Salon.com > Interview With My Bully

Interview With My Bully: The bully who asked me out

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My prep school may have been home to the offspring of politicians, federal judges and national media personalities, but first and foremost we were teenagers. And so in the spring of 1998, my class gathered in the school library to plan our senior prank.

“We should direct all highway traffic into the school parking lot!” somebody suggested.

“Let’s cover everything in Vaseline!” someone else said.

I played along, but I was having a tough time. Eight months before, my boyfriend Ben had been killed in a car accident. He’d been different from the other guys: almost preternaturally kind and, like me, overly intellectual. On the way to our junior prom, we’d sat in the limo discussing “The Great Gatsby.”

I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed -- a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

Interview With My Bully: When I confronted my bully about racism

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Judy Blume, my mentor and friend, told me not to engage with my bully. “Forget her, she isn’t worth it,” she told me. But I had a strange curiosity over what happened to the woman -- I'll call her Mary -- who had once been my tormentor. Over the years I’d developed a secret theory of bullies, that they were the ultimate softies, the ones who have to build a fearsome spiked carapace over some sad, sad hurt. It's that kind of empathy, perhaps, that made me a novelist. And Mary certainly gave me a story to tell.

Bullying, unfortunately, was a part of the warp and weave of my childhood. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the '70s, where my Asian family was the only color in a sea of Scandinavians. When I was in second grade, a crew-cutted boy shoved me against some metal monkey bars, cracking the back of my head open.

But the most difficult time came when I entered junior high. I was underweight, bookish, bespectacled. Gym class was a convergence of all my anxieties. The other girls were tall with pretty hair that feathered and training bras, while I had no breasts and not even an undershirt for camouflage underneath the one-piece uniforms that looked like a baby’s onesie.

Interview With My Bully: The mean girl I can’t forget

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

A week before the seventh grade, my family moved for the 13th time. My dad was in the oil business, and we left Indonesia, where I’d had friends, for a small Southern town, where I had none. My only companion dressed exclusively in navy culottes and white button-down shirts, her wardrobe compliments of her Pentecostal religion. We were practically the only two girls without The Hairdo: a feathered Farrah Fawcett cut that necessitated a cloud of Aqua Net hairspray to tame it in Louisiana’s humidity.

Each morning of seventh grade I took the bus to school, and each morning I was bullied by a girl I’ll call Jane.

“Ew -- don’t you wash your hair?” Jane shouted at me from two rows back as her sidekick Kim laughed. I did wash my hair, but apparently once a week was not enough. And I wasn’t exactly the most fashion-conscious kid. In fact, I was pretty much fashion unconscious -- to the point where I could have used some smelling salts and a personal shopper. I thought sitting behind the bus driver would protect me. Instead, he just turned up the volume on the Eagles. (Years before Noriega was tortured by rock 'n' roll music, so was I.) This went on all through seventh grade. That year, I pretended to be sick so often that I’m surprised my parents didn’t whisk me to the local hospital.

Interview With My Bully: I admit it — I was a bully

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

Valerie Jones was an earnest sixth-grader with glasses, braces and a bladder control problem. We met in homeroom on the first day of middle school, both new and friendless, having just left the womb of elementary school. I chatted her up and she seemed grateful to have made a social connection. But after I made newer and cooler friends, I used that connection to crush her.

Once, after a particularly long social studies lecture, it became clear from the growing dark spot on her skirt and her uncomfortable shifting that Valerie had wet her pants. (Valerie is not her real name, by the way. I've changed names to protect the real people.) I sidled up next to her and whispered, “Did you have an accident? It’s OK, you can tell me.” After she finally admitted she had, I told everyone.

Manipulation formed the heart of our relationship. Recently, I found an entry in my middle school diary: “Dear Journal, Guess what! Valerie Jones, the biggest nerd in school, has an uncle who owns a dance/dinner club. For her birthday, he’s letting her rent it and invite 100 friends! Since she has no friends, I get to make the invitation list! This is gonna be great!” (The party never took place.)

Interview With My Bully: The bully who asked for forgiveness

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:30:00 +0000

No one person ever led the bullying I experienced as a child. When I try to remember that time in my life, I think of a mob of faces, and of the mercy I hoped for but never received.

I grew up as a fat girl in an unforgiving new money suburb. One time, I was going to play with a younger friend from my block when a group of girls surrounded us, some shoving me, some yelling "Moose!" (Moose was the nickname that plagued me throughout school, following me until I left for college.) The girl leading the mob, Stacy, had one year and at least four inches on me. Her golden good looks would've made her pretty if not for the furious expression she wore whenever she caught sight of me. I broke through the circle of screaming girls and ran till I got home. I never told anyone, though the violence frightened me.

