When I was ten I went to war.
Not war in the actual sense, of course. My war was with the kid down the street. His name was Derek, and he was a year younger than me. This might make me sound a bully, but believe me, this was anything other than the case. When Derek moved in, initially we tried to make friends. We both liked Hot Wheels. This was a firm basis for a friendship.
However, me taking offense at blackcurrant jelly on a PB&J at his house snowballed into blood feud in short order. (Derek’s family was of Eastern European descent and blackcurrant jelly was only beginning to really enter into the Canadian market.) As anybody knows, it only takes the slightest insult – and personally, I think choking at the unexpected mix of blackcurrant1 and peanut butter is definitely pretty damn slight – for children to form inviolate hatreds. After the Blackcurrant Incident, Derek hated my guts. I didn’t understand it, but one thing about kids hating you, when you’re a kid, is that it’s incredibly easy to reciprocate.
It really only took one-half a heaved brick for my confusion to curdle into hatred. (Well, it was a whole brick, but it was only half a throw.) And because wars inevitably escalate, friends got dragged into it. However, friends-of-warring-friends have varying degrees of interest. In my case, my friends were willing to cooperate in missions of espionage when they came over to play (tipping over of bikes, careful theft of basketballs, that sort of thing), but they weren’t emotionally invested beyond wanting to support me in my Ahab-like quest as much as they were able, which was not a lot. They didn’t live down the street from Derek, after all. They weren’t Queequeg and didn’t need to bring along their own coffins.
Derek, on the other hand, had friends who were invested. He befriended another Chris and Jason. Other Chris and Jason hated me. Not personally, you understand; I was a mouthy kid even then but hadn’t yet mastered the art of personally offending people for life.2 Other Chris and Jason hated me impersonally, the way they hated anybody in my year at school, because Other Chris and Jason had been in my year until they were left back just before Derek moved to Toronto in the summer. When Derek met them, they were given a cause. It wouldn’t last forever, of course. Just long enough.
(Incidentally, I feel it worthy mentioning that Other Chris and Jason’s experience is one of the reasons I’ve always felt that leaving back poor students is counterproductive. Yes, it sucks that students who don’t entirely understand what they’ve been taught get advanced regardless, but Other Chris and Jason got to feel marginalized at the age of nine. So far as I know neither one had any education past high school; I believe one of them didn’t even finish. They weren’t dullards. They just got told, right off the bat, exactly how much society thought of them. I don’t see how it helped. I particularly don’t buy the “leaving them back helped all the other students” argument, because if they were disruptive in class it was just a matter of transferring the problem to a new bunch of kids. And they weren’t particularly disruptive before they were left back.)
Other Chris and Jason, combined with Derek, formed a terrifying unit. Jason was athletic, Other Chris had a particularly criminal sense of inventiveness, and Derek was, even at that early age, a master of covering ass. An example of this happened when I was riding home on my bike, around the corner where Derek lived. I was still at the “ride on the sidewalk” age, so it was easy for Other Chris to run out into the sidewalk suddenly. I hit the brakes (coaster bike, push the pedals in reverse), which gave Jason, hiding in the bushes across the street, the chance to run across it and jam a broomhandle into my spokes. This led to about five minutes of shoving me around while I sat on my bike saddle (I wasn’t going to relinquish my bike), which was exactly the amount of time available before Derek’s mom arrived home from work. Really, you have to admire the precision.
Another time, down at the park, the traditional “water pistols filled with Kool-Aid” attack went awry for Derek and his crew. Water pistols filled with Kool-Aid are a great weapon when you’re a kid: you get your target in trouble if he’s wearing anything the Kool-Aid will stain (and he probably is), the sugar attracts mosquitoes and other bugs, and of course there’s the soaking factor combined with a little unpleasant stickiness. Unfortunately, my friends and I knew the woods behind the park better than Derek did (and Other Chris and Jason didn’t live near the park so they didn’t know it at all), so it was easy to run, jump the creek right next to the log we knew was almost entirely rotted out, get our feet wet and continue. When Team Derek gave chase, they naturally tried to run across the log, which snapped. In retrospect, it’s probably lucky they didn’t break anything.
I wish this story ended with a dramatic flourish, but it doesn’t. Kids lose interest in things over time, and kid-wars are no exception; eventually Jason and Other Chris found better things to do with their time as they got over being left back as best they could, and my friends had never had much interest to begin with, exhortations of “I got your back” aside. Derek and I eventually just learned that giving one another dirty looks was a lot easier than carrying out “missions” to spray each others’ pet cats with water pistols.3
It’s part of growing up: with luck, you realize when bullshit is bullshit.
