Kaiser's Kisser

Kaiser’s Kisser

Tim Kaiser was the quintessence of a schoolyard bully: overgrown, overweight, bitter about being ostracized by the very peers whose lives he daily made hell.

In the early 1980s, Westernmost Fort Lauderdale was no more than an inkling of the metropolis-adjacent suburb it’s since become. The Everglades began where my housing block ended. As attendees of the only private Southern Baptist academy for miles around, ours was a particularly insular community.

Tim’s home life sucked. He was the youngest of three brothers; his seniormost sibling had nearly four years on him. Money was perenially tight. His father, a perpetually scowling transiently employed ex-Marine, subscribed to “spare the rod.” At home, Tim internalized the tumult. At school, Tim psychologically displaced it upon any peer too small and/or timid to retaliate. I was the exception, not because I won him over but, rather, because I was willing to fight back. It didn’t hurt that I was Tim’s only rival in terms of size. During peaks, our uneasy truce parodied friendship. During valleys, it descended into shoving matches.

Tim was a mischief mastermind, as evidenced by the strategically advantageous position he took before calling me the unholiest of unholies. I was acutely aware that my height and weight were, ahem, disproportionate. My rail-thin brother daily reminded me, as did my bathroom mirror. My weight was the fastest way to find me seeing red.

Despite cease and desist commands, Tim continued calling me “Fatso.” Resolved to do him grievous bodily harm, I gave chase. Tim eluded me by circling the picnic table betwixt us again and again. Alas, I picked up a granite gravel specimen and dared him to reiterate “it that shall not be named.” He did, and wound up with one less tooth to neglect brushing as a consequence.

My mother arrived in hysterics. Tim’s mother, in contrast, came cool as a cucumber, a vibe she maintained throughout the ordeal. Her contributions were few, brief, and mostly meant to downplay the seriousness of the situation. I suspect that, as his mother, no one knew better than she what a match in the gas tank Tim made it a point to be; ambivalence was her tacit acknowledgement that Tim must have done SOMETHING to set me off.

Due to our ages, Ambassador Christian Academy’s brass swept the incident under the rug. My mother did not. She made me extend Tim an olive branch despite eyewitness consensus that he’d sewn the wind that reaped him the whirlwind. The apology gift was a toy car, cherry red with white racing stripes, several orders of magnitude larger than a Matchbox. The compulsory peace offering cost me several weeks’ allowance. Adding insult to injury, I was forced to gift-wrap the conciliatory token and pen an apology. Had I possessed then the wit that I possess now, plus the capacity to pull one over on my panopticon of a mother, I would have bought Tim a boxer’s mouthguard and signed the card, “Just in case you didn’t learn your lesson.”