1988-1994
The house where I grew up in my hometown of Aurora bordered right on the city of Twinsburg, so much so that once you turned the corner on the street where I grew up, you had crossed over into the village of Reminderville, where (according to Wikipedia) 83% of the area is part Twinsburg City School District. When I was very young, I was not allowed to go into that area, which was divided by a marina which had a small beach and a playground at the end of our block, so I didn’t give it much thought for a while. I recall my older sister once making a remark about how the ice cream man was probably scared to come to our block because “Those kids would probably throw a bomb in his truck” if he chose to leave their neighborhood. I never thought about the kids that lived there being different from us, or even had a concept of who they might be.
One late summer day I was at the marina with my friend Kenny, and we were building a sand castle by the lake. We were minding our business when this gruff, portly boy began to cave in our sand castle with his feet. I yelled at him to stop, but he kept on doing it. As I started to rise to my feet to challenge him, he reared back and punched me in the face. I had never been punched in the face before, I was only in fourth grade, and this action seemed so adult. He hit me in the face a second time, and my glasses went flying off. At this age, I only knew how to do the “let’s try and maybe wrestle the other guy to the ground?” move, and so I tried that against him, but he seemed to get the better of me with that, too. I found out later this kid was only in second grade, but I think he was a little taller than me and definitely more beefy.
After this pummeling, I walked home with Kenny crying and defeated, and I told my dad about the whole thing while blubbering through tears. My dad walked with us back to the marina to confront the kid, and made us both laugh by stomping and “making muscles” when we left. I’m not sure what exactly he would have done to resolve the issur, but by the time we made it back to the marina he had left. That Monday at school I told my friend Doug that my face was sore because this second grade boy punched me, and I really don’t know why I chose to offer that information. He didn’t seem to believe me, in a weird way. Kenny and I both saw the boy again at the marina a couple months later, and he had a pair of nunchucks that he was playing around with, hitting the playground equipment and almost daring Kenny and I to get hit with them. He bizarrely claimed that it couldn't hurt that much, because the nunchucks might as well be “made of ice.”
I would see this same boy again at times over the next several years, and I always quietly wondered if he (or any of the Twinsburg other boys) were able to tell us apart or cared enough to remember us from one encounter to the next. There’s a season 6 episode of the Simpsons called “Lemon of Troy” where the boys of Springfield were engaged in a bitter battle with the boys of the bordering town, Shelbyville. The boys in Shelbyville (Twinsburg) are bigger, badder, dumber, and more homely than the boys in Springfield (Aurora), and I’ve always told Mary Alice that this is a mirror image of what it was like. In the still frame here, Bart has just triumphantly reveals to a Shelbyville boy (who is basically the Shelbyville version of him) among some other townies that he’s “Bart Simpson,” which draws blank stares from the group. It’s only after he tells them he’s from Springfield that they want to beat him up, and I always suspected the Twinsburg boys were the same kind of self-absorbed toughs who didn’t know or remember us from anyone else, they only knew to be physically aggressive once they realized we were from the other block up the hill.
One evening my family and I came home after being out all day and saw that the basketball hoop in our driveway was all bent and mangled. This was particularly upsetting to me, as I was really into playing basketball at the time, and had dreams of being the next Mark Price. A few days later my friend Louie told me that he and my friend Aaron had witnessed what happened from down the street; Aaron’s bedroom window had a view of my driveway, and he said that they both watched a boy he knew from Twinsburg (where he had once lived) named Justin hanging from/pulling on our hoop in an attempt to break it, along with a few other boys. I decided to overlook the fact that Louie and Aaron were bigger than the kids they were watching and might have thought to go stop it, because at least I had an ID on the culprits responsible. I had never even heard of this kid, but Louie and I were on the same baseball team, and lo and behold a short time later we played against a Twinsburg team that Justin was on.
On the night of the game, I was playing second base in the field, and at one point I had an opportunity to face the kid while he was standing on the second base bag. I was still a little guy in the 8th grade at this point, but had suffered enough abuse in life that I was becoming a real hothead and wasn’t too worried about consequences. I said to Justin something to the effect of, “So, destroy any basketball hoops lately?” He looked at me with dead eyes and said “Yuuuup!” Then I followed with something like, “And you broke my basketball hoop?” He turned to me again and gave another “Yuuuup!” After the game, I hatched a plan - if you know anything about youth sports, at the end of each game they have the kids line up and high five each other while robotically saying “Good game, good game, good game…” When I passed Justin in the line, instead of high fiving him I gave him a shove. He stopped in his tracks and turned around looking confused, saying “Who you pushin’?!” I began to wonder if he knew what the hell I was even talking about when I had confronted him. It seemed par for the course for the Twinsburg boys, just to brainlessly act and react without any thought. The coach on their team bellowed something like “COME ON GUYS, NONE OF THAT!”, and I seem to recall the guys on my team being happy for me that I least got a shove in.
