by Bobby Bones
Everything—getting A’s or reading encyclopedias—fed into a great desire I felt to be in competition with the world. I understood that to get out of Mountain Pine I had to rise to the top in some way. I don’t remember when I first knew I had to get out of my hometown; that goal just always seemed to be a part of me. But as I got older, certainly by high school, it was obvious that very few opportunities existed in the place where I grew up. I didn’t have any money or status, even in Mountain Pine, so the only way I was going to differentiate myself was by working hard and knowing more than other students. As soon as I realized that, life became a competition. I think it was probably a one-sided competition, but I didn’t care.
That competitive drive is what catapulted me to become captain of the twelfth-grade Quiz Bowl team when I was only a seventh grader. As a twelve-year-old on the senior team, I was a shrimp among giants. But I was pretty good. Nah, I was great! And I got sooooo many girls by being the captain of the Quiz Bowl team in seventh grade. Walking down the hall at school, I had my pick of the ladies. I was THE MAN. Okay, that’s a total lie. I’d say that being the captain of the Quiz Bowl team for five years straight probably contributed to the fact that I was a virgin into my twenties.
The competitions pitted one school team against another, and the matches were similar to Jeopardy! With four people on each team, you hit a buzzer if you knew the answer to questions on a wide range of subjects such as science, history, sports, current events, you name it. Contestants didn’t even need to wait for the end of the question to be read before hitting the buzzer, which added another layer of stress to the game. But that’s where I was awesome. No one was faster than me. (Unfortunately, sometimes I’m still quick but not in a good way, if you know what I mean.)
There were Quiz Bowl teams for every grade level from elementary school all the way up to college, but since they were basically a battle of who knows the most facts, and my hobby was reading the encyclopedia, I quickly moved up grades until I landed on the senior team. I was playing against eighteen-year-olds and just dominating them. I don’t curse much, but I’m going to say it: THEY WERE MY BITCHES. It’s not really anything to brag about, because it’s pretty nerdy, but it was a big deal to me at the time. And I only got better and better until I became a legend—a little legend in my little town, but a legend nonetheless. I was basically the Uncle Rico of Quiz Bowl. Still living the dream, years later.
Being a Quiz Bowl god went to my head, too; I thought I knew everything. My hand was glued to that buzzer. So when a question came up that I didn’t know the answer to, I still hit the buzzer. I remember the question to this very day: “What’s the national holiday for trees?” Well, I know the answer now—Arbor Day—but at the time I buzzed in, I didn’t have a clue. This was smack in the middle of a big tournament with a huge rival. Oh crap.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I bet it’s tree-mendous!”
My line got a big laugh—and me kicked off the team for the next couple of games. It was funny for a second but then not funny at all. I hated having to sit out even one round. I wanted to compete in a match, all the time. It wasn’t so much that I loved winning as that I hated losing. I felt like people were looking down on me when I lost, and I didn’t want to give them any more reasons to look down on me than they already had. See, it was never about being superior. I just didn’t want to be inferior.
I really was a huge nerd. I mean, for starters, there were my glasses. I’ve had terrible eyesight from as early as I can remember. I’m color-blind and my right eye has never worked. I was born with a severe astigmatism, which could have been fixed if the intervention had been done early enough. So at five years old, I was given a patch to wear and became the pirate who got beaten up on the bus to kindergarten. Imagine being the poor kid and the pirate. I mean, if you’re rich and a pirate, that’s kind of awesome. But the poor dirty kid who was the pirate, that’s begging to get annihilated.
Each time I wore the patch, they would beat the crap out of me, break my glasses, and throw my patch out the window. By the third time, I told my mom, “You can send me to school with the patch, but I’ll take it off as soon as you can’t see me.”
