The Arch Nemesis

The Old Man has had, and continues to have some good friends. Many of these are from childhood. Now, I know that along the way, I have accumulated an enemy or two, but I hope the score adds up to an overwhelming preponderance of the positives. There was one, however.......

He was a couple of years older than me, and in 10 year old culture, that might as well have been a century. He was a regular tormentor of the Park Street Battalion. I follow a comic strip in our daily paper called "Curtis". For those unfamiliar, he's a little kid who from time to time runs into a couple of characters named "Derrik" and "Onion". They generally pop out from behind a fence or an alley and make Curtis' life miserable. I understand Curtis. We had our own Derrik and Onion rolled into one.

One day NemesisBoy ambushed me as I was walking home from school by myself. After some rib jabs and shoves, he produced a length of rope from his bike saddlebags. By this time, I was a couple of minutes shy of having my pants grow significantly lumpy and aromatic.

He proceeded to tie me to a tree. Not just any tree, mind you, but a very prominent maple tree that was on the main drag through our part of town, Longwood Ave. Thoughts swarmed through my mind, but chief among them was, "I'm gonna kill this asshole". That's a pretty severe one for a 10 year old. Of course I said nothing and he rode off on his bike cackling like the witch in the Wizard of Oz. Then the fun began.

People I knew were riding by in their cars...returning from work, shopping, or errands. Many of these were the same people who had wondered why that little Jackson boy was sitting up in that tree "humming" while playing airplane, and I'm quite sure they had thoughts like, "He's at it again....now he's gone and tied himself to a tree". Some of them waved, including my dad. All the while, I attempted to ply the skills I had honed during those Saturday Western matinees. Cisco and Pancho, Hopalong Cassidy, or The Durango Kid always managed to extricate themselves easily. For some reason, my efforts weren't working. Their ease of escape was probably related to that 6-shooter the good guys could fire 213 times without reloading.

Dad finally came back as the afternoon drew to a close and he realized that I just might need a bit of help. He got me untied and I managed between sobs to tell him the story. He gave me a piece of advice. "I could go have a talk with his dad, but that probably wouldn't change anything. As a matter of fact, it would probably make it worse. You're just going to figure out how to handle this yourself." "Oh, gee, thanks, Dad" I thought.

Turn the page a couple of months to summer. We were at a church picnic and this jerk was surreptitiously picking on me when he thought no one was looking. I caught the look in my dad's eye and the tumblers in my brain fell into place. In front of God and everybody else I got all over this dude like white on rice. I slapped, kicked, punched, and bit. He was howling and crying and it all was over in the blink of an eye, before anyone could break us up. Truth be told, I'm pretty sure my dad was intentionally slow to mosey over. As we rode home in the car, I expected a tongue-lashing, but rather, all he said was, "I think your problems are over, son."

Like all those other times in my life, he was right. I never had a moments trouble and neither did some of the other members of the Battalion.

That tree is gone now, having served it's purpose. But the memory lingers, the lesson lingers, and the memory of the look in Dad's eyes when he pulled me off Nemesisboy will stay with me forever. After all, you never forget how pride looks.