Author’s Note: This fiction piece was inspired by my emulation piece of  “Fairy Tale”, along with an emulation I made from an excerpt from The Glass Castle found here. As Shane Koyczan’s piece,”Troll”, addressed the issue of cyberbullying, I thought it would be fitting to also write about bullying, but with a different perspective.

Whereas in “Fairy Tale” was the perspective of a victim, in “My First Hit”, I write from the perspective of the bully and create the picture of what factors in his life led him to be a bully. There is something that is behind the insults and jeers that bullies say, in terms of insecurities, jealousy, or in my story, abuse, which carries forward his aggression into his adolescence.

And thank you to Victoria for assisting in giving me feedback on early drafts!

If you or anyone you know are facing domestic abuse, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233, or if you are a youth in need of someone to talk to, please call the Kid’s Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868

And I would like to mention again that this is a work of pure fiction.

At the age of 12 was my very first hit. It was easy to get into the motion of swinging fists and cracking knuckles; I saw it all the time, outside my house when I left for school each morning. Bone against bone, the shattering of someone’s peace was more enticing than the spattering of blood from their mouths. The fear in their eyes, that deer in the headlights look, it’s all that was of value. It was always a struggle for power on the streets and in the school hallways.

So when I get punched square in the jaw and pummeled to the ground in a flurry of fists six years later by a pipsqueak hiding behind a hallway corner, I was pissed. But it was already over when it started. A teacher rushed to break up the fight and came to escort us to the principal’s office, hesitating at the red-stained tiles when she walked back to her class. I forgot the walk to the office, unaware of the stares from the secretaries, and oblivious to the pool of blood collecting on the carpet at my feet. I was in a stunned daze. It’s been a while since I lost a fight.  

It’s just my mom and I living in the neighbourhood infamously known for its troubles. Local politicians call it a “low-income household community”, but I see the reality behind that sugar-coated phrase. Poverty, starvation, gun violence, sexual assaults, I’ve seen it all. I walk past alleys, knowing that someone is dead from an overdose hiding behind the cover of a dumpster. And no one does anything to change that. At a young age, when you should be learning your ABC’s and 123’s, I was learning to hold a knife, since fighting would take me farther than education.

As a lower class child of society, I wore the tattered clothes and worn shoes, the obvious signs of a poor kid. This made me an easy target as a scapegoat. I became known as the one who was at the butt of all jokes, the one who was blamed for the wrongdoings of others, the one who was seen as a screw-up.

I heard on the radio of politicians saying “all children deserve equal chances” and held tight to that idea, becoming my lifeline. But it soon snapped when I noticed that teachers ignored the name-calling. So I decided to keep my head low and endured the verbal assaults. On top of a nightmare that racked me with whimpers and sobs in the fetal position every night, where my mother would come over to soothe me, I knew I could never be in this position of weakness again.

The perfect moment for my first hit came at the age of 12 when I was called a fatherless child born to a mother of a whore. Instead of responding with the usual silence, I exploded with the anger I bottled up from their remarks. Punches left and right, they were out for the count before they could lay a hand on me. Teeth bared, heavy breaths, I felt wonderful. A new world was open to me, and I relied on fighting to express myself. An atmosphere of hostility and competition soon developed in my neighbourhood. I couldn’t ever lose.

Adding on to my spikes of aggression that flared, I built my reputation as a troublemaker. I got into fights at school for the most miniscule things. Someone stole a pencil? They get the hook. Someone roughed up one of my boys? Corner them in the alley. Ratted out when I was cheating off of them? Death threats. So when I come home one night, limping with bruises and a stream of blood coming out of my swollen eye, my mother furiously asked why I’m becoming exactly like my father.

My father in my life was an elusive figure. A moving shadow that I was never able to pinpoint. Looking in the mirror when I was alone, I tried to figure out what parts of me belonged to him. I had my mom’s black hair and dimpled smile, but instead of having her hazelnut eyes, mine were sapphire blue. I never had the courage to ask her what happened to my father, but that night, I wanted to be comforted. I’d take a story over a lecture any day. After she calmed down a bit and got me cleaned up, she told me the story.

