A chapter from my memoir 13,760 Feet–My Personal Hole in the Sky by Mark L Berry
With the companion song: Outside of School
– Music by Simon Ashby
Words by Mark L. Berry
– Performed by Simon Ashby (Vocals, Electric Guitar)
Sorted by Speed
(2400 words)
I couldn’t help the tears whenever I was reminded of Susanne, that she was gone forever, as hard as I tried to hold them back. Even today, sometimes just thinking about her brings that all-too-familiar sinking feeling, and they sneak to the surface. I don’t like crying. It’s not manly, and my dad never respected it while I was growing up. We’re extremely close now, like best friends. But we shared a lot of father and son moments while I was learning early life lessons, and I still turn to him when I need a reminder. According to his mantra, crying is never an acceptable solution to any adversity, pain, or grief.
I didn’t make the long drive from New York up to Massachussetts to see my dad when I needed him after I was thrown off a trip for attempting to return to work too soon after Susanne’s death. I should have. It took me a long time to ask for his help. I’m stubborn that way, but that’s also the way he made me. Stoic, self-sufficient, solid—these are terms I learned over the years from Dad’s How to Become a Man playbook. Eventually, I hopped a flight up to see him. My cockpit duties were suspended, but I still had pass benefits.
Riding in any car with my father is our best personal time now that we’re both adults, as long as catching up doesn’t interfere with his driving. After he picked me up from Boston’s Logan airport, he was in the middle of a story while behind the wheel of his Mazda when I interrupted, “Look out!”
The unwashed SUV swerved away from us while honking. The occupants were a blur through the salty and dirt-covered windows even though the filthy glass was close enough to reach out and write wash me with my finger. Dad swerved back into his highway lane with a quick jerk. I heard the inertial reel snap locked as it did its job even as my head almost hit the passenger side window. Dad slowed to let the startled vehicle’s driver pass us on the right. “Blind spot,” was all Dad said.
After a brief silence, which I used to readjust my tightened seatbelt, Dad continued with his childhood summer camp story as if nothing had just happened, “I just broke his nose. The big baby acted like he’d never seen blood before.”
I’m not sure the stereo in Dad’s car even works, because we never turn it on. I relish the moments we spend together and make the most of them, especially as a captive audience while on the road. He was telling me about his first day at sleep-away Camp Pemigewassett sometime in the late 1940s when accidentally sharing a lane with another car on Interstate-95 momentarily interrupted him.
“Some kid wet his bed, even before I arrived. He thought he could just switch mattresses with mine and get away with it. I walked in and every kid was staring at me. I knew something was up as I put my bags down beside my bunk, even before I smelled the urine. It was easy to pick out the face of guilt and fear among my unfamiliar cabin mates. It was a face that just needed to meet my fist before introductions.”
Dad has always been a bruiser. Dad’s killer instinct is inherent in every aspect of his personality. He likes to remind me how tough he is, and how I should be. I envy his toughness, but sometimes question when tough becomes ruthless. That’s our biggest difference; he acts, while I stop to consider my options. He’s always first, fearless, and relentless. I inherited his DNA, but somehow missed the blood-craving gene. For him, there’s no backing down—flight isn’t an actual choice in the primitive fight or flight conditioned response to threats. He’s like Rorschach in The Watchmen, and Ajax in The Warriors. I think I disappointed him when I was young because I didn’t instinctively think with my fists first. As his oldest son, I was expected to be a bruiser too, and never cry.
The story of my childhood fighting wouldn’t win me any Oscars for best performance in an action film. As the only first-grade boy in a combined first-, second-, and third-grade class, I was a soft target for the upper classmen of Dundee Elementary—and it didn’t help that I was also young for my grade with a September birthday. It seemed that the entire class had to test their pecking-order position against me. Walking to and from school became a dangerous event, often involving circuitous routes through the woods to avoid potential confrontation. The threat, “I’m going to beat you up after school,” was a recurring theme.
Those guys are just jerks
Their parents don’t love them
So don’t take their bait
When they call you a fem
A year of physical development was a huge deal if it meant I had to fight someone from a grade or two above me. Six year olds typically didn’t fare too well against seven or eight year olds.
Whatever you do
Don’t let them see you cry
Let them punch you
And beat you ‘til you die
I wish I could tell you I was the exception—the Jack Reacher of my day. I wasn’t—and the biggest sin I could commit was to come home crying. My dad expected me to win. At the very least, he expected me to earn respect. Almost daily I fought off name-calling, wedgies, being spit on, and a general pack mentality that I was slow to break into.
‘cause they were waiting for me when the school day let out
The first one who saw me, let out a big shout
“There he is. Let’s get him, that wise-acre fem.”
I ran for the woods but I failed to outrun them
Sports were finally a way for me to earn acceptance among my peers, and fight less. In small numbers we played Cream the Carrier or King of the Hill. In larger numbers we played two-hand touch football in the street, or tackle football in the grass. Anyone who didn’t want to play tackle on anything softer than asphalt was a fem, the ultimate term of disrespect in my neighborhood back in the 1970s. If someone took a hit that left him gasping, for instance if he were tackled on the point of the football, then two players had to sit out—the injured and one player from the other team to keep the sides even. The game wasn’t actually going to stop just because somebody felt a little wounded. Several plays later, the conversation usually went something like this, “Tough it out. Don’t be such a fem. Get back in the game or we’ll give you a wedgie. I think I hear your mother calling you, momma’s boy.”