I tried contacting Stacy, but she ignored my emails. I moved on to Delia, leader of the mean girls in my elementary school. Delia sometimes called me names, but generally stuck to catty mind games. One day in sixth grade, she walked up to my desk, looked deep into my eyes, and said I had "such a pretty face." Then she shook her head sadly. She and her eighth grade boyfriend tried to convince me his friend had a crush on me. I weighed 250 pounds, so it was unlikely. I saw her at our 20th high school reunion this summer. She teaches grade school now and commended me on an essay I'd written about bullying for Salon.

Interview With My Bully: The bully who denied it

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This article made possible by Salon Core members.

One sad autumn a couple of years ago, I wrote two pieces, similar in tone, about being absolutely friendless in middle school and high school. They were written weeks apart but published within hours of each other. That week, everyone felt bad for me.

“I’m sorry it was so hard for you,” said my friend Lisa.

“Can you believe what we survive?” my sister asked with a sigh.

There was one dissenting voice. “That’s not true,” said Veronica, when she read it. “You had plenty of friends in high school. Well, maybe not plenty. But you had me.”

Did I? Veronica may be one of my closest friends now, and we may have gone to high school together, but that’s not the same as the presumption that I had had her during that time.   I responded with a passive aggressiveness that is uncharacteristic (aggressive aggression is more my speed). It was all the more jarring, because I said it with a laugh: “If I’d had you, I would have asked you to protect me from you.”

What my childhood bully taught me

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My gut clenched when I saw the Facebook friend request from Ted, the guy who bullied me through junior high and high school. Four years of hell.

I don't blame my later struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse on the considerable bullying I received as a kid, but that, combined with parental violence at home, contributed to the self-loathing I used to justify my bad behavior. I found myself wondering whether Ted could somehow harm me, more than 40 years later.

I accepted the friend request. Ted lived in Tennessee, hundreds of miles from my Pennsylvania home. I felt fully capable of defending myself through an electronic medium. Words had become my weapon. My problem was physical violence. Maybe I finally had the advantage.

Then Ted sent a message that he'd be making a delivery to a restaurant in a town near me. He asked to get together for dinner; perhaps surprisingly, I accepted his invitation.

On the day of our meeting, he called to say he'd be waiting for me in his tractor-trailer, behind the restaurant -- I imagined with one or two biker buddies all wielding tire irons. We chatted on the phone for a while. When I asked him whether he remembered beating me up, he told me he only vaguely recalled any of that.

Interview with my bully: The courage to remember

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:24:00 +0000

"My name is David Santisi," the email read. "There was a Janni Simner in my fourth- or fifth-grade class ... was that you?"

It was me, but even so, I was slow to respond. When former classmates got back in touch, they always seemed happy to have found me, eager to catch up on our lives -- and not at all interested in mentioning the fact that, if we went to elementary or early middle school together, chances were they were among those who taunted me, in countless quiet and not-so-quiet ways.

Throughout those early school years, I was that kid: the one who was a little too awkward and who cried a little too easily, who it was safe to pick on -- to tease and call names, to pull the hair of and throw rocks at -- because, well, everyone else did. There was no one well-defined bully who made my life miserable. It was, as far as I could tell, nearly everyone. Anyone who remembered me well enough to Google me should have remembered that, but you wouldn't know it from their too-cheerful emails. There were no apologies in those emails, and there were no regrets.

Facing down my eighth-grade tormentor

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:01:00 +0000

Sean Lynden and I grew up together in the dumpy end of Palo Alto, a quiet college town that has since become the heart of Silicon Valley. We played soccer together as kids. We weren't friends, exactly, but we were friendly.

And then one morning, in our eighth-grade metal shop, he simply stopped speaking to me. He began, instead, a concerted campaign to humiliate me. At first, this took the form of neglect. But pretty soon he was mocking me to his friends, and then they were mocking me, and before long one of them was threatening to kick my ass.

This went on every single day for months. I wasn't frightened so much as terribly sad and confused. I was an insecure kid, often excluded by my brothers, and therefore hypersensitive to social neglect. I spent weeks puzzling over what I'd done wrong. I cried in my room, not just at Sean's abrupt and unexplained scorn, but also at my own cowardice. Because, of course, I never said anything about this stuff -- not to my parents or brothers, or teachers, or anyone. I felt ashamed of being picked on, and that shame served as my consent.

Readers: Interview your own bully

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:01:00 +0000

We've just kicked off a new personal essay series called "Interview With My Bully." In the first installment, Steve Almond calls up the guy who, in eighth grade, launched a calculated campaign of humiliation against him -- and ends up getting a heartbreaking explanation for his former bully's behavior.

Interested in closure -- or at least a conversation -- with your childhood tormentor?

Why not track him or her down, record your interview, and send it to us for possible publication on Salon?

Even years later, a discussion can lay adolescent angst to rest and perhaps even lead to understanding -- and less bullying for future generations.

Send your submissions to bullyinterview@salon.com. You can also blog your Q&As on Open Salon and tag them "Interview with My Bully."