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| Doesn't look too rough, I mean I'll need a towel and some sunblock but otherwise, I'll be fine. |
As insufferable as I must have been I did have one friend. Not in the
sense that we played together but sometimes we sat by each other at
lunch and would both get picked last for games. His name was Robby and really wanted to be his friend because he was possibly the only
person lower on the social ladder then myself. I would call him every
once in a while and he would say he didn't want to play, he just
wanted to read books, but if I wanted to I could bring some books
over and join in. Too nerdy to play? I thought I was all-in nerd
wise, but here I was out classed. Robby even had thick lensed
plastic glasses. That magnificent bastard.
Robby did try to save my life after I had made fun of a much older boy at lunch recess one day. The older boy chased me down and I was bravely holding tight to a fence post while he tried to pry me off and in his words – 'deck me in the mouth'. 'Decking in the face' was the misuse of the old slang 'to deck someone' meaning, to punch a sailor so hard he was knocked unconscious and fell to the deck of a ship. While the boy was claiming that he was going to deck me in the face I was too terrified to point out his misuse of the colloquialism.
Robby saw my predicament and ran over and started to pull on the kids waist to pull him off of me. Robby being less occupied with survival started right in with making fun of the way he was using the term 'decked'. He was saying, “You are going to deck us in the face? Why don't you deck us on deck of a boat on Lake Tahoe. Or do you mean a deck of cards?” The whole time he was pulling and mocking keeping the situation from degrading into a full blown deck-a-thon. The bell rang and we went in to class, not to bad off for having looked death in the eye. After school we stayed around the class for a bit until we were sure any murderous 5th graders had gone home.
