Revised July 26, 2024.
A memoir in the third person.
What is the difference between a hero’s journey and a villain’s origin story?
On an intuitive, obsessive compulsive level Ron knew the answer to this question. He knew that everything is about choices. The problem is that the choices are not always in your control. Sometimes, choices are made for you. Especially when you’re eleven.
Ron was too short to be playing basketball, but he enrolled in the summer basketball clinic at the local high school anyway. As he sat in the stadium lobby, surrounded by about 30 of his 11-year-old cohorts, waiting for the doors to the basketball court to open, he wondered how he ended up here. He didn’t remember ever asking to attend basketball clinic. And he didn’t recall being coerced into it either. More likely than not, somebody, probably his mom, suggested it and, absent any kind of alternative, the suggestion became reality.
Naturally it would be his mom who would suggest it because it was his mom who was stuck with him all summer. Actually, that’s not true. His mom wasn’t stuck with “Ronald.” She loved Ronald, and she enjoyed having him around. But it was summer and she wanted him to be out playing, like his older brother Jesse did. Ronald was nothing like Jesse. Jesse had his father’s wavy hair whereas Ron had his mother’s straight hair. Jesse had chiseled masculine features. Ron had a friendly, open, rounded face. Jesse was handsome and lean. Ron was cute. More importantly, Jesse had friends. And Jesse would go outside. With his friends. And engage in the sort of feverish competitive savagery considered normal for fourteen-year-old boys. The kind of mischief that some people consider necessary to find your manhood. Playing competitive sports, or chasing girls, or arguing over the rules of a game. Ron, on the other hand, was not particularly athletic and preferred to spend his time indoors. He scanned the newspaper every morning, reading pretty much anything that didn’t have to do with Watergate (whatever that was). He could spend hours crouched over construction paper with his 30-count set of colored markers. He liked watching Phil Donahue, and he loved classical music.
There was a TV commercial that aired frequently, usually in the middle of Gilligan’s Island reruns, featuring a high brow upper-crust elderly gentleman in a double-breasted suit standing next to a harp and a marble or plaster bust of somebody probably Beethoven. The commercial was for an album set of 120 Classical Masterpieces, and the names of classical works would scroll across the screen while music played in the background. Ron would write down some of the names then, every couple of weeks, ride to the local library on his purple bike to browse their album collection. (Jesse wouldn’t have been caught dead on a purple bike.) Over time, Ron worked his way through Bach, Pachelbel, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin, among others.
Record albums, for those who don’t know, were kept in cardboard slip covers and if you held the cover the wrong way the album could slide right out. This is what happened to Ron one day as he was leaving the library. He was holding the album covers with the slit side facing forward and, when he hit the breaks on his purple bike, the albums flew out of the covers like a pair of skeets and crashed onto the gravel pavement. Ron picked up the albums, very distressed, brushed them off, and slouched back to the circulation desk.
It’s important to note that this was 1974, in a predominantly white suburb in Indiana. There were no blacks, and only a handful of Mexican families, many of whom were employed by the steel mills in Gary and East Chicago. And although most of the people in his small town were perfectly decent, he learned at an early age that some of his neighbors were not going to be receptive to him. Ever. And so he learned to keep his head down and go about his business. As a result, aside from saying “thank you” at check out, Ron had never spoken to the librarians, and they had never really spoken to him. Until now.
Ron was almost in tears as he approached the librarian, a blonde woman probably in her thirties. He assumed he would be in trouble. He was also very shaken by the damage he may have caused to these albums, which he assumed were very expensive. He described to her what happened. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I can pay for it, I promise. I just need to talk to my dad.”
Ron’s eyes were cast down as he said this so he did not notice when the one librarian multiplied into three. The two other women must have come from the back when they heard his squeaking apology.
“No, no, it’s okay!” They all sang in a cooing chorus. “We can replace them. It’s okay. This happens all the time. Don’t worry. It’s okay. We’re not mad. You don’t have to tell anybody. It’s fine. Would you like to check something else out? Go ahead, choose another album. Please. It’s okay.”
Ron looked up and saw how all these women were trying so hard to be soothing. It went beyond tenderness. It was more like familiarity, or even love. Suddenly, it occurred him: these women knew him. They probably talked about him every time he came in. He was that cute little brown kid who checked out classical albums.
