My Friend The Bully
I know a guy, his name is Kirk Neal… Who am I kidding? His name is Neils Kirk. A lot of you know him. Kirk is a guy that I consider a friend. He’s the kind of person where his personality is so big that I can’t ever judge him, although I might judge some of his acts. I’m going to go back and forth in time, so buckle up.
Even among his closest friends, sometimes questionable behavior was expected out of Kirk. It was part of the experience.
Going from St. Andrews to Millsaps, I decided to go through rush. At the Pike House, Beau Butler asked me to suicide Pike because that’s what all the Jackson boys did. I explained to him how that fact made me nervous. Should I go Pike, there’s a pretty good chance all I’ll do is drink and get stoned with Neil Brown and Neils Kirk, and I was determined to make a fresh start in college.
When Saturday came, I pledged KA and proceeded to do those things at the KA house instead of the Pike House (although to be fair, I did them at the Pike and Sig houses too.) Maybe I wasn’t as ready for a fresh start as I thought.
The next year, Kirk was embroiled in a controversy where he was accused of making a personal profit from the printing of the Old North T-shirts. Old North was a party the Pikes had to make fun of the KA Old South, a fact that everybody knew, but nobody ever seemed to mind. They even had a miniature cannon to match the KA Naval Cannon, which Gilbert Myers threw his body on when they tried to fire it. While that could have ended with a dead Gilbert, that never seemed to happen to him, and everybody laughed.
The next year, the Old North T-Shirt featured a cartoon caricature of Kirk hanging out a window to the Pike House, with dollar bills stuffed in every pocket and overflowing in his hands.
One night, Kirk sat with the other pikes on the third row of the third base side bleachers at the Jackson Mets game. Kirk spent all night shit-talking the third baseman loudly enough for him to hear. Beer was a pretty important part of attending Jackson Mets games. This guy used to lug around an ice chest and sell them in the stands so you didn’t have to leave your seat. Sounds like a pretty shitty job, but the guy returned year after year.
Leaving the game, the third baseman caught up with Kirk in the parking lot, and one shot broke his jaw. A few days later, Kirk was slurping down a milkshake at the Millsaps Grill with some other Pikes who were taking advantage of the fact that, with his jaw wired shut, he couldn’t respond and spent the night talking shit to him.
Seeing that he wasn’t enjoying having the tables turned, I said to him, “Sit higher up in the bleachers next time. That way, they can’t hear you.” meaning the Jackson Mets players. Kirk was a pretty big guy, but you’re never so big that there’s not somebody playing third base who can one-shot your jaw.
There was a gay kid at Millsaps. His name was Joe. This was a time when it was pretty unusual to have an openly gay kid at Millsaps. Joe had trouble with his classes. He had trouble with his dad. On the third night of the Greek Fraternity Rush, he didn’t get a single invitation to any of the houses. He failed out of rush. He was on his way to failing out of school.
There was this park bench at the very top of the bowl. People were used to seeing me there with some co-ed who recently got dumped. While the Chi Omega’s adopted me and took care of me, when it came to conversations about how much and why boys suck, I did my best to attend to all three (and eventually four) sororities.
While people were used to seeing me up there with a girl, they weren’t at all used to seeing me hold private council with a boy, a very gay boy. Joe needed to talk, though. His life was sometimes painful. Not because he was painful, but because the world can be pretty cruel to boys who are different, and Joe was very different.
At the end of the conversation, Joe hugged my neck for a long time and said, “Thank you.” Thank you for listening, I guess. I’m not gonna lie; I was uncomfortable. Not because of the hug but because everybody at Millsaps could see this gay guy hanging off me.
Strolling downhill so I could get in line for hamburger night, I got a lot of awkward glances from my friends. Reaching out to an outcast, I was breaking pretty much all the rules. They knew it, and they knew that I knew it, but nobody was willing to challenge me on it. Deep down, I was kind of hoping somebody would. I prefer a stand-up fight to broiling subterfuge.
“Is he gonna be ok?” Of all the people at the entire school, the one person to ask about the well-being of this little gay kid was Neils Kirk. There had been times before when I suspected people judged Kirk wrongly. Eating my hamburger on Ruby’s poppyseed bun, I let my eyes wander around the different Greek tables in the cafeteria; my friends all, but the one person who didn’t judge me was Neils Kirk.
