Girl #4: "Megan & The Flagpole of Doom"

I. Momma's Got a Gun

It was time to bid Bowling Green farewell... for now. My dad had gotten a job in Louisville, and so the family Williams were moving to the big city. The prospect of leaving the unrelenting boredom of country life was exciting to me, although I would miss Dina and my friends greatly. I also wasn't too thrilled with starting over again at yet another strange and unfamiliar school, because I had come to like the one in Bowling Green so well. As quaint as that school had been, I was worried I'd be swallowed up whole, like Pinocchio by the killer whale, at a city school.

My dad had to start his new job fairly quickly, so he went ahead up to Louisville, leaving us to do the actual moving part. My mom wasn't used to being home alone, and it didn't do well for her nerves. Although we lived in the middle of nowhere, which made a home invasion seem highly unlikely, the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere, where nobody could help us, or hear us scream, made it all the more frightening a scenario.

One night, while we slept, there was a loud knocking at our front door. Mom woke me up, her eyes wide in terror, with a shotgun in her hand. She told me not to be afraid, and to follow her to the kitchen to stand-by at the phone in case the police had to be called. The door continued knocking, as mom slowly crept up to it, shotgun in hand. When she got close enough to the door, she pumped the shotgun menacingly, which made the knocking abruptly stop. There was a space of silence, as the person on the other side of the door weighted his options, before I imagined he slowly backed away and made a run for his car, wherein he backed out with such urgency, it spit out a torrent of rocks from our gravel driveway. My mom and I both exhaled in relief, and keeping the gun in one hand, she immediately called my dad, who was staying at my aunt's, to tell him what had happened.

My dad calmly explained that the man was not a burglar at all, but the man that my dad had actually borrowed the shotgun from for quail hunting. He was supposed to have come by earlier, but had been running late. It was no wonder that he had run off at the sound of his own shotgun being pumped, as it was a particularly familiar sound to him. Despite the explanation, my mom demanded that dad come back at once and drive us all up to Louisville to live with him immediately, because her nerves simply couldn't take another night like that. So, the very next day, dad showed up, we packed up what little we could fit in our jeep, and we left the house forever, leaving behind a great many of our possessions and furniture with it. It was an entirely wasteful and stupid thing to do, which as it happens, is completely characteristic of our family. All the way up to Louisville, we all teased my mom over the shotgun fiasco. Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" was a big hit at the time, so when it came on the radio, my dad turned it up, and began singing "Karen's Got a Gun", and we all began singing along.



Now that I think about it, leave it to our family to take a song about a woman murdering her sexually abusive father, and make it into a happy family sing-a-long for a long car trip.

II. Welcome to the Dollhouse

In their haste to move, my parents, ever the responsible adults, neglected to perform a very important step whenever one plans on moving to a new city: finding a home which to move into. Being so young, I didn't fully realize that our family was, technically, homeless, nor did I much care, because we were moving into my aunt's house, where we would live with my four female cousins: Missy, Mandy, Michelle, and Melinda. After spending a year in perpetual loneliness in the country, the idea of moving into a house that was constantly buzzing with people, in a neighborhood full of kids my age, appealed to me about as much as a discovering a Jomba Juice would appeal to a man lost in the desert.

If my experiences with girls could have been considered limited at that point, I was certainly about to get a crash course. My four cousins were separated in age range to the point where it served as a helpful evolutionary chart to chronicle the process of how women go from innocent and cute to neurotic and crazy. Missy and Mandy were both in high school, while Michelle was a couple years older than me, and Melinda was my brother's age. My time in that house taught me the invaluable lesson that when girls gather into a group, or the more appropriate word would be "bloodthirsty mob", it is for the best that any male in proximity stay out of sight - in fact, get as far away as possible.

Don't get me wrong - my cousins were all sweet, fun girls, and I adored being around them, especially the two who were closer to my age. The older ones, however, tended to turn vicious and cruel when they had their friends over, such was the nature of teenage girls. Missy, for the most part, would just ignore me when friends were over, while Mandy was more apt to play pranks. I remember one time they were playing with an Ouija board, and Mandy tricked me into believing she was speaking to the Devil, who then subsequently "possessed" her, and she chased me through the house. I was terrified of my cousin for days after that, because she'd occasionally turn to me while eating, and secretly inform me that she was still possessed, so I should watch my back. Consequently, she was the one most often called upon to babysit my brother and I all the time.

The way my cousins' very personalities would transform when friends were over made me grow resentful of "groups", especially groups of teenagers, as they all seemed cocky and mean, especially to those they perceived of as weaker than them - namely, me. I grew resentful of older kids, in general, so much so, in fact, that when I watched horror movies like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street, it seemed to me that Jason and Freddy were performing a great public service dispatching these obnoxious asshole teenagers. I was outraged that older kids felt they were entitled to walk all over anyone younger than them, and seeing as I had quite literally been the victim of an older kid walking over me (and kicking me in the face - refer to my previous blog entry), my resentment was understandable. I was convinced that all older kids were bullies, the lot of them.

