Outsiders

It held the #1 spot in my List of Favorite Books¹ for a long time.

I read S.E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders three or four times in elementary school just for fun, if you can call reading a modern Shakespearean tragedy “fun.” I fell in love with the Springsteenian romance of the underdog and the humble nobility of the Greasers—their bonds of brotherhood, the notion of found family. One of the times I read was when we were assigned to read it for class. Once the class finished the book, the teacher let us watch the movie during class. Immediately after, at recess, a bunch of boys decided to have a “rumble” but the whole thing fell apart when we all wanted to be Greasers.

(Ironic, given we were a rather affluent elementary school on the east side of Salt Lake City, Utah. We all lived about two miles west from being about as Soc² as you could be in Salt Lake…)

Funny how they boosted Tom Cruise’s face on the poster because his star had ascended since the film was made, when really his character was nowhere near the top tier with, say, Daryl or Sodapop or even the main Soc, Bob Sheldon.

I loved S.E. Hinton’s characters. I connected with Daryl: the rule-keeping brother (yet another chapter in my history of connecting with square, rule-keeping, responsible sticks-in-mud like the X-Men’s Cyclops and Avengers’ Captain America). I connected with Sodapop: the starry-eyed optimist, a round peg in a square hole. I could see myself in Ponyboy: an introverted dreamer/writer still trying to sort out who he really was. I knew I was nothing like him but still wanted to be Dallas: tough as nails, romantic, a little insane but good at heart. I connected with Johnny: the shy kid who was scared of his own shadow after getting jumped and nearly killed by a group of Socs.

Little did I know just how much I would connect with Johnny³ a year or so later.

See, I was also jumped. Not by Socs. By a gang of skinheads, on a patch of lawn outside a Mormon church on the east side of Salt Lake. It was my last day of seventh grade.

Done signing yearbooks, a couple friends and I left the back field of the school and walked past a buzzing huddle of skinheads. You could feel them radiating menace. I picked up my pace a bit, repeating “if you don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you” in my head, consciously not looking in their direction, just trying to clear their blast radius.

And not clearing it.

A sudden shock—a shove in the small of my back, sprawling me out on the grass. My first thought, after receiving the blindside shove, was that it had been delivered by a friend, because that’s what idiot 7th grade boys do to their friends—random, unprovoked shoves. But then I rolled over and saw the crew of skinheads looming over me looming over me like rabid hyenas, snarling, spitting, “WHAT DID YOU SAY?!?”

I had said nothing—like I said, I’d kept my head down and picked up the pace, “don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you” looping in my head like a mantra, a skipping record. So I pleaded my case. “I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING!” But they weren’t listening. It was a setup, an excuse, a rationalization, a line, a lie. They held me down and took turns punching me. A stampede of teenage combat boots jackhammered my ribs. Laughs. Swears. I curled up and tried to cover my head, but they got their storm of blows in. 

It was like inverse Outsiders: the well-off white kid getting jumped by the kids from the less-well-off part of town. I don’t know if they got bored when I wouldn’t (couldn’t?) fight back or got scared off or what. But the beating stopped after some measure of time I couldn’t possibly tell you with any accuracy. Felt like ages. May have been just a minute or two.

I laid there, bleeding from my mouth, aches in my newly bruised ribs. Still not totally sure what had happened. Some girls whose names I don’t even know were kind enough to come running and check on me once the skinheads had abandoned their prey.

“Are you ok?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that one. I wanted to seem tough and bounce right up to my feet, wipe the blood from my face and say something heroic like, “Time to punch some Nazis.” But I was shell-shocked. I’d just gotten the living crap beaten out of me. I wasn’t Dallas Winston; I was an open scar, still bleeding. And, oh yeah, just to make it even more embarrassing, I had peed myself. I don’t know that I’ve ever told anyone that before. The girls didn’t mention it, kindly. Neither did the friends I eventually walked home with.

(My friends ran away after the skinheads’ first shove and, honestly, no one ever questioned that decision. Not even me, really. I don’t blame anyone for not feeling up to challenging a gnarly-looking gang of pissed-off skinheads, hunting some violence.)

