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Dear Caelan,
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 Pilatte, 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.
These pages describe the delusions, fantasies &