In any group of males, it’s never the smallest and weakest most cruelly bullied, but one whose size would suggest he need never stand for such treatment. Wasted size offends smaller males, and makes them vicious. Such was the case at Frederick Douglass High School in Napierville, Illinois, where freshman Brandon G—, already 6-1 three months after his 15th birthday, couldn’t walk between classes without being loudly ridiculed on good days, and, on bad ones, ridiculed, slapped, and even spat on.
His most avid tormentor, Jalen D—, wasn’t quite 5-2, and skinny, but the son of an alcoholic father who’d insisted early on that Jalen learned to defend himself, and sent him to boxing lessons. Jalen didn’t stop with self-defence, but discovered that lots of boys reflexively submitted to a classmate who seemed to carry a big enough chip on his shoulder. There was a girl Jalen hoped to impress — Ashlei, who sat two rows away from him in homeroom. He’d commonly try to impress her, or at least make her laugh, by hassling Brandon in the corridor. “Make way,” he’d announce loudly, “for The Big Dickwad.” When that stopped amusing Ashlei, he took to trying to trip Brandon, or slapping him. At his urging, Ashlei began filming a highlight reel of Jalen’s daily humiliation of Brandon. Seeing him slapping the much bigger boy around gave her much more pleasure than seeing Stepdad slap her mom around.
One Wednesday lunchtime, though happend that no one — including Brandon himself — expected. Just as he was about to burst into tears, something in Brandon snapped. He grabbed Jalen, lifted him horizontally to chest level, and hurled him to the ground — spiking him, in football parlance — eliciting a mass gasp from those watching. Brandon looked amazed by what he’d done, and terrified that Jalen might get up and come after him, but Jalen was going nowhere. Lying at Brandon’s feet, he seemed amazed by how much pain he was in. “Awesome!” one of the onlookers observed, on the mutual behalf.
That afternoon, Ashlei put her little video of the encounter on line, entitling it Awesome Body Slam. When she got back on line after dinner, she discovered that 32,452 people had already watched it. By the time she went to bed, half a million people had done so.
Jalen seemed to have lost all feeling below the waist. His father’s lawyer was seen on the local news promising to win millions of dollars in a lawsuit against Brandon’s parents and the school district. Douglass’s wrestling coach tried in vain to persuade Brandon to try out for the team. The jocks tried to get him to eat with them at what the not-cool kids sarcastically called The Table of Heroes in the school cafeteria. He refused the coach and very warily accepted the jocks' invitation. He was afraid that some of them might resent his new fame — within a week, over two million had viewed Ashlei’s video — and try to test him. He wasn’t at all sure he could be that brave again.
He was invited onto local television shows, whose hosts acted as though he hadn’t been overcome by anger long enough to stick up for himself, but cured cancer. Literary agents sure they could get him a book deal kept calling his parents during dinner. Of the 329 comments on Ashlei’s video, 322 were positive. Brandon couldn’t have been more embarrassed. Ashlei sent him a text message asking if he wanted to hang out.
As the physical therapists tried at length to restore his ability to walk, unsuccessfully, Jalen had a lot of time to think about what had happened. It occurred to him that if he’d continued on the path he’d been on, he’d be his dad one day — someone everyone feared, but no one loved. He decided to try to make up for having been a vicious little shit by doing good stuff, like tutoring younger kids, and helping those newly immigrated to America with their English. He decided to stop pretending, for fear of other kids resenting him, that he wasn’t bright. He was actually exceptionally bright.
Brandon, meanwhile, tried in vain to make sense of having been embraced by those who’d always most fiercely disdained him. When the star of the basketball team pointed out that he needed to do some bullying if he were to maintain his place at the table, Brandon wasn’t sure if the guy was kidding, but decided not to take a chance. The great thing was that, having paralysed Jaden, he didn’t actually have to do any fighting. Everyone backed down. It felt to him like payback for all the years he’d been picked on so mercilessly. He was dreaded by the sort of ordinary shy kid he himself had been until so recently, but felt that at any moment he might turn back into such a kid himself.
He began drinking — a lot. One day in the 11th grade, he came to Spanish class drunk, and the teacher noticed, and embarrassed him in front of everyone. Brandon's asking if the teacher would like his fucking nose broken impressed many of his classmates, but also got him expelled from school. Jalen was their class’s valedictorian.
Chronological adulthood arrived. Brandon had grown to 6-4. Intent on never again looking like anyone might dream of bullying, he spent every spare minute at the gym. No matter how buffed he became, though, what he saw when he looked in the mirror was the shy, pudgy outcast who as a teenager had been routinely humiliated by cruel classmates. At the urging of one of the gym’s other obsessives, he began taking testosterone supplements. He and Other took to going out drinking, but their greater interest was in intimidating other men. Other tried one night to steal the wrong guy’s — an up-and-coming welterweight boxer — girlfriend, was thoroughly humiliated, and hanged himself the next morning. Brandon had never felt so alone.
Jalen got his teaching credential, and was hired to teach special needs kids in Schaumburg. His kids loved him. Their parents loved him. His fellow teachers loved him. He wrote Brandon an email apologising for having tormented him, and received no response. He married a speech therapist. They seemed to adore each other, Jalen’s sexual limitations notwithstanding.
Brandon had a relationship of his own, with a waitress at the chain coffee shop where he got a job as a line cook. He hated her for loving him — couldn’t she see who he was inside, under the bulging muscles? — and slapped her around when drunk. He was very often drunk. His hating himself for his slapping her around made him drink more, which in turn made him more likely to slap her around He’d found another source for his testosterone supplements. He re-read Jalen’s email a hundred times, and was furious to know that Jalen is so happy.
Where was the fairness?
Where was the fairness?
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