The day I punched Buck Blalock in the stomach

Seventh grade isn’t tough for everybody–just the geeks.  Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.  I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know.

Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.  It was tougher for Buck Blalock.  He was a big, doughy kid in my class, way too mature and sensitive to live in the world with the rest of us on the island–the Lord of the Flies island we all inhabited back then.

He was “Piggy,” all right, and I might have been Ralph or Simon and been his friend, but it seems I didn’t have the nuts for it.  I had just moved back to Atlanta the year before, and I didn’t want to be “the new kid” forever.  A lot didn’t depend on what I wanted, though, and that became clearer and clearer as time went along.  Several of the boys were just as happy to keep me “the new kid” forever if they could manage it.

So, here I was, kinda big and doughy and sensitive myself, and the teachers must have thought Buck and I were a match made in Heaven.  They kept arranging for us to be partners in this and buddies in that.  Maybe that plan was working out fine for Buck, but I started looking down the road, and I didn’t see any promising forks.  It wasn’t that I disliked Buck and liked the other boys–Buck was fine, and some of the other boys were jerks of extravagant proportions.  It’s just that the choice, at least in my mind, became a matter of throwing in with Buck and being a social outcast for life, or putting up with the annoyances of trying to be “one of the guys.”  Even a seventh grader can do a simple deduction like that, and hey, some of the guys were all right.  Some of the girls, too, but I could see that wouldn’t be happening for any friend of Buck’s.

All of this came to a critical point one morning when the teachers assigned Buck and me to a job or errand involving close confinement in some sort of book room or supply closet–I forget which.  Anyway, here came Buck, all sincere and mature, bearing in, suggesting we become best chums or suchlike as that.

I fell apart.  This mindless aggression welled up in me–horror and revulsion, not at Buck, but at the specter of what I thought being friends with him meant.  I punched him once in the gut, which he hardly felt since he was pretty well padded there and I hadn’t followed through very much.  I let him have another with a little more force behind it and started yelling something at him, something about staying away from me unless there were some reason he had to be around.

Well, his chubby face fell as only chubby faces can fall.  The poor guy was sort of devastated–predictably, I guess.  I could see that things had not worked out as he had planned, not at all.  Normally, I had a soft heart for people in pain, but not this time.  In my callow mind, he meant to do me harm somehow, and it was really more a matter of self-defense, the way I saw things.  That drained all the empathy from me mighty quick.

So, I wasn’t Ralph or Simon, though I certainly wasn’t Jack on our little island.  I admit I was one of the cast of nameless boys; still, I have trouble seeing this as an allegory about the banality of evil.  It was a learning experience, for sure, and though Buck paid a price for my further education, I’m pretty sure he rebounded in whatever way he was able.  I can’t help feeling bad about the experience, though–a fact which shows in that I prefer to think of it in rhetorical terms, terms beginning with, “If harm was done….”  The subjunctive passive voice, [1] if there is such a thing, gives one some hard-won intellectual distance and comfort.

Historical notes:

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