the karate kid

I had a very Karate Kid moment last week. I decided that I need to relieve some aggression (got tons of it!) so I went to watch a kickboxing class. Halfway through the class I decided it was too intense for me, but I still sat watching. I glanced at the schedule of classes and instructors. I scanned the names and saw one that turned my blood cold - Butch. She was my childhood bully from the time I was 10 until I was 14. It all started when I was playing wiffle ball with my brother Chris and his friend Jack, who were both 7. Butch came over and took the bat out of Jack's hand. Even then, at 11, she was huge. Her face was apelike and her arms hung lower than normal. She was one of the illustrations on the evolutionary chart that hadn't quite made it to homo sapien.

When Jack protested, she swung the bat up over her cromagnon head and was about to hit him with it when I stepped in.

Hey, I said, pick on someone your own size.

And for the next four years she did.

Butch had three brothers, all very nice and normal, and loving, normal parents. Her father was missing his fingertips. Butch had chewed them off as an infant. When she was 13, she stabbed her older and bigger brother in the arm, threw him down a flight of stairs and broke his arm. She was Rosemary's baby's baby. So after our initial meeting, she beat me up as often as she could over the next four years. She always had at least four other girls with her, and if you tried to fight back they'd hold you down while she wolloped you. Once while I was playing football with some boys, she came at me with six other girls. I thought I looked especially cute that day. I was wearing Madonna-inspired fluorescent pink fingerless gloves and dangly high heel earrings. Within seconds of seeing me, Butch had me on the ground with dirt in my mouth and my earrings in her palm. Okay, so I willingly took them off and gave them to her. It was my gift to her for not tearing them out of my ears.

Every time I came home broken and bruised from Butch, my mother and I lied to my father about the nature of my latest injury. Hoboken was pretty rough back in the day, not the yuppie mecca it is now. My parents left Hell's Kitchen for Hoboken in the late 60's to escape the drugs and violence and moved right into the thick of it across the river. If we told my father the truth, he would have moved us to Long Island. So, I had bruises and scrapes from basketballsoftballbaseballbikeridingrollerskatingdogchasedmefelloffthecurbandintoabus. (There was no fate worse than the threat of moving to Long Island).

Once I went to high school out of town, the beatings stopped. Mainly, I think, because Butch just didn't see me anymore. I have heard tales of her as an adult. She had been on a Jerry Springer-like show twice. Once for being a mother on welfare (yes, a man actually put his penis in her venus flytrap of a vagina several times!), and once for being a mother who strips to feed her babies. Recently I had heard that she was arrested for beating up a male security guard in her son's high school. She was actually going to complain to the principal that her son was being bullied.

So there I was, sitting in a stuffy gym watching people pound on bags, staring at my bully's name on the schedule. The music from the triumphant end of The Karate Kid swelled in my head. I pictured our reunion and what I would do. I visualized the man muscles erupting out of her guinea-t, the angry blood vessel shooting down her forehead, the hair on her chest curling up and over the gold chains weighing down her next. Next, I pictured my blood on the new dress that I was wearing. I felt the throb behind my eye that would swell shut within minutes of contact with her fist. I looked at the clock - Butch's class was set to start in ten minutes. I ran out of the gym and arrived home minutes later, sweat-soaked from fear. I think yoga might be more my speed.