The Cursed Blood
celebration and thanks of fruitful harvests and ended with drinking and the burning of the Straw Man to bring fresh starts, luck, hope, and prosperity for the next season.Every now and again over the years I find myself wondering if, as the revelers tossing their papers with bad habits and bad thoughts jotted onto them into the flames to be purged that night, if they had idea the tragedy, misfortune, and horrors that was only just beginning to be set into motion for all of Feydom. I know I had been pleasantly clueless of what the fates had in store; of that I can assure you.
Up until then I was a pretty average kid, nothing special, nothing unique. My family wasn’t rich or famous and I definitely wasn’t popular or even really noticed (outside of the opportunity my existence offered for regular entertainment, at my expense of course). I certainly wasn’t athletic or even very coordinated as I regularly tripped over my own feet. Not particularly smart or gifted, or even noticeably unique in any interesting way, I was honestly just an average, simple, run-of-the-mill kid.
Lots of folks liked to say it was a great time to be alive back then. A perfect time to grow up. It was years before cell phones, the internet, and social media, back when “kids knew their place.” And years before things really started to “go to crap” as the old timers in trucker or VFW hats lining the lunch counter at the local Walworth would insist, as they sipped at their coffee and picked at fried baloney sandwiches and slurped at split pea soup. Mom used to bring me in there every Saturday for a Coke and egg salad sandwich in one of those paper lined red baskets.
Good times.
That glass Coke bottle really made it taste better, and to this day I can’t quite get over the soda fountain taste. And yeah, there’s a difference. Something about that frosted bottle of ice-cold soda with a straw just made it more real as you sipped at it and crunched on those salty potato chips.
I was thinking about this when we were puttering about a local AMES Halloween section (another now defunct , long shuttered, and bankrupt American department store) for my costume with my very frazzled and tired Mom, the Friday before I went to a school friend’s Halloween party.
Billy, a short, chubby, freckle-faced, and allergic-to-almost-everything kid was easily the closest thing to a friend I’d had for years—and pretty much my only friend, to be honest. However, I’m fairly sure he only invited me because his mother made him as her and my mom were in a book club together. I was the weird kid, and even he knew associating too much with me could earn him a trip to the toilet bowl courtesy of “the jocks.”
We only hung out on weekends, but never outside or in the sun (his mother insisted it wasn’t good for him). And he always vanished from school at lunchtime, which I couldn’t blame him for as the cafeteria could be a risky pace to be—no place to hide and lots of people to laugh at you and make things worse when the inevitable bullying started up.
It was nothing personal. He was just as scared of the football team as I was and didn’t want to give them any more reason than normal to take an unhealthy notice of him. Like everyone at the bottom of the school food chain, things could easily get difficult quick if one wasn’t careful. Although on this particular occasion, I’d had a rough, frightening, and exhausting day, to say the least.
I remember it as if it were yesterday.
I was thinking about that Saturday tradition of lunch and hanging out in the school cafeteria, just daydreaming away over a chocolate milk and what the lunch lady tried to sell as a sloppy joe. “Staring off into space” as my mom liked to call the habit.
Quite suddenly, but not entirely unexpectedly, things all at once got out of hand rather spectacularly as one of the school varsity patch jacket-toting dick heads from two grades up decided to take up his favorite past time of screwing with me.
My daydream of a nice tall ice-cold Coke, a grilled cheese, and a spirited game of chess was interrupted as one of those cardboard milk cartons the cafeteria served was dumped over my head.
This indignity was predictably accompanied by a chorus of raucous applause, pointing, high fiving, and laughter as I sat there in stunned silence. Rivulets of milk streamed from my hair, down the back of my shirt, into my eyes and onto my face and glasses. You get the picture, right?
“Kids can be cruel.” I’d heard that often enough in my life up to that point as I was tall for my age and a little too thin (my dad regularly called it proper bean pole thin) with thick rimmed glasses, no Nike shoes or school sports jacket and longish hair, so I’m sure you can hazard a guess at the stuff I dealt with in school up to that point.
I’d heard it all from teachers and the school guidance counselor and even my parents who had exhausted almost every avenue of recourse to try to put a stop to it, even getting kicked out of a PTA meeting if you believe it. Everyone ended up always saying the same thing and nothing made it any better and everyone knew it. Everyone just gave me those “poor kid” sympathetic looks.
I’d just learned to take it and move on.
I sat there with my face flushing with humiliation and wiped at my face and cleaned my glasses off with a part of my shirt not yet covered in milk. Scrubbing at the lenses until I could see through the streaky mess well enough to make it out of the cafeteria and down the hall to the bathroom without tripping and falling on my face.
Or at least