Confessions of a recovering bully

Hi, my name is Dylan, and I’m a former bully.

I swear I’m not anymore. I’m basically a teddy bear these days. A living, breathing, paranoid, socially awkward, human teddy bear, but a teddy bear nonetheless.

But once upon a time I was a monster.

I said this one time at my former job, and it got a pretty good laugh out of my coworkers. 99% of people who know me can tell you, whatever else I might be, I am not a monster. But for a time I was the baddest bully in town.

I don’t know if it was my upbringing on the hard-scrabble city streets, or maybe because for a time I went to a school that felt like a converted prison (all concrete, asphalt and chain-link fencing). Whatever the reason, by the time I was eight-years-old I had a serious attitude problem.

Most likely my bad behavior stemmed from my parents’ divorce and my mother’s subsequent new boyfriend/eventual husband. That’s a rough thing for a kid to deal with. I lashed out, and several of my classmates suffered as a result.

It was also around this time that I found myself moving from the familiar concrete jungle of San Francisco to the suburban sprawl of the South Bay. With my life turned upside down, I fell in with a bad crowd.

My group of friends from about the age of 8-10 was basically a schoolyard gang. Lunch money (or sometimes just plain lunches) was stolen; kids were relentlessly mocked while others were subjugated to beat-downs. 

Other schoolyard gangs were common at my school, and you needed a group of your own for protection. You’ve all been through school; you know what it’s like. We weren’t running complex extortion rackets, or dealing illegal goods (sometimes candy though) or tagging our turf, but we were a gang nonetheless. 

We had a rather sophisticated method of settling differences between gangs. My school had a huge open grass field, with a track around it, adjacent to the playground. For whatever reason, the teachers assigned to oversee recess and lunch never seemed to take notice of any shenanigans that occurred in this field. This made it a perfect staging ground for our “gang fights” (and I say that with the loosest possible definition).

If two gangs had a problem with each other, we’d arrange for a showdown to occur in this field. One member from each gang was chosen to represent his/her own gang (mostly “his” – girls had cooties at the time, so naturally us guys kept our distance for the most part) and would be tasked to duke it out with one another while the rest watched. The others would sort of form a protective circle around the two combatants in order to help shield any teachers from witnessing the brutality of our gladiator combat.

It was all surprisingly efficient, respectful and gentlemanly for a bunch of 4^th graders. All we were missing were some white gloves to slap each other with, and to stand back-to-back and start pacing before each fight.

I was the main brawler for my gang. I was freakishly tall for my age, standing about 5’6” by the time I was nine-years-old. My height rate rapidly declined after that, as I’ve only managed to top off at 5’11” and 7/8ths of an inch (I just tell people I’m six feet tall), which I hit somewhere around age 14. Since I was abnormally larger than all the other kids at the time, I was an ideal candidate to challenge whatever pipsqueak the other gang could muster up. 

Not to brag, but my gang was tops at my school as a result of my distinct physical advantage.

When I said these were fights, I really just mean kids wrestling with one another. Rarely were straight punches thrown, maybe some kicks, but for the most part it was grabbing a kid and trying to shove him down to the ground, and keep him down until he gave up.

Problem was rarely did these fights stay mano-a-mano. It usually wouldn’t be too long before everyone else got involved and chaos ensued – usually after it became too apparent that I was winning the fight, and the other gang wanted to save face. Next thing I’d know there’d be kids hanging off every appendage of mine, and I’d be swinging them around like King Kong atop the Empire State Building.

After a few years my aggressive tendencies faded. Children’s counseling helped me get over my issues about the divorce – and my new step-father won me over after introducing me to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Soon I was no longer swinging kids around in bouts of childish rage, but rather as a game for smaller kids. I became a human rollercoaster.

At times I do worry, however, that this “Bully Dylan” still lurks beneath the surface. Like a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde (for the classic lit nerds) or Bruce Banner and Hulk (for the comic book nerds).

But for now my bullying past is behind me. Now I’m just a teddy bear, a big ol’ softy, the bleeding heart, the nice guy who finishes last, a pushover. I’ll take that over the alternative.

Just don’t ever make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.