True to my word, I stopped wearing the patch (and my glasses for years) and my eyesight in my right eye grew worse and worse until it got to the point where it is today. I can’t see shape or color at all with my right eye, only light and darkness. For a while I asked about new medical techniques whenever they came out, but they were never for my eye because the real problem, the experts explained, is in my brain. Come to think of it, many experts have explained to me that I have a lot of problems in my brain, not just my eyesight. But the short of it is, my right eye doesn’t work.
When I entered junior high school, not only did I have bad eyesight and need to wear glasses, I was also very small. Minuscule. I didn’t grow much until my senior year, and didn’t really get to my full height until college. To make matters worse, the school in Mountain Pine was split into two parts—kindergarten through sixth grade in a building at the bottom of a hill, and seventh through twelfth grade a hundred yards up the hill. So as a seventh grader, already small for my age, I had the pleasure of going to a school with twelfth graders who looked like giants.
I was an easy and obvious target. Being one of the poorer kids didn’t help. Although my goal was not to wear the same clothes two days in a row (certain suicide), that wasn’t easy because I didn’t have a lot of clothes to wear. I certainly didn’t have “outfits.” I do love a good outfit now, though. Having a little money does allow me that luxury known as “outfits.” I came up with an elaborate mix-and-match scheme that had the same clothes appearing every three days in different ways so as not to attract attention. I’d turn stuff inside out. Wear it backward and say, “Yeah, Kris Kross, you know.” For those readers who don’t know Kris Kross, take a second and educate yourself in legit kid rappers. Dang. Everyone wanted to be like Kris Kross back in the day. Once I wore one of my few pairs of pants to school backward (like the aforementioned Kris Kross) and broke the button off the front. I thought my mom was going to kill me. “You aren’t a rapper,” she said. Little did she know, years later I’d sign a recording contract as a rapper named Captain Caucasian. No joke.
Despite my best efforts, embarrassing things always seemed to happen to me. We all have a humiliating moment from childhood, the one where if someone asks you about your most embarrassing moment—bam!—it comes to mind immediately. For me, that moment came in eighth grade during the football off-season. Coach decided we should wrestle. The entire team sat around a mat that Coach Gandolph had thrown on the ground. “You, you—go!” he’d call out two guys at random, and you would have to get out in the middle and hit the mat.
I didn’t want to wrestle anyone. I was the smallest guy on the team. But I couldn’t not wrestle. So when Coach called me, I stood up in my loosely fitting blue spandex wrestling shorts and threw all ninety pounds of me into the match. At a certain point, while I was working hard at a takedown but not getting anywhere, I noticed that everyone was laughing and pointing at me. I’ll be honest, people laughed and pointed at me a lot, so I didn’t think much of it. But when the guy I was wrestling started to back away, and not out of fear of my mean moves, I knew something was up.
Unable to figure out what was going on, I looked around and then noticed where the boys were pointing. I looked down and saw a hole had ripped in my shorts. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was what was sticking out of the hole.
After that everything became a blur. I was so humiliated, I stumbled back to the edge of the mat and covered myself while everyone laughed harder and harder. Even Coach laughed. I don’t think they had another wrestling match that day.
Now, if anything so much as touches the shoulder of a thirteen-year-old boy, it’s going to elicit a physical reaction. It’s just a fact of life. At that age, your body is doing all kinds of crazy things that it has no control over. Apparently, thoug
h, my boner made a huge impression on my peers, because they started calling me T-Bone. But getting an erection wrestling another guy in a small town in Arkansas is not really what you want to be known for.
The next day everyone was calling me T-Bone. When I walked into class or the cafeteria, they began chanting, “T-Bone, T-Bone, T-Bone, T-Bone!” I went into the bathroom and cried. It was awful and it didn’t go away. A name like that really sticks. Kids calling me T-Bone became a daily thing. I hated it so much, I stopped going to any school events that weren’t football games or Quiz Bowl.
