Grantley Gibbons: Lifelong Coward

"You walk behind me. Or I'll kill you."

It was not the thick hand around my throat that convinced me to accept this as sincere. It was not the pressure of the restroom wall on the back of my head. It was not his teeth, nor was it the quiet way he said it. It was his eyes. Terry was probably no taller than I was and  not more than a year older, but he was wide, strong, and feared in a school where it seemed like everyone knew kung fu. This might sound like the beginning of another one of those novels that are so popular these days, Hunger Games, Divergent, City of Bones, but it's not. William Beagle Junior Secondary School was a cultural mishmash and, no kidding, we had many, many serious martial artists. We had an a riot that made the news. What school in Canada has riots? During a lengthy strike by the Canadian Union of Public Employees it was vandalism, not cluttered halls or overflowing garbage cans that closed the school. I was part way through ninth grade in Surrey, British Columbia. This is not a fiction piece; nobody writes fiction about Surrey, British Columbia.... but I digress.

As an aside, I have changed the names of the brothers in this story…just in case they are out on parole.

As I said, it was his eyes. I first wrote about this on 9 June, 2011. It was not even intended for public consumption at the time. I just wrote because I couldn’t talk about the way the memory came to me with such force that I was unable to speak about it at all. I struggled for days to come up with an appropriate simile that would convey how cold his eyes were. They were a pale blue, but clear and razor sharp. They weren't dead like a vampire or cold like ice. But they were cold. It has been more than thirty years since that day and I am convinced that Terry is either dead or in jail for murder at this very moment. I haven't thought of him in years, but when his eyes came back to my vision I didn't know how to tell people this story and have them know just how brutal this experience was for me. Lest anyone think that I recovered a lost memory in the manner so trendy in the 1990’s, I should point out that I had not ever forgotten about this moment, I just hadn’t really thought about it much for decades. The image hit me while I was at the gym. I was warming up for chest day. I was sitting on the edge of the bench getting ready to recline and do my first heavy set. 

I don’t think now is the time to explain why my mind had been prepared to receive this epiphany, but my having been reminded of what it was like to be bullied as a kid was part of it. Moments before I got in position to grip the bar, I suddenly remembered Terry threatening to kill me. I didn’t have a panic attack and I didn’t freak out, but suddenly I saw my life in stark clarity and contrast to how I had seen it for many years. Underneath everything I had ever done, every decision I had ever made, there had been an undercurrent of fear that matched that moment. Even good decisions had been tainted by it. That is an epiphany that can’t be put off until you have finished wailing on your pecs. I looked in the mirror and saw in my face an odd mix of confusion and clarity competing to occupy the same face. I grabbed my stuff and left the gym. I told no one about this for days. Writing was the only way I could think of to process a memory that had resurfaced after three decades. I had literally never told anyone about this event. And I didn't know if I should, after all these years. Floods of clarity are unpleasant and hard to articulate. And it led to other memories that explain who I have become and even a small scar on my right hand. Again, I had not recovered lost memories; I had just suddenly seen the true impact and the lifelong damage of those experiences. I had been bullied before and had been that kid who learned to roll with it and often get out of situations by being funny, clever, or at the very least talkative.

This was different. Terry was feared by everyone. No one got in his way. One day, for reasons I still don’t understand, he pointed at me and told me I was dead if he ever caught up with me. For many days my routes from class to class were planned around dodging Terry in the halls via a series of sudden course changes and a strong reliance on the prey's instinct for knowing the predator's routine.

Of course, there came a day when I let my guard down and walked into a restroom before Terry did. I was washing my hands and looked up to see that he was standing at the urinal. Wouldn’t you know it, the urinals were between the sink and the door. I had to pass behind Terry and thought that he was too busy to catch me. I said everyone feared him, right? Here’s why; I kid you not, while still peeing he shot one leg out behind himself. With his foot against the wall opposite the urinals, that leg blocked the narrow space that led to the door. He finished what he was doing, zipped his pants up, and turned to deal with me. He didn’t need to stop peeing to detain me. That is cold. I was six feet tall and weighed 145lbs. He was a juggernaut. Perhaps because of those terrifying eyes, I really don’t remember anything physical about that moment. His hand gripped my neck and he smacked my head against the wall tile to get my attention, but I remember neither of those contacts. He reminded me of his promise to kill me. All I could think to do was ask him what he wanted. “You walk ten feet behind me from now on or I will kill you.” I managed to avoid being killed by simply accepting his terms. It didn’t happen often that I had to walk the same route that he did, but when I did I walked just a bit behind him. My total surrender worked. In fact, there was a certain safety in being in that spot because no one would ever violate Terry’s space. The surrender worked so well that you would have thought we were old friends if you'd seen us together.

And you would have been right. We were old friends. 

Surrey, BC was an awful place in the seventies and eighties. I did grades 1 through 3 at Hjorth Road Elementary and hated almost every minute of it. I have always felt too young to be where I am and that has made me feel like I was born to be taken advantage of. Being born in November means you are about the youngest in the class and one of the most immature, even if you are among the smartest (especially if you are among the smartest). It also means that if you are a gentle person and afraid of conflict you are a target. At times I don't even blame those who bullied me. I had it written all over me. I even got beaten up once or twice by kids who were shorter than I am but had no fear of losing and could sense my panic. To tell the whole truth, I had actually started grade one at another school and my teacher told my parents that I would never survive because I was too nice. So we moved to another apartment complex, where I first met Tim and Terry. This new school was also a nightmare much of the time, but when I got home, I would go bike riding with Tim and Terry. At first I simply ran along because, chicken that I was, I had not learned to ride. My parents had tried to help me, but… Anyway, one day at the age of seven I borrowed a friend’s bike and managed to teach myself how to ride and off I went. My parents got me a bike with a banana seat right away and from that day, Tim and Terry and I were pals.

After three years we moved. Then we moved again. And again. And again. By ninth grade I was back in Surrey and attending William Beagle Junior Secondary School, where I met Tim again but not Terry. Tim and I shared a couple classes, but the friendship was gone and we were just classmates. Terry was a year older so I didn’t even expect to reconnect with him.  In fact, when I was warned to stay away from this frightening monster named Terry, I did not make the connection. It was only days before he trapped me in the bathroom that I even connected him to Tim.

I had tried in the past to stand up to bullies. I had been hit a few times, even at church. So violence wasn’t new to me, but Terry’s coldness was. He didn’t hit me, didn’t molest me in any way. He just convinced me with his cold eyes that he meant it when he said that he would kill me. And I caved in to his demands.

And that was the real trauma. I saw malevolence and I folded. I have twice run into burning apartments to help the people I heard screaming. I have stood up for others at the risk of losing my job. I have driven to confront the parents of my daughter’s fifth grade bullies in their own homes. But I have lived in a perpetual state of fear when it comes to standing up for myself. Bosses, neighbours, coworkers, my first wife (especially my first wife) fellow churchgoers, etc. have all benefited from a powerful but nonspecific fear I have had of defending myself. This is true even of people who would have never had done anything to hurt me, but still had interests that conflicted with mine. I just accommodated everyone and believed it was because I was a nice guy.

At 44 years of age, I was shattered with the sudden awareness that, where standing up for myself was concerned, I was not a nice guy, I was a coward. Confronted with the idea that maybe the only reason I was about to bench press 240 lbs was to compensate for choosing cowardice as a scrawny kid, I couldn’t face the mirror in the gym. 

And the gym is all mirrors.