To give you a few snapshots of my fifth-grade year, I can remember the hell that I got from my parents after my fifth-grade teacher in P.S. 32 called them in and demanded I be placed not in special ed, but in a mental institution for not behaving in class. (I mention, even now, in my defense that this behavior that made me the “worst one in the class” consisted of talking to the girl next to me. Fellow classmates who brought switchblades to school and used them to extort lunch money were considered by Mrs. Bright to be more socially acceptable.) This finally pushed my parents to move to another neighborhood (with, of course, a new school). Before leaving, however, I went around the class and asked each of my “friends” to sign my autograph book. Most simply wrote things like “drop dead” or “I hope you get hit by a car.” One little girl, though, surprised me by composing a whole poem on my behalf. I remember it even now. “I wish I were a grapefruit and here’s the reason why. Because when you come to eat me, I’d squirt you in the eye.”

Upon moving to my new school, my first notable act was to strike out in a schoolwide softball game, thereby eliminating my class’s team. After that, I became the key player in a new game. It was called “Let’s Kill the New Kid on the Way Home from School.” The way it was played was that every day after school about a dozen boys from my class would gather outside the door I was supposed to exit from in order to escort me to a vacant lot about a block from school and teach me a lesson. I, having no desire to learn whatever it was that they so badly wanted to teach me, would each day trick them by exiting from an unexpected door. Inevitably, within seconds someone would scream out, “There goes the new kid,” and the game was on. I’d have to run five blocks home and slam the door before any of the boys, usually lagging half a block behind, could catch me. In spite of having flat feet, the motivation factor made me very fast and I usually got home safely. (To this day, like Forrest Gump, I still run; only now just for exercise.) Occasionally, though, they would catch me. At this point, I would appeal to the group’s macho instincts and tell them I’d fight whichever one wanted to beat me up. In this one-on-one confrontation, I, the much more motivated fighter, inevitably beat up my tormentor, more than once breaking a nose in the process. This, however, only made things worse. The assailant’s mother would usually come in to school, and I’d get in trouble for starting a fight. Then all the boys in the class would agree that now I really had to be taught a lesson and the cycle would begin again. The game only finally ended after several months when Kelvin Gibson, a very large black boy I had befriended in my former school, suddenly began being bused to my new school. He was immediately recognized as the school’s finest athlete and thus became the main man in class. Only when he, in a gesture of friendship for which I am still grateful, declared the game at an end, and me under his personal protection, could I again walk home like a normal person.

Not that this ended my problem. My new teacher again called my parents in because I wasn’t living up to my potential. At this point, my father took two new approaches. First, he informed her that I was, in fact, performing way above my potential. In fact, he assured her, I really did not have potential, but was gifted in making people think that I did. Second, he drove me down to the Bowery (the section of New York where drunken vagrants live on the street begging for coins from motorists) so I could see what I would amount to if I didn’t start shaping up in school. The trip, however, had an unanticipated effect on me. I didn’t at all see these men as worthless vagrants. Rather, I saw them as fellow nonconformists who had been beaten down by teachers, the boys in the fifth grade, the grapefruit girl, and all my other enemies who only wanted to marginalize people. These were my friends. Someday I would liberate them. For now, though, I demanded we stop the car so I could give them all the money I had.