The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  Most of my classmates were content to call me gay once or twice per recess, but no one seemed to relish the opportunity more than Jake. In a class filled with mean, privileged Catholic kids, Jake was the absolute worst. It didn’t seem like he called people gay because his religion forbade it; it just seemed like calling people gay was the only thing fueling his entire existence. He was a Catholic robot who ran on calling people gay instead of on gasoline or electricity or whatever fuels robots. I’m struggling to think of Jake doing anything besides calling someone gay during the six years I went to school with him.

  Jake sucked. In fact, he still sucks if a recent Facebook search is any indication. I clicked past the frat memories and beer pong pictures and landed on “Details about Jake,” producing the following text verbatim:

  I am an Asshole. But I am one of those rare lovable assholes that once you get to know, you just can't help but like me. So, if you meet me and you think I am the biggest Asshole, that you've ever met, wait a while, we'll probably end up as friends. (By the way if that doesn't sit well with you that sucks. And if you think that you'll always hate me and think that I am a dick you've got the odds stacked strongly against you so good luck with that.)

  Based on my memory of Jake, he’s being far too nice with that description of himself. I also apparently have the odds stacked strongly against me, whatever that means. Jake’s Jake-iest moment came during a fifth-grade field trip to Skateland South, a roller-skating rink in Shawnee, Kansas. This place was exactly what you’d picture from a roller-skating rink in the mid-‘90s: Lots of neon lights rotating around a blacklight-drenched skating surface, with various claw games, arcade cabinets, and shoe lockers surrounding it.

  I was—and still am—absolutely terrible at skating in any form, so I probably would have fallen down numerous times without any outside interference. However, Jake wanted to speed up the process. Whenever I stepped onto the rink and worked myself into something resembling an actual skating motion, I’d quickly get tripped or shoved to the ground. I expected to see Jake whenever this happened, but was surprised to see a revolving door of other classmates instead. Several of them were among my quieter classmates, ones who hadn’t bullied me nearly as much as Jake or the other main offenders. On one occasion, the fingers on my left hand were skated over immediately after I was pushed to the ground. I clutched my arm to my chest and looked up to see Josh, a classmate of mine who had never bullied me before. In fact, he would even come over to my house to play video games on occasion.

  “Sorry, Dan,” he said. “Jake’s telling us all to push you over.”

  In almost any other situation, I’d want to make sure that I did my due diligence and got my facts straight before seeking revenge. Considering my long history with Jake and my knowledge of how much of an irredeemable dickhead he was, I wasn’t too worried about it at the moment. I got back to my feet and scanned the area, spotting Jake talking to two girls on the other side of a waist-high wall on the edge of the rink. Giving myself enough time to actually get my footing and start skating semi-properly, I worked up some speed and beelined directly toward him.

  When I reached the edge of the rink, I lunged forward and threw the first punch of my life directly into Jake’s dumb face. The actuality of what happened probably looked significantly less cool than the Stallone-caliber punch I envision in my head, but it felt amazing nonetheless. Jake was on skates, so not only did he get punched in the face in front of two girls he was chatting up, but his legs flailed around like he was a Looney Tunes character as he struggled to remain upright. He made a valiant effort, but his skates slipped out from under him and he fell directly onto his back.

  Several of my classmates, their parents, and some faculty members witnessed this, and Jake was helped to his feet and left the field trip. The school called my mother and she arrived shortly thereafter to take me home. That weekend, the principal of Holy Trinity called my house. He informed my parents and me that he was going to hold a class meeting to discuss the incident. Days later, I found myself in a room with Principal Weber, my fifth grade teacher, Jake, the kids who shoved me down, the kids who witnessed it, and all of their parents.

  We were organized in a big circle with the children sitting at desks and their parents sitting or standing behind them. To my surprise, most of the kids that had shoved me down had no issues with placing all of the blame on Jake. Some of them even defended my retaliation, as did some of their parents. One mother seemed terribly inconvenienced by the meeting, constantly rolling her eyes and saying “Why are we here? This is just boys being boys.”