So, Jesse and Ron were not very much alike. And, it’s not like Ron didn’t have any friends, despite his Mom’s misgivings. He got along well enough with his classmates. It’s just that his friendships were, for the most part, situational. Not the sort of friendships that carried over from school into the “real world.” But Ron’s mother couldn’t see that. She saw his isolation as unhealthy. Like loneliness or depression. And she worried that maybe he wasn’t liked. She never actually said it, but you could see it in her eyes. “Where are your friends? How come they don’t come around?” He didn’t know. How do you know when you’re not invited to something unless someone tells you, “Oh, hey Ron, by the way, we decided to get together over the weekend and we didn’t invite. you.” Nobody says that. So, how would he know? Maybe his class was just a class of loners. Did she ever consider that?
What’s worse, Ron’s mother had recently gotten into the habit of telling Jesse to “take your brother” whenever Jesse wanted to meet up with friends. And Jesse’s friends would jostle Ron around and say things like, “Hey, are you tough like your brother?” Ron never knew how to respond to that, which sort of answered the question. No. “Take your brother” was a bad development for everyone involved. So, if Ron didn’t object to attending basketball clinic, that was probably why.
The Instigator
They were almost two weeks into the six week basketball clinic and, somehow, Ron had still not made any friends. There were four elementary schools that all fed into the same high school in Griffith, Indiana and, for whatever reason, none of the attendees in the clinic were from his class. But it was not a complete waste. Ron was amused by the rhythmic squeak of tennis shoes, the vibrating clank of the basketball rim, and the rare but occasional swoosh of the net. He also marveled at the smell of the basketball’s rubber on his hands. He was getting the hang of dribbling, and the two-handed pass, and even the layup. And, most surprisingly, he was enjoying the feeling of exhilaration that comes from engaging in sweaty physical activity. But it was pretty obvious that he was never going to be Julius Erving.
“Hey! You!”
Ron was aware that somebody was yelling in the lobby, but he was preoccupied by his jog strap. It itched and he was trying to figure out how he could scratch it without digging his hand into his shorts. If Jesse’s groin itched, would he care if anybody saw him scratching it?
“Hey!”
Sometimes when you’re deep in REM sleep, outside noises, like alarm clocks, can seem very distant. Being preoccupied can have the same effect. On some level you are aware that somebody is yelling, but it doesn’t quite register.
“Hey! I’m talking to you!”
Ron looked up. The crowd in the lobby appeared to have parted so as not to stand in the path of the voice. A puny kid with straight blonde hair cut in a bowl, and beady eyes that were set a sliver too close together, was pointing at him. Ron seemed to be the last person in the room to know he was being yelled at.
“Yeah, you!”
The puny kid’s voice was shrill, but his face was slack, like someone who is trying to look innocent. The sort of guy who would shoot a spit-wad at the teacher and then point at someone else. Ron had never met this guy before, but he knew his type. We’ll call him Shithead.
Shithead’s scratchy voice shot across the lobby like a crow.
“See this guy?!” Shithead pointed at a much bigger kid standing next to him. “You and him. Are going to fight. At the football field. After class tomorrow.”
Ron weighed only 69 pounds—easily the smallest boy in his class back at Wadsworth Elementary. And this kid was… much larger. Ron let out a nervous laugh and lifted his upturned hands in the international gesture of I’m not armed. “What are you talking about? I don’t even know him.” Ron looked at the bigger kid for support. And the bigger kid, we’ll call him the Dancing Bear, was smiling. He had braces. Ron looked around the room. Everybody was staring at him. There wasn’t an adult in sight.
Oh, great, Ron thought. This is just great.
The doors to the basketball courts opened and they all filed into practice.
Training
Ron’s family lived in a tri-level house with pail green aluminum siding on the two-story portion, and red brick on the ranch level. Geraniums lined the brick wall leading to the front door. A visitor to the house would be greeted by an entryway lined in gold wallpaper overlapped by a fuzzy burgundy design. The carpeting was olive green. The couch and loveseat were covered in plastic. A portrait of Jesus hung above the stairwell leading to the upstairs bedroom. Beyond the living room was the kitchen with a screen door leading to the back yard and a stairway leading to the basement. The basement had cold tile floors, wood paneling, a washer and dryer, a black and white TV, and a desk where their father did the taxes.
The screen door slammed as Ron entered the kitchen. His mother was at the stove. The smell of chicken with mole tickled the air. He tried to explain to her what had happened at the gym. His head was spinning so fast from panic that he didn’t hear exactly what she said, but it was something to the effect of, “They’re just trying to scare you.”
Jesse, who was also in the room, disagreed.
This was a Mexican household. And, like many good Mexican households, they were not unfamiliar with the sport of boxing, with fights playing on ABC’s Wide World of Sports when available. This included, most recently, the January fight between Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, with the inimitable commentating of Howard Cosell. Ron had mentioned the fight to a classmate who immediately said how much he hated Ali. Ron accepted this as another cultural peculiarity of where they lived—like the fact that he watched Sesame Street while everybody else watched Captain Kangaroo—so he never mentioned Muhammed Ali in public company again.