Let’s back up a bit. Were these the dumbest skinheads ever? Did they not read the Skinhead Syllabus? Jumping a kid as blindingly white as me? Obviously their little act of violence had nothing to do with skinhead ideology, with race, with Aryan supremacy, with Nazi dogma. It was about teenage angst, hate, power, violence, steam, and—on my end of it—blood, bruises, urine, humiliation. They felt like breaking something and I was just the right kind of glass.

A few dozen hits later, I became the kid scared of his own shadow.

Really. I was. Some actual, unexaggerated thoughts I had that long summer:

- Was the beating a one-off? Or was I their target now?

- Were they going to come to my house and try to finish me off some night? (I didn’t sleep with my ground-level window open for over a year.)

- Would they follow me (a FIVE HOUR DRIVE!) to my parents’ cabin in Montana? (I genuinely wondered, knowing now how irrational it was, but it felt in the realm of possibility back then.) They hadn’t required any reason the first time (I thought) so why wouldn’t they go out of their way to taunt me in Montana. Or at least, say, outside the movie theater at Trolley Corners? The basketball courts at the park? The sidewalk going into Crossroads Mall? There were always some kids with anarchy symbols and neon green hair outside the entrance. The few times I dared venture to the mall that summer, my heart pounded as I passed. I kept my guard up even as they were well in the rearview. I wouldn’t be blindsided again.

I was already a shy and nervous kid. This tossed me into a steel cocoon.

Despite a near-constant simmering of anxiety and paranoia, the summer ended with no incident. The first day back at school, one of the skinheads’ friends sneered at me between classes,

“How’d you like getting your ass kicked?”
-What?
“My friends kicked the shit out of you. How’d you like it?”
-I didn’t. 

His laugh echoed like a threat as he turned his back, cackling down the hall. I don’t know what he’d hoped to get out of our interaction. Maybe he got it.

Later, someone mentioned a possible reason for the thumping I took. In geography class, the year previous, I had joked about a kid’s shoes. There was a kid in my class who had the women’s version of Nike Lava Dome high tops…

Honestly, the pink swoosh is pretty cool. I was 10000% wrong. But we all already knew that.

…and I had pointed it out⁴. Maybe that was it. Somebody said that the skinheads were itching to mess someone up and he pointed them towards me. Kids can be cruel. In this case, I was the hero/victim in my own story while playing the villain/antagonist in another. Cruelty spreads. I can’t defend my own cruelty and idiocy. Johnny from The Outsiders was more innocent than I was, a purer soul, more undeserving. So maybe I wasn’t as close to him as I’ve been thinking:

• There was no rumble to settle the score, though I had a neighbor who was gang-connected and offered to “help.” I declined, when the offer came to even the score.

• There was no Outsiders-ish cross-socio-economic romance. A surprisingly low number of eligible skinhead bachelorettes in the 801 made it unlikely that I was gonna find my neo-Nazi Cherry Valance. Probably for the best.
  

• I have yet to have a tragic/heroic moment of saving anyone from a fire or telling any friends to “stay gold.” Though I hope all my friends will do just that, gold as they are.
  

• I wasn’t a hero or a martyr. Most people didn’t even know and, if they did, I was embarrassed by it, tried to downplay it. Who wants to say, “yeah, I got beat up. Yep. Lost control of my bodily fluids too! Cool, right?” Nobody. And they’d wanna say “I got beat up because I was a prick to some kid about his shoes” even less.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing about it all these years later: to confront it and bury it. I wasn’t blameless; I’d been mean (whether the story is true, which I tend to believe it is, or not). Maybe I can purge the dual humiliation—the one dealt to me and the one I dished out.

1. An actual list. Exists to this day.

2. Pronounced “SŌSH”, the Greasers’ rivals, a group of rich preppy kids.

3. SPOILER: Not the dying part, though.

4. In retrospect, I was probably just jealous too. I wanted the low-top yellow Son of Lava Domes that all my cool friends were wearing but couldn’t get them.