I was four.

Mom killed a fly, I felt it die and it made me cry.

No, this is not an undiscovered Dr. Seuss book.

This is just salt and pepper, black and white, cause and effect, right and wrong.

Mom killed the fly and I cried.

She looked at me like she’d just met me that day (and was not impressed).

“What are you doing?”

“I’m crying!”

“I can see that, but why are you crying?”

“Because you killed a fly!”

She stared at me with her brows furrowed. “Why would that make you cry?”

I took a deep breath. How could I begin to explain this to somebody? Even my own mom?

How could I make her understand that I breathed that fly’s last fly breath?

How could I explain that I felt the white-hot sudden pressure of the SMACK and then the biggest nothing of all weighing me down, sucking me into a black, lonely vacuum?

How could I convey the terrible vision I saw of all the baby flies out there in a fly nest waiting for their mother to come back home and feed them, only she would never come home again?

Those poor baby flies had no way to understand that their mother was dead, her top half smeared into a chunky red line across on the screen door, while her bottom half has been mashed into white clots and poky legs sticking out of the flyswatter. But I did. Their suffering was as clear to me as my own head pictures. I could see the fly babies, feel their tight chests constricting around their lungs as they stood at the entrance of their nest, waiting for their Mother to return, watching the sky, hungry, terrified, hanging onto each other’s hands and fighting as that squeezing tightness worked closer around them, clutching their chests, pulling their mouth corners down.

I knew exactly what they were going through because I went through it with them right there in my kitchen, waiting with them for a mother who would never come home because she was dead.

And it was my mother who had killed her.

It was a brutal irony, even though I had no clue about irony. Not yet.

The same terrible empathy also happened with ants carrying their dead buddies back home on the sidewalk, with worms writhing pointlessly as they drowned in puddles after it rained, with June bugs doing weak circles upside down in the bird bath, or a sparrow dive-bombing the front window, hitting it with a feathery THUNK and falling to the grass below, stunned, dead or both.

I was surrounded by misery, suffering and death, all of it beaming out at me, all around us, all the time on some ear splitting frequency apparently only I could receive, but could never understand.

I couldn’t understand why we always killed flies. I couldn’t understand why we walked past dead bugs and worms and everything else like it was all just okay. Didn’t anybody else feel bad?

Apparently not.

But why? Why didn’t anybody else seem to care? Why was it okay to smush a spider, but it wasn’t okay to kick a kid who laughed at you when you were sad to see your girlfriend go to school? Why was it okay to step on ants, but not okay to kick mean boys in the nuts?

My mom told me it wasn’t very nice.

She said kicking people in the nuts was something that bad boys did and the way she said that made it very clear that she was on a fan of me being a bad boy. I found that concerning.

“Am I a bad boy?”

My mom shook her head.

“Of course not! You’re a good boy. That’s why you would never kick or hurt someone.”

I didn’t want to argue with her against my own interest, but that poor woman was wrong.

I one hundred percent would kick and hurt someone. I would kick and hurt them hard enough to kill them all the way to dead if they did something bad to me and I wouldn’t feel bad at all.

Because they would deserve it.

My poor, nice mom must have thought that, just because I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to so many bugs and birds and puppies and creatures, that must also have meant that I was a good boy all the way down to my guts, but the truth was, I wasn’t good or bad. Not yet.

I wasn’t really anything. I didn’t really grasp the full moral ramifications of Good and Evil. The main reason I wanted people to stop killing flies wasn’t because I knew it was morally wrong, I just wanted them to stop killing flies because it made me feel sad. It wasn’t the flies themselves I was trying to protect. It was me and my own bad feelings. I was being selfish, in a way.

Protecting myself.

As a baby, when it came to understanding the morality of Good and Evil, I was like a fish.

Let’s say you went into the Fish World and said to some average fish, “Hey there Fish, what’s it like breathing water instead of air?” The fish would look at you like you were crazy. Fish don’t know about Water because Water is just Everything. And fish don’t know about Air, because how could they? Air is completely out of the purview of Fish Science. Yeah, there may have been a few exceptional fish who came back from jumping experiments and spoke of a place above their world where they couldn’t breathe and were huge finless aliens in Unidentified Floating Objects abducted them for unknown purposes, but all the normal fish would think those jumping fish were crazy because UFOs are obviously not real. (right? Please?)

My house was like the underwater, except for Good. In the world of my home there were no angry people, no fights, hardly any arguments or troubles or family strife, no drunken rages or deadly weapons or racists or anything that would have given me any need to gauge morality.

This sounds amazing, but it turned out to be a terrible problem. It did not prepare me for life.

Not in Clinton.

I would have been better served knowing more about gauging morality because I was not mentally equipped as a four year-old to wander out into a world that was pretty much filled with people who already knew exactly where they stood with regard to Good and Evil.

And many of those people had decided to go with Evil.

They also appeared to go out of their way to let people like me know about their decision.

I began to learn all about these people on that dirt hill in the empty lot behind my house.

There is a good chance this hill was a temporary feature of my neighbourhood, a by-product of the construction that would soon see the few odd tiny wartime houses and subsidized duplexes that defined my little neighbourhood joined by long, low brick ranch homes for people that I would have defined then as “richies.” But for a pre-school child, a few months of dirt hill feels like an epoch and so the power of this towering clot of mud was a huge part of my life. From the lofty heights of the crest of that mud hill, I could see everything in my world: the shingly roofs of the wartime houses, top branches of trees, the corn field behind the duplexes where boys get lost so don’t go there, and maybe when the weather was right, Lake Huron, although mom said it was 15 miles away and impossible to see, which shows how little she understood my Super Vision.

