Jason Y writes:
RL: I dunno, I think we were just boys, age 9-13. Boys are EVIL, especially at a certain age. Didn’t you know that?
Jason Y: Boys and girls at that age are equally evil. At least that’s how it was in Korea, my experience in America wasn’t much different either. There are a few that are kind, but a lot of them aren’t. If you get on their bad side, they’ll crucify you. 😆
I enjoyed being an evil little boy. We were nice a lot too. We had friends, and we mostly treated them well.
Smear the Queer is just a game. You play it with your friends. It was the same as Kill the Man on the Hoppityhop. One guy gets on the hoppityhop and starts bouncing all around the yard, and he’s automatically the Queer. Everyone yells, “Look, he’s a queer! Smear the queer! Smear the queer! Hahahahaahahahaha!” Because, you know, queers have to be destroyed on sight, right?
The other guys jump on him and try to pull him off the hoppityhop, and he tries to throw them off and bounce away to escape. You climb on his back and hit him. You try to waste the guy on the hoppityhop and dislodge him from the ball. No one ever got hurt. We were 9 or 10 years old, and we engaged in continuous physical fighting. Boys that age can’t even hurt each other.
We had some designated victims who we relentlessly teased to try to provoke them into attacking us so we could have an excuse to waste them. They performed right on cue. But those designated victims were also our some of our friends. It all depended on the dynamics.
We also had Olive Wars and Dirt Clod Wars. We would split into two armies, and both sides would arm themselves with dirt clods or unripe olives. Then it would be a war. You would throw olives or clods at the other side and try to hit them. The olives were hard, and they hurt like Hell if they hit you.
Quite a few times, these wars would get seriously out of hand and people would get mad. I remember one time we went up to see our cousins, and we ended up in this huge evil Berry War, and the last thing I remember before driving off to the plane was them chasing after us at the airport screaming that they were going to kill us. Other times at home it was similar. The Olive War would disintegrate into a great big real fight, guys screaming at each other, calling names, trying to hit each other, running home.
There was this kid named RSJ, and he was called Dickie. His real name was Richard. He was on crutches for some birth defect. Nothing wrong with that, but he was mean as a snake for some reason. His older brother tormented him mercilessly, and even his own mother joined him and creamed him emotionally. They spoke to him in the most mocking, humiliating, degrading tones, ridiculed him with voices full of derision and contempt.
I am not sure what the dynamics were, but his family was mean and cruel to him, and then he was a vicious little shit himself. Both processes were driving each other somehow, but I am not sure who started it.
We called him Dogdoo Dickie and he hated that name so much! He saw red if you called him that! So of course we called him that constantly, and we tormented him mercilessly like mosquitoes on your skin. We would provoke him to get him to react and try to fight us. After we provoked him, he would come chasing after us with his crutches flying. He would try to hit you with his crutches! We would run away from him trying to avoid getting hit by his crutches and yelling names at him and laughing. He would come after us with his crutches swinging with the meanest, evillest look on his face. He was nasty!
Mostly we just got along though. Except for some designated victims who everyone bullied or other people bullied depending on the dynamics, all the rest of us got along and had all sorts of fun.
We did kill animals though. We started out killing insects like all boys. We would take magnifying glasses and set insects on fire on the sidewalk. We had garden pests, and instead of just killing them, we would slowly torture them to death. Like tomato worms. We hated those things, and when we caught them we would put them in this little “bullring” and they would be the “bull.” We would have “bullfights” with them. We would take big nails and throw them at the tomato worms yelling, “Picadors! Picadors!” and we would try to spear the tomato worms with the nails.
Also we had pillbugs, and they were serious pests. We soon tired of killing them in the ordinary way so we started devising all these new experimental ways of industrial pillbug murder. It was Pillbug Holocaust, and we were like Nazis. We tried every method under the sun to murder those bugs in all these new and experimental ways. We even did “surgery” on them where we would take them apart and examine their insides like scientists. We were Mengele!
My parents found out about our Pillbug Concentration Camps, and my father was disturbed. He said it was evil and ordered us to stop. He thought we were on the road to being serial killers.
We also killed snails in experimental ways. Salt is great. You pour salt on the snail, and it kills it in a horrible way. We also conducted biology experiments on snails where we would paint them with paint, release them and try to find them later to see how far they traveled.
