Much of the time it seems as though bad behaviour leads to bad behaviour, leads to bad behaviour. A cycle so common it’s a stereotype. One person, a bigger, faster, or cooler person, dumps on another person that is skinnier, slower or has less money. The skinny person then finds someone more stupid or vulnerable, and picks on them. A neatly tied circle where everyone treats everyone like garbage. People know of this dynamic at an early age, but are at a loss to articulate that being an asshole to someone else won’t make their own problems go away, or that the loop can be cut.
For example, in grade eight when you force a kid named Kaiyan to buy you a bag of Cheetos with his own money so you can beat him up and steal the Wrestlemania card inside, it doesn’t make up for the time in grade one when Tyler chased you around the school, fed you sand and told your parents and the principal that you were harassing him. Looking back you might see a thread sewing the two events at the beginning and ending of primary school together, but in the worlds of Tyler and Kaiyan those two events might as well have occurred on different planets.
It seems virtually impossible to look at an incident of bad behaviour without first looking at everything else. How it’s tied to other incidents, how it ties to those desperate feelings of wanting to fit in, of how it ties to what was on TV that week, of who else got picked on earlier that day, to having racist parents, or to what was for breakfast. There is the basic understanding of an event, say a fight, and then to put that into context the need to understand everything that is not the fight. So yah, that could take a while. Probably too long, so a more simplified recollection will have to suffice for now.
At a certain point around my final year of elementary school Wrestlemania was a Big Deal, and the Hostess Frito-Lay company had manipulated all the boys in my class into believing we all needed to possess a complete set of the 20 available Wrestlemania cards, each with a photograph of a different character. There was one card in each bag of potato chips. It didn’t take long for patterns to emerge, and for us to realize that with a fair degree of regularity specific flavours had specific cards in them. To get them all you were just going to have to get past the flavours you couldn’t stomach, or just throw them out and save the card, hoping the pattern was reliable. We had all noticed that the patterns were not strict, and that even though dill pickle flavour usually gave you Hillbilly Jim, it wouldn’t be a surprise to wind up with Kamala instead.
I guess I had gotten sick of spending my flyer route money on potato chips and still not having a full set of cards. Davey Boy and The Dynamite Kid of the British Bulldogs were never going to tag team again if my card set had anything to do with it. I was obviously going to be the last one to get a full set of cards, and might as well be dead. At home I could have all the potato chips I wanted, so buying more in order to get the cards was just annoying. I got it into my head that I could force other people to buy chips for me and get the cards I was missing. The idea was essentially an exercise in seeing what I could get away with. I can only really make sense of the sheer ugliness of the plan by believing that other circumstances lead me to it. But maybe that’s not taking responsibility. Maybe that is making an excuse for simply being an ugly person and doing ugly things just because I could. I could flex my privilege, and so I would.
Everyone in class knew that if you wanted to get The Dynamite Kid you needed to buy a bag of Cheetos. They might taste gross, but you’d still get the card. During recesses and lunchtimes I started to put my plan into action. I went up to Kaiyan and told him he had to buy me a bag of Cheetos. It started out easily enough. We were sometimes friends in the way that kids like and hate each other on a regular basis, oscillating back and forth. We already had not been getting along, and he refused my demands. In response, I continued to add pressure. On lunches I would follow him around, walking to the far edges of the school property, and onto the streets nearby. We both refused to go to our lunch time sitters’ places under the assumption that both of us would be punished. So instead of being stopped by an adult who could make better sense of my stupidity, we locked ourselves into one another. I would spend my lunch walking a few steps behind Kaiyan, tracing his snaky lines around the field. We walked through grassy patches and gravel together, alternately through dust and damp. Sometimes he’d start running, feebly trying to lose me, but I was determined, and neither of us had any place to go.
Kaiyan and I walked and ran around the field every lunch hour for what felt like weeks. I continued insisting that he buy Cheetos for me, and he continued to refuse. I remember feeling like I had invested more effort into forcing him to buy me chips than it was worth. At some point I recognized the idiocy of the continual harassment, but with stupidity of pride I could not back down. Backing down would mean losing my place on the playground. It would mean an admission of guilt. An admission bigger than carrying through with my insistence. After a few days Kaiyan stopped alternating between running and walking, and only ran. As the lunch bell rang he bolted across the field, racing me out of the classroom. His increased effort to get away was paralleled with my effort to start attacking him. When Kaiyan would pause, huffing to catch his breath, I would leap, dragging him to the ground punching. Physically we were evenly matched with similar bodies. I was not convinced that I could end up victorious. As our dance of hate continued, I felt myself becoming an uglier person.
Kaiyan never had to relent. If he had wanted, he could have told someone, or recruited other friends to beat me up and stop my harassment. This is the story I tell myself to make it ok. That he had options, that he could still make choices. That he had a way out. After several fights, falling into the gravel scraping elbows and knees, he gave up. He finally agreed to buy me a bag of Cheetos. He would come to school the next day with the Cheetos and give me the card, but he had to do this just off school property, away from the arbitrary lines that we thought meant something. Upon his agreement our tension shifted. I had won. The work had paid off even though I recognized I had taken things way too far. I was not just mean, I was abusive. Tied to the victory was an acknowledgement that I was an ugly person. No victory at all.
The day after our agreement Kaiyan came to school with the bag of Cheetos for me. Locked into my hate, at lunch time I walked him off of the school grounds, and onto the far sidewalk. He pulled the crinkly bag out of his backpack and I watched as he ate the Cheetos, fingers dusty with orange. I watched to make sure he didn’t wreck the card, or try to keep it for his own collection. I watched to humiliate him. He ate his way to the bottom of the bag, and except for a few crumbs it was empty. There was no Dynamite Kid buried beneath the orange. There was no one. In my blindness I had not let myself think of the possibility that the bag would have the wrong card, or worse, no card at all. My victory over Kaiyan was most hollow at his moment of giving in. I made him into a lesser person. I had broken him out of stupidity, pride and stubbornness. All of these, markers of my insecurity and self-loathing. That bag could not have been anything other than empty for our story to be complete. There was a beautiful, sickening poetry to it.
Kaiyan never told on me. I never had to deal with any consequences or take responsibility. It was only through drawing things out for so long that I gained any self-awareness. The two of us never talked again afterward. There wasn’t a way for us to patch things up, move on and become friends, or even just friendly again. It is my hope that Kaiyan doesn’t remember me, that he doesn’t recall those hot feelings of humiliation and anger, but I’m afraid the truth is that I chipped away a part of him. After eating the last of the Cheetos Kaiyan dropped the wrinkled bag to the ground. We watched it fall slowly and hit the grass. Empty.
