Crazy Uncle Mike

My 4 Attempted Murders as a Child

I was an angry and violent child. I was also short and super skinny growing up in a dying industrial town, in a bad neighborhood, and on the wrong side of the tracks. In my neighborhood fighting was a way of life. The neighborhood had a hierarchy based upon whose ass you could kick. I seemed to be eternally on the third rung of that hierarchy of the younger guys. You see there was very definitely two age groups in the neighborhood.

The amount of respect you got, when you got picked for games and sports, what you got to do, even if you got to hang out with the older guys was based on your rank. It was more than common in the neighborhood to get bullied by people of a higher rank. And there was only one way to rise up the ranks, you had to kick the ass of a guy who had a higher rank.

There was a kid who lived across the street from me, who had an older brother and the older brother didn’t like the fact that his little brother was ranked fifth in the neighborhood. So he was constantly nagging him about this and finally one day, he pushed him hard enough to get him to fight me. It was a pretty typical planned street fight, a circle of kids, lots of noise, a declaration that someone was about to kick your ass. I didn’t want to fight, I never did, not because I was scared of others, but I was scared of myself and my anger. I knew about the anger inside me and I was always terrified of what it meant. I knew something about myself, if I got hit and started to cry, I lost my mind.

He hit me in the face, I told him to stop, he hit me again, “stop!” I yelled. He was now emboldened and he hit me again, the tears started and I went over the edge. I swung as hard as I possibly could and I caught him in the temple. I hit him so hard that he spun completely around, his body went completely limp and he fell like a dead man, face first onto the sidewalk. I thought he was dead, everyone thought he was dead and I knew this because all of the kids ran like hell away from what had happened. His older brother dropped to the ground to see to him and I heard his six-year old brother scream, “you killed my brother,” as he ran at me and jumped on me. He had those little kid finger nails and I could feel them digging into my body and I was completely re-enraged.

The scariest thing about me losing my temper is that when it would happen, while I would be in a murderous rage, my brain would speed up. Everything would happen in slow motion and for this reason I was often mentally ahead of everyone around me, which was really unfortunate for the person I was focused on. And now, I was focused on this little bastard digging his nails into me. I snatched him off me and at the same time saw the car coming up the street. So I timed it and tossed him into the street in front of the car. He hit the pavement, bounced up and immediately got hit by the car flying forward and landing face first in the street. The driver jumped out of the car and once again, everyone thought I’d killed someone, so did I. Until he moved. At which point I charged into the street and started kicking him in the head as the driver pulled me off of him. At which point I ran home and would later find out that in fact, both kids were alive and not seriously hurt. I was ten years-old. And the way things worked in my neighborhood, two weeks later I was grabbed in an alley by the 19 year-old sister of the kid I knocked out and she pinned me against a garage door while her little brother punched me repeatedly in the face, then she slapped me a few times for good measure.

This was in the fall, that winter we had some incredible snow storms. We had huge snow banks piled up on the street, from the sidewalk into the road. We had a snow day and the plows were scraping the streets up to the curb. Me and my nemesis, we’d had 18 fights since we were five years-old, he was a complete sadist and I didn’t like him but that day he was the only kid around to hang out with. We were building a tunnel in the snow and after we had constructed a several foot long tunnel in the snow bank, and while I was crawling in it, he collapsed the tunnel on me burying me in the snow. I was an asthmatic as a kid and so one of my biggest fears was suffocation and being buried in the snow I was completely freaked out, angry, totally out of my mind. I came screaming out of the snow bank like a banshee and right at him. Our nineteenth fight was underway and we were throwing punches, he caught me in the nose and it started to bleed. Nosebleeds were a frequent thing for me given my allergies but he didn’t realize that, and when he saw me bleeding he stopped thinking that blood meant victory and that I would run home.

He was incredibly wrong. The blood meant nothing to me and I launched at him and for the first time ever had the upper hand. I pulled him around and down into the snow bank, we were hanging half over the curb into the road on the snow bank. I had him pinned down and was pummeling his face when a noise caught my attention. The city snow plow was coming down the street plowing the snow off of the curb line. I have no idea how the driver didn’t see us, but I saw the plow, saw the his head and neck were off the curb far enough and I pushed his shoulders down with the full intent of having the plow cut his fucking head off. In the last second he got a rush of terror and adrenaline and thrust himself out of the way of the plow, so close that the plow actually grazed the hood of his winter coat. He scrambled off crying and ran home, he never fought me again.

The final straw that scared me, made me realize that I had to get my anger under control happened in the following spring. We were playing baseball and as would so often happen with kids playing sports, a kid that I didn’t get along got angry about something. He through a baseball at me when my back was turned, and a hardball to the back hurts like hell and I snapped. I grabbed an aluminum bat and when at him. It surprised him and he was unarmed, I planted my feet and swung as hard as I could directly at his head. At the last second, he jumped to keep from taking a bat to the head, I caught him full on the point of his shoulder and he fully cartwheeled. Had I caught him in the head I certainly would have seriously hurt or maybe even killed him. As he tumbled to the ground I lunged forward ready to finish what I started and three other kids tackled me and took me down, holding me down while he ran off home.

Having nearly killed four kids in a year, the fourth one, after my anger subsided, had triggered real fear in me. I was completely and totally terrified of myself and what I was capable of doing to someone. I didn’t want to kill anyone, I didn’t want to go to jail, so I started a long process of learning how to control my anger. I’ve done really well over my lifetime and while I’ve thrown a couple of punches over the years, I never again lost control the same way I did when I was a child.