We also killed fish, and I have to admit that was pretty damn evil. We fished at this place called The Smelt Place which was maybe 200 yards away from the beach. You could go there and catch maybe 100 smelt in a day. It got boring after a while, endlessly catching these moronic fish who were obviously too stupid to not get caught.
After a while, we would reel in a smelt and then cast the line with the smelt still on it onto some nearby rocks on the rocky shoreline. When we did this we would yell, “Acapulco cliff divers!” The smelt would land on the rocks and we would reel it in over the rocks. Pretty awful torture for the smelt, and the smelt would get killed pretty quickly. Then one time TM caught a smelt, kept it alive somehow and tied it to a rope on the back of his bike and dragged it on the way home for a bit until it died. That was hilarious!
Some of our girl cousins came to live with us for one year. Their family was falling apart badly, their mother was dying, diabolical divorce underway, and their father was an evil actual Nazi from Germany who we hated. Anyway, my mother’s side took those girls and shuttled them around to our relatives on their side of the family to keep them out of the father’s hands because we hated him so much. Those girls were 5, 7 and 9, and they were pure evil. They were driven crazy by all the family dynamics. They lived with us for a while when I was 10, and there were Boys Versus Girls fighting all the time. It was a kick!
My little brother went to kindergarten with one of my girl cousins. The first day, he came home and there had been some Black kids in the class somehow, don’t ask me how. My brother came home disgusted and said, “Black people sure are stupid! They’re dumb and loud!” 5 year old race realist! He had been exposed to almost no serious racism at home because my father was a liberal. I remember one time someone said nigger at the dinner table, and my Dad flipped and turned the whole dinner into an Antiracist Inquisition. We were not allowed to use that word around him.
We were also evil little thieves. I personally did not steal too much. Mostly we stole from the workmen who were working on new houses in the back. We would sneak back there at night and rip off nails, chisels, all sorts of construction materials. I have to admit thievery was pretty damn fun. I didn’t steal much other than from the workmen. I think my father found out we were thieving from the workmen, and once again he got disturbed and thought we were going to turn into criminals. I think he ordered us to take the stuff back. We lied and told him we returned everything, but really we never did, and even worse, we kept stealing more stuff!
The backyard was undeveloped, just bare ground, and we built these huge forts all over the yard. Then we had highways going all over the yard connecting one fort to the other. And we would drive trucks over these highways. We would fill the trucks up with the stolen construction materials and trade them with each other. I think a certain type of nail become “money” at some point and could be used to purchase things. There was a low spot in the yard where water collected from rain, and we called it Mud River. We built all these bridges over Mud River so you could walk across it on boards, but it was always this mysterious place with evil and frightening overtones. Mud River was sort of like Hell or Land of Evil.
We had army men, and we used to mess around with them. We took some of the army men and made them into POW’s and kept them in a “prisoner of war camp.” Then we took objects and totally mutilated these poor army men, wounded them all over their bodies, cut off arms and legs, decapitated them, and took red paint and painted blood all over them. It was ghoulish and brutal!
We did this because the POW camp was evil, and it was place where POW’s were tortured to death, not kept in safety. After we killed these poor guys, we called them “The Spooks,” because they were dead now. Then we buried them down under some dirt and leaves, apparently because they were dead and needed to be buried. But we kept digging them up so we could torture them some more even after death.
At one point we found some dogshit, and we smeared dogshit all over them just to make them even more evil. Then we reburied them. They symbolized Evil or Terror somehow. We were actually very scared of the Spooks because after we were done mutilating them and covering them with blood and dogshit, honestly they were pretty frightening looking.
I honestly really enjoyed being an aggressive, violent, diabolical and evil little boy. It was a barrel of ticks!
All the other boys were exactly the same as I was, and we all ended up OK. None of us turned into serial killers or even victimizing criminals, and we all stayed out of jail for the most part. A lot of us got arrested, but most of us no more than a handful of times, and we only served a few days here and there. Typical crimes were burglary, breaking and entering, possession of a deadly weapon, drug use, drug possession, possession of drugs for sale, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, drunk driving, etc. I committed a number of these crimes myself and was arrested for five of those offenses and threatened with arrest for two more.