Gang Fight

One morning at recess he came up with his best idea yet.

May 1962

The slide was a popular choice during recess in 2nd grade, but at some point, some adult decided we could no longer use wax paper to sit on to go down the slide. They were forever thinking up stuff like that, talking about how sitting on wax paper made the slide too fast, as if there were such a thing as too fast. Then there were the swings, and there they conspired against us when we discovered that the best thing to do was jump out of the seat while it was at the apex of its arc. We thought we were paying tribute to pilots who had to bail out of their planes; they thought we might twist an ankle. They were always getting in the way of important things, especially things that were fun. Later, when I got to junior high, an English teacher scolded me for saying they in an essay without properly identifying who the heck they were. Well, dear reader, now you know who they are, fun spoilers—just a side note. And then there was the jungle gym, which many people remember fondly. But admit it, the thing’s boring. There’s the climbing of it, taking less than a minute, and then there you are. That’s your jungle gym experience. Now there were some who would stand in the middle of it at the bottom and pretend it was a submarine, but come on, it doesn’t move, now does it? Eventually, I came to feel that a jungle gym was something they wanted us to use so we wouldn’t climb trees. By the 3rd grade I started climbing trees even though they cleverly didn’t have any on the schoolyard—I wouldn’t be deterred though; I climbed trees at home and at Verdugo Park.
Now, Dale Kranz and I were friends. I stuck by him because ideas were constantly pouring out of him—crazy, funny stuff that I hadn’t heard from anyone else. One morning at recess he came up with his best idea yet.
“We’ll get a bunch of people and we’ll all fight.”
“What??”
“Yeah, like you, me and Billy and maybe Ross.”
“We don’t want to fight those guys, they’re our friends.”
“No” he said calmly, although he was becoming impatient with my lack of vision, “they’ll be on our side. We’ll fight four other guys.”
We were quiet for a while, circling the yard like a couple of prisoners with a huge, improbable plan. We started eyeing potential opponents. Then Billy caught up with us and we filled him in on the plan. The three of us tracked down Ross and the four of us circled the yard one more time to work out the details. We would fight at the east end of the yard, in the sand by the slide and the jungle gym. The sand was important in case any of the combatants fell or was thrown down; better to fall in sand than on the blacktop. We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt during the fight.
Dale, Billy and Ross picked out their opponents—who were very enthused about the idea—and I picked Timmy, a kid who wrote a three-sentence story that I didn’t like for some reason, but I had another reason for picking Timmy: he was the skinniest kid in the entire school. He looked like he was made out of pipe cleaner. If I was going to be in a fight, I certainly wasn’t fixing to lose.
We positioned ourselves in the sand between the slide and that jungle gym. One of us called out, “One, two, three go!” After that I had the sad realization that one could not fight and watch at the same time. I had no idea how anyone else fared; Timmy and I were locked on each other’s shoulders. Then I put my foot behind his ankle and pushed him back. Instead of tripping and falling, he went airborne, landed on his back hard enough to make clouds of dust from the sand. I pounced on him and pinned his poor little arms. The match, or the mismatch, was pretty much over. Timmy had no move to make and I didn’t know what else to do. I knew that this was the part where the good guy starting punching the bad guy on the ground. Punching him though required taking one hand off of him in which case he might escape. So I hit him in the mouth with my knee. He said, “Hey” as if I had gone off script, then his mouth started bleeding and Timmy began crying. Instead of feeling triumphant, I felt horrible; his tooth cut my knee, and I didn’t get any thrill from seeing Timmy bleeding and crying. It wasn’t like a cowboy movie at all.
I felt relieved when Miss Bennett grabbed me right under my armpit and lifted me off the ground. She didn’t say anything; she just hustled me off the playground and dropped me off in an empty room. We were all put in separate rooms, interviewed then all brought together and received a lecture. During my interview I had no sense of trouble; expect that I felt bad for Timmy. We had planned the whole thing and it had come off pretty much as we imagined it. It was the best use of recess we could think of, much better than any playground equipment available. I explained this to Miss Bennett but by the puzzled look on her face, which never changed, I wasn’t sure she understood. When we were brought together, Miss Bennett explained to us that this wasn’t a good way to play and that we would have to find another way to play. What made the moment so memorable was how calm and logical Miss Bennett was. We all agreed to find a different way to play. The next year we discovered the joys of basketball—as well as off-campus tree climbing--and neither Dale, Billy, Ross nor I got in a fight in the entire 3rd grade year. Sad to report though, I don’t remember anything about Timmy after that day.