  In the end, nothing was accomplished. The consensus seemed to be that Jake was a dick and my actions were understandable given the context. Regardless of the useless nature of the meeting, my mother and I decided that it was time to get out of the toxic environment of Holy Trinity. We were almost at the end of my first semester of fifth grade, and I could start the second semester fresh in public school. On my last day at Holy Trinity, the teachers held a little goodbye party and gifted me a bunch of POGs and a softball that was begrudgingly signed by my peers, who couldn’t have been that sad to see me go.

  With public school, I saw a chance to reinvent myself. This was a nice idea in theory, but it wasn’t particularly useful in practice. I would no longer be forced to wear the red shirt and blue pants of Holy Trinity every day. Unfortunately, this proved to be more stressful than freeing considering I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to wear. Based solely on what my peers wore, I should have invested heavily in gigantic JNCO jeans and wallet chains, but that seemed too stupid to me even back then. In this new environment, I could conceivably wipe away my previous reputation as the weird kid in school. I imagined myself starting fresh, learning from my past experiences and blending in with my peers for once, instead of feeling like an outsider.

  This idealized version of “Fifth Grade, Part II” didn’t come to pass. One of my first acts was an extremely ill-fated attempt to woo the most popular girl in class. My second genius plan was to ditch “Danny” and start going by my initials. For approximately two weeks, I signed my tests and papers as DJ Ryckert. Even in these years, before I irrationally hated all electronic music, I would see that name on the page and feel like it just wasn’t right.

  In no time at all, I was an outsider again. I thought that removing myself from the bullies of Catholic school would be my saving grace, but it turned out that many of my peers were some shade of terrible, regardless of religious inclinations. In time, I would learn to accept and embrace the fact that I wasn’t like everyone else. That would take years, however, and I still had one friend who wasn’t tied to any school that I attended.

  Larry was the one kid in my neighborhood that I hung out with, and I had hung out with him a lot ever since we met around kindergarten. Our neighborhood in Lenexa was home to a lot of young married couples, and most of their children were significantly younger than me. Larry was the only one within walking distance who was my age, and we shared a love of video games.

  Larry was a “friend” by default, given the slim pickings of friend candidates in my neighborhood. On the one hand, he was my age and liked video games. On the other hand, he was pretty terrible in every other way. Imagine Cartman from South Park made flesh and you’ve got a pretty good sense of what Larry was. He was loud, foul-mouthed, mean, insensitive, and not particularly bright.

  His propensity to freely cuss in front of his parents fascinated me and made me somewhat jealous. I always viewed myself as a wholesome, clean kid during my childhood, and seeing someone be so proudly foul-mouthed was alien to me. I bought Aerosmith’s Get a Grip on cassette around this time, and one song featured a lyric about being “shit outta luck.” I opened the liner notes, looked up the song (“Walk on Down”), and saw that Joe Perry wrote the lyrics. For a while, I considered myself a fan of Aerosmith but disapproved of that no-good Joe Perry.

  Larry would lose his mind whenever I beat him at Street Fighter II or Mort
al Kombat, frequently throwing action figures at me and screaming “Get the FUCK out of my house!!!” In one particularly dramatic outburst at my place, he threw one of my Ghostbusters action figures at my framed Ninja Turtles poster. The glass shattered, and he tackled me to the floor before punching away at my arm and chest. My RC car must have gotten crushed under one of us, because I noticed the antenna lying next to me as I tried to escape from under him. I picked up the thin, long piece of metal, and whipped him hard across the cheek. It drew blood, and Larry stomped home in a rage.

  No matter how many times this kind of thing happened, we kept hanging out because of the lack of other options. We didn’t talk much about school, but I got the sense that he didn’t have many other friends either. One of the rare times that we were around other kids was on his tenth birthday. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to put on a live Mortal Kombat stage show of sorts. His parents organized a party at the house with several other kids, so I’d have a chance to cast them as members of Mortal Kombat II’s roster. This was a party filled with ten-year-old boys, however, and my script called for two girls to play Kitana and Mileena. I was still at least fifteen years away from being able to talk to girls without having a panic attack, so we asked one of the more socially capable boys at the party to help us out. He asked a couple of twin sisters from the neighborhood to wear maroon and blue handkerchiefs on their faces for our dumb video game play. They weren’t interested for some odd reason, and Kitana and Mileena became victims of my last-minute rewrites.