Jesse led Ron to the cold dark basement where he tried to teach him how to fight. If this were a film, this is where the training montage would come in. The training montage was popularized by the Rocky movies. An otherwise boring collection of video clips, showing Sylvester Stallone running in the dim morning light, is overlapped by a punchy 70’s soundtrack to create a story within a story. A tale of overcoming obstacles and finding oneself through adversity and dedication, leading up to the big fight. Generations of people would turn to these montages for inspiration at times like this; imagining that their struggles were part of a greater story, punctuated by a crescendo of music. Unfortunately, Ron did not have this inspiration to draw from. The first Rocky movie wouldn’t be released until two years later. Instead, Ron had thoughts of Muhammed Ali taunting his opponents and fighting against Ken Norton with a broken jaw.
Jesse demonstrated how to stand feet shoulder’s width apart. How to keep on your toes. How to keep your hands up and in front of you to protect your face and body. “Your arms will get tired, but keep them up anyway.” He showed Ron how to jab: to keep your wrist straight and your punches quick. He demonstrated the quick jab by making sound effects like a leather glove hitting a punching bag. Tsch. Tsch-tsch. Tsch-tsch-tsch. He showed Ron how to vary the punch selection so the other guy doesn’t know what to expect. Jesse danced around the cold basement floor, and Ron followed. Sort of.
In the end, Ron was okay imitating his brother so long as he didn’t think about why they were doing this. So long as he didn’t think about what would happen when there was an actual person, a very large person, standing in front of him. Ron’s foot coordination left a lot to be desired, so there probably wouldn’t be any “floating like a butterfly,” but maybe he could still “sting like a bee.”
“One more thing,” Jesse said. “You need to set rules.”
“Rules?”
“Rules. No biting. No kicking. No scratching. No weapons. This is a fist fight. And once there’s blood, the fight is over.”
“Once there’s blood, the fight is over.”
“Once there’s blood, the fight is over.”
That night Ron stared at the ceiling of their second story bedroom, his heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings. He replayed that morning’s encounter in the gym lobby over and over and over again. Trying to figure out if there was anything he could’ve done differently.
Fight Day
The next day, it was difficult to focus on the two handed pass knowing what was coming. But as practice went on, and nobody said anything, Ron began to believe that maybe his mother was right. Maybe they were just trying to scare him. As the final whistle blew, and class was dismissed, Ron let out a sigh of relief. But then, Shithead and the Dancing Bear came up alongside him.
“Let’s go.”
Ron’s stomach did a quick flip, but then he settled himself down and, as they were walking across the parking lot to the football field, Ron recited the rules his brother had taught him the day before. Shithead repeated each rule and agreed. The Dancing Bear didn’t say a word.
Ron hung his glasses on the chain link fence. The white yard lines on the football field were faded. He could tell that the grass had become overgrown behind the bleachers. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear the wind hissing through its long blades.
At first, nobody did anything. Ron stood there with his arms raised, just as he had been taught, and the Dancing Bear stood there with a smirk on his face. Finally, Ron stepped up and threw a right jab, hitting the Dancing Bear on the left cheekbone.
The Dancing Bear’s mouth gaped open and his eyes grew wide. You could tell that he wasn’t expecting to get hit. Like he hadn’t completely thought this through. Ron threw another jab. And another. The Dancing Bear started to back up. The Dancing Bear must have thrown a couple of punches but Ron was too focused to notice. Quick jabs. Arms up. Quick jabs. Arms up. Ron didn’t know how many punches he had thrown, but at some point the Dancing Bear tripped and fell backwards.
Still focused, Ron sat on top of Dancing Bear and kept punching at his face.
At some point Ron heard that same scratchy voice he had heard in the lobby the previous day. Shrill and distant, Shithead started yelling.
“There’s blood! There’s blood! The fight’s over! The fight’s over!”
Suddenly, as if awakening from a dream, Ron looked down. The Dancing Bear was crying. Blood was running from his nose and his lips. Ron’s knuckles were also cut up, probably from the Dancing Bear’s braces.
Ron jumped up and raised his hands in the air. “The fight’s over! The fights over! The fight’s over!”
As Ron was stepping back, a little boy, maybe three years old, ran up to Ron crying and yelled, “You beat up my brother!” The little boy tried to kick Ron before running away. Meanwhile, the Dancing Bear got up, lurched towards the chain link fence, and grabbed Ron’s glasses. At that instant, Ron burst into tears.