There may have been a demon inside of Kirk. He had a very specific and well-known reputation for bullying. Every time I write about my time at St. Andrews and don’t mention the bullying, I get messages about it. At a small religious school in Jackson, Mississippi, in the seventies, there was a bullying problem. I’m of the opinion that every school, private or public, has a bullying problem, but every time I say something like that, somebody responds with, “Well, WE didn’t.” I’m pretty sure they’re either lying, not paying attention, or were doing the bullying themselves.
Adolescents bully. They do it because they’re insecure about their place and society, and social animals survive by maintaining their place in society, so they point to the people they think don’t fit in so nobody will notice that they don’t fit in either.
In seventh grade, I had this friend named Walter. Walter was such a great guy. He was super thin, though, and socially awkward. People use the phrase “socially awkward” these days to telegraph autism, but I don’t think he was autistic. I think he was twelve. That sort of thing happens when you’re twelve.
Kirk, a year ahead of us, had identified Walter as a target and regularly bullied him. I was bigger than Kirk. I was bigger than everybody. I’d begun lifting weights, and the results were surprising even to me. There were a number of kids who hid behind me. It felt good. I spent the rest of my life putting my body between the smaller kids and whatever tried to hurt them.
One day, it snowed. They didn’t call school off yet, though. They let us out for lunch, and the ground was covered with white stuff.
In those days, the junior high school kids had class in the upper school building—the one with the giant portrait of Erasmus on it. One day, read my story about why there’s a giant portrait of Erasmus. The Lunch Room was in the old part of the school where the elementary and middle schools were, so every day, we tracked across the football field to eat lunch and then walked back. Normally, it was eventless, but that day it snowed.
On the way back from Lunch, I heard Kirk say, “heyyyyy, Walllllllter!” I was a pretty moody kid. I still am. I wasn’t in the mood. Walter acted like it didn’t bother him when the older kids made fun of him, but it did. It bothered me, too. Eventually, there was going to be a confrontation. I guess that was the day.
“Cut it out, Kirk.”
“What are you gonna do about it? Huh? Kambell!” The “C” in my name is always the hard sound, but sometimes, it’s harder than others.
I’ve mentioned that Kirk was a big kid. He was an inch or two taller than me and almost as muscular. He also wore pretty thick glasses, though. You’re not supposed to hit a kid with glasses, even if they’re an asshole.
Punching Kirk, I might break his glasses, and I’d get suspended—so I tackled him in the snow. My plan was to twist him around and hold his arm behind his back until he said, “Uncle.” Those things never work out. He was twisted around, but his glasses fell off. “Get his glasses!” I screamed and held Kirk’s arms behind him. I didn’t want our wrestling in the muddy snow to end up with his glasses getting broken and me getting suspended.
“Trent’s Coming!’ Somebody shouted. I was getting suspended.
Bob Trent studied education and was the dean of the upper school. He wore glasses, too. It wasn’t my day. Things and things and things happened, and in a couple of years, Trent would end up in charge of the school while the board scoured the country for a new headmaster. After that, things and things and things happened, and Trent left the educational field altogether. I’ve written about how, for some years, it was rough to be a Methodist. Some years, it was rough to be an Episcopalian, too. Dedicating your life to serving the Lord doesn’t mean you’re gonna have an easy go of it.
Standing up to Kirk meant that I was no longer a bully target by anybody. When you’re a kid, you hear all these stories about how if you stand up to bullies, they’ll leave you alone. I think that’s true, but my point was to get them to leave my friends alone, and that became more difficult. Taking steroids to become bigger and stronger, what actually happened was that I would end up being the bully about as much as the boys I tried to fight earlier. I’m not proud of that, but I’ll cop to it.
A lot of times, when I write, I’m trying to do with my pen what I used to do with my body. I’m trying to stand up for the little kids. It makes some people pretty furious. You’d be surprised how many people think God himself gives them the right to bully the weak. It gets worse as you get older.
