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Despite being a talkative know-it-all with a sarcastic sense of humor, I somehow made it all the way to the fifth grade without having what I would consider a real “enemy.” But that’s where my luck ran out. I had somehow become the target of ridicule of the class clown, John. For weeks, he made me the butt of his many jokes. If it had stopped there, that might have been tolerable. But his jokes spread to name calling, taunts, and teases. And since the other students admired his sharp wit, many of them soon joined in the chase. My life had become a fifth-grade version of a living hell.
One evening, I went to my father for advice. For some reason I chose the one night a week when his drinking buddies were at our house for a visit. Ironically, that turned out to be a far better choice than the sober hindsight of age would suggest.
The men listened to my dad give me the mature and reasonable advice to have a respectful talk with John, telling him how his comments made me feel, and asking him to please stop. After patiently suffering this apparent affront to masculinity, my father’s best friend at the time, Jerry, interjected with this advice: “Bullshit! This is what you need to do. You get to school tomorrow morning extra early. You wait outside the school in the parking lot and wait for this ‘John’ to get dropped off. Once he’s away from his mom and not yet buddied up with his friends, you walk right up to him, get in his face, and you say this: ‘John, you and I are either going to be friends, or we’re going to be enemies. And you need to decide which it’s going to be, right now.’ ”
“Then what do I do?” I asked.
“Nothing. That’s all you have to do.”
“But what if he says he wants to be enemies? Or what if he wants to know what I’m going to do about it?” I complained.
“He won’t,” Jerry assured me. “But if he does, all you have to say is, ‘I just need to know where we stand, John. Are we friends? Or are we enemies?’ Then no matter what his answer is, say ‘Okay’ and walk away.”
It sounded too easy. But all the men, including my father, seemed to think it was a good solution. So the next morning, that’s exactly what I did. I waited to get John alone in the parking lot and executed my lines with the precision and seriousness of a military officer. John’s reaction surprised me as much as my parking lot ambush probably surprised him. Despite his being a few inches taller and several pounds heavier, he took a step backwards. His eyes widened. And he stammered out a set of words less meaningful than the tone of voice he used to stammer them. Each of his two or three disjointed sentences contained the word “friends.” But his tone was a combination of shock, fear, and shame. Our business concluded, we walked into the school together.
John never spoke an ill word of me again.