Eventually the loud chanting wherever I went subsided, but the name never left me. There are guys I see now when I’m back home who still call me T-Bone—and it still sucks. Even in your thirties, being called a stupid nickname from eighth grade can make you feel crappy. Luckily, by the time I was a junior in high school, I finally got to a place where I didn’t want to jump off a bridge every time someone called me that.
So if you’re reading this and you’re a kid, Holy cow! It gets better. (Although I don’t know if you should be reading this if you’re a kid . . .) This book process is weird. As I wrote the story about “T-Bone” the first time, I didn’t think much about it. But reading it back during the editing phase, I literally said out loud, “OHHH, NOOOO.” It almost felt as if I didn’t know the story. The truth is that I cried more about the T-Bone incident than I wrote above in the story. I cried every day after school for probably close to three years. I don’t know why I held back. And I also didn’t mean it when I said “it gets better.” It gets way better. And it gets as good as you make it. You can change how you feel about yourself. And the better you feel about yourself, and the better you treat others, the better you get treated. Yeah, it’s a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason. So I’m going to write the following lines in a therapeutic way: I, Bobby Estell, am glad I got a public boner in eighth grade. It made me who I am today. Okay, that felt good. Back to the story.
Everyone got bullied where I went to school, except for the bullies, of course. There were three or four awful kids who tormented me. If they weren’t calling me names, they were shoving me in the hallways. The worst one of the group, King Mean Guy #1, hounded me the entire six years we were in school together. He was bigger than I was, not only because he developed early but also because he had been held back a grade, so he was older. Which meant he was dumber, too. He loved to make me call him King Mean Guy #1.
He gave me quick daily doses of bullying: knocking my books onto the floor of the hallway in between classes, punching me in my shoulder over and over until I admitted he was the king, spitting in my food. But the worst incident, by far, was in the cafeteria during ninth grade. I was just sitting at a table by myself, eating lunch alone like I did every day, and still do today, by choice, when King Mean Guy #1 came up to me out of the blue and said, “Hey, you’re in my seat.”
“These aren’t assigned seats,” I said. I might have been small, but I had a big mouth. I could never beat King Mean Guy #1 physically, but mentally there was no contest.
“If you don’t get out of my seat I’m going to make you get out of my seat.”
“I’m going to sit here.”
I had been beaten up so many times before. What was one more? But King Mean Guy #1 was a bully, and those guys trade in attention and power. Him pushing me out of his seat would have been boring, and at this point everyone in the cafeteria was looking in our direction to see what was happening. I was being challenged, and the pressure was on.
But instead of pummeling me, he unscrewed the cap to the ketchup bottle on the table and dumped it all on my head.
I didn’t do anything. I didn’t react or get up or try to wipe any of the ketchup dripping down my head and into my eyes and ears. I just sat there and continued to eat. The ultimate act of defiance against a bully is to ignore him. King Mean Guy #1 pushed me and then grabbed another bottle of ketchup from the table behind him and dumped that one all over my head, too.
Now I had two bottles of ketchup all over my head, my face, and my clothes. At this point I remained glued in my seat not out of defiance but sheer humiliation. I was too embarrassed to get up out of my chair and go to the bathroom to clean up. So I sat there and finished lunch, covered in ketchup. With everyone laughing at me.
When I was done, I finally got up, put my tray away like I did whenever I ate lunch, and left the cafeteria and the school entirely. Then I walked the mile and a half home, covered in ketchup.
Normally when I got bullied, I was okay with it because on a deep level I had the confidence that one day those guys were going to regret beating the crap out of me at school. I was smart and would be so successful, they would rue the day they picked on Bobby Estell. I had to feel that way to survive. If I hadn’t, I would never have gotten out of Mountain Pine. So, generally, I protected myself with the old one-day-you’ll-see thing. But this was the one moment in my life where I wish I had stood up for myself. I was a coward just to sit there drenched in ketchup. It still bothers me. Worse than the boner.