This giant dirt hill was a good place to take a bucket of hose water and make a mudslide, play dinky cars or Mud Suit, but if you were me, and I was, you would cut out the middleman and do all three at once to maximize your options.

On the day I learned about Good and Evil first hand, I strolled out through my back yard and started climbing the hill only to find two kids already up there, sitting on top like they owned it.

At first, I didn’t mind one bit and you might even say that I was happy to share my hill and that is because I was a fool and I was too trusting and I did not yet understand the nature of Man.

But I would find out.

I clumb up the hill, threw down my dinky cars, flopped into the mud and smiled at them.

“It’s sure good mud up here, eh?”

As I looked up at them, I had my first inkling that there was something not-right about these two boys. They were older then me for sure, bigger and thicker, but that wasn’t all. They were shiny and blonde and rosy, like giant babies with soft white skin and little same shorts and shirts. Yeah, you heard me. Shirts! In the summer! And they had shoes on too. It wasn’t even Sunday. But that was not the strangest thing about them. The real kicker, the thing I couldn’t believe, was how clean they were. You’d think they’d fallen out of the catalogue. They were literally scrubbed.

It was incredible to see these two soft, shiny, well-scrubbed little big boys sitting up there on my mud hill, just about as opposite from sun-brown, mud-caked, bloody mosquito bitten, scabbed-over, snotty-faced me as you could get. We looked like a Before and After commercial.

While I was realizing this, I guess they were busy doing some of their own realizing because the Smaller One was giving me That Look, as in when Mom said, “don’t you give me That Look!”

It was that look you might give that had a curled lip on it. It had all kinds of bad attitude. That Smaller One was trying to look mean, making That Look at me, but his gummy little Elmer Fudd voice with broken Rs made it too funny, too ridiculous for him to hurt any of my feelings.

“What do you think you’re doing up here, kid?”

He was spitting that “kid” at me like it might cut me. And I didn’t notice. Not yet.

I smiled at them, lolling back. “Well, I think I’m sitting in the mud. How about what are you two doing up here with those pretty little outfits on when it isn’t even Sunday School day?”

When I smiled at them, I could feel the dried mud cracking at the corners of my mouth.

Those boys were quiet, looking at me and then at each other and then back at me with kind of nothing faces, like with no expression, but I could see something hiding underneath.

At first I thought maybe they were mad because they had put their pretty clothes on by mistake and now they were in the mud, but then I realized, of course, they’re scared of me. Poor little guys, new kids not from Clinton up on my hill in their Little Gentleman outfits and I show up with scuffed olive skin, wolf strength and an advanced brain for figuring out clues and thinking up good ideas, and they were probably thinking, “Hey, we have to be careful with this cool guy.”

Except that I was also nice. I decided to let them know so they wouldn’t worry.

“It’s okay, boys! I’m super strong and have a powerful brain, but I am very nice. Even if you look like two fresh babies in Little Gentleman suits up here on my hill behind my house.”

Bigger One shook his head like he couldn’t hear me very well. “Your hill?”

“Yeah, but I don’t mind if you play here. We can team up.”

“We don’t team up because you look stupid and dirty and this hill isn’t yours!”

Smaller One snorted.

“This hill is our Grandfather’s property and we can kick you off whenever we want.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from these kids. We were literally in my back yard.

“This is my back yard,” I said, pointing at the back of my house. “I live in that house.”

Bigger One got a lot closer to me.

“Why are you so stupid and dirty?”

I looked down at myself sitting in the mud, then at the little gentlemen, wondering what it was like to have such a small brain instead of a big, powerful advanced brain. Like mine.

“Well, I bet I got dirty from sitting here in this big pile of mud and dirt. Same as you right now, only I’m not wearing Sunday School pants when it’s not even Sunday School day.”

This is what I meant when I said I was brought up with a kind of deficit in preparation for the real world, as a direct result of not being exposed to a wider range of Evil in my home. My parents were just too nice and even though I lived in a rough part of town, you don’t get out that much on your own before you’re five. If I had been more experienced, I might been a little more concerned about how I was outnumbered and could have been beaten up by these older boys but I didn’t have to worry about that because right then, Man came out tearing down John Street.

Man was pretty much famous around town I bet, because he had not only a brown Camaro with white stripes on the hood, but he knew how to squeal tires, spin out gravel, play loud tunes, smoke cigarettes and drink so many beers. He also knew how to say a lot of different cool things like “hey man” and “yeah man” and “be cool, man” which is why I started calling him Man.

He made sure to say man at the end of everything else he said, like it was a punctuation. I tried it a few times myself and it worked great. For example, if it was supper time, and your mom cut your pork chop meat off the bone for you, you could nod and say “thanks man” and she would be proud that you were both grateful and cool.

The Little Gentlemen turned to watch as Man roared past the hospital, gunned it down John Street, and skidded up in a cloud of dust onto the dry lawn in front of his duplex.

I clapped when he got out of the car.

“Way to go, Man!”

He bowed.

“Thanks, man.”

“Hey Man, are you going away again soon?”

He nodded. “Yeah, man. I just came back to get something to eat.”

“When you go, are you gonna peel out and shoot gravel, Man?”

He laughed. “You just wait and see, man.”

I clapped again and then I noticed that those two older boys weren’t clapping.

If anything, they looked a lot like they didn’t enjoy Man nearly as much as I did. They looked up and down John Street, taking it all in, the whole row of townhouses, and then turned back to each other, shaking their heads again and making this kind of a face like a Grandma would make if you told her you gave your egg salad sandwich to the ants because you didn’t like mayonnaise.

