Bobby and the Sunday Gunfight

Readers of my blog know I sometimes post fanciful pieces – fiction, humor, poetry, dog stories, even. Anyhow, the following is of that sort. My wife loaned me a book on creative writing. It gives you topics to write on, supposedly to fire up your creativity. This one was titled “It was Sunday morning.”

Bobby stepped off the boardwalk and looked down the dusty street. He repositioned the stiff leather gun belt and holster on his thin hips, and wished he’d had some time to practice.

Black Bart suddenly emerged from the livery at the other end of town. Even at 50 yards away, he seemed huge. And getting bigger. He was striding forward, his right hand hovering over his own holstered weapon. Bobby took a tentative step to meet him. 

Bullies

The gym of our old high school was a floor down from the primary classroom building. Two sets of stairs opened from the main hall down to the small gymnasium.

One morning after P.E., I was walking up those stairs, heading to my next class. To my dismay I encountered a group of upperclassmen, my sometime tormentors, who were walking down the stairs. “Hey, Carp,” one of them taunted, slugging me hard on my left shoulder. Without thinking, I slugged him back.

Which triggered the rest of them, five or six guys, to begin cursing me and hammering the same spot on my deltoid muscle. That pummeling pretty much summarizes my 9th grade.

Lots of people have terrible, scarring memories of bullying. I never experienced the bad stuff. No “swirlies” in the restroom, no really damaging physical violence. My early high school years were not a living hell. A living heck, maybe.

But because I was not a jock, but a “brain,” a nerd, I experienced my share of contempt, ostracism, and various attempts, often successful, to humiliate me.