This complicated moment warrants a deeper analysis. First, it’s important to know that Ron had acquired, only within the past few months, his first pair of glasses. Without them he was blind. He didn’t know he was blind before he got his glasses, but once he had them he realized he couldn’t be without them. Second, Ron had never been in a fight before and he had not had time to process the emotions that it created: the building anxiety leading up to the fight; the utter terror of the fight itself; the unexpected exhilaration he felt as the bully kept backing up; the shocking realization that the Dancing Bear had brought his little brother to watch; and that fucking Shithead. But, beyond all of this, the thing that finally broke Ron was the injustice and the powerlessness one feels when trying to defend himself in a world that has no honor. How you can survive an ordeal and still lose?
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Jesse stepped forward.
“Give me the glasses.”
Jesse held out one hand while the other held a chocolate shake. The Dancing Bear froze. Next to Ron’s brother, the Dancing Bear did not seem so big. Three years, at that age, is like a generation.
The Dancing Bear handed the glasses to Jesse and Jesse handed the glasses to Ron.
“Go home. I’ll take care of this,” Jesse said as he pulled some restaurant napkins out of his pocket.
Ron grabbed his purple bike and wheeled it across the parking lot while Jesse prepared to mop the blood off the Dancing Bear’s face. A long-haired pothead-type teenager who happened to be hanging out in the parking lot called out to Ron.
“Who won?!”
The question caught Ron by surprise. He had been so busy trying to survive the ordeal that the question of winning and losing hadn’t even occurred to him. He perked up.
“I did!”
The pothead lifted a fist. “Hey, way to go, man!”
Ron rode out of the parking lot, replaying the incident over and over in his head, and practicing how he would retell the story. Fifteen minutes later he was still dizzy from the adrenaline when he coasted up the driveway and walked through the back screen door.
“I won!”
Bats
“That is the worst thing I ever heard.”
It was an uncharacteristically clear night. The stars were unimpeded by smog or clouds. Ron’s friend Mary was bobbing up and down in her swimming pool with a pool skimmer held high above her head. Bats would sometimes swoop down above the pool at night, probably trying to catch the insects that were attracted to the shimmery water, and Mary made a sport out of trying to swat them. Ron was bobbing at the opposite wall. Proof that Ron had friends, even if they were mostly girls.
There were plenty of above ground pools in town, big round steel drums edged by brown rust, but hers was the only pool he knew of that was in-ground. Not that he had been in very many back yards, but this underground pool with the little lights along the wall made him think that she was probably rich, though he had no real frame of reference from which to judge any of this.
“Seriously?” She continued. “Your parents told you that there are no winners in a fight?”
“Yeah.” Ron could taste something salty or bloody leaking in his mouth. He dipped his raw scratched up hands in and out of the water. The chlorine made the knuckles sting, and the sting reminded him that he had overcome something. “I don’t remember exactly what they said. There are no winners in a fight. Nothing good ever comes from violence. Violence only gets you more violence. Something like that.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Speaking in cartoon metaphors, if Ron was Charlie Brown, sort of mopey and unsure; Mary was Lucy Van Pelt—very certain, and always a little bit outraged about something. He envied her assuredness. How does someone even become like that?
“Do you really think you didn’t win that fight?” She asked.
“Well, I didn’t get beat up, so…”
Mary lowered her skimmer and stared at Ron for a long time.
Residents of Griffith, Indiana were treated to summer evening concerts of chirping. Constant. Incessant. Chirping. Were they crickets? Grasshoppers? Katydids? Locusts? He had no idea. All he knew is that the sound was so loud and so ubiquitous that you didn’t even really notice it, until you did. Many years later the word “crickets” would come to mean silence in response to something ridiculous. This is what Ron was experiencing at that very moment, literally and figuratively, as Mary stared him down. Finally, Mary lifted her skimmer back up in the air.
“You won that fight, Ron. You won. Don’t let anybody tell you you didn’t win.”
An Uncomfortable Realization
Winning the fight, if you can call it winning, was completely anticlimactic for Ron, and did not provide any emotional payoff. No dancing around the ring with your hands raised in the air. No standing on the ropes to receive the adoration of cheering fans. Just a pothead asking who won and a parent waxing philosophical about violence.
There was a part of him that wished that he had gotten injured. Not badly, mind you. But enough so that people would feel sorry for him and take seriously the ordeal he went through. Enough so that people would notice him.
