A Youth Well Squandered... A Memoir of Caustic Nonfiction by N.R. Pollard

-The Ballad of Pedro:

Summer Camp wasn’t the best experience for me, but it could’ve gone a hell of a lot worse. I guess if you want to get technical it was more of a “Day Camp” program, which is sort-of like Summer Camp, only you get to go home at three o’clock. Like traditional camp, the teenage camp counselors can only do so much until schisms inevitably rear their little snot-nosed heads. I was about twelve going on thirteen when I first laid eyes on that curly-haired kid sitting at the picnic bench under the aluminum flagpole. He looked kind of like Randall from Disney’s Recess but wasn’t hardly as much of an asshat… yet. My buddy told me his name was George, but for some godforsaken reason my adolescent brain thought it would be funny if I started calling him Pedro. I still can’t pin down why exactly I started it, although he was wearing one of those “Vote for Pedro” shirts from Napoleon Dynamite, so maybe it was inevitable one of us would light the powder keg. What I wasn’t anticipating though, was the brutally visceral response from George because right from the get-go he wasn’t having any of it.

It started off simple enough; we called him Pedro during casual conversations and shouted it at him from afar. One would typically try to broach stupid playground-taunts as level-headed as possible, be it through casual conversation or simply ignoring it. But Ol’ George wasn’t a man of formalities; he’d go all red in the face and screech whenever we’d approach, which only encouraged us to keep pushing him. When he got really steamed up he’d launch into his hallmark retort, delighting me and my pals to no end every time he whipped it out.

“MY. NAME’S. NOT. PEDRO!!!” he declared. “IT’S… GEOOOORRRGGEEE!!!!!”

We even got kids who’d never met him calling him Pedro, it was spreading like the mumps. Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and come one overcast morning we admittedly took it too far. Let me rephrase: my buddies Tyler and Elliot took things a bit too far; I was simply along for the ride so weigh the responsibility at your own discretion. We were lounging about our little clubhouse on the tree line by the basketball court when George poked his shrewd little head through the brush.

“What are you guys doin’ back here!?” he interrogated.

“None of your business, Pedro!” Tyler snipped, kicking dirt on George’s shoes.

George stood tall, threatening to call over the Head-Counselor. “C’mon guys, don’t make me tell Head-Counselor Kyle. I just wanna know what you’re doin.”

What were we doing back there? Well, when you’re strapped for much to do outside of hiking and staring at the sun until mid-afternoon, you tend to make up stupid little games with your stupid little friends. One of these games involved boosting packets of Kraft Mayonnaise from the mess hall, spinning them nice and tight, and tossing them against large rocks hoping they would pop. We called it the “Mayo-Factory” and like a sweaty bunch of J.P. Morgans, you better believe we were territorial of our little base of operations.

“Think Fast, Pedro!”  I said, whipping a mayo packet at him. It splattered against the tree behind him, and he went lobster-red. Breathing all heavy as he charged up.

“Oh man, here it comes,” Elliot jeered.

“MYYY. NAME’SS. NOTTT. PEDROOOOOOOO!!!!” he erupted.

That’s when he jumped on me, he didn’t manage to knock me over but was clinging onto my chest with his dirt-lined fingernails. He swatted at me like a pissed off housecat and grabbed a clump of my hair, trying to wrench it from my scalp. Elliot grabbed him by the collar and yanked him off me, tossing him face first into the splattered tree. He bounced off the bark and tumbled to the ground, his Abercrombie sweatshirt smeared with fresh mayo.

“Oh shit,” Tyler stuttered. “Here comes the rain.”

George craned his head back and bleated out a wounded warrior cry as we booked it down the hill. A passing counselor taking his kids for a nature walk stumbled upon a prone George dry-heaving on the leaves clutching his abdomen. Elliot must’ve knocked the wind out of the poor kid. Head-Counselor Kyle pulled all three of us aside the next morning, but like acting Congressmen, we covered each other's asses and denied everything.

“Uh… I was playing volleyball,” I lied.

“Me and Tyler were in the gaga pit,” Elliot lied.

