Five Minutes

Five Minutes

by

Varo Borja

Violence is endemic to human nature. For most of us, desensitization occurs through the media, but for some of us personal experience can contribute to the lack of compassion for other people’s suffering as well. I went to high school in a neighboring town where violence was an every day affair; pillowcases placed over unsuspecting heads and beaten until red with blood, fistfights redolent with racial strife and bigotry where one or more participants lost teeth or hair, and drug-motivated beat downs where the small change pushers lost ground and game to older, wiser, cocaine wielding criminals fresh from the streets and toughened by gang warfare who wore their purple skinned bullet wounds and knife marks to prove it. In this essay I will attempt to describe the culmination, for me, of my lifelong desensitization to violence and the nuclear blast that enveloped me in my senior year of high school, and changed the way I think and feel about violence forever.

On a bright, crisp, late September day in 1991 I drove to school in my Honda Accord with many hopes for the future. I had applied for a Naval Academy scholarship and had lofty plans of one day soaring through the cool, azure skies of the Mediterranean doing mach 3 in an F-14 Tomcat, and then relaxing on the beaches in the south of France sipping good claret and resting my tired bones on the ample bosom of a hard bodied Moroccan belly dancer. I was destined to graduate with honors the next spring, I was starting sweeper for the school soccer team, and I was dating a rather beautiful and barely intelligent Barbie doll who went to school in a nearby town. I was listening to my favorite rap album at the time, Straight Outta Compton, and relishing the lyrics fraught with the rape and gun battles that I only aspired to be able to commit. My heroes were Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain, Ice Cube, and Easy Mother Effin’ E: two of which had died or were soon to die by their own hands and the other two heavily involved in a culture of violence of which I was destined that day, unbeknownst to me, to take part in.

I crept in my car past the first row of parking spaces at the school and into the second, bass booming and treble blasting with one hand on the steering wheel and the other brandishing my silver-plated, rubber gripped Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver. My friends and I were all pistol-wielding suburban punks who drank cheap whiskey on the weekends and drove 90 mph down dead end roads where we’d fire off a few rounds at the phantoms in the underbrush and then shadowbox with invisible assailants, drunk on Early Times and the wine of innocence. My brother Lucas and I would usually end up in some minor scrape with two or more local idiots outside the Servco gas station on Highway 18 and go home with bloody noses or black eyes, only to sneak in the side window beneath the begonias and the radar of our ever-vigilant, but overworked mother. My mother was a police officer with ten years of protection, service, low pay and war stories under her belt, and through her tutelage and the assistance of two other veteran beat cops I had learned how to fight and to fight well. I had also learned how to wield every sidearm from my paltry Smith .38 to a Glock 9mm to pretty much anything Sigsauer made and sold in the United States. I could field strip an AK-47 blindfolded by the time I was 12, and more than once I had been to the gun range on mornings wet with dew and loud with the staccato rhythm of fully automatic assault rifles and submachine gun fire. By the time I was 14 I was a junior fascist of the order of Adolf (a nickname given to the junior police), I’d seen a C-130 crash at Fort Bragg during an arms show killing all hands on board, and had been in more fistfights and ad hoc wrestling matches than I dared to count. As I pulled into school that day though, my ten or so years of weekend gun play and extra-curricular boxing matches were all I knew of the world and its ways, and that wasn’t a hell of a lot.

Next, I remember walking from the parking lot to the front entrance, past all the fine honeys and flexing football players, past the empty cardboard cases of Busch Light and Beast, past the geeks commiserating by the graffiti clad doorway as to exactly which was better in Module Q1 of Queen of the Demonweb Pits: a specialized necromancer or a lawful-good paladin? The smells of early fall and teen angst greeted me on my arrival: cheap cigarette smoke laced with wisps of cheaper, south of the border dirt weed, Polo cologne saved for and bought at the local Belk, and the odor of burnt school pizza wafting from the cafeteria on the other side of the building. I immediately headed upstairs to the third floor to take up my usual place of residence by locker number 357: a prize won from a Freshman for the fictitious phone number of one of my acquaintances on the cheerleading squad, and a warm Budweiser. When I reached my place of repose on the third floor two of my friends were already awaiting me. My brother Lucas and my buddy Scratch (so named for the short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster; his name was Michael but he wanted to be a lawyer and he was a devil with freshman girls) were all decked out for the day in loose fitting clothes and baseball caps turned backwards. We were expecting the usual fight that morning: whites vs. blacks in some fashion or another. We played devil’s advocate most mornings, jumping into the fray on whatever side seemed to be losing, helping to balance the scales of the very volatile “scholastic” environment into which we had been placed and then ducking out before the authorities showed up, sneaking into our Honors English classes with pencils in hand and halos glimmering. After our initial exchanges of adolescent banter and “what up Ho’s” with each other and our surrounding school chums, we took a seat and waited expectantly for the faceless, would-be gladiators to emerge from their respective corners. We didn’t have to wait long.