The problem with being liberal minded is that you see everything from the other person’s perspective, regardless of whether it’s the right perspective. It’s not a conscious thing so much as it is just the way you engage with the world. In this case, instead of feeling a sense of righteousness, Ron, and probably his parents, realized that Shithead was probably operating from an emotional rather than an intellectual center. Shithead may have been a victim of bullying himself, thus relieving himself of victimization by reversing roles, by assuming an aggressive posture. Or he may have lacked any kind of autonomy or control in his home life, and coercing strangers to fight may have given him a feeling of power. Or maybe Shithead had a compulsion to create drama around himself to drown out some kind of emptiness he felt inside, perhaps due to neglect. Any of these could have been his origin story. You see. That’s the problem with being empathic. You’re understanding of others cancels out your own lived experience.
Even so, Ron gave very little thought to the fact that he was, at one point, sitting on top of Dancing Bear and repeatedly punching him in the face. SITTING ON TOP of a kid and PUNCHING HIM REPEATEDLY IN THE FACE. How was that not a bigger deal for Ron?! Or his brother? Or his parents? Shouldn’t he have gone through some sort of existential crises? Did he just block it out as a form of post traumatic stress?
Even though Ron was fighting Dancing Bear, Dancing Bear was really just a footnote. Ron didn’t even remember what Dancing Bear looked like and never bothered to learn his name. The real problem was Shithead. The face Ron would remember was Shithead’s. The name Ron would go out of his way to learn was Shithead’s.
What bothered Ron most about the whole incident was that Shithead chose to pit a big white kid against a small brown kid. Why would somebody do that? Were Shithead and Dancing Bear friends? Ron didn’t know. But this lopsided contest appeared to be designed for a predetermined outcome. The goal was not to see two people fight. The goal was to see the little brown kid get beat up.
It was not meant to be a contest. It was meant to be a lynching.
On some level 11-year-old Ron knew that. But it would be years before he could put it into words.
The Post Fight Interview
In the absence of any feeling of satisfaction, Ron imagined a different ending:
Howard Cosell: Ro-nald Ro-driguez. Good to see ya Champ!
Ron: How-ard Co-sell. The world’s greatest newscaster.
Howard Cosell: You’re very kind, Champ. So how did you feel out there?
Ron: I felt great, Howard. I felt great.
Howard Cosell: So did you worry…
Ron: Worry?
Howard Cosell: Did you worry that the Dancing Bear would neutralize your footwork?
Ron: Well, if the Dancing Bear dreamed it, he would have to apologize.
Howard Cosell: What was your plan going into the fight?
Ron: As always, Howard. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
Howard Cosell: For those who couldn’t see the fight, how would you describe it?
Ron: Rodriguez comes out to meet the Dancing Bear and the Dancing Bear starts to retreat. If the Dancing Bear goes back an inch further he’ll end up in a ringside seat. / Dancing Bear swings with the left. Dancing Bear swings on the right. Look how Rodriguez carries the fight. / Dancing Bear keeps backing, but there’s not enough room. It’s a matter of time, then Rodriguez lowers the boom. / Now Rodriguez lands with a right, what a beautiful swing. And the punch lifts Dancing Bear clean out of the ring. / Dancing Bear keeps rising, and the ref wears a frown. For he can’t start counting ‘til Dancing Bear comes back down.1
Howard Cosell: [Laughing]
Ron: What did you think of that?
Howard Cosell: I think you are extraordinarily brilliant, Champ.
Who Are the Bats in Your Nighttime Sky? What Are the Crickets Saying?
The following week Ron’s mother went to talk to the the basketball coach who, as it turns out, was an old classmate of hers from East Chicago. (Decades later, when asked what she remembered about the incident, she would express pride at Ron defending himself, seemingly forgetting any comments to the contrary.) Two weeks later, at the end of the clinic, the coach awarded Ron a basketball for trying the hardest. As far as Ron knew, there were no other repercussions from the incident. They never heard from the Dancing Bear’s parents, and Ron never saw the Dancing Bear again. Ron and Shithead both finished out the clinic, but they never spoke to each other and Ron would not see those beady eyes again until junior high school. But even then, they never spoke to each other about the incident, or about anything else. It was as if they had never met. It was as if it had never happened.
But it had happened. And everything, everything, everything matters, because today is only an epilogue to what came before. And yesterday is a prologue to what comes next. And someday somebody will crack the code that determines why and when and by how much an event will break or bend the line that runs across the palm of your hand.
Vigilance is learned the hard way. Your arms get tired from holding them up, but there is power in the ability to imagine life through the eyes of your adversary; even when that adversary is a big stupid boy lying on ground beneath you; bloodied and beaten, his tear-filled gaze directed up at the pale blue Indiana sky.
Adapted from an actual interview between Howard Cosell and Muhammed Ali.
What a ride this was! Took me completely outside of me and seamlessly dropped me back into today. Brilliant!