She Walks Among Us

Bad Boys

Bad Boys

The Time: Autumn, 1958. The place: the playground of the Washington Consolidated School, Washington, Connecticut. A big crowd of kids are in a circle around two fighting boys. Jimmy Tompkins has his arm hooked around Billy Dils' neck from behind. Jimmy's got Billy on the ground, a leg also hooked around Billy, so Billy's trussed up like a pig in a python's embrace. Both boys are coated with dust.

Boys? They look like men to me. And this is no mere scuffle. I look at Jimmy Tompkins' arm locked in complete deadly earnest around Billy's Dils' neck: the arm is long, powerful, sinewy, hairy, blood vessels bulging as he slowly strangles Billy, whose face is blue and contorted in a purple-veined grimace.

Both of them are guys who've stayed back and stayed back and stayed back and are now fully pubescent, full-grown eighth-graders who drive cars and shave. Jimmy plainly intends to kill Billy. The kids--everyone from third-graders to high school seniors--watch  with great interest.

Our town was small, and so the school went all the way from first grade through twelfth. That meant grade-school kids like me mingled with the junior high and high school kids in the cafeteria (called the "Rainbow Room," because it had different-colored strips of linoleum on the floor; we thought it was in commemoration of the iridescent mystery meat that often glistened on plates there) and on the school grounds. But Jimmy and Billy and plenty of other guys (and gals) were just treading water until they turned 16 and could drop out. We were watching, right there on that Connecticut playground in the middle of the 20th century, a primordial battle between young males at their testosterone-soaked apex, a primitive, timeless, roaring, snarling rite that echoes down through the tens of thousands of years of human existence.

At least, we were until Mr. Bordeaux, the fearsome assistant principal, strode into the melee with his black crewcut and red furious face, picked the two up by the scruffs of their necks, cracked their craniums together and ended it. The older, stronger, fiercer male had established his supremacy and peace was restored. Much to our great disappointment.

I remember Jimmy Tompkins' long greasy hair flying around during the fight, seriously disarranged. Most of the time it was combed in a high, baroque pompadour of elaborate architecture. The top was wavy, in confectionary layers, with a prow of curls like a breaking wave over his forehead. The sides were combed horizontally and met in the back in a classic "duck's ass." The sideburns were almost Edwardian in length and luxuriousness, but cut sharp and square at the ends halfway down his jaw.

Billy Dils' hair, on the other hand, was about a quarter of an inch long and bristly (he would eventually have hair down to his waist). The badass guys around our country town, the "hoods," either had hair like Jimmy's or aggressively short proto-skinhead crewcuts. They tended to be rivals, though there were occasional alliances--like Tony Lentini (long and greasy) and Bruce Canzono (crewcut), a pair you didn't want to see coming toward you if you were a sixth-grader with a new bike. The regular non-hoody guys--the good students, the athletes, the school band members, the churchgoers--wore their hair trimmed, not long, not short. But the bad guys were these two tribes of adversarial primates, sort of a precursor to the Mods and Rockers of the 60s.

Young men, of course, have been making trouble since the beginning of time (harnessing that troublemaking energy to power the machinery of war is the job of old men, and some old women, too, and that's another story). It goes directly into the "nothing new under the sun" category.

But in the 50s there actually was something new under the sun, a new conduit for that force of nature called young male energy, as new as nuclear fission and every bit as portentous, something that had been similarly waiting for a zillion disparate currents in human history and affairs to flow together, converge and culminate in a force far greater than the sum of its parts, that would be unleashed upon the world and change it forever, is still changing it, which can never be stamped out or stuffed back in no matter how hard Pat Robertson,  the Pope, grim-faced Muslim clerics or Miss Grundy put together try.