  Larry and I played the lead roles of Johnny Cage and Scorpion, respectively. My faithful adaptation of Mortal Kombat lore was going about as well as you can imagine until a climactic scene in which Cage (Larry) hits Scorpion (me) with his trademark fireball (green Koosh ball). With a yellow handkerchief over my mouth and a black scarf around my head, I caught the Koosh ball against my stomach and tried to sell its devastating effects by doing a front flip. I decided to do this flip on the fly, failing to factor in my complete lack of athletic ability or threshold for pain. Also, I don’t know why I thought the physics of a fireball hitting someone would cause them to flip forward, but whatever. Thankfully, I cleared enough of the flip to avoid landing on my neck. Paralysis was dodged, but landing on my back on a thin layer of carpet in Larry’s basement was enough to cause pain every time I stood up for the rest of the night.

  My mother picked me up early from the party and took me to the doctor, who said I would be fine but I probably shouldn’t be flipping onto what amounted to concrete. This was the same doctor that had previously seen me for a different Mortal Kombat-related injury, as I once tweaked the muscles in my neck while straining too hard to complete a “Test Your Might” challenge in the Sega Genesis version of the game.

  Our love of Mortal Kombat was one of the few things Larry and I had in common, as every other aspect of his life was inconceivable to me. His brother Harrison was 16 and worked at the grocery store that my father managed. When I stepped into Harrison’s bedroom for the first time, the decor seemed borderline illegal to me. I’d only occasionally get a chance to peek in there, but every inch of the walls and ceiling was covered with Playboy centerfolds and various disembodied photos of breasts. I hadn’t quite hit puberty when Harrison was still living at home, but I remember thinking “This kid seems like he’s got it made.”

  Hindsight makes it pretty clear that Larry’s home life might not have been ideal. His mom didn’t seem concerned by his awful behavior, and his nearly silent father always gave me the vibe of a Vietnam vet who was about one bad DMV trip away from snapping and winding up in the newspaper.

  Larry’s parents were from Denver and they viewed Broncos football as the most important thing in the known universe. I didn’t care about football, but I knew enough to know that the Denver Broncos were bitter rivals with the Kansas City Chiefs. Thinking that I’d playfully irk them during breakfast one morning, I did the “Tomahawk Chop” motion and chant that was frequently done at Chiefs games. Larry’s mother responded by standing up, calmly walking over to me, and twisting my arm behind my back hard. When I went home and told my mother about this, she told me that I wasn’t allowed to hang out at Larry’s house for a month.

  I had no intention of disobeying my mom’s ruling, so I spent more of my free time that month swinging and playing by myself at Kickapoo Park, a small park between Larry’s house and mine. One day, I spotted Larry walking on the sidewalk toward me as I sat on the swing. We hadn’t had any contact for the last few weeks and I didn’t know what to expect from him. As he got closer, I stopped swinging and noticed that he had something in his hand.

  “Does your mom think you’re too good to be hanging out with my family?” he asked.

  “I think she’s just mad about your mom twisting my arm,” I replied.

  Without another word, he cocked his arm back and heaved something at my face. A sharp pain shot across my cheek as I instinctively put my hand over it. Larry ran back toward his house, and I pulled my hand away from my face to see a red streak across my palm. A bloody shard of green glass sat in the sand by my swing, and it looked like it came from a bottle of Heineken or Rolling Rock.

  My mom upgraded the Larry Warning Level to critical when I got home, cleaning my wound and bandaging it up. She told me that I was never to be around him under any circumstances. I understood her reasoning, but I wanted to see him get some form of comeuppance before we officially ended our friendship.

