The Evil

Some boys are born evil.  Some have evil thrust upon them.

In an early post, I alluded to a “(save one)” incident.  This was me at my absolute worst.

I can’t remember how old I was exactly.  And as with most evil, it came as a result of boredom and obsession with a new toy. 

My toy of obsession was not actually a toy but a compass.  Not the directional finder tool but that thing you could draw circles with that all school kids used to carry around in their school bags.  It held a pencil in one of its arms and a sharp pointed spike on the other.  I doubt it’s used in schools any longer as it would probably be categorized as a weapon.

I can remember spending inordinate amount of time drawing circles and then drawing circles within circles, connecting circles with circles of various sizes.  For some reason the symmetry just fascinated me.

Eventually, I must have filled all the available paper with circles and went on find other worlds to circle.  At some point, I found myself sitting on the floor next to our big, black, upright piano in the room we called the living room (even though we spent very little time there).

I never knew why we had a big, black, upright piano in our living room.  I think I saw Mom sit down at it maybe twice in 18 years and play a little.  The piano had one key in the center that was completely dead and it laid there like a flat tire for eternity.  It was basically a piece of furniture that covered a lot of wall space.

So there we were; a stately, ancient, black piece of furniture and a bored male child with essentially a knife in his hand.

I don’t remember what I was carving into the side of the piano or how long I was carving into the side of the piano before I finally realized that I WAS CARVING INTO THE SIDE OF THE PIANO.  I still rate that moment in the top 3 panic attacks of my life.  I knew I was in deep shit.  I even thought for a while that at that moment I had coined the word “shit”.

My life passed before my eyes.  It didn’t take long.

As bad as this moment was – we haven’t gotten to the evil part yet.

Here’s the evil part.

I decided, for some inexplicable reason, that my only hope for survival was to somehow cast doubt on my own guilt by implicated other possible suspects.  I then proceeded to carve my sister’s name into the piano.  JUDY

Needless to say, this ploy failed miserably.  It also had an added undesirable effect.  My initial fear had been of what my mother was going to do to me.  That was quickly superseded by the fear of what my sister was going to do to me.  I’ve never seen anyone, before or since, look that angry.

I don’t actually know what was done to me.  The brain fortunately blocks out excessive trauma.

After 20 years or so my sister eventually forgave me;  she hasn’t  forgotten.

The one solace I take from this experience is that even though I did, indeed, commit evil; I wasn’t very good at it.