Childhood Once

Of all my disturbing childhood memories, the most surreal is the one of Glenn M. chasing his sister Lori down the street one night while smacking her on the back with his dick.

It happened. I was there. I saw it.

Lori had dome something to piss Glenn off and the next thing I know she’s on a dead run, screaming down Evergreen Drive with her brother galloping calmly behind her smacking her with what, I remain convinced, was and is the largest penis to ever reside in the state of Georgia. It was much that of a half-flaccid baguette being nonchalantly wielded by an insane man-child. I don’t recall how long he chased her, but eventually Lori got away and told their Mother. Glenn’s “but she started it” defense didn’t get him as far as he’d hoped and he was forced inside for the rest of the evening. The rest of us were left to our own devices, the mammoth shadow of Glenn’s penis as cast on the asphalt by our new streetlights etched forever in our forming memories.

Glenn was two years older than me but by seventh grade we were in the same class at Ursula Collins Elementary. Glenn never lost that peculiar fondness man has for his dick and would routinely take his out during class and lay it on the community table. There wasn’t much anyone could do; and truly, it deserved a chair of its own. Glenn failed seventh grade again that year but oddly enough wound up joining the rest of us that next September in Junior High. I think the principal at Collins was as scared of him as we kids were. It’s as plausible as anything else I could figure.

I have done a lot. I have seen a lot. And I have spent time around some bad people. It has been nearly 26 years since I’ve seen Glenn, and to be brutally honest, I am scared of him still. And I do not scare easily. I don’t know that I would call him a bad person. He was simply the toughest and meanest person I’ve ever known. And it would be years before I met someone who could lie as convincingly as he could. But the jury is still out on bad.

Toward the end of seventh grade and knowing Glenn’s academic failings, I was under the misguided assumption that I would be some fifteen miles away at Langford Junior High and free of Glenn and his ubiquitous penis. This too had to be the thinking of Chris A. when he decided that the thing to do one cloudy Thursday afternoon was to pick a fight with Glenn. It would be the worst decision of his young life. Glenn was mean but he was not a bully. Chris A. was. And he was pretty good at it. At just under six feet and over 200 pounds, Chris out-talled Glenn by eight inches at least and outweighed him by eighty pounds. On our big horrible, yellow school bus (number 1, I believe), Chris shoved Glenn from the seat behind him. Uncharacteristically reserved, Glenn warned him one time. Chris shoved him again. Glenn calmly stood up in his seat and proceeded to administer the worst ass-whipping I’ve ever seen. Glenn’s hands were like concrete slabs and the sound of them hitting the side of Chris’s head was the sound of melon after melon striking the ground hard and from afar. The memory of that sound weakens my stomach to this day. It was seventh grade justice in that a useless bully got the living shit beat out of him. And at once it was terribly sad because a fat, friendless kid with no future lost the only power he would ever have—the ability to inflict fear and pain on those weaker than him. No one was much scared of Chris after that. Even though Glenn was the only one who could do what had been done. I think Glenn beat the cruelty out of him.

Glenn and his dick quit school not long after following us to Langford. I rarely saw him after that.

He was in the news back home a few years ago I heard. His ex-wife’s live-in boyfriend killed Glenn’s biological child and Glenn was briefly interviewed on the local news. He did not present himself particularly well as I understand it. I don’t suppose many people would under such circumstances.

I have a soft spot in my heart for children and typically have a visceral reaction when I learn of a sad fate befalling a child. But I had no reaction at all when I learned about the death of Glenn’s child. I would wish no such horrific fate on any man, yet I had no reaction whatsoever. And worse, I felt no shame because of it. I’m not sure I understand that at all. Not at all.

Glenn M. is merely the curator of some of my more surreal childhood memories. He of the equine manhood and canine fondness thereof. He is the tough man-child who scared me because of that which he was capable. And while I recognize there is every possibility he moved on with his life, refocused his blankness, and overcame his inherited pathology, I know things did not play out like that. Glenn is still chasing his little sister through the dark streets of Georgia, wielding his baseball bat of a penis. Lori is still running, laugh-screaming to her Mother that Glenn is a monster.

And I am certain they love each other the way brothers and sisters always do.