  The next day I put my plan into motion, but it required a little setup. With my cheek bandaged, I grabbed my stepfather’s shovel and several paper bags, and headed back to Kickapoo Park. Three swings hung from a metal structure there, and I dug a hole about fifteen feet in front of the middle one. It was probably two feet deep at most, but it seemed massive to me back then. Trees surrounded the park, so I went around breaking off long twigs that I crisscrossed over the hole. Next came the paper bags. I tore several of them at the creases and laid them flat over the twigs. Once the hole was adequately covered, I concealed the entire thing by shoveling a layer of sand over the top of it.

  I walked over to Larry’s house and knocked on the door for the last time in my childhood. He answered in his pajamas and asked me what I wanted. I told him that I wanted to race him, and he was too stupid to wonder why I’d want to do such a thing. A quick change into his shorts and sneakers, and we were heading back to Kickapoo.

  “Okay, the starting line is here,” I said. “We go on three, and the first person to touch the swings wins. Mine is the left one, yours is the middle.”

  Larry agreed to the terms and we lined up for the race. With good reason, I never went into anything resembling an athletic event with any sense of confidence. This one was different, however. I wasn’t going up against my peers at recess; I was going up against Larry. Put simply, Larry was a big fat kid and I was not worried about outrunning him.

  We counted down together and started sprinting. Sure enough, I immediately pulled ahead of him and reached the swing first. Upon making contact with the goal, I turned around just in time to hear twigs snap and see Larry disappear into the ditch with the most satisfying guttural yelp I’ve ever heard. I peeked down into the hole to see him covered in sand, looking about as pissed off as I’d ever seen a kid.

  That was the last time I’d see Larry as a child, because shortly thereafter I moved to the nearby town of Olathe. Both Jake and Larry were asshole ghosts of my past for several years, until I ran into a drunken Jake as he was leaving a house party during college. With our skating rink incident being ancient history at this point, I thought it would be fun to reminisce a bit about our childhood at Holy Trinity. He slurred his way through a brief conversation, then hopped into a car with his frat brothers.

  Our little reunion was a non-event, but it got me thinking more about my childhood and wondering what Larry was up to. I hadn’t driven by my old Lenexa neighborhood since my family moved prior to sixth grade, so one weekend I decided to pay a visit. My old
house looked the same, with mulberries staining the driveway and my basketball goal sitting just as unused as it had been when I lived there. Kickapoo Park had been renovated with new slides and swings, and Larry’s house looked exactly how I remembered it.

  It had been long enough for me to wonder if Larry’s family still lived there, but I went up and rang the doorbell anyway. He would have been about 20 or 21 by then, so I assumed that I’d encounter his parents if anything. Sure enough, his mother answered the door. I was about a foot taller and six years older than I was when she twisted my arm, so I had to remind her of Danny from down the street. My Tomahawk Chop was apparently forgiven at this point, as she gave me a hug and invited me into the house. To my surprise, she told me that Larry still lived there and was asleep in his room. She led me down the hall to what was once Harrison’s room, meaning that at some point Larry had graduated into the vaunted Boobed Room of Adulthood.

  After rapping at the door and unsuccessfully yelling at Larry to wake up, his mother told me to go ahead and walk in. Larry was groaning in bed and rubbing his eyes as he tried to get his bearings. I noticed that the disembodied breasts on the wall had been replaced by dozens of Japanese anime posters. Wearing a Dragon Ball Z shirt, Larry finally woke up enough to have something resembling a conversation. He relayed plenty of information in a short amount of time, including how he had been experimenting with a lot of drugs and had just received his second DUI as he drove home from a 311 concert. Also, he had lost his job doing something stupid that I don’t quite recall.

  After this enlightening conversation, I got in my car and drove back to my dorm, feeling pretty good about my life choices. Larry would resurface later in my life via Twitter and Facebook. I learned that he spent several years following 311 across the country and becoming extremely vocal about Illuminati conspiracies. We eventually had a second falling-out when I made a post about going to New York City for a Nintendo 3DS event that I was covering for my job at Game Informer. He failed to convince me that I was a government pawn, blindly falling into President Obama’s plot to control citizens’ minds through new technology, so he took the next logical step and blocked me on all social media. After all, I was probably reporting his activity to the FBI.