Everything is nothing with a twist

My orientation program at school included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled… I don’t know what my parents thought. Cuts and bruises, even black eyes, could be explained. Football, surfing, something. My hunch, which seems right in retrospect, was that they couldn’t help, so I told them nothing.

William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

On the first day of 8^th grade the Double Shirt Crew almost kicked my ass.

We had been playing soccer and I had scored the winning goal for my team. I was elated. This was really going to help me fit in. After the game ended, I began walking from the upper field towards the quad. I was alone – I didn’t know anyone by name and did not have any friends.

It was late afternoon, a few minutes before recess. There was no one in the quad. As I arrived at my locker and began to open it, someone shoved me hard from behind. I slammed into my locker. I turned around – more scared and surprised than physically hurt – and looked straight into the blue eyes of a kid about my height. His nose was two inches from mine. This kid, I would later learn, was Stephen, and he was co-dictator for life of the Double Shirt Crew.

This was late August, 1994. We had moved to Kenya a few weeks earlier. The big rainy season was ending, and Nairobi was emerald green. My school – the International School of Kenya (ISK) – was on the outskirts of town, surrounded by coffee plantations.

The school grounds were huge. For me, coming from an Israeli public school, it seemed on par with Harvard. On one side of the compound was the Multi Purpose Building (where the theater crowd hung) as well as the upper field. On the other side was the pool and the lower field. In the middle lay the quod and the classrooms – a collection of round huts with thatched roofs.

In this idyllic setting I spent a couple of the worst months of my life.

My family wasn’t settled in yet in Kenya – my dad was looking for a house for us. In the meantime, we were still living in the Serena Hotel near the center of town. My mother and baby brother had flown back to Israel a few days earlier, after just a week or two in Nairobi. My grandfather was scheduled to undergo quadruple bypass heart surgery and my mother wanted to be there for it. And so, during the first few weeks of school it was just my Dad, my younger brother and me.

My English was OK, but not quite fluent, which didn’t help. I was also seeped in Israeli manners and completely ignorant of the social mores at the school. I once walked on a narrow path near one of the classrooms. The principal and one of the teachers were speaking to each other, each standing on opposite sides of the path. I nonchalantly walked right between them. The principal stopped me, looked me in the eye and told me it’s very impolite to walk between two speaking people. Next time I should stop, apologize and ask to be let by. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

But I digress, I was just about to get my ass kicked by the Double Shirt Crew. Stephen was holding me by my t-shirt, while the other guys (who I later learned were called Zach and Matt and other cool American names) were blocking possible escape routes behind him.

Stephen told me I had pushed him during soccer. If I ever did that again he would beat the shit out of me. He pushed me again, and I slammed into my locker again. They left.

The Double Shirt Crew where the in-crowd at my school. They were American, and wore a uniform of baggy jeans, Vans shoes, and two t-shirts, one over the other. They also wore their hair in bowl cuts. I could and would try to imitate the clothing, but nothing was going to change my Israeliness or my Jewfro, which prevented me from bowl cutting my hair.

After the incident at my locker, the Double Shirt Crew zeroed in on me as their target of choice. For the next couple of months, they basically bullied the shit out of me. They never beat me up. Instead they used low-intensity conflict tactics: they used to walk into to me “by accident” or trip me whenever we ran in gym class. I’m not sure what the other kids thought. Maybe they were happy I was taking the brunt of the bulling. Maybe they were scared to confront them. Maybe they just didn’t care enough because this wasn’t one of their friends.

After a few weeks my mom flew back to Kenya. I guess she somehow sensed something was wrong. Not wanting to be a snitch, I initially resisted her interrogation. Eventually though, I told her about the Double Shirt Crew. The next day I found myself in the principal’s office recounting the events of the past couple of months. After that talk the bullying pretty much stopped.

In Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan talks about the “ambient low-grade violence” he lived in as a mid-century kid. I don’t think this has changed. Every kid – at least every male kid – is surrounded by violence while growing up: the school bully; the “play” fighting in the school hallways; getting your ass kicked by your older brother; getting your older brother to kick someone’s ass as retribution or as a deterrent. Your life is soaked in violence.

And then, one day, just like Keyser Söze – poof, it’s gone. Violence stops permeating your life. For me it was in my late teens.

The reason for this is that high school is mandatory and has (virtually) no prerequisites. Later stations in life (college, work, marriage) are both voluntary and selective. High school is the last time in your life in which you and other people of your age group – some of whom you may despise – are forced to spend time together in one place. When you couple that with raging testosterone you get violence. After the bullying stopped, the school began to grow on me. I began making friends, started writing for the school paper and got a (small) part in the school play. Looking back, ISK was a great school. It was a place that helped me explore, think and learn. But 25 years later, my most vivid memory is still of sliding down a muddy hill after being tripped by someone, the coppery taste of adrenaline and blood in my mouth.

This is one of my earliest memories: I’m looking at the body of a dead soldier by the side of the road. The soldier is lying with his back to me near a burned tank.

This was in Ethiopia in the late 80’s, during the civil war. I was 7 or 8. My father worked at the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa, and we “lived” in the city. I use scare quotes because when, every number of months, the rebels got close to the city, we would be evacuated to Israel. Then, when Mengistu’s army would push the rebels north, we would fly back. Until one day the rebels took the city. We returned to a liberated Ethiopia.

I think the time I saw the soldier was the only time my family left the city during the war. At least I don’t remember other trips.

So we spent our time In Addis. We lived in a large villa in a good part of time. A good part of time in Addis in the late 80’s meant that most of the other houses around us were villas. But the road outside our house was red dirt, not asphalt. And the neighborhood kids each had one item of clothing (a shirt or a pair of pants),t and used the wall surrounding our compound as a toilet (number 1 and number 2). In between bathroom brakes they played soccer in the street with a rag ball.

The main landmark in Addis was the city’s slaughterhouse. We passed it on the way from home to school everyday. You could smell the rotting flesh a few minutes before seeing the mountain of bones. After a few times we made sure our windows were closed before the aroma of dead ruminants and putrefied flesh hit us.

My brother and I went to the International Community School. I remember two friends from school. One was Nepalese and he claimed to have gotten tape worm from eating pork in the street in Katmandu. The other was an American kid called Michael. Our main pastime, for some reason, was playing with army surplus stuff. For example, we used to dine on US Army field rations. I thought they were the pinnacle of human technology – vacuum sealed, just add water.

Growing up in Addis was not easy I suppose. But I remember it fondly, even miss it in a homesick kind of way.

Today, we live in a suburb of Tel Aviv. 4 bedroom homes organized along shade covered col-de-sacs. My kids have never seen a dead body or a mountain of rotting bones.

I hope that means they turn out better than me.