Of course, I never considered that one day I would actually be a teenager, and every bit as obnoxious, not to mention, eligible for murder at the hands of a slasher villain. I was living within the glorious and warm cocoon that was childhood, where thoughts of the future were limited to whether or not I'd have enough money for the ice cream man the next day. I think when people reminiscence on the simplicity of childhood, it's the ability to live in the now, which is inherent in every child, that we really miss.

Anyway, while three of my cousins were older girls, with lives too "mature" and "complicated" for a boy my age to comprehend or relate to, I tended to hang out with Melinda the most. It was through her that I met Megan.

III. Best Friends

The days spent at my aunt's were never dull. I seem to remember those days as if every night was a pizza party, complete with movies. I even recall watching Batman for the first time sometime around that first month of living there, which kick-started my fascination with the character and his mythology forever. That movie made such an impression in my mind, I even remember the Diet Coke commercial that played before it:



I also remember spending most of my time playing the insane library of video games my cousins had accrued. They had more video games than I had ever seen in one place before. One game I played obsessively was called Mighty Bomb Jack for Nintendo:



If something wasn't going on in the house, there was usually much to do outside of it in the neighborhood, which was always bustling with kids my age. Within the first week of living in Louisville, I befriended the kid across the street, a guy named Aaron, and we became best buds... especially because he had a Sega Genesis. A game system that wasn't Nintendo?? Heresy! Aaron was the first person I would consider my "best friend". When we weren't in his backyard, jumping around, pretending to fight ninjas, we were printing up our very own newspaper, with me as the artist, and handing them out to neighbors for 25-cents each. We always had such a good time whenever we hung out, because Aaron's family had a plush entertainment set-up in their basement, and we'd almost always have it to ourselves to play video games or watch the movie channels, which was all the more a luxury for me since my family never had the movie channels, and were generally considered forbidden because of the high risk of nudity that was on them late at night.

I had already seen naked women before - once, in an issue of Playboy I found in my parents' closet in our country house, and the second time, er, well... let's just say that when living in a house with four girls, accidentally walking in on one of them getting dressed was an inevitably. I won't say which one I walked in on, because odds are, they're all probably reading this, but I had only the briefest half second to even comprehend what was happening, before a hot curling iron was launched at my head, and I scurried the hell out of there. I didn't really understand her reaction at the time, because even though I was certainly aware of and fascinated by the major physiological differences between sexes by that age, it was no more than an idle curiosity. I was eight, and hadn't hit puberty yet, so vagina's held as much allure to me as interest rates for home mortgages. It was just a thing that girls had, for some reason, and that was sufficient enough for me. In fact, the first time I ever saw a vagina, I remember thinking that it almost seemed to... grimace. Like it was constantly worried about something. It seemed like an all around, troublesome body part (I didn't even know the half of it), and I wished girls, as a whole, luck in dealing with it.

My point is, my parents needn't have worried - movies with nudity were not as much of a priority to my friend and I as movies with shit tons of violence! The bloodier the spectacle, the better! We would stay up super late watching movies like American Ninja, Bloodsport, and Predator, so that the next day, we could talk excitedly about the movie over bowls of Cocoa Puffs (which I had renamed "Poo-poo Puffs", causing the two of us to explode with laughter... and Poo-poo Puffs), and reenact the movies outside. It was all harmless fun, and nobody was ever in danger, except maybe our imaginary opponents. I went over to Aaron's for many reasons, but there was one reason in particular that kept me coming back...

Aaron lived next door to a girl I absolutely adored, named Megan.

IV. My Little Pony

To me at the time, Megan was like an angel. She had golden, curly locks and a cute smile. Megan regularly came over to hang out with my youngest cousin, and they would play with My Little Ponies. This was one of the first (but certainly not the last) times I had ever felt nervous to talk to even be around a girl. For one thing, she was in what I considered my home - my sanctuary, the only place on Earth where I could relax and be myself in all my disgusting glory! Sure, I shared the house with four girls (not counting my aunt or my mom), but I've never had a crush on any of them, despite the fact that I was raised in Kentucky. It was uncomfortable and awkward to have a girl that I liked watch me play Nintendo, or be around when I was doing something equally as nerdy, like watching Batman for the 80th time. When I liked a girl in school, I could be a different person than I was at home - a larger than life person. So here was Megan, seeing me in all of my... mediocrity. When I would wake up, my hair completely disheveled, and walk downstairs with urine stained pants to announce to my mom in the kitchen that I had, once again, peed the bed (or, rather, the bundle of blankets on the floor of Mandy's room that served as my bed), Megan would be there. It was humiliating.