Apparently, two young black students had been staring a little too intently at the posterior of a young white girl who happened to be the girlfriend of a white boy named Robbie K. Robbie K. had grown up in one of the surrounding backwoods communities and was quite accustomed, from a young age, to parties at which only one or two black persons were invited, and that more often than not featured a burning cross and crisp, white linens, no matter how unseasonable ghost costumes were at the time. Also, that day Robbie was accompanied by one of the more Caucasian of the power weight lifters at the school, James Dell, who was also known for his disdain for the black race and his rather outspoken manner for that disdain: the ability to crush a man’s face with one punch. Finally, unbeknownst to me, Lucas, Scratch and everyone else at the school that day, Robbie K. had a ten-inch Bowie knife tucked away under his flannel shirtfront.

The fight started in a flash, with the two young black males being joined by eight other members, all black, of various sports teams and cliques. James Dell held them off with flurries of rights and lefts, uppercuts and haymakers. Before my friends and I could join the fray though, Robbie had unsheathed his Bowie and knife and driven it up to the hilt in a fourteen-year-old black boy’s chest. The boy’s name was Terry. Terry had been raised by his aged grandmother to respect his elders, to do well in school, and to stay away from drugs. Terry was a child that had got caught up in a moment of passion, joined a stupid fight over teenage bravado, and ended up on the business end of a knife driven by more than one hundred years of ignorance, hatred, and wounded pride. Terry died almost instantly. Several wails went up at that point from the stricken crowd as Terry fell backward into his schoolmate’s arms and gasped his last few breaths. Still mad with the lust of battle, Robbie began slashing around with the now blood soaked Bowie knife, dealing a mortal blow to Randall Moore, another black boy of seventeen who was trying to get out of the scuffle. Randall received a slit open gut that year instead of a high school diploma. He came barreling down the hall past me and my two shell-shocked friends, spraying blood on lockers, bookbags, and lunchboxes, screaming for his God and for his mother. I wore Randall’s blood on my shirt and shoes for the rest of the day, dumbfounded at what I had just witnessed. After the police and the ambulances had come, after the media, like vultures, had descended upon the scene and picked clean the bones of a tragedy that they and their kind had helped to create, and after a thousand tears had been shed by a hapless community reaping, through their children, an unwillingness to reconcile racial hatred and bigotry that had steeped like a cauldron of shit for more than five generations, I wore Randall’s blood home. The fight that day had lasted a maximum of five minutes, but in five minutes time the lives of more than one hundred high school students had been drastically altered, two of which would never see another school year or grow into the happy, productive members of society for which they were supposedly being trained.

As for me, I didn’t cry. I drove home that day a little upset but unable to take in, at that young age, what had befallen my community that day. I’ve heard that the best time in a young man’s life to send him off to die for some ultimately trivial, propagandized cause is between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. I’ve also read that most soldiers in Vietnam were around age nineteen, and long before that children died beneath the flags of bloated monarchs as young as age 13. I do know that after the fight I gave up trying to get into the Naval Academy. Smoking reefer and chasing girls took the places of the junior fascist corps and organized sports. I still listened to NWA on occasion, but I developed a stronger affinity for Neil Young and Mozart and I gave that Smith and Wesson .38 back to the wizened old beat cop that had loaned it to me. That day didn’t end the maelstrom, however. Robbie K. and James Dell got off on a self- defense plea about three months later, ushering in a whole new era of violence at the school and in the community. Fights raged daily after that; police were at the school every day and metal detectors had to be installed. I witnessed a boy named Chris, who I had attended school with since our Elementary days, have his face rammed into a water fountain, breaking off his front teeth and scarring him forever, all for uttering a racial slur. I witnessed a girl of seventeen have most of her hair ripped out by four other girls of about the same age for uttering the same racist remark. I didn’t come out of that year completely unscathed either. I graduated in the Spring, but not with that bright golden honors sash that I had so greedily desired. I graduated with a 3.35, mostly for giving up on my Algebra Trig class and indulging more and more in cheap Tennessee bourbon. Lucas, Scratch and I would smuggle in pints of the brown stuff and mix it sparingly with coca-cola. By the end of most days I’d be so drunk that one of my friends would have to drive me home and pour me into my bed before my mother arrived. I came out of that school with a diploma, but I also came out with a taste for liquor that would haunt me for over ten years afterwards. I don’t blame my alcoholism on the school or anyone else, but we are all products, to some extent, of our environment.

In conclusion, I must say that reliving these experiences through this essay has not been easy. What started out as a simple descriptive process has turned into something of a confession. I have no need for either pedant or priest to absolve me of my past sins of omission or commission, but one thing rings true throughout this essay: violence begets violence, whether that violence is of a physical nature or of an emotional one. Since sobering up over four years ago, I have tried to live a life a peace and harmony and one in accord with the principles of a Higher Power. I find much solace in silent reflection, and the excitement of a brawl is more foreign to me today than Mandarin Chinese. I live a quiet, simple life, and I have the privilege of helping to raise two small children today who have never known me to be either drunk or violent. Hopefully, I will be able, in some small capacity, to pass on to them the value of “turning the other cheek” and a sense of wonder and respect for the sanctity of human life. I can’t help but wonder if I could have made a difference that day, sixteen years ago, to those boys bent on murder in halls where learning and play should have been predominant. If I had had the same values and respect for life that I’ve acquired over many years in the school of hard knocks that I have today, could I have stepped in and been a peacemaker that day instead of willing spectator? Unfortunately, hindsight is always 20/20 and the past is long dead, so I must continue to make amends for that sin of omission on a daily basis as I trudge the road of a happier destiny and try and give away some of the grace that has been bestowed on me.