When I was a kid there was a kid named Tony Keel that lived in apartments behind my house. He got a great bike for Christmas and rubbed it in our face. I took it from him and threw it down these stairs that were full of snow at the time. By the time he got it out it was rusted pretty bad. I should have had to work until it was replaced.New Shoes
Once in the school yard Jamie Schreiner bragged about his shoes. I took them off and threw them in a huge mud puddle. Jamie went into the school crying and out came the principal. The principal ordered me to wade out into the puddle to retrieve the shoes. I began to take my shoes and socks off. He stopped me and made me wade out into puddle; shoes, socks and all. School yard justice. Administrative justice.
Broken Doors
I don’t think I was a bad kid, but I was unsupervised much of the time. Tw and I were racing on our bikes through the apartments where he lived. It was our haunt. We looked around in the backyard of an empty apartment. There was a half-dollar sized hole in the apartment’s sliding glass door. We thought we would make a fish tank out of it so we took a hose laying in the closed in back patio, put it into the hole (a perfect fit), and turned the water on. We closed the gate and proceeded to circle the apartments.
I can’t remember if we heard the doors explode, but we saw the broken doors, turned off the water, and entered. We put a drinking glass to the wall and listened to see if we could eavesdrop on the people in the apartment next door. We snooped around upstairs and left.
Some days later tw’s mom called me over to his apartment. She asked if we had broken the doors. Tw admitted that we had done it. “She knows,” he said. “I didn’t do it,” I said. She left the decision up to me, to tell my Mom or not. I didn’t tell my Mom. The punishment didn’t fit the crime very often in my house.
For the next six weeks tw had to pick up trash every day after school. I saw him many of those days. I never helped him. I was afraid.
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