Another issue was that I was at the age where I began to notice the major differences between boys and girls, which disturbed and annoyed me. For example, I couldn't, for the life of me, understand why they all loved the movie Dirty Dancing. It seemed to me a total bore of a movie. Now Batman - that was a good movie, or better yet, Ghostbusters... which, by this point, I was totally obsessed with anything Ghostbusters. Before moving to Louisville, I used to go to a daycare called Kindercare, and we would take a field trip every year to an amusement park in Nashville called Opryland. Boys would battle girls over what music we got to listen to in the van, and it was always between the Ghostbusters soundtrack or the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. The boys were woefully outnumbered, so we would have to suffer not only listening to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, but all of the girls badly singing along to it. It was agonizing.

So, when I moved into my cousins' house, I was suddenly surrounded on all sides by New Kids on the Block and being bombarded by multiple viewings of Dirty Dancing. I couldn't comprehend why all of my cousins insisted on pretending that these were acceptable, while they utterly refused to watch an actual good movie like Ghostbusters. I began to think that girls were either terminally stupid creatures, or that they were all simply conspiring against me - as if someday they'd go, "Ha, gotcha! New Kids suck, we were just messing with you!" To this very day, in my more agitated moments, I sometimes revert to that frame of mind. Justin Bieber's inexplicable rise to popularity has not helped.

Megan was no exception. She was into all that stuff as any girl at the time was. This was something I hadn't experienced with Dina, who seemed to enjoy the same things I did. How was I supposed to even talk to someone who was so profoundly different from me? Most of my attempts to talk to her were met with conspiratorial giggles with my cousin, or just plain indifference. One day I was drawing in my sketchpad, when I struck upon an idea. I remembered how Jessica, the girl in my kindergarten class, seemed impressed by my artistic ability, which had grown quite a bit by that point. Megan was really into My Little Pony, and she would often play My Little Pony with my cousin. I had grown reasonably good at drawing horses, so I drew a picture of Megan's favorite My Little Pony character and gave it to her as a gift. She seemed excited and flattered by the gesture, not to mention impressed by my drawing skill, and it seemed that I had at least won her good graces for a time... until Greg showed up.

V. Leader of the Pack

Greg was an older kid that began hanging out with my cousins on regular basis. I can't remember exactly how old he was, but I want to say he was a high school Freshman. Greg had the classic handsome features, such as well tanned skin, an athletic body, and a chiseled, square jaw that melted most girls' defenses instantly. He looked like one of the jocks in Revenge of the Nerds, which was one of my favorite movies at the time, so it's no wonder I drew that comparison. If there was one thing that movie taught my young, malleable mind, it's that the word "jock" was only two words away from being "jerk", and Greg was most certainly that.

He would swagger in, causing girls of all ages to get so excited that they would gather around him like he was goddamn Johnny Depp. Even my aunt seemed charmed by this guy. In reality, he was probably not as much of a jerk as I remember, but I resented him because he commanded so much admiration with little to no effort, based mostly on his good looks. It didn't matter that they guy had almost no personality. In fact, this almost seemed to appeal to girls more because it made him into a sort of an "everyman", so they could project whatever idealistic personality traits they wanted. The one trait about him they all seemed to agree upon was that he was funny, which simply wasn't true. In my mind, Bugs Bunny was funny; Gallagher was funny; Pee-Wee was funny; this guy never said anything funny, yet girls laughed at any weakly thought out joke he threw out, and it drove me nuts! Not for the last time, I considered the possibility that women, as a whole, were conspiring against me.

Greg would sometimes play basketball with the younger kids, which all the girls found endearing and sweet, even though he played as if the game were being held in a state penitentiary. That guy threw elbows like ninjas throw stars, and he'd play it off as if it were an accident. He was crossing cats, faking kids out so that they'd lunge for the ball, only to eat pavement. As all the girls fawned over him, I was screaming in my head, "Did you not SEE him dunking the ball on my HEAD???" It didn't matter - Greg could do no wrong.

I personally began having an ax to grind with him because Megan was crushing on him just as hard as anyone. In retrospect, of course Greg was no real threat to me in regards to Megan, seeing as he was in high school, and she was eight. Nevertheless, I hated how unfair it was that while I had to work for her attention, this guy got it effortlessly. If only my current self could travel back in time to warn my 8-year-old self that such was life, so better get used to it or face living a long, bitter existence, my child incarnation might not have taken such drastic measures to demand attention.

VI. Say Hello to My Little Friend... an 8" Flagpole

My family was having a grill out, and it seemed like everybody we knew in the neighborhood was over. This included all of my cousins, some of their friends, Megan, my friend Aaron, and... stupid Greg. Of course, we he finally sauntered up, everyone showered him with affection and bombarded him with hamburgers or hotdogs for his perusal. I just sat on the driveway, smoldering in jealousy, quietly eating my hamburger with Aaron, who was very much cognizant of my hatred for Greg, so he wisely allowed me to smolder away in silence.