Which I didn’t, so it was a face that I knew very well. It was beyond disappointment. And that’s when I finally started to understand that my whole “being a friendly kid willing to share his hill” thing wasn’t working out with these snarly little gentlemen. Something was very wrong.

“Why do you little gentlemen keep looking at me with those looks?”

Bigger One:

“Because it figures.”

Huh?

“What figures?”

Bigger One pointed one by one at the line of townhouses across John Street.

“Low class. Low class. Low class. Low class.”

The last “low class” ended up with a finger pointed at me.

“Low class? What’s that?”

“That’s where people like you and that guy live.”

He was pointing at Man’s house.

Man was the coolest guy around, so maybe low class meant cool and good, even though it didn’t sound like it. And they wouldn’t have been sneering when they said it to me.

“Well yeah, Man is cool. Me too.”

Bigger One snorted.

“Do you even know what low class means?”

I shrugged, not wanting to brag too much about my advanced brain or go into a lot of unnecessary detail about how I could read when I was two, and not just the easy kid words.

“Of course I know what low class means because I could read when I was two! Don’t you?”

“Yeah we do! We’re the ones who just said it! Low class means poor people. Dirty, rotten poor people who cause trouble and make too much noise. That’s who lives in those houses.”

These kids were way off.

“No way, man. Those people in those houses aren’t dirty rotten. Greg and Randy and Mimi and Man and everybody else I know lives over there. They’re my friends! Even Greg’s sister!”

Bigger One squinted his wet blue eyes, looked back at Smaller One.

I knew what the face he was making was called. It was a smirk. Nobody likes a smirker.

“Then your friends are dirty, rotten poor people. Just like everybody else in this part of town.”

I wondered if this kid remembered that I lived in this part of town, right there on Princess Street. All that separated me from John Street were a few small cedar shrubs and this very hill of mud.

“What about over there? On Princess Street?”

They slid their eyes along my pointing finger.

“What about my house?”

The Little Gentlemen looked at the tiny green box I lived in, shaking their heads already.

“You live in that little green house?”

I nodded.

That’s when Bigger One put his face down, very close to mine. Like he had no fear of me, but if I had wanted to, I could have bitten him right on the nose. He was that close to me.

“Then you’re low class too.”

As he glared at me, I had an Advanced Brain moment. A realization.

“Didn’t you say your grandma and grandpa live here, right near this hill?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, wouldn’t that mean they’re low class too?”

They did not like this application of logic. Bigger One clenched up his fists, literally growled at me in frustration and then backed off, pulling on his brother’s arm, yanking him to his feet.

“Come on. We aren’t supposed to hang around with the bad boys who live around here.”

They stomped down my hill and made their way to the house where their grandparents lived. It was nothing like my house. It was made of bricks, it was low to the ground and very wide one way, but very skinny the other way. It seemed very new. Even the big yard was new. That house also didn’t look like the duplexes across the road, which were squat and tall with small yards.

Hmmm. I stood up and looked at the different houses in my neighbourhood, noticing for the first time that Mrs. Marcus’ house (she let me drink from her garden hose whenever I wanted) also didn’t look like the duplexes or my house. There were a few others that were bigger, taller, with garages and trees in the yard. I was processing all this when I suddenly clued in to what those boys said to me. Maybe I hadn’t known much about the difference between low class and whatever else class there was, but I sure knew when somebody was calling me names.

They had called me a bad boy. Me! Those two Little Gentlemen had called ME a bad boy and then walked away with fancy outfits glowing in the sun, acting like they were in charge.

I looked down at myself.

Was I a bad boy? Was I low class, a dirty rotten poor people kid?

I did a full circle, surveyed my neighbourhood, and not just the houses. Two gravel roads, sometimes freshly oiled. A corn field. A few trees. A parking lot full of machinery across from my house, where I could climb around and be careful and not fall on anything rusty.

While I was looking around, I saw Man come out with a sandwich and settle on the hood of his Camaro, endless cigarette jutting out of his Fu Manchu, shirtless, faded blue tattoos on his arms.

I looked down at myself, at my bathing suit clad body, caked with mud crackling in the sun, leathery, tanned skin spackled with scratched out bug bites, knock knees, dirty bare feet.

What did these fancy boys know? What made them so good? Did they live in Clinton?

Maybe for the first time, I thought of my town. Of being from a town or a part of town. I knew it was called Clinton, Population 1250, according to the sign. And I knew there was a Huron County and Ontario and Canada, which was over a hundred years old and then a whole world.

I knew I lived on the edge of town, because of the fields around us, but we also had the Clinton Public Hospital to the east, and an unusual geographical, moral tug o’ war a few blocks west, where the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall sat within spitting distance of the Elm Haven. I was not very keen on the Kingdom Hall because they didn’t have Christmas, which was unbelievable.

The Elm Haven, however, was a powder blue roadhouse bar and motel with a lot of naked ladies inside and I was very keen on that. I couldn’t go anywhere near that building without struggling to wrap my head around that fact that not even three inches of cheap wallboard and a few threadbare black-out curtains were all that separated me from real live naked lady strippers.

Actual naked lady strippers were just walking around doing whatever real naked lady strippers did! Just being all around and drinking coffee and rye whiskey and not wearing clothes, which-

Wait a minute. Think about clothes. They’re so thin! And they’re right there on top of the naked! We’re right there with naked ladies all the time, but they’re wearing clothes! The whole world was around naked ladies. And men. And everyone. We were all just living our dumb lives completely naked except for a thin layer of polyester way thinner than the Elm Haven walls. Even Mrs. Marcus and church ladies were walking around naked under there. Full naked!

