On a warm, sweet smelling summer day, the breeze blew, the birch leaves shimmered, and the starlings glided from lawn to lawn searching for what food they could scavenge. The grass was a cross between brown and green, but the green was mostly weeds. The sun blazed down while the cicadas’ song resonated which created an illusion that made the day feel like it was twenty degrees hotter. The asphalt reflected the sun’s ray back up into the sky creating a blurred barrier of heat. Houses were lifeless, air conditioners ran full blast, and turning on the TV was a thought out of mind. It was summertime for the residents of Fontaine Dr. Most houses in that Cleveland Hill neighborhood cost on average between fifty and seventy thousand dollars with lot sizes about the size of a small carrot garden. It was close quarters with each little individual Cape Cod styled house stacked on top of the other or as momma would always say, “Close enough to hear the next person over pass gas.” At the end of almost every driveway was a basketball net or just a pole because sometimes the back board would get stolen. In every other house there was a family with two or more kids. Across the street were the Muhammads who had four kids; Shareif, who was a year older than me, was the only name I could remember out of the four. Then there was Paul a couple of doors down. Paul was the most athletic fat kid out there. It didn’t matter what the sport was whether it was football, baseball, hockey you name it; he was playing and he was good. Then across from him were the Williams who had Zack and Eugene who were, let us say, missing the mark intellectually. Then five doors down were the Randsburys that had a family with four boys. I was closest with Andy and Greg, the eldest of the four. Here and there families with kids would come and go because our neighborhood was the “transition” neighborhood. Either you could transition down to the ghetto, which was about a mile or less away, or you could move up to a better neighborhood, which was also about a mile away; it all depended on your parents’ job- that is if they had one. Paul, Andy, Greg, and I would always run the neighborhood with our K-Mart bicycles. We were like a pack of wolves picking on whoever was fresh meat, and “testing” them to see if they fit in. By testing I mean we would scavenge their house to see what video games they had or any sports memorabilia they possessed. Chances are if they didn’t have anything of value to us, we would give them a final test by jumping them. If they could fight back they could take whatever two wheeled vehicle they had and ride the area with us. We were such a tough looking crew, at least we thought we were, with Paul “The Wall”, Andy who resembled a young Andre the Giant, Greg who just had a wild look in his eye all the time or maybe his eye was just lazy, and then there was me. The kid with the buzz cut who wore camouflage shirts with jean shorts every day. We were always ready to fight someone whether it was each other or a kid from a street over. Maybe we were scared of something. Maybe we were angry at someone or something. We all had our problems. I haven’t realized it until recently, but when momma got sick and we were broke, I became scared. I didn’t know why or what I was scared of but I just knew our lives were dramatically different. I never understood my or anyone else’s anger until I matured. Paul didn’t know who his father was. Maybe he felt no one had his back. Andy and Greg came from a house where they had to share everything and that included their mother’s attention, which they didn’t get a sufficient amount of. Even with all of our problems it didn’t matter what we wore, what phone we had, what the size of our house was, or what we looked like, we were a bunch of kids; it was a simpler time.

The summer before going into my seventh grade year, my mom had sold our little cape and we were moving. I said goodbye to the twelve hundred square foot house with the green roof, the two upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, and the big kitchen with a butchers block in the middle of it. Then it was time to say goodbye to the gang. We didn’t say much to each other at least nothing memorable. We made broken promises to come to each other’s houses and keep in touch. Life can sometimes take you far from what you’re from.

A week later I moved into my new house in Williamsville. My current home is a ranch styled home that is almost double the size of the Cape with orange brick, and basement that could fit a bowling alley. The yard seemed endless because of the giant grove that is behind the house. I thought the house was in a great location, less than a mile away from Main St, and I was confident that I could find more kids to form a new gang with. I only found one boy on my street, Mike, but we were in the same grade. We became best friends until school started. It was my first school year at Mill Middle, I had little confidence going into the school on the first day, barely knowing anyone and lost in a hand-shaped school. I screamed out a couple names to some of the guys I recognized from baseball in the best jock voice I could, “Jaaakkkkkeee what up? Yo what up Mike’O?”. The only response I would get is a quick awkward stare that indicated they did not nor did they want to know me. All the guys were dressed in Nike apparel while I was wearing my typical camouflage and jean short combo. As I sat in a study hall with no work to do I sat there with my hands folded into a sweaty bunch. Everyone around me was listening to music on their IPods; all I could do was listen to the dead air around me. One lunch period everything and everyone came down at me. “Why are you wearing jean short? Are you poor?”, some kids would yell at me. Other kids would scream, “Dude you’re gay. Where are those shoes from? My grandma’s closet? Get out of the closet homo!”. Then Mike, the only person I thought had my back, turned and said, “You’re lucky you’re my neighbor or you wouldn’t be able to sit here”. The wolf from Cleve-Hill just entered a world of over privileged snakes that instead of beating up your body beat up your mind and confidence. In that moment, while I was being verbally slaughtered by my peers, I felt all those punches I had thrown at the new kids on the block come straight back at my mouth, making my come backs muffled and my eyes fill with tears. The astringent words that inundated my mind felt like knives running through my veins that eventually pumped through my heart. Just as I had been while I was fighting in the Cleve-Hill neighborhood, I was afraid as the self-degrading comments ripped my psyche. I realize now that since I had nothing of value for them to use, I was getting the “final test”. I never thought about what went through the minds of the kids we picked on in my old neighborhood until I was being abused. I wonder if the kids who picked on me, were scared of me. I had my reason to be scared when I was the bully, but I wonder why these snakes had such an invective nature; they had each other, they had both parents in the house, and they had expensive possessions. Maybe their parents were too busy with their white collar jobs and couldn’t give enough love to their kids. Maybe they were picked on at home. Maybe it was a competition to see who could make the most insults. Maybe the reason is not for me to know, but rather I understand that people are the way they are for a reason.

I saw my old friend Paul the other day at the Tim Horton’s by my house. Paul “The Wall” grew up and became the “Steel wall”: he started to work out and lost ninety five pounds. He told me that Andy was a football player now and he had just won a sectional championship. Paul also told me an incident where Mrs. Randsbury found a pound of weed and a bong in Greg’s room. We laughed at Greg’s perpetual stupidity, indulged in the nostalgia of our childhood, and once again went our separate ways. Since the morose days of middle school, I find myself accepting more people whether they smell, they talk to loud, or they just don’t have a nice bone in their body; everyone is different, but some people cannot accept that and a relationship with reciprocity will never exist in their lives. Some people crack under the pressures of life like a clay pot in an overly hot oven, some people don’t even go into the oven, and some people come out looking just fine. Our lives are wet bricks of clay, constantly being cut and smashed into pieces, but I apprehend that with every cut and dent our world creates, we must smooth the edges, and ultimately attempt to create a beautiful sculpture.