I was still upset that Justin had gotten away with breaking something so important to me, so Louie hatched a plan where I would call his house and menace him. When I called, his mother answered the phone, and asked who was calling. I paused, and replied “Some kid.” She angrily demanded “Some kid WHO?,” and I blurted out “SOME KID WHO JUSTIN BROKE DOWN A BASKETBALL HOOP OF!” I then told her everything I knew he’d done, and she started yelling out to him for answers from the phone. I heard some murmured whimpering from him in the background, and she assured me she’d take care of it. Looking back, it absolutely reminds me of the part in The Christmas Story where Ralphie falsely tells his mother that Schwartz taught him the F-word, and then you hear Schwartz crying and getting smacked over the phone when Ralphie's mom calls Schwartz’s mom to tell on him.
They weren’t all bad times; One summer afternoon in around the same time period, the toughest boy in my grade at Aurora (who could have easily taken any one of their guys) was playing baseball with me and my friends at the marina, when a Twinsburg boy came by riding his skateboard, which prompted our version of Nelson the bully to yell out, “So what’s this kid gonna do, kick all of our asses?!” We all laughed confidently behind our fearless leader, as the kid passed without a word. It was a nice position to be in for once, because it felt like it was me and my friends who were always outnumbered and getting bullied by them. For example, there was a time when I was at the marina tossing around a football with my friends Scott and Bob, and we were greeted by five Twinsburg boys who asked us if we wanted to play a game. Instead of doing a four on four game, they insisted that the five of them play the three of us. After a brief time of getting obnoxiously mauled by them, Scott suggested the next time we have the ball we just take it and walk away without saying anything. Once we did, they started after us, calling us names. This one boy ran up to me to douse me with a full bottle of water, and he either missed me on purpose in order just to be threatening, or had terrible aim at point blank distance - I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, because it was pretty typical of them to seem completely deranged.
You’d think eventually they’d have grown out of it, but they never seemed to. In the Summer of ‘94 I had purple/red-ish dyed hair à la that one era of Kurt Cobain, and one afternoon I was walking in the Twinsburg area with my friend Mikey, when we heard heckles coming from a nearby yard. They were coming from a boy I was familiar with, who I had watched grow up and go through different phases of his life. He had gone from being kind of a geeky glasses guy, then had an alternative rock look, and was now a tough guy wearing a gold necklace and a white v-neck undershirt. He was standing on his porch with two other giggling oafs. “Hey!” he called out to me, “Nice hair! I used to have hair like that, but I never went out in public!” I had remembered when his hair was like that, and wondered to myself why he'd chosen to have hair like that if he didn’t want it to be seen in public. I could also tell that, as usual, based on how he was addressing me that he had no idea who I was, despite my having seen him around my entire life. He yelled more and asked me “Who my fat ass friend was,” and since we were outnumbered and outmuscled, we had no choice but to keep walking.
Later that Fall, I was riding the school bus in the morning and the driver asked me if I knew a kid from Twinsburg named (using his initials only) named M.B. I knew the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. She told me that he had been killed in a car accident the previous night a couple miles from my house. Louie was also on the same bus route, and when he got on the bus he confirmed that M.B. was the porch heckler. I couldn’t believe it, I had just seen him that Summer in my driver’s ed class, where once again, I don’t think he recognized me. When I got to school, I found Mikey smoking pot behind a tree and I told him what had happened to M.B., and he said something like “Sweet! That’s so awesome.” I honestly felt upset by the news; Unlike Mikey, I had watched this guy grow up and now he was gone. I found out that he had been driving like a maniac with a passenger I knew (from Aurora, ironically) who was also a total dickhead, blew through a four way stop and got slammed into by an oncoming car on his side (passenger survived). Even though I felt rattled by what had happened, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a fitting end to the rivalry seeing that we were now on the verge of adulthood, and hopefully this would teach all those jerks a some kind of lesson about karma. (Never mind that I almost died in an accident months later). I know that sounds a little inhumane, but I was 16, and I’m certainly not using his full name in case anyone in his family ever Googles it. I recall seeing a memorial plaque for him where it said something like “Sweet Loving Angel,” and I remember thinking that they couldn’t have known him that well.