Once I realized that, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the naked people everywhere. If you were going past my house during those first few days of My Naked Revelation of 1969, and if you wondered why I was laughing out there on my front lawn, well now you know I was laughing at your naked butt right there inside your pants, fooling everybody but me. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was right there, wobbling away and it was just about the funniest thing ever.

I guess this was possible proof that I was, indeed, a Bad Boy and I will admit that, shortly after my Naked Revelations, I tried to convince Greg’s older sister to show me her bare bum in the back of my dad’s pickup truck, which I know is bad and wrong, but she was older than me.

That made it less bad, right?

I guess there was other, even more compelling evidence that I was a Bad Boy, and one particularly good example was something that happened over behind the Elm Haven.

Erie Street was the last street in Clinton, and it ran along the east side of the roadhouse. The West side was bordered by a bean field, straight up out in the country. It made sense, because we weren’t really civilized enough to be considered town kids. We were too feral, running around on dirt roads and playing in a mucky little creek ran down John Street, with a culvert bridge and the rich stink of runoff from a manure pile somewhere upstream. That little creek went behind the houses leading down to Erie Street and emptied out into a bottomless swamp in between the Elm Haven and a haunted barn where Man told us that guy had hung himself when he was caught with the horses. I never figured out what was so bad about being caught with the horses, because there was a huge barn full of horses over by the arena and a bunch of guys worked over there for harness racing and you never once heard of anybody hanging themselves about that.

Anyway, that haunted barn had an old rope hanging down from the middle beam, in the dead centre of the building and it had dried blood all over it. It had turned black with time so it looked just like paint, but it was obviously blood. Some older kids tried swinging on that rope and it stained their hands and they never got clean no matter how much they washed. Devil’s Blood, I guessed and I bet it burned through your skin, so I was never going to grab it. It was scary enough just seeing it hanging there. The interior was all cobwebs and broken, jagged fingers of wood sticking up everywhere and there was a known thing that, if you had the guts to sleep in that haunted barn overnight, you would for sure be the bravest kid in town, but you would die.

The stories were enough to keep me from going inside the barn, but there were nowhere near enough to keep me away from the swamp beside it. I was obsessed with this deadly swamp.

My mom had told me many times to stay away because it was dangerous and yes, I heard her Voice in my head telling me NO whenever I just so happened to find myself over there for no reason in particular, but even that wasn’t enough to stop me. I just had to go into that swamp every chance I got. It didn’t matter if it was full of quicksand and three boys drowned in it. The more bottomless the swamp was said to be, the more I wanted to go in and check it for myself.

That had always been one of the biggest problems with me. Maybe my worst problem. If I saw any kind of water collected anywhere, great forces outside of my control would force me to take my pants off and go in. I would also take off my shoes and socks, by the way, because I was not an idiot. I would tell myself that this time I was only going in a little bit, not even up to my ankles, but that would be a lie every time and by the way this was one of the reasons I always wore a bathing suit. You never knew when there might be a stagnant pond of oily water by a manure pile, or a creek full of rusted out car parts and barbed wire fence to be explored barefoot.

On this one glorious summer day, as I had so many times, I found myself beside the Devil Barn already in bare feet, already wandering out into the middle of the swamp where so many had drowned, laughing back at the less courageous other boys who were hesitant to follow me.

“Lots of bottom here!” I yelled and made a big deal out of walking around in the water, slamming my bare feet down into the bottom that was indeed there so they could see that it was perfectly safe. That’s when I stomped on the business (sticking up) end of a broken beer bottle.

This old stubby beer bottle was planted neck down, broken half up in the muck at the bottom of a deep part as if it was placed there on purpose, like a punji stick in a Vietnamese tiger trap. I hit it good and hard, howled and jumped, sucking my foot out of the goo with a slurpedy POP, with a cracked off piece of Molson 50 stuck in me. Seeing that big shard of glass scared me more than the hot, stinging flash of stepping on it, but after I yanked it out, the sudden gush of deep red blood scared me even more. It came off the cut in thick blobs, not nice drips like a finger cut.

It scared my friends Greg and Robbie too. I could tell because they turned and ran away. I don’t know if they knew where they were going, but they sure knew where they shouldn’t have been and so they ran away from me and that terrible swamp as fast as they could go.

In a sickening moment of realization, I knew God put that broken bottle there to punish Bad Boys who actively chose to disappoint their moms, so I didn’t blame my friends for running, but I did blame them for stranding me. How would I escape? How could I make it out alive?

The answer was that I had to run, just like they did, only slower and with a lot more limping. I didn’t want to bleed out and I didn’t want to get caught out there in the forbidden swamp, so I decided to let panic empower me and I just started running. I knew Greg and Robbie had raced up North Street for Robbie’s house, so I figured I only had to make it that far to be safe.

I hop-ran, saying “ow” every time my cut foot landed on the jet black, freshly oiled rocks on the gravel road. They were frying pan hot in the blistering sun that day and I am sad to report that the gravel was the perfect size to get mashed into the gaping red gash on the ball of my foot, which would turn out to be no fun later. But I didn’t let that stop me. I just kept running.

Luckily, I didn’t have to run very far before Robbie’s mom showed up in a station wagon. She had a towel with her and wrapped it around my bloody, black foot after looking at the cut.

When she saw it, she made a face and said, “Uh oh.”