I hated being complicit in showing my own weakness. I couldn’t let it go. I had such a chip on my shoulder about the fact that I had so many deficits. Everywhere I looked I saw kids with things I didn’t have, things they took for granted, things like dads, rules, and braces. Braces weren’t anything to be jealous of, but they made me mad, because I had crooked teeth with who knows how many cavities.
That chip came with me wherever I went, even on the vacation with Evan’s family that I mentioned earlier. As I was packing, during the summer after ninth grade, I had that mix of excitement and dread that followed me around so much of the time. I had never been on vacation before, and it would also be my first time out of Arkansas. We were driving in a van to Colorado. I couldn’t wait to get out of my stepdad’s cramped but still-awesome-to-have house and go to Colorado—Colorado! But at the same time I worried about the trip. How did people act on a family vacation? Especially when the family wasn’t theirs.
We drove up mountains the likes of which I’d never seen before and rode horses. I remember all parts of the trip so vividly, even sitting in the hotel room watching the world premiere of Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone” video. Why do I remember that? Because I was in a freaking hotel! I never got to do that. And I was watching MTV! We didn’t have MTV. It was amazing.
The McGrews were as generous with me as anyone could be. They took me on vacation like I was their son and even bought me a T-shirt with COLORADO printed across it. I loved that shirt. And yet I still harbored resentment toward them (even as I fought the feeling), just as I resented everyone who had more than me. Evan’s family was by no stretch of the imagination rich. His mom was a schoolteacher and his dad was a freaking war hero drawing disability. But in my book, if you owned a van and drove it to Colorado to ride horses, you had money. I never showed my resentment in any way. Instead I kept it all inside, but I thought Evan had it so much easier than me and I held that against him. I hate myself now for feeling this way. These were the greatest, most loving humans in my life. I know that my bitterness stemmed from a deep insecurity. When we got home from Colorado, I begged Jerry McGrew to let me rake his leaves, cut his grass, anything to even the field.
Without money, size, or straight teeth, I had to come up with some sort of defense mechanism to guard myself against complete self-esteem annihilation—which is why I cracked jokes. I became an oddly introverted extrovert, which is what I am to this day. I was very alone and quiet and guarded most of the time. And then when I had an occasion to be on, I was really on. I didn’t talk a lot, but when I did, I insisted everyone watch or listen to everything I did or said. I would sit at home and write “jokes.” I memorized funny movie lines and practiced in my best voice, which I guess was practice to become a radio announcer. I spent countless hours alone at home practicing for the three minutes people would pay attention to me. (It’s not unlike my life now, where I’m alone in my room for hours on end, pra
cticing for the few hours a day people somewhat care what I have to say.)
The idea that you could use your flaws to your benefit and that a quirky guy could be a star was obviously appealing to me. That’s part of the reason why my hero growing up was David Letterman. I used to get up when I was eight years old and switch the channel to NBC while my mom slept in her chair so I could watch Late Night. I didn’t know what the jokes meant, but I was still fascinated. No explanation was needed for the crazy physical stunts he did—like throwing watermelons off buildings and jumping into Styrofoam Dumpsters. That was hysterical and like nothing I’d ever seen before on TV. After I learned a little more about his life, I liked Letterman even more. I couldn’t believe that he had started out as a weatherman. Even during that job, though, he didn’t seem to have taken things too seriously (I read that he would sometimes report the weather of made-up cities, which got him into trouble). I admired the fact that he took a lot of risks and failed a lot—including a morning TV show that was canceled after only a couple of months. For obvious reasons I related to underdogs. He was even goofy looking like me. While watching Letterman and his dry, silly delivery night after night, I thought, I want to be like this person.
In the meantime, though, I had to survive high school. I loved to get a laugh more than anything, but sometimes I directed my humor at the wrong folks. Once, during my freshman year, I overheard two seniors, huge linemen on the varsity football team who could have easily been mistaken for middle-aged mill workers, complaining about the game they lost. Our JV team had won our latest game and I just couldn’t help myself.