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This is the weirdest entry in your “I Should Write Dr. Strange” series so far.
And yet here I am, thinking about how Deadpool would be the strangest person to get Dr. Strange’s back in a situation like this.
Well, almost as strange as Squirrel Girl.
Sheesh. Canadians just don’t know how to hate properly do they. No tears. No blood. Not even some petty and stupid vandalism…
Having read this, I can’t help but think of the fun I had watching War of the Buttons. Kid wars are strangely good memories after the fact provided no major injuries happened.
It was my brother and I who had the kid war and it got nasty a couple of times. However the best memory I had was learning to fill up my water guns with HOT water instead of cold.
My war was very short. I want to say that it started over something like Transformers or He-Man and which was best, but how it started was never really important. It was a guy I had been pseudo-friends with before and was pseudo-friends with afterwards… eventually. Don’t even remember his name. Scott, I think.
How it ended, tho, well, that’s more entertaining. He finally called me out after school one day. We had a small crowd, with each of us having what were basically our seconds in our corners. Now, I was small for my age when I was younger, and I was also one class ahead of the other kids my age, and possibly-Scott was big for his. I knew I couldn’t take him in a fair fight, but he had challenged me in the morning for a fight after school. So I didn’t eat lunch, just left it in my lunchbox and packed all of my books into my backpack after the final bell. When we met outside, there was the usual posturing, with each side trying to get the other to back down in front of the crowd.
Once it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, we shrugged off our backpacks, and he began to take off his coat, which is when I swung my backpack by one strap up and over my head and straight down onto his, along with 10 or 15 pounds of books, lunch and a metal lunchbox. He went down with the first shot, but I kept hammering him with my improvised flail until he was crying and trying to shield himself with his arms. His second tried to stop me after the second or third hit, but I was like a child possessed and smacked him away on with the next upswing of the backpack before bringing it down again on possibly-Scott. Eventually, I got too tired from swinging and dropped the pack, then straddled him and started with the punches; this was, in hindsight, overkill, but I think this was the first real fight I had ever been, and I didn’t ever want to have to get in another one, so I had made the decision to just brutalize the guy. It worked; I didn’t get in another fight until I moved three years later.
After I had exhausted myself totally, I helped possibly-Scott to his feet, both of us crying. I helped him dust himself off and sent him on his way. The next week we were both playing together again, the fight largely forgotten.
The closest I ever came to something like this was in high school of all places. Some asshat, who I don’t remember the name of and who would talk to me constantly in driver’s ed even though he didn’t like me, challenged me. Now I knew he was just trying to act big in front of the popular guys, hence why it was ok to talk to me in driver’s ed, there was no one else to suck up to. He wanted to have a fight in my front lawn, I figured ok, I either beat him up or have them arrested for trespassing. But what I remember most about this is when I was organizing my “forces” (as I was planning on fighting him alone, but I wasn’t going to take the chance of being alone while he brought a group) one of my friends said he wouldn’t back me up. Now at the age of nine I could understand the reluctance, but we’d know each other for about four years and if the situation was reversed I’d have had his back. In the end nothing happened. Though I do find it strange that that friend who wouldn’t fight for me joined the National Guard and I can promise you it wasn’t for anything as noble as love of country.
How amateur. Girl wars were all out psychological warfare.
You don’t steal your enemies bikes, you tease them until they develop eating disorders! Geez!
the traditional “water pistols filled with Kool-Aid” attack
Wow. Never experienced that before! That’s ingenious. ‘course, I never had brothers…
And blackcurrant jelly, and blackcurrant Skittles, and everything else like that is just WRONG. When I was in the UK, I had my mother send over a jar of grape jelly, because I was in serious withdrawal.
And then there was the time when you had to fight an evil clown in the sewers with the power of your childhood innocense.
Kate the Short: I agree with you that blackcurrant is about the worst thing I’ve ever eaten. I would describe it as ‘evil in food form’, but I have found the one thing that is made from blackcurrant that is actually edible: jelly babies.
I don’t understand how, but blackcurrant jelly babies are actually good. They taste vaguely of grapes, but there’s still that distinctive taste of blackcurrant that told me what I was eating. Unfortunately to get jelly babies you have to import them from the UK and they are expensive. I got mine from my sister when she went to the UK for a class trip. Though there’s a “European” food market in town that I have yet to investigate.
Yeah, me and my friends too. We were at war with the group of kids from across the street.
The weird thing is that we never actually got into a fight about anything, the hate was just there from the beginning, it was all dirty looks.
Of course, that didn’t stop us from coming up with strategies. The one that I remember most was different bike formations, should we ever have to fight them while still in the bikes (I’m not sure how that would have worked, but that didn’t stop us). We had one that was a straight line, another that was an arrow, a reverse arrow, etc.
