring can turn the sweetest flower of a 30-something girl into a yowling growling grouch.

But Mrs. Rattigan read to us a lot. She read us Little Annie Rooney and Angleworms on Toast. She seemed to like me most of the time. When our cat had kittens, she came to our house and took one home. She gave us free time in class to talk or draw (something most of my Oxford teachers did, and something that few teachers do today).

One sunny spring day, Mrs. Rattigan knew that a lot of us guys were thinking about baseball. She asked us to figure out how many players were on a baseball team. The “fellas” and I were trying to figure this out when she suddenly says, “well, why don’t you all go to the library and find a book on baseball?”

Being allowed to go to the school library was like having a “get out of jail free” card. For me, most of the time, the school library was an oasis. I loved the smell of the books, the feel of the magazines in their heavy clear plastic binders, the World Almanac with all its longest rivers and biggest cities. I loved that library for a long time—until the time came that the kind old (30-something) librarian, Mrs. Shay, turned against me.

Once at the library, we found out how many players were on a baseball team. Not from a book, but by asking some fifth grader who happened to be hanging out there. Mrs. Shay had asked him to help us find a book on baseball, but he just puffed his lips and said, “well I can just tell ya about it!”
So we played baseball (softball, actually) just about every day at recess. We’d choose up sides by doing that thing where you put your fists on the handle end of the bat and top fist wins unless one kid pinches the top with his fingers and you can’t kick it out of his grip. We let some girls play. Barbara Hanson could play anytime even though she wasn’t good because she was cute and Johnny Kotlarczyk had a huge crush on her (which lasted until the last day of our last year at Oxford).

But no one really wanted to let Ruth play. Ruth was pretty good at hitting the ball. But she was what you’d call a handsome girl (i.e., “ugly”) with a Delaware accent so strong it sounded like a speech impediment. Ruth was always nice to everyone, and I hated how the guys made fun of her.

“You love Ruth!” they’d taunt whichever kid was on everyone’s shit list that day.

One day Sam didn’t want her play. Neither did Ronnie Baronowski. Hell, I really didn’t want her to play either, but I couldn’t stand all these jerks telling her she couldn’t. So I picked her on my team and insisted that the others let her play.

“You love her!” Sam mocked me with one of those sugary sweet sing-songy voices, sort of the way Bluto would talk to Olive when he was first trying to pick her up, before he revealed his true psychotic nature.

Ruth smashed the damned ball nearly all the way to the monkey bars—a home run. Now she did love me. I was toast for the rest of the day.