bad

Isn't it funny how a little thought can gain momentum in your head and soon become a full on memory?

Yesterday I saw an abandoned shopping cart on the side of the road. First I thought about how I'd heard about some stores in the metro area having trouble with people taking their carts out of the parking lots. So much so that they had to install them with an alarm which would go off when the carts were taken outside the perimeters.

And then I thought about how expensive shopping carts are and wondered if it were general knowledge how expensive the carts are if people would still leave them, abandoned, on the side of the road.

Then it came, the memory.

{Cue dreamy music and wavy vision}

Johnny Davis was bad. Very bad. For one thing, he smoked cigarettes in the second grade. His hair was greasy and slicked back. He wore stained t-shirts and dirty jeans. Every other word was a bad one, even when he talked to teachers. He was in a fight every single day, doling out nosebleeds and bruises. He laughed a sneaky little laugh, like a villain on a cartoon. He was bad. Very bad.

In the Summer of 1981, Johnny Davis got a new hobby. In addition to picking on girls with big frizzy hair, he started taking shopping carts from Safeway. One by one, he'd take a cart, push it down the alley by the Yarrington's house and, with one great shove, deliver it into the creek.

My brother and I often fished near the site of the great shopping cart pile. We first discovered a problem when our hooks got snagged and broke, always in the same place. And then one day we caught him red handed. Bad, bad Johnny Davis. Badest man in the whole damn town.

We hid in the bushes and waited for him to come again. What was he doing? Why was he dumping the carts in the creek like that?

After a while of doing this every day, many times aday, the proof began to emerge from the water. The tip of the shopping cart iceberg.

Johnny Davis was eventually caught and sent straight to jail. Well, maybe not jail but he was sent away. And everyone talked about how expensive those carts were. More than anything though, we were all puzzled by the senselessness of it. Why is someone driven to do something like shove shopping carts into a creek, over and over, all summer long?

Was it fun? It didn't seem like fun. It seemed like work.

The craziest part of this whole story is that Johnny Davis is now one of my brother's friends. I actually talked to him not long ago at a party but all I could really manage to do was shake my head and remind him of how bad he was.

He's so normal now...and even nice, if you can believe that. How can you go from being that bad, criminally bad, to being a nice, normal person? I suppose lots of people do it.

It would be interesting to do a follow up with all of those bullies of my childhood. Is George Case a nice, normal person now? Does he have children whom he reprimands for doing things like building nests in a little girl's hair on the school bus? Or is it a houseful of hellions, cursing and spitting and daring?

My money's on the latter. I think Johnny Davis is an exception.

Speaking of who's nice and who isn't...guess who Daisy thinks is pretty nice. Me. Awww shucks. Thanks for nominating me for the nice matters award.

p.s. My mother asked me not to use Johnny's real name. He's married now to the granddaughter of one of her churchlady friends and she thinks it's terrible that I'm "digging up all of this old dirt" about someone who's trying to lead a respectable life. I'm still using George Case's real name because old wounds heal slowly and I'm still not over that nest he built in my hair on the bus 8 second trip.