TO-WIT: WHAT YOU WISH FOR
I knew as soon as they walked in the door that this was the case I had been waiting for all my professional life. Mother and Father took a seat on the sofa near the rear of my office while their marginally pubescent son sat in the chair directly across from my desk.
He told me that he was being bullied at school and at once both my ears and ire pricked up. Since the beginning of the semester, he told me, a classmate had been taunting him, punching him and flinging at him the sort of anatomical invectives certain to induce any self-respecting male teenager into a fight; well, almost any.
He’d refused to fight, he said, but when things escalated he finally retaliated with a punch of his own that broke the other kid’s jaw into several well deserved pieces; now he was facing an expulsion hearing.
Never before has mayhem so excited me. The clients quickly agreed to a fee arrangement (my offer to pay them to get the case helped seal the deal) and with the power of attorney executed, they left me blessedly alone to my own salivating devices.
“A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” I recited slowly to myself as I yet again recalled standing in the alley behind the junior high school building, fearfully waiting for my own antagonist and his entourage. I was a new transfer to this school and having been bullied for months by this future assistant janitor I seemingly had no choice now but to accept his challenge to fight; he was bigger, older and stronger than me and the match lasted maybe thirty seconds. I didn’t even fight back, threw not one punch, and by the time I got up off the ground he and his entourage had finished their hooting and were gone. The pain went away quickly enough, the hooting never has.
I jumped into my new crusade with unrelenting abandon. I mean, come on, how often do you get to save two souls at the same time? And I might have done it too, had any of the witnesses corroborated my client’s story. As it turned out though, my client had not been entirely forthright in his account. He left out the part about his actually being the bully, about his being the flinger of anatomical invectives, about his harassing, hounding, taunting and tormenting of the kid who’s jaw he broke. But for that however, I might have prevailed.
I cut the best deal I could for him, a one year expulsion. “Does this mean I don’t have to go to school for a whole year,” he queried gleefully.
“Yes,” I replied, “and you should use the time to best advantage by learning the broom.”
Talk about your funks. What do we do when our fantasies of redemption implode, leaving behind a void into which the hauntings of our youth opportunistically seep. I think I handle it pretty well, provided a diet consisting entirely of Hershey bars, pizza and milkshakes is seen as a solid indicia of emotional stability.
I might have nurtured that funk for who knows how long had I not recently gone out to dinner at a fine local restaurant. There, as I handed him my keys, I recognized the bald and grossly overweight valet as the selfsame bully who had in that alley stood over me and laughed so many years ago.
It appears my assistant janitorial forecast wasn’t that far off. Maybe that doesn’t change the past, maybe nothing does, but maybe the present is the only present we ever get. I sat down at the table and began to think about his tip.
©2015, S. Sponte, Esq.