Seeing her response made me suddenly feel all the pain all at once and I started crying. She grimaced and tried to rub some of the blood away with the towel to see what all was in there, probably hoping to pry some of the oiled rocks and bits of tar out, but I howled and pulled away.

“Leave it in! Leave it in! I don’t want it out!” I howled. “We can’t touch it!”

If I thought this was about as bad as things could get, I was wrong because my mom pulled up in her car. She must have been parked around the corner waiting for me to go into the swamp and get cut, because there was no way she could have found out so quickly what had happened. How long had I been standing in the swamp, bleeding? How long had it taken me to run up the road?

It didn’t line up.

Mom was already shaking her head when she got out of her car and, unlike Robbie’s mom, she didn’t look scared or grossed out. She looked like she had better things to do than drive over here for this kind of malarkey. She looked like she had already had enough and we had just started.

Even the sound of her voice had its hands on its hips. “What did you do now?”

I took a breath and considered my options and yes, I know, this also marks me as a Bad Boy.

“Well, I was just walking down the road and I guess I stepped on a broken beer bottle. Molson.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Just walking down the road? Really? Are you sure about that?”

Looking back, I have to admit that, even though I was scared and crying and bleeding to death, I still had the gumption to come up with a story. Unfortunately, it was one she knew to be untrue.

I glanced over at Robbie’s mother and saw that she knew more than she was letting on.

My mom reached out and poked my bathing suit. “Why are you all wet?”

I thought about telling her it was pure sweat from the waves of agony I was suffering as I bled out, but she knew I had wolf power and would be able to resist terrible amounts of pain.

“Okay,” I admitted. “I went into the deadly swamp. But I had no choice! I had to go!” I told her that I had bravely gone into the deadly swamp to save Greg’s life before the quicksand got him.

She didn’t believe me, but at this point, it didn’t matter. Something had to be done.

Mom stood up and shared a look with Robbie’s mom.

“Stitches?”

Robbie’s mom nodded. “Yeah.”

Mom’s face tightened and she nodded.

Stitches?

That didn’t sound good.

“What are stitches?”

My mom sighed like she was about to start digging a giant hole and the ground was really hard.

“We’re going to have to go to the hospital.”

My chest tightened and I had to work to breathe. “What? Why? What are you gonna do there?”

“That’s where you go after you do things you’re not supposed to do. You need stitches.”

The hospital was only two blocks away, so we were there in no time. When mom took me into the emergency room, they rushed me into another place, where I was laid down on a very scary bed in a horrible room that smelled like ether and chemicals and metal and everything I touched was ice cold. I had been sweating from my terrible run, wet from the swamp and I was mostly naked except for a bathing suit, so now, everything I touched was like ice. Even the floor, which I tracked everywhere I limped with oily black footprints and splotchy clumps of bloody tar.

The doctor came in and smiled at my mom and started mumbling. He was famous for it. He would be my doctor for my entire childhood but I don’t think I ever knew exactly what he was saying. He was one of those old timey British war doctors who had a pipe in his mouth and would maybe take a bored look at your hideous wounds and nod without any concern and say “yes yes” to himself and maybe tap the lip of your hideous wound with the mouthpiece of the pipe as he considered whether he needed to amputate something or tell you everything was fine.

As he talked, Mom nodded and pulled the towel away from around my foot so he could see it.

When the doctor looked at the cut, he didn’t react like Robbie’s mom at all. He wasn’t impressed one bit. If anything, he seemed to be disappointed, like, that’s it? I wanted to defend myself somehow, tell him that hey, it might be infected or something, so he shouldn’t be so dismissive. I also wanted to tell him that, even if it didn’t look that bad, it felt terrible. It was burning!

He didn’t get too excited about my pain either, it turned out. Either that or he seemed to think I was getting what I deserved, which he made very clear to me by what I now understand to be a miserly application of anesthetic. Apparently, if you were a bad boy in late 1960s Clinton, you got your stitches the same way they got them back in the Civil War. The hard way. I also learned this by being secured to a gurney with leather straps so I couldn’t escape, which I very much wanted to do. This was also when I learned that good boys stayed home like they were told, whereas bad boys went into the swamp and got stitches and cried so hard they threw up.

This is what hit me as I stood on the mud hill, processing what those boys had said. Those Little Gentlemen were right. I should have realized it whilst under the needle and thread of Dr. H at the Clinton Hospital as he stitched me up and ignored my howling tears and I should have realized it whilst stomping around in the deadly swamp, ignoring the rules and giving no cares. Yes, my heart might have been in the right place, but I was indeed a bad boy from the low class part of town and I had the scars to prove it. Those pasty little gentlemen were right. They knew. They didn’t even have to send a pretty woman to offer me an apple. They just had to point at the apple tree, knowing I would take one myself, gobble it down and nip back to the tree for more.

And that was only the beginning of what would become my descent into Badness.

Greg and I started hanging around outside Man’s house, like vultures on a dead tree, waiting till he dumped his ashtray out on the road, after which we ran out to root through the ash pile for butts long enough to fake smoking them up and down the street. We stuck them in our mouths and wished for matches and went around saying “right on, man!” I’m lucky we rarely got matches at the same time as butts or I would have had throat cancer before Grade Three, but it just never worked out. Part of the timing problem was that as soon as we found matches, we ran like escaped convicts down to the bridge to burn everything we found that could be set on fire.

For months, the first thing I thought when I got up in the morning and the last thing I thought before I went to sleep at night was that I had to burn things. I needed matches. Lots of them.

The most reliable means to get matches (and sometimes other cool man stuff) was to rifle through our dads’ coat pockets. They had a lot of fun bills and receipts from faraway towns where we couldn’t go, from places with names like “Mal’s Diner” and “North End Store.”