Crickets, cicadas even, the silence was deafening. Kyle eventually hung his head in resignation and let us all go with a final warning. It didn’t really matter much anyway. After the “Mayo-Incident”, George’s mother pulled him out of the Day-Camp Program. To this day, I know not where he is or who he’s become since our brief time together, but if you’re still kicking around out there, I implore you:

How’s it hanging, Pedro?

-It’s a Gas:

Like most disagreements amongst teenage boys, it always starts with a girl. The girl in this case being my older sister, who during third period health class was all my buddy Phil could talk about. I’m usually good when it comes to a slight ribbing, but when the guy just keeps going on and on about what he’d do to your sister if he had the chance, it tends to eat away at one's patience. Some wiseass named Louis whipped around to me, “You just gonna let him get away with all that, Nick?”

Now my mind was made up, come the end of the day I sped past my house and hopped on the interstate. I got off at the Rockaway Mall and crept my way through the Macy’s towards the inner complex. Here we go, Spencer's; I swear it’s always next to the Hot Topic. I brushed past the menagerie of Rick and Morty bongs and strap-on dildoes until I saw it hanging there on the rack, Liquid Ass Fart Spray. Now it was time to scheme, and scheme I did. I could spray his locker, but I don’t know his combo. I could spray his precious Ford Tarus, but they’ll catch me on the security cameras. Wait, what about his backpack? It was settled: I bided my time for a good few days so he got all nice and complacent, thinking I simply let his verbal taunts go. At lunch, I waited for Phil to go to the bathroom before I moved in. Howard and Marlon were talking about tractors or Crown-Vics some shit, I flashed them the bottle, riffing something like “You guys better jump ship while you still can…”

They looked at me like I was holding a pipe bomb, scurrying off as I unzipped the backpack and let it rip. I drenched his notebooks and pencil case and his Google Chromebook until the fumes kicked in, and boy did it kick. It started off slow, but gradually you saw people’s faces cringe and wince in disgust as a slight murmur echoed across the room. Then suddenly, half the cafeteria rushed to the other side like a rogue wave. Kids were shoving each other to the ground and ditching their gourmet cafeteria nachos as they stampeded for the far exit. All the while Phil comes sauntering back in exclaiming, “Jesus Christ, who shit their pants?”

The bell rang as I merged with the frantic crowd to make my daring escape, that's when I heard it…

“GODDAMMIT, THEY GOT MY FUCKIN’ BACKPACK!!”

I laughed all the way to Algebra. It was glorious. Everything had gone to plan.  He carried all his crap around in a plastic trash bag for the rest of the day. It was Late-December, so the underclassmen started calling him “The Grinch” from across the hall, which only served to fuel the shallow sense of victory. He inevitably heard through the grapevine that I was the smelly culprit, refusing to speak to me anymore. I tried texting him to hash it out but he stubbornly refused to apologize, saying I took things way too far and calling me insane. Calling me crazy got me mad in turn, and after a brief exchange of cursory insults we blocked each other on all fronts. Thinking that was the end of our friendship, the next day we had health class together and I was more than content with ghosting him for the next two years. That’s when the loudspeaker’s rang out “Lockdown! Lockdown! LOCKDOWN NOW!!”

Ahh shit, looks like we’re all gonna die.

All lockdown drills start off like this, but the hint of urgency in the announcer's voice rubbed us all the wrong way. Some classmates whose parents worked at the local P.D. confirmed our worst nightmare, this was not a drill. This was the real deal. Phil and I looked at each other and fervently shook hands, apologizing profusely for both our parts in this bullshit feud. The band kids were divvying out drumsticks while Parker the Powerlifter held a fucking desk over his head, ready to launch it at the would-be gunman.

That’s when the S.W.A.T. Team kicked the door in, riles drawn as they patted each of us down for potential weapons. The serial vapeists were pissing themselves but the cops didn’t bother confiscating any of their nic-sticks, so they leveled out. It turns out some math teacher that everyone despised overheard some underclassmen arguing in the hallway, and one of them threatened to shoot the other. She called the main office which went into full panic mode, and the rest is history. They never found out who made the threat, but without them it’s likely me and Phil still wouldn’t be on speaking terms. All it took to rekindle our friendship was the inherent threat of death.