I write about Ed King a lot. King stood up for black kids who were being bullied for simple things. If you’ve ever seen the photos of the Woolworth Sit-In, then you get an idea of what I’m talking about. I’ve seen menus from Woolworth lunch counters in the sixties. It’s unimaginable that a mob like that would assemble to bully and threaten a pretty small bunch of black kids wanting to sit at the counter and eat a shitty ham sandwich for fifty cents, but they did. They bullied the white kids who sat with them. They dumped ketchup and sugar over their heads. If you see a photo like that, you’ll think, “Somebody’s gonna get killed.” And they did get killed, just not that day.
You have to be pretty stealthy about picking on black kids these days. It still happens, but the bullies soon find themselves surrounded by harpies and guys a lot bigger than them. They do it on YouTube and the radio now. It’s safer to be a white bully there.
The current favorite targets for bullying are gay kids, trans kids, and drag queens. I can kind of understand that, you know. I mean, there’s so many more of them than there are of us. They pose a very genuine and present threat. Wait, you’re telling me there aren’t very many of them? That makes no sense. Why would there be so much hate spewed out toward trans kids if there’s just a handful of them?
Being a minority has always made people a target. The smaller the group you’re in, the more likely you are to be bullied. That sounds so incongruent, but it’s true. The people who pose the least threat are treated with the most hate.
I know this kid. They were assigned “female” at birth. At some point along the way, they realized they weren’t female. This was a beautiful person. As a woman, they looked like a young Carly Simon. As a man, they looked like a young Robby Benson, with a goatee beard.
Transitioning sounds like a very painful process to me. Besides all the hormones, you have to start explaining to people, “Yeah, I’m a boy now.” and deal with all the shit they feel about transgender people without actually being one. Having to deal with other people’s shit while you’re dealing with your own shit sounds like such a horribly unfair situation.
For about four years now, there’s been a lot of political advantage to picking on trans people. In the 2024 elections, nearly a third of GOP political ads said something about “two genders” and other issues they don’t really understand. Locked in a room with nothing but Fox News and GOP political ads, you can understand why so many people feel like there’s a trans army threatening their grandkids. There’s not. Even if they wanted to threaten your grandkids (they don’t), there’s not enough of them to do anything about it.
I can’t remember a time when a presidential candidate made open bullying the central part of his campaign. They say that Jackson did. He signed the “Indian Removal Act.” and organized the “Trail of Tears,” so that might be the case. In Mississippi, Jackson was revered because he solved our Indian problem and won the Battle of New Orleans, even though it turns out that the battle need never have happened. A treety had been signed, it just didn’t get to Jackson in time to prevent the attack.
Whenever I write about Trump being a bully and what I think of it, I get very angry messages, sometimes private, sometimes public. I’ve had threats. Threatening me because I said Trump was a bully seems to be making my point for me, but they don’t see that. It’s entirely possible to turn an entire country into bullies. It’s happened here before. It’s happened in other countries too.
A couple of years after college, my friend Neils Kirk started spending his summers working for his dad in Europe. One year, when he came home, he greeted me with a big hug and a kiss on both cheeks like an Italian Count. “Whatever they did to you in Europe, it agrees with you,” I said.
The urge to bully is universal. We all feel it. We all know to fight it, but we sometimes choose not to.
It’s never benefited me to stand up for the little kids. Even though Kirk didn’t, I’ve had guys beat the snot out of me for standing between them and the person they hated for no reason. Sometimes, they’d get friends to help them.
Here comes the part of the story where I can’t tell you the names, even though I know them. Some of you know them too.
A couple of summers after my confrontation with Neils Kirk, everybody hung out at Mr. Gatti's Pizza. Some boys from another large private high school took it upon themselves to attack a single guy, by himself, that I didn’t even know. I did what I always did. I stood between him and them and said, “No.” I thought that was the end of it.
After a while, I went to the bowling alley nearby and played video games by myself. In the parking lot, trying to get home before I got in trouble, four boys met me to exact their vengeance upon me for standing up to them in front of people. I got beat up pretty badly. Really badly, actually. As big as I was, four-on-one is still four-on-one. I also tend not to have a killer instinct that works against me in a fight.
At home, I said “good night” down my parent’s hallway, made an icepack from the refrigerator, and made my way upstairs before anybody could see my face. I can’t actually recommend being the guy who stands up to bullies. It comes with a price. I paid it, but I can’t recommend you pay it too.