I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go to grown up man places when I was out trucking or playing in my band, just like my dad. I would smoke cigars with all naked ladies and eat bowls of chili and toasted westerns and open faced burgers. And even though I didn’t like beer and coffee at all, I knew that I would have to get some of that too if I was going to do it right.

When the universe was kind to us, we got lucky in our pocket searches and found a pack with more than a few odd matches left and then it was time to make stink bombs and burn stuff. If you want to make a deadly stink bomb, you had to find an old shotgun shell that has already been shot off and fill it up with the cut off ends of the matches. I mean the burn-y part. Once you have them all in there, you light another match, throw it into the shell and run away like crazy so you don’t lose an eye, just like Vietnam. You didn’t have to see it blow off anyway, you mostly wanted to hear explosions and smell rotten eggs, which is why they were called stink bombs.

Sadly, letting off stink bombs was a gateway crime that led to breaking pop bottles, throwing rocks at a tin garage door, and putting mud balls in Man’s muffler which, if you get caught, will end up with you getting killed, which Man told us so we told him the other Randy did it.

That just makes one more bad thing I did because it was a lie. The other Randy was only three.

If I had kept on going the way it looked like I was going, it wouldn’t have been too long before I would be sent to reform school or maybe even Man Jail, but then something happened that turned me away from the deadly path of crime onto which I was surely wandering.

Even after I thought I had become so bad that nothing could stop me, I learned about a kind of bad that is so far past normal bad that it’s not even called bad anymore. It’s called evil.

And the name for evil in my part of town was Danny.

Danny made my broken bottles and stink bombs look like bubblegum and Grandma cookies.

In all my years of life, I could never have conjured up a reign of terror like the one Danny started on John Street, turning our neighbourhood into a pit of suffering where we learned the hard way about fighting, swearing, kicking, yelling, spitting, backtalking, lipping off and deadly poison.

Yes, deadly poison.

We actually had to learn about the use of deadly poison at age four because of this one kid.

Until I saw Danny, I was told I was about the brownest kid in the area (PS I am white) so I was thrilled to hear about a kid who was even darker than me. Somebody said he was an Indian, which was the only word I knew for Indigenous people back in those days, but I could hardly dare to let myself believe it was true. In Clinton? You might as well say there were dinosaurs in town. As far as I would have known, these things existed only on TV, especially in westerns.

Even though I was sure it was all malarkey, I couldn’t help but wish we could have real life Indians in my neighbourhood, because I knew we would end up being blood brothers. When we played Cowboys and Indians, I was always the Indians. TV cowboys were too boring. Yeah, they had six-guns, hats, horses and sat around campfires eating beans and I liked beans, but that was about it. Now think about TV Indians. They had war paint, bows and arrows, tomahawks, long hair, buffaloes, no-saddle horses, spears, furs, tattoos, pemmican and they camped every day. You camp once in the summer and it’s a holiday but here the TV Indians were, camping for their whole lives. Plus they ate wild animal meat, which gave them great strength and wilderness abilities to communicate with woodland creatures and read the signs of nature. Just like me. In general, I was cool with being told almost daily that I “had to be Indian or something” because, indeed I had a totem animal (Wolf) and remarkable nature powers like sneaking and darkvision. And if this new, even browner kid Danny really was Indigenous, I would have to be his friend.

I couldn’t wait to meet him and find out. Until then I met him.

That’s when I found out a whole bunch of things.

And none of them were good.

Everybody’s first meeting with Danny played out in some variation of my first meeting. I was playing on Mud Hill and I saw this new kid strolling down the road. Actually strolling, like Popeye. I knew this had to be Danny because, sure enough, he was even browner than me, just like they said. He walked with his elbows stuck out, like he was taking up more space and he had to be at least a year older than me but he was much smaller. Having said that, the way he walked, all puffed up and important, you might think he was enormous. This contrast was intimidating but I was thinking how great it was that he was coming up to my hill, because I was going to be the first of my friends to play with him and it was on my own home turf, my actual back yard!

I crouched back down to get my trucks, planning to show him the big red firetruck that was even more amazing because my dad was a fireman, but I was hit with a sudden shock, a flash and the world flipped, spun, whirled over my head, mud hill upside down, moving up, up, upper and-

– the ground slapped my air out in one sharp “OOF” that made me forget to breathe. I choked on dirt trying to get air, gasping, watching my life flash before me. It didn’t take very long, which didn’t say a lot about how much awesome stuff I had been up to in my four years, I guess.

Once I could focus my eyes properly, I saw Danny from a new angle, from below, upside down as he stood with my red fire truck up over his head. It looked a lot like he was going to-

He slammed the truck down on my head and yelled with a huge voice:

“I’m the King of the Castle!”

Then he said bad words.

All of them. In one long breath.

Bad words!

Terrified, in shock, eyes spinning, forehead swelling up from the firetruck attack, I tried to roll away from another swing and went down the hill, picking up speed and landing in the grass.

I tried to stand up, doubly dizzy, glancing back as Danny reared up on my hill, shaking his knotty little fists in the air and cackling with evil glee. “You come up here again and I’ll kill you!”

He didn’t mean he would “kill me” like a normal kid meant it, like he would punch your shoulder or trip you. Danny meant it for real. He would actually kill me. To death.

In two, three minutes tops, my life had gone from attempted friendship to attempted murder. My response was immediate, instinctual and powerful: I ran into the house in terror, free running cry-snot burning two clear tracks down through the dried, crusty mud under my nose.

