This is a memory that comes back to me at various times and always leaves me feeling ashamed. It was a turning point for me among “the boys”, the boys I had hung out with. And it lowered my status with those boys permanently. But it also burned into me a really important lesson.

A New Kid came and joined our class. He was a blond haired, good-looking, natural athlete who pretty much took my place on our class baseball team. We would play some form of baseball at every recess; baseball was our religion. Oddly, I can’t recall how old we were when this all took place; was it 8, 10, 12, or even 14 years old.

Somebody established an after-school bowling league and all of us boys joined. Strangely, though never having bowled much, on the first night of the league I had the highest score, which was announced the next morning on the audio broadcast to every room in the school. (My scores declined each week after that until I became fairly hopeless at bowling.)

While the New Kid had immediately become popular something had  then gone wrong for him and all my buddies had turned against him. So, in order to endear myself to my little tough buddies, I started insulting The New Kid, and eventually said something truly nasty that involved his mother, who was also our new guidance counselor, a very pretty, sexy woman.

The New Kid had had enough and challenged me to fight, with the classic line, “You want to step outside?”

And I said no. 

I had a few reasons for saying no, one being that The New Kid would have beaten the shit out of me, but also because The New Kid was right – I deserved to be beaten for what I said.

And I could not have faced my parents for having gotten into a fist fight for saying what I said. So I said no and retreated with my tail between my legs.

The boys called me “yellow” and “chicken” and I’m sure spread that opinion of me around the school quite a bit.

I could see what I had done: I had lowered myself by becoming an agent of the other kid’s desire to bully. It is true that I had my reasons for resenting The New Kid; he had replaced my position as first basement on our team and shown me to be a lesser athlete. But what I did was to attack him to amuse and impress my buddies. And I have seen other people do this in movies, in fiction, and in real life: lose their dignity and honor in order to get approval from their social circle.

One alternative, the less courageous one, is to simply turn away and not become part of a bullying session. The more courageous path is try to stop the session entirely. I had chosen the worst path – joining in and leading the session until the victim, smartly, turned on me as both the mouthpiece and the least scary opponent.

I think I have felt myself falling into that same pattern from time to time over the decades and remembering the shame in the bowling alley, I  pulled away.

An odd sequel to this story is that The New Kid’s mother, the guidance counselor, ran off with one of the teachers, a handsome guy himself. They must have made a great looking couple, but they both left the district as soon as the affair became public. The New Kid was not seen again. But my shame for refusing to fight never went away.

I wondered if he had attacked me for being Jewish if i would have had the courage to fight him. Because that would have been a reason to fight that my parents would have been rather pleased with. Oddly, though in Mahopac there was plenty of anti-semitism and rampant racism I don’t recall being attacked verbally or physically for being Jewish… except for one very hard to explain incident, another story.