Here is my tale of woe:
When you're young groups of friends get thrown together, and people haven't really figured themselves out yet. From the age you start hanging out with other kids until you get to junior high it seems like each group always has at least one semi bully and one small nerdy kid that always gets picked on. I unfortunately was the nerdy kid.
This was the mid to late 80's and my best friend and I always wanted to skate. He had a launch ramp and a quarter pipe at his house so we always skated around there. The ramps attracted a couple of neighborhood kids, and before we knew it we had a group of five of us that always hung out and skated together. We were all nerds to some extent and for proof we each picked a different skater from the Bones Brigade and solely skated their decks. I was the youngest (by about 2 months) and the smallest, so I got the brunt of the picking on (except when someone's younger sibling hung out with us). The eldest two of the group were both named John. They were two years older than us, and from the get go I was not a fan of them. Even when I was 10 I knew their racist remarks were inappropriate. If I said anything I got it worse. I didn't like these kids, but we were the only skaters in the area, and I wanted to hang out with my other friend, so I put up with it.
As time went on the eldest John got worse and worse. He was relentless and moved onto physical attacks. They were supposedly all in good fun, but how many "Charlie Horses" can one kid get before he breaks? So one day we're skating in the circle of the dead end street my friend lived on and John grabbed my board and threw it across the circle so that he could cut in front of me on the ramp. I don't know why it happened that day, but without even thinking about it I threw the first punch of my life directly at his mouth. I remember it seemed like hours passed as I started at him and blood began to pour out of his lip (he had braces which cut his lip open). To me the sign of blood meant that I was the winner and I was free of his tyranny. Suddenly reality set back in and he grabbed the hat off my head and wiped all of his blood on it. I loved that hat. I had it for years and always had it on. He then walked the little bath that led into the fields and threw my hat into the creek and it was washed away.
After that everyone made their way home. The next day we met up again to skate. The incident was never mentioned again and things went back to exactly how they were before. It was completely pointless, with the exception of feeling like a god for about .5 seconds. Eventually I stopped hanging out with them and started hanging out with even nerdier punk/alt rock stoner kids who never picked on anyone because they were too high to think of anything.