When I got inside, my mom couldn’t understand exactly what had happened through the shuddering sobs that staccatoed my explanation for the fat, purpling goose egg swelling up on my forehead, but she heard enough to figure out that somebody had knocked me down. The part she was having trouble with was the firetruck. Was I saying I had been run over by a truck?

No! He picked it up and double handed it down on my face! What don’t you understand?

When she finally figured it out, Mom’s maternal drives kicked in with all the force 1960s parenting could bring about as she wiped off my runny little face: “Well, don’t play with him anymore.”

I looked up at her in shock as she nodded firmly. “You need to stay away from him.”

If I hadn’t been so focused on trying to reconnect my bludgeoned brain with my quivering legs, I would have snapped. Stay away from him? How would I do that? This monster lived in our neighbourhood! Unless there was going to be some radical shift in road-crossing policies, or we were moving, I was never going to be more than one block away from this stone-cold killer!

There was no other place to go. Unless I figured out a way to deal with this evil Danny, I would be killed and probably have my head put up on a sharpened hockey stick on my own mud hill.

It was my blood brother Greg who found out that this evil kid’s name was Danny. He heard it from Man. Man and his buddies were working on Man’s Camaro and Danny came strutting over to them. They howled at this brown kid’s insane confidence and, just like that, Danny was in.

All the way in.

Man and his buddies took every opportunity to give Danny nearly-whole smokes and said loads of bad words with him, and one time they let him go for a tour in the Camaro! Right down John Street, spitting gravel all the way! We had spent years forging a relationship with Man, desperate to get nearly-whole smokes and also, packs of matches, but we were never so bold as to think of a tour in the Camaro, but then this new kid just struts up and boom, he’s Man Junior?

The real kick in the eye was that Danny was way better at hanging out with Man than we ever could have been. He already knew all the bad words and he never had to go home for lunch or supper. It was like he had no Mom or Dad and it made me wonder if he killed his parents. But then how did he survive without them? Could you make enough money to live on only by destroying the lives of others? Did he have his own house? Did he not have to eat food like a normal boy? And most concerning of all, was he a boy? Maybe he was an actual demon?

To make it even that much worse, we were completely hypnotized by this terrible demon. He was a Great White shark and we were those divers who can’t stop going into cages to watch. You know that you avoid this primeval monster, but you just can’t help yourself because these deadly creatures are hypnotic, the perfect manifestations of the primal cruelty of Nature Unleashed. Danny had no doubt, no fear, no remorse for anything he did to the world around him, no matter how evil. And his ability to smell weakness was unmatched. He was able to instantly figure out and implement every awful thing that would shock and upset you and make you want to cry and tell your mom but you couldn’t tell her because a) you had better not say words like that to your mom and b) you really don’t know what the heck they mean or even how to say them correctly.

I found this out firsthand one day when I tried one of those Danny words.

Mom was taking me somewhere in the car. I was already going mental because we never went anywhere. Just driving ten blocks downtown was a thrilling expedition as far as I was concerned. I hopped in the back seat while Mom got in the front with my baby sister and I was so excited that we might get chocolate milk that I felt like I might scream and I wanted to share my incredible joy and gratitude with my family, so I leaned over the seat with a huge smile.

“Fuck off, Mom!”

Suddenly I was piled up against the car door with a burning hand-shape seared into my face and a loud ringing in my ears, one worse than the other. I would have cried if I had any idea I’d been smacked, but all I could do was try to figure out how I came to be upside down against the door while, off in the distance was a crackly voice telling me to never say words like that ever again.

I felt my hot cheek against the vinyl seat as I struggled to listen through the buzzing in my ears. The details were fuzzy, but the intention was clear: I said a word that WE DO NOT SAY!

Some time later, Mom and Rhonda (that baby sister I mentioned) and I ended up downtown because Mom had to buy some stuff (but not chocolate milk, after that kind of talk) and she was hanging on to my hand like she was still thinking about snapping it off and eating it. She was mad in a way I’d never seen, because she was never mad. Her face was reddish, her lips thin and tight together and her eyebrows were down in a sharp V as she told me that I would never talk like that again and although it hurt her to punish me, if I was going to be walking around talking like that I was on the fast track to being a Bad Boy because only Very Bad Boys said things like that and where did I even hear such a thing because we didn’t use that language at our house.

I told her, but if I hoped she would go out and smack Danny in the head, I might as well hope to grow antlers and goat legs. All she did was tell me I should know better than to go around saying anything I heard a Bad Boy say and didn’t I remember that she’d told me to stay away from him?

Well, yeah. I sure as heck did! I tried all I could to stay away from that kid and it was impossible! Which is why, on that day, I decided that I would have to kill him. I would kill Danny. For real.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it head on, however, because, even though I was bigger than him, he was a lot meaner and crazier, and he had gathered a group of weak-minded hangers-on, every one a boy desperate to wreak enough havoc on the world to make their insane leader laugh. My assassination campaign would have to be subtle, careful, untraceable and thus began my new career as an Advanced Scientific Assassin and Inventor of Deadly Potions designed to kill one – and only one – person. For the next months, maybe years, while other kids in my neighbourhood were outside, avoiding group beatings from Danny and his crew, I was in the bathroom. Mixing.

Brewing.

Preparing.

I began by trying to get my hands on any container that had the scariest looking pictures on the label. Skulls were the best, because I knew that meant it was already poisonous, although the bone hand was pretty good too. I could just imagine what kind of trouble that stuff would cause inside an Evil Boy’s soft guts if it could strip somebody’s hand to the bones – and I liked it.

