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Arthur Shuey
Jim Cannon, Kevin Krest, Wally Simmons and I did what boys did then - we either hung around each others houses(usually Jim's or Kevin's because they were neighbors), visited girls, or walked to 7-11 for soft drinks and junk food. One of the girls, Cindy Malvin, lived on Royal Palm Drive, in "turf" claimed by a bunch of high school athletes and hooligans who traveled in larger packs than ours, and that was enough reason, in their eyes, for us to fight. One night, no less than eleven of these creeps backed me and Wally up against the wall of Cindy's house and started closing in for the kill. I told the largest of them in even tones that I would kick his ass back to his mother's whorehouse, so shocking and extreme a comment in those innocent days that the Royal Palm Gang stopped their advance.
I was desperately gambling that I
could convince them by acting as if we outnumbered them a hundred to one that
they didn't really outnumber us eleven to two, and the gamble worked. They were
content to make an appointment to bring their entire gang to meet our entire
gang at a spot in Kings Forest woods at a particular time and place, and then
to leave. Wally and I were even more content with their departure. The only
problem left was that our "gang" consisted of three medium size freshmen
and Kevin, who was a small freshman, whereas the Royal Palm Gang must have numbered
twenty large sons of bitches, some of whom were in their junior year of high
school. Oh well, the appointment was two weeks off.
Jim and Kevin were let in on the dilemma,
and we discussed who we might ask to help us out. Between the four of us, we
received a grand total of zero positive replies to our S.O.S. We walked to 7-11
to ponder the problem. On the way there, we were harassed mildly by another
bunch of high school hoodlums. Andy Reid, Kelly Milam, Kevin Yeates, Jeff Pilate,
Russell Dean, and Ronny Gayle Midgette were the core of this group, which specialized
in dope smoking, cruelty to small animals and spitting on the sidewalk near
the corner of Virginius and Lemon Way. We figured out that they had nothing
against us but their own meanness. As a grasped straw so absurd that it might
just work, we thought that they might be grateful for a chance to be mean to
anyone. In other words, they looked like good cannon fodder to me.
Jim and I went over to the Midgettes'
house(described more fully elsewhere herein), kattycorner from Kevin's and the
usual haunt of Andy Reid and his crew, knocked on the door and essentially requested,
"Take us to your leader." Their leader was Andy Reid, aka "Dirty
Andy," who was hiding behind the door as we talked to his flunkies. They
told us he wasn't there, and we left the message that if they wanted a fight
and didn't care whether their opponents had done anything to provoke them or
not, they could help us tackle the Royal Palm Gang.
Generally, imagination is a mirror
which reverses the image of pain. The more a person enjoys inflicting pain on
others, the more afraid of receiving pain that person is. Bullies, torturers
and sadists spend so much time thinking about hurting that their own fears and
feelings of hurt are multiplied. This makes them highly unreliable henchmen.
This is the key to most action novel plotlines. It left me having to come up
with a plotline in which I could use a bunch of pubescent, misfit thugs to come
out ahead of the relatively wholesome Royal Palm Gang.
It was fairly simple, really. My troops
would only be good until they suffered the first injury so, risking unsightly
bulges around my midsection, ankles and wrists, I shoplifted a dozen hunting
grade slingshots and 500 marbles from a discount store, armed them with these
and a miscellany of bb and pellet guns and hid them behind trees, amidst brush
and in ditches around the appointed rumble site. The Royal Palm Gang appeared
on time, sixteen strong in their letter sweaters, and began a slow, confidant
advance toward me, Wally Simmons, Jim Cannon, Larry Clemmons and Leonard Leedum.
They never reached us. Andy and the
boys began peppering them from all sides when they got close to us. Their collapse
and rout were complete. Skirmishing continued for a few months. I was knocked
out on the road back from 7-11 one night. A fight in the Midgettes' doorway
was inconclusive. The Royal Palm Gang learned not to play basketball near our
turf after a few balls were punctured by hidden pellet guns. They learned to
look into their cars before entering after a pig we had stolen from a farm and
dosed with tranquilizers and laxatives jumped out one morning and bit one of
their leaders before escaping into the woods. They learned to read, "Fuck
you, Sam," patterned into their lieutenant's manicured lawn in gasoline,
which killed the grass for three years. Eventually, they learned to leave us
alone.