ray raze ray used to be a teacher at my grade school, but he didn't teach me. i wasn't even in high school anymore by the time he was there. a kid said something he didn't like at lunch recess, so ray grabbed him and threw him against the wall. the kid felt brick bite into his shoulder_blades and looked at ray snarling like a wild animal ready to kill and thought, "this fucker's crazy." another teacher had to pull ray off of him, or else he would have beat that kid until he wasn't thinking anything. they transferred ray to a different school. let him be someone else's problem. he was friendly enough around me. but he had one of those spring loaded smiles. you know the kind. and you know the deal with someone who smiles at you that way. you don't need anyone to lay it out for you. your gut tells you what you need to know, and you listen. he could make you like him. that was a thing he knew how to do. he had charisma. he knew how to work it and use it as a form of social currency. but he couldn't make you trust him. he couldn't stretch it that far. i played basketball with him once. i was twelve. i couldn't handle the ball. no one taught me how, and i couldn't work it out on my own, so all i did was shoot. it got to where i could sink twenty-foot jump shots with my eyes closed. i tried out for the basketball team in grade six. i had to guard eighth graders who were bigger and stronger and meaner than me. they had no interest in relinquishing the ball. no one let me shoot. no one let me do anything but sweat. i didn't make the team. when i played ray, it was me and my dad against ray and his wife. "first team to twenty wins," ray said. but there weren't teams. not really. it was me and him. he didn't pass his wife the ball. not even once. whenever my dad got the ball, he passed it to me. ray fouled the shit out of me. he was three times my age and he outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds. he shoved me. he wrapped his arms around me so i couldn't move. i drained my shots anyway. catch and shoot. catch and shoot. we lost by one point. the four of us went out for lunch after. ray gloated the whole time. he thought he'd accomplished this great thing by cheating his way to a narrow victory in a meaningless basketball game against a kid and his dad. the rest of us sat there and let him have his moment. there wasn't anything else to do. he and his wife are still together. she isn't in his facebook profile picture. neither are his kids. he's standing next to some other woman he liked the look of, whose name he probably never knew. and there you go. 210831 ... tender square this makes me want to listen to the lemonheads "it's a shame about ray." it also reminds me about a teacher my sister had in grade school that bullied her, it was sadistic. (p.s. picturing you in grade six trying out for the b-ball team now) 210831 ... raze i'm sad to say there wasn't much to see at that try-out. at least not if you were there to root for a young johnny. there was a whole lot of trying and failing to gain some ground against a bunch of kids who thought they were too cool to play with the likes of me. i remember asking the coach during "halftime" what i was supposed to do to get someone to let me have the ball for half a second so i could show them what a difference-maker i could be. all he said was, "be more aggressive." short of elbowing the player i was guarding in the ribs, there wasn't much i could do. and i wasn't about to play dirty. i got my revenge in high school. i never made the basketball team (i stopped trying after grade six), but my grade nine PE teacher had us play this game where we would all stand at the free throw line and take turns shooting. if you made your shot, you went to the back of the line and waited for your turn to shoot again. if you missed, you had to try and get the rebound and then make a shot before the person behind you sank *their* shot. if their ball went through the hoop first, you were out of the game. if you got your shot to go down first, you went to the back of the line and kept playing. the last person standing got bonus marks. i wasn't very athletic. i didn't excel at much of anything sports-related in grade nine. but my final grade in that class was better than what some of the jocks saw on their report cards. no one ever beat me at the free throw game. 210831 what's it to you? who go blather from