Playing through the pain taught me to tough it out. Eventually I earned enough credibility to avoid being picked on regularly. Nevertheless, even as a new pack member, there were still more battles to fight.
Cecil moved onto my Connecticut-suburban block all the way from Georgia. I was in third grade and he was in fourth. He must have had his own parental coaching because he was ready to fight for a position among his new peers. Most of the kids I played football with in my neighborhood were older than me, so I still must have looked like the softest target. Cecil called me a fem, an insult I had to answer or lose what hard-earned respect I clung to—it was automatic.
He hammered me with a few good punches for no good reason and I hate to admit it, but I ran home crying. Dad dragged me right back out of our house, across the neighborhood lawns, and straight into Cecil’s house, uninvited. I was scared and confused. I was still on my feet, but Dad was hauling me by the arm. I pulled against him and begged him to let me go, but there was no fighting his two hundred and twenty lbs. of solid muscle or his unbreakable determination not to raise a wimp. I thought Dad was supposed to be on my side, not throw me back into battle to get hurt some more.
Dad told Cecil to beat me up again in the hall between their family bedrooms and kitchen while yelling orders to me, “Keep your arms up to block. Keep your head in the fight. Lead with your right (Dad and I are both left-handed). Keep your feet moving. Whatever you do, don’t you dare cry!”
By today’s standards, Dad’s actions would probably cause him to be arrested. To use Susanne’s line—I can smell the metal that he’s forged from—Dad’s desire to raise only strong offspring is very real.
Dundee Elementary sits in my memory with scattered books, dented metal lunchboxes, broken thermoses, ripped clothes, skinned knees, bloody noses, and unauthorized tears. So on the first day of sixth grade, as I entered North Street Elementary after we moved across town, the school Susanne began attending after her move from Denmark, I looked around Mr. Hardvall’s classroom and tried to guess who it was going to be—who I was going to fight to establish my new reputation.
Whatever you do
Don’t let them see you cry
Even if they punch you
And beat you ‘til you die
The bell rang after first period. We were scheduled for English composition next. In the hall, as all three sixth-grade classes mingled for the classroom exchange, Stuart Helgeson grabbed my sleeve and said, “At lunch, you and me are going to go.” My blood pressure peaked and I almost cold-cocked him right then and there, I was so wired for a fight. The crossing classes wedged between us and we all settled into our newly assigned seats, but word spread with viral speed and everybody was sneaking peaks at me—the new guy already set to be tested on day one. After verb conjugations and attempts to identify subjects and predicates, our classes switched again, and this time the kids all gave me a wide berth in the hall. I wasn’t the local favorite. I was clearly the unpopular visiting team.
Back in Mr. Hardvall’s class, I didn’t learn anything the rest of that morning. I watched the clock. At 12:15 p.m. our combined lunch hour and recess was scheduled to begin. The weather was windy, with green leaves just starting to turn their last-breath radiant colors, but still warm. When the bell finally rang to start the now fully anticipated lunch break, nobody went straight to the cafeteria. They all gathered behind the school on the foursquare, basketball, and tetherball courts—where painted pavement opened up to the jungle gyms and further away, the baseball diamonds and the schoolyard’s perimeter fence. I used that walk through the hallways, and then through the staring spectators outside, to psych myself up. I told myself: He’s just a big fem. Stuart led me to the middle of the what felt like the entire student body, which parted to let us inside the giant huddle. I clenched and unclenched my fists. I felt my heart rate increasing and fought to maintain control over my breathing—in through my nose and out through my mouth. That was the practical advice my dad had given me, and I heard him in the back of my mind coaching: “Break his nose or at least make it bleed. If you don’t make the first guy suffer, you’ll have to face every other kid in your new class as they try to kick you to the bottom of their pack. Just remember this: hit first and hit hard; whatever you do, don’t cry; and don’t stop swinging until you decide it’s over.”
Whatever you do
Don’t let them see you cry
Stuart grew up to become a walk-on starting wide receiver at Penn State. He became a United States Marine. He competed in Eco-Challenge races across the Australian outback. I mention this because even in sixth grade he was athletic, and this was not going to be an easy fight for anyone—especially not as the new kid with everyone watching and rooting against me.
I closed within two steps of Stuart, ready to throw my first punch. I wanted him to step into it and I wanted it to count. My blood was pumping. All I needed was for him to take a single step toward me and I would start the fight with all the fury I had—no leading jab, but a surprise roundhouse left. I wasn’t going to hold back in any way, or wait until he hit me first.
Even if they punch you
And beat you ‘til you die
The whispering crowd silenced as Stuart pointed into the distance and spoke. “We’re going to run around that backstop, then to the far baseball diamond, around the entire school, and the first one back to this half-court line is the winner.”
“What?”
“We need somebody to say, ‘One-Two-Three-Go!’ Are you ready to race?”
It came as a shock that at North Street Elementary, the pecking order was sorted by speed, not by fighting.
I raced for all I was worth. Even the teachers cheered for Stuart as we ran by. I think my little brother, Tim, who was in the second grade, was the only one who yelled my name. I came in second in a two-person race, but I didn’t care. I finished winded, but not with the wind knocked out of me.
My dad was born with the killer instinct. I had to learn it. Life would still throw many more challenges my way, but they would be emotional and intellectual ordeals rather than the kind solved with raw knuckles.
Susanne was in the audience of my race that day with Stuart, and behind the school—past the baseball field backstops—was the fence that separated our school from an expansive cemetery. That’s where the girl who I hadn’t taken notice of yet is now buried. I had to be tough when our lives first overlapped, and tougher still, now that she is gone.