This story is well out of order but when I was talking to my friend Casey
the other day I was reminded of it and see how I have very little
editorial oversight I will include it here. When I was about 12 and
my brother Matt was about 10 we were on a trip to visit someone
somewhere and for a day trip we had gone swimming at an indoor pool.
It was fun and everything was going swimmingly, so to speak, when a
group of kids about our same age started harassing us. I can't
remember exactly what the primer was that set off the powder keg of
splash and dunk fighting but at some point my brother brought out the
big guns and decided to insult our Hispanic antagonizes in their own
tongue. The main problem with that was that he, or I for that matter,
really knew what our Spanish insults meant, let alone how they were
pronounced. He started in with calling them 'Pinchy Hoe-toes' his
approximation of the very vulgar Spanish insult 'pinche joto' which
would be F-wording homosexual in English. It was not intended to calm
the waters. The kids didn't understand what her was trying to say at
first and then after he repeated it a couple of times they caught on
and then they thought it was hilarious and then kept asking him to
repeat what he had said. Nothing is worse when you are trying to
insult someone then to have them laugh and ask you to repeat it
again. Somehow the cross-cultural multilingual insult attempt really
relieved the tension and I don't think we ended up as friends but it
seemed like the fighting stopped and we both coexisted in the
communal urine vat.