The science behind my plan was that if I mixed a lot of these skull and bone juices together, I would be creating some kind of Super Poison that I could put into a delicious treat of some sort that I would pretend to eat outside and when Danny came to steal it, as was inevitable when any other kid had anything good, he would eat it all and die in an explosion of blood and barf. And nobody would ever know that I had done it out of sheer revenge and True Hero’s Justice.

Unfortunately, being an Advanced Scientific Assassin and Inventor of Deadly Potions was challenging. Mom made it her business to prevent me from collecting the components I needed. When she found out I was creating the Deadliest Poison known to Mankind, which I foolishly bragged about, she forced me to resort to much less deadly stuff, like shampoo, mouthwash, and aftershave. She said maybe I could just make him sick or give him a touch of the runs.

I did not agree.

I needed to kill this Terrible Boy and all the potions I made out of soap were useless. Sure, some of them made my little sister sick (she tested a few for me), but that was not enough revenge.

I wanted to watch Danny drink my potion, then suffer and die like a toad-eating dog, choking and clutching his throat in agony, feeling very sorry indeed that he had stolen that treat from me, while I stood over him, reciting from a list of names of other kids who had suffered under him.

He would look up at me in terror and beg for the antidote, but I would not give it to him. Also, there was no antidote. I never made any antidotes. While he choked, other kids he had victimized would show up and cheer with delight at Heroic Justice when they saw his lifeless corpse and then we would take his body and throw it in the Haunted Barn Swamp and I’d make a speech.

I wish I had written that speech and saved it, because in my opinion it would be inspiring and I think it would have motivated other kids to defend themselves by poisoning their tormentors.

You may wonder how a four year-old can be so cruel as to plan a murder with so much commitment and so many logistical inputs, but when I tell you what Danny did to our friend Matt, you will understand and you will probably start mixing up your own potions to kill Danny.

Matt was a slow talking boy with thick glasses and a gentle voice who believed every single thing anybody told him. He was that kind of nice that made him think everybody else he met was going to be the same kind of nice back to him and sometimes that attribute was a lot of fun. You could run up to him and claim that you had seen ten vampires riding ten giant flying cobra snakes behind the Jehovah’s Witness church and he would take off screaming in fear. Or you could convince him to come over to your house because you had a magic TV and he would come over and wait excitedly for Bugs Bunny to appear and give everyone free chocolate milk.

“When is Bugs Bunny coming out?” he would say.

“Oh man, I just found out he won’t come out until you try to kiss Greg’s sister right on the lips,” and off he would go, all puckered up and Greg’s sister would either run away or fight back, trying to kick him in the nuts or get him in a headlock. You might think that was mean, but when I tricked him, it was all in fun and I usually told him it was a trick before he went too crazy or got nut kicked. But when Danny found out about Matt’s trusting nature and too-kind heart, Danny would never ease off on any of his tricks. He would take them as far as he could.

The worst time, the time that made me want to make the deadliest potion ever and kill Danny the most, was when he gave Matt a free bottle of Kist Lemon-Lime “just to be nice” but guess what?

It wasn’t Lemon-Lime pop in that bottle. It was piss. Danny and his friends had peed in that Lemon-Lime bottle. They actually did that and in a terrible twist, they were the poisoners.

Now, Matt was naive but he was not crazy and so he was reluctant to take a drink from that free bottle of pop. Danny and his hangers-on were laughing so hard that even Matt knew something was going on, but he was scared and just wanted to get along without getting hurt so he did it.

He drank some.

For a long time after, some people laughed when they heard that story, usually when Danny or one of his evil hangers-on told it, but some of us didn’t think it was even one bit funny. I don’t know if drinking pee could kill you or not, but for sure it would make you feel sick and humiliated and scared. That’s just what happened to Matt. He was never the same boy after that.

I heard about it from a kid who was there, one of the hangers-on. He said Danny walked over, sat down beside Matt, looked him right in the eye and laughed as Matt drank from the bottle. I knew exactly what Danny was doing when he looked at Matt. I knew that he wanted to stare into Matt’s eyes as he died. He wanted to see that too-nice boy suffer. He wanted to watch Matt panic and struggle to breathe and Danny would eat up Matt’s misery like it was a piece of chocolate pie.

I told you earlier that, up until I was four years old, I didn’t know much about Good and Bad, that I mostly just did the things I did without thinking too hard about it, but after I met Danny, after I said the bad words to my mom and got smacked, after everything else, I was changed.

Over a few weeks, I learned that, no matter how bad and low class my neighbourhood was, no matter if I lit matches or blew off stink bombs or broke pop bottles and tried to smoke nearly whole butts and threw rocks and spit greeners and used a loud voice near the hospital, those little gentlemen were dead wrong about me. No matter how much Bad stuff I did, I wasn’t a Bad Boy, not really, because I would never be able to truly hurt someone on purpose like Danny did.

My mom tried to make me feel better about everything by explaining that Danny was probably “like that” because he had bad feelings about himself so he tried to make himself feel better by making everyone else feel bad, like it might make him feel higher to see us feeling low. But that didn’t make me feel any better. I figured that, actually, Danny was like me, and not just because we were browner than other kids. He had the same power I did, to feel the feelings of bugs and worms and other creatures. He felt it all just like I did, all the pain and suffering and sadness. But the thing is, when Danny felt their pain and fear and misery, he didn’t suffer with it the way I did.

He liked it.

That’s why I had to kill him. He was Bad and getting rid of bad people was good for everybody.

So for the rest of that summer before Kindergarten I stayed inside to make plans.

And poison.