Eventually, Greg got up, stretched, and announced he was going to play basketball. He asked if I wanted to play, to which I answered "No" and continued silently eating my burger. He then asked if I would eat my burger somewhere else, instead of the basketball court, to which again I answered, "No". He shrugged and told me that they would just play around me. The game started up, and in no time, of course, the basketball ended up on my plate of food, exploding it everywhere, the majority of it getting on me. Before going any further, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that, yes, I was being an obstinate little ass, but in that moment, I felt a sense of self-righteous pride that this guy wasn't going to tell me what I'm going to do. So one can imagine how stupid I felt, covered in baked beans, ketchup, and potato chips, knowing that this was my own fault for not moving out of the way, all the while listening to everyone laughing at me, including the enemy, Greg.

The most painful of all, though, was seeing Megan laugh at me. This sight mobilized the anger that had been simmering in me for weeks. My entire body began shaking, and my vision blurred not only from the tears welling in my eyes, but from pure rage. I had never been this angry before in my life, not even after being trampled on by Daryl the Albino. So I picked up the basketball and launched it at Greg's stupid, perfect face. He dodged it easily, and was even more amused than before. "Whoa, what's his problem?" he asked, as if he had not just witnessed my lunch exploding into my face.

One of my cousins, I can't remember which, said, "Oh, just ignore him, he's just jealous because he likes Megan."

My eyes flashed in betrayal, and my rage was replaced with shock, panic, and fake outrage. "What? No, that's ridiculous!" I sputtered, hysterically trying to seal the truth back up in a bottle, like it was a mischievous genie intent on ruining my life.

She only continued, "He drew all these pictures of My Little Pony for her, it was so cute!" This elicited a fresh round of laughter. Greg offered an insincere "Awww" of mock sympathy. Now I had enough. It was one thing to be the object of ridicule, but to take something that was supposed to be a gesture of romance, and turn it against me hit me to close to home. I wanted to completely thrash Greg, but I knew I didn't stand a chance. It seemed I had no other choice but to walk away, and I did just that... until I saw something shining to me from the grass in the afternoon sun. It was a long, 8-inch metal flagpole. I had been using it as a prop in most of my imaginary adventures for some few weeks, and it had become the bane my uncle's existence because he'd have to move it out of the way every time he tried to mow the lawn, but he'd only see it after nearly destroying his lawnmower running over it. I picked up the pole, testing it's heft, my tears splashing on the hot metal. Truth of the matter is, I didn't think about using the pole as a weapon, nor did I think about much at all, except making the pain go away. I turned back to Greg, who gone back to shooting basketball, while the girls had stopped laughing and chatted amongst themselves.

Nobody saw me coming, as I charged at Greg, much like Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. As Greg turned around to face me, I clumsily swung the pole, which was much too long and heavy for me to swing very fast, but it hit Greg in the eye, bringing him to his knees as he shouted out a curse. Everyone stopped what they were doing, to slowly digest what had happened. I dropped the pole, surprised that I had actually not only hit Greg, but brought him down. I had little time to be jubilant of my victory, as Greg, now absolutely enraged, stood back up, picked me up by the scruff of my shirt, and threw me into some nearby thorny bushes. Even though the bushes scratched the shit out of me, I had the most curious reaction to it all... I was laughing. My laughter only provoked Greg more, and he came towards me with violence in his eyes, screaming "You think it's funny? You think it's funny?" Thankfully, my cousins, finally snapping out of their shock, pulled him away, helping him to nurse his eye, while I continued laughing in the bushes. Aaron gave me a hand out of the bushes, and we ran back to his house, the both of us laughing our asses off in amazement at what I had done.

"You were like a Jedi or something!" he exclaimed, as I treated my cuts with rubbing alcohol, which burned hellaciously, but I was too happy to care. I agreed that what I had done was very Jedi-like, and Greg should count himself lucky I hadn't used a lightsaber. There was little to no aftermath to my "fight" with Greg. My parents were so much angry as surprised, if only because I had never gotten into a fight before that; I had mostly just gotten my ass kicked all the time. My cousins were upset with me for a time, but being the capricious teenagers that they were, they moved on fairly quickly. Greg stopped coming over as often, and when he did, he wouldn't say a word to me, which was all the better. As for Megan... believe or not, I had somehow won her respect that day, and after a week or so, found myself being invited to her house to watch movies, with my cousin Melinda always present, of course. Megan was never my official girlfriend, but I began to not care after awhile, as I had a new crush rapidly developing at school.

Although I look back on that day, disturbed by the violent lengths I had gone to protect my pride in front of Megan, my flirtation with violence as the answer to all my problems was only beginning. This would kick off an era in my life I'm not proud of - the era of The Foot Fist Way.