My war story is a little…odd. We acted out actual ‘wars’, with one another, teams formed on the basis of mutual hatred.
My only ally was a younger kid, also excluded from the gruesome twosome who would shoot imaginary bullets and us and cheer at our ‘deaths’.
So once I let them capture the younger kid. They came around after teasing me that I was all alone, that the kid was my only friend etc. etc.
I replied that he had been boobytrapped by an imaginary bomb and they were all dead.
Yeah….
I was briefly part of a rivalry which involved my best friend and her brother vs some guys who lived near them. It was this whole territory argument as the boys didn’t want Jake and Jo (my friends) to cut across ‘their’ field on the way to and from school. So of course they made sure that they did everytime, and over a few weekends I joined in as well.
All I remember is making endless traps for them to fall or walk into, and then dodging about with Jake’s walkie talkies. I don’t think the enemy was even around for most of it.
But after being involved with both kinds, I agree with Karen. Girl wars can be downright brutal and can last forever if both parties are willing. Two girls from my class hated each other all the way from age 10 till age 13 when it culminated in an epic slap-fight and hours of crying in the toilets afterwards.
I killed a man once. I have no idea what you are all talking about.
Let’s see…I was picked on occasionally in my elementary school years (including by a neighbor who threw a chunk of gravel at my face that nearly knocked out a tooth). From ages 11-13 I was mocked by both boys and girls for being smart and quiet and playing clarinet — a “girl’s instrument.” Age 13, in particular, was pretty much hell, including a guy who decided to be my arch-nemesis for some reason.
Age 14, it stopped. It was like, we were becoming freshmen in high school and we had to move on. And I know I got better at being sociable.
My senior year in high school, my arch-nemesis decided to start things up again — little stuff like trying to knock my books out of my hands, standing in front of my locker and not moving, whatever. I don’t recall complaining, but other people noticed what was going on…and after a week, one of my friends came up to me and said, “Don’t worry about David. We took care of it.” And except for big stuff like graduation, I never saw him again.
(On the other hand, my next-door neighbor was the homecoming queen, and she has nothing but nice memories about me and our respective childhoods, so, you know, I try to see things her way when I can.)
@Klytus: In Vegas, just to see him die?
@MGK: Was this before helmets were “encouraged”?
Actually, All the “kid wars” I’ve been involved in have NEVER had a ceasefire.
I was bullied constantly in school, but it never developed into wars; I just let them abuse me, because there was no recourse and no one to help.
My female friends and I did have a brief war with some boys once. We threw mulberries at them (to stain their clothes, just like the Kool-Aid), and they beat us with thick green bamboo stalks. A bit one-sided. Then my dad chased them and they ran like hell.
Oh, and we had a war with some brothers who lived a few doors down, and they actually kind of scared me. They were mean, and would throw things at my house and steal my toys. Later we made pseudo-friends with them.
I had a similar feud with the kids on the other side of the cul-de-sac. It got to the point where we were determined to ride out bikes all around the back alley road despite their blockade. They underestimated our determination. They thought garbage can lids and lying in the dirt would make us stop or go around them. This was long before Russel Crowe in ‘Gladiator’ used shields to crash attacking chariots. Of course we ran over top of them. I suppose turning around and running over them again was rubbing it in but our side of Frontinac didn’t take shit.
I had a traditional war where I fought over territory or whatever in second grade, but where it really gets epic is that in fourth grade the whole block decided to have a war and I wouldn’t come. Because, you see, I had seen the horrors of war — I knew it could escalate to rocks! and sticks! and violence! and pain! and I knew how trifling the prizes were. So I agreed to be an ambassador to negotiate for the return of a friend’s little brother. I was gearing up for a nonviolent protest with singing and signs when everyone lost interest.
In grades 3-5 I had a series of school wars, where everyone picked sides at the beginning of the year and they lasted until next september. We made forts in the bushes and trees, and the weapons were varied forms of dirt. My side exclusively used dirt clods, mined from the depths of the earthen forest(We got the desolate side of the shcoolground with no grass). The enemies used a combination of chunks of gradd and dirt pulled from the ground, and leaves wrapped around dirt. However, when the dirt clods got low in the later years, I decided to also use paper origami boxes filled with dirt. I was on the winning side every time, because I took it really seriously as a military general for my sides. Needless to say, about half of my elemntary school hated me, and the other half I was on good terms with. Once the wars stopped on the the guys who was on the other side started bullying me, and after a while I just beat the fuck out of him and not only made him cry, but he got kicked out of school for the principal finally having enough of his shit, wince this was the third fight he had gotten into. Good times.