A bully in high school taught me a lesson that has served me well throughout my life and especially in my law enforcement career. Let’s call the bully Dennis. Warning: this true story contains imagery that some may find offensive and even unbelievable in today’s school environment.
When I was in high school in the early 1960s, the boys’ gym and locker room had one shower. It was a room about ten feet by 15 feet and had maybe a dozen and a half shower heads around the room. After PE class, all the boys had to strip and shower together naked.
One day as I was entering the shower, the high school bully, Dennis, was a few feet behind me and couldn’t resist the target of my bare butt. With his towel, he executed the perfect towel-snap to inflict an extremely painful sting and welt on my left butt cheek.
Without thinking and in a blind rage, I spun and bulldozed him through the shower sprays and back into the corner of the shower room with intent to maim him – two dripping wet naked teenage boys pressed together in combat (think of the steam bath scene with Vigo Mortenson in “Eastern Promises,” a phenomenally great movie, by the way).
I had Dennis by the throat and was ready to do serious harm when he collapsed into a quivering lump of cowardice and shrank to the floor, sobbing an apology and begging me not to hurt him. Nonplussed by his sudden 180° change in behavior, I let go, turned my back, and walked away.
In that instant, I had learned that bullies are cowards. Their bullying posture is a mask to hide their true nature. They do not know how to be nice to people or accept friendship in a normal way. They demand respect through the use of fear and see that as friendship. But if you stand up to their bullying and confront them to show that you will not accept it, they will fold.
As a cop, that knowledge helped me on many occasions with belligerent subjects. Of course, if they were drunk or on drugs, a physical altercation was still likely. But in those cases, the sober person who can think usually wins.
That lesson became more pertinent in the latter stages of my career when I had the fortune to become involved in a number of cases of police misfeasance and malfeasance. In those cases, I invariably became the target of bullying campaigns on the internet with adversaries attacking me from behind the cover of aliases. In one case, a 1000-page ethics complaint was filed against me with the IAI alleging that I had fabricated evidence in a case in which I had caught the police fabricating the evidence. The ethics complaint was signed with fictitious names and signatures. Nevertheless, the IAI spent months investigating the complaint, then dismissed it after determining I had not committed the alleged violations.
Sometimes, our character is forged by events early in life. I guess I owe Dennis a belated “thank you” for snapping me in the butt with his towel in the shower that day. He taught me one of the most important life lessons I ever learned.