“Your father was a man of simplicity. Always a dreamer, which I found out when he forgot my name on our first few dates. A plain white shirt with a trimmed beard was his thing every time we went out in the city. He would tell me stories of the skies and the stars, and how they came to be, with a smile that reached his eyes every time. His eyes – as blue as the clear skies – was what drew me to him. We married, and then we had you.

“Because of his wandering mind, he had trouble keeping a stable job, never wanting to be stuck in one place for long. He constantly got laid off, and so we moved for him to work in the mines. After a few months on the job, we ate dinner without speaking to each other. He never once told me another story of the skies or the stars. He never looked me in the eyes, and when I asked him why, he never told me. Just huffed and said that he didn’t want to talk about the mines.

“Not long after that, empty beer bottles began to pile up in the recycling bin. It started with one and soon became a six-pack every night. One particular night, your dad came home from his late-night shifts. I was sleeping when I heard you screaming and him hollering at the top of his lungs. I heard a bottle shatter on the floor and the front door slam before I came running out.  By the looks of it, you probably had a nightmare and wanted your daddy to put you back to bed like he used to when you were a baby. A piece of glass must have hit you in the head because your face was covered in blood. You cried and cried into the night, and your father never came home. That was when I knew we couldn’t live with him anymore. So we moved here.”

That night, I get a hit from the nightmare again. I’m still lying on my back against the cold floor with a towering figure standing above me. The bottle smashes, a hot searing pain develops on my head, and I begin to cry. It’s all the same; but tonight, something is different. Instead of the shadow being silhouetted by the living room light, the black figure clears and reveals the face of a man. The man’s face is smeared with streaks of grey, contrasting against his striking blue eyes. It’s my father. And I realize that at the age of four, it was my very first hit.

This is the memory that haunts me as I make my way into the principal’s office for another reprimanding. As I sit in the sunken chair in front of his desk, Mr. Presley has his back to me looking out the window. What he is looking at, I do not know, but he audibly sighs before coming to sit in his chair across from his cleared desk. Mr. Presley is a well-kept man, with a polished look and dry-cleaned suit and tie. He’s earned my respect, being a principal who has different ways of dealing with troublemakers in the school. Often, he has an eagerness attached to him when I am in this seat, but today, that feeling is absent.  

“I am not sure what to do with you,” he starts off. “I admire your competitive spirit, to say the least, but it’s coming to a point of a warranted suspension. With five write-ups and a possibility of judicial intervention, I can’t bail you out with simple solutions anymore.”

He stares at me with cold eyes that make me flinch. It’s his philosophy to make it the student’s responsibility to figure out a solution to their problems. Without blinking, he asks me, “What would you like to do?”

With the flashback to my dream, and considering how much damage my father has caused and the damage I could continue to cause, I respond, “I would like to start with a clean slate, Mr. Presley.”

“And how would you like to do that?“

“I’ll start by saying sorry. “

Saying sorry to those I have hurt was possibly the hardest thing I have done. It wasn’t the injuries I received or my fall from grace as a bully that was hard to endure, but that feeling of guilt rising up in my chest, suffocating me from the inside out, was worse. But I realized I did something that my father never had the courage to do: apologize. He never apologized for abusing me, never apologized for ripping our family apart, and never had enough balls to look me in the face and own up to his mistakes. I hope he one day sees the man I have become.

Of course, I’ve blabbed all this to the school counselor, and things have been better. I’m still prone to outbursts of rage, but I’ve started to simmer down when someone tempts me. And I’ve been coming to class daily and catching up on what I’ve missed. My mom smiles more radiantly now.

I now know that after this turn in my life, I will never follow in the footsteps of my father’s legacy again. Because I now know